“Well, uh… the lieutenant will get it figured out.” He scratched his head, focusing on some invisible attraction on the floor. “Something minor happened, you know? That’s all. Lieutenant Larsen’s not going to be happy about it, though, no matter what excuse he gets.”
I laughed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
Campbell shrugged, but reddened further. “Look, I’m not worried. Are you worried? Don’t you need to get back to your evidence and stuff?”
“Relax,” I said. “Sure, I need to get back to my evidence and stuff. Although I don’t think it’s going to take us anyplace new.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know what happened with the shooting. But the piles of bodies downstairs are a little harder to figure out. There’s some information that we don’t have, and it may have died with the boat’s captain. Sometimes that’s just the way it goes.”
I turned to walk back to the mess room but stopped. Campbell bumped into me, gripping my shoulder as I stumbled.
“What?” he said.
“The officers’ quarters are off this hallway, right?”
“Should be,” he said, taking a step back and looking at the doors around us.
“Well, then, you can help me right now. Which of these rooms is the captain’s?”
His mouth dropped open, then formed a smile as a visible wave of understanding washed over his face.
“Oh, I see.” He looked at all the placards and pointed to the doorway to my right. “You’re right on top of it.”
I turned the handle set flush in the door and pushed. The panel, just as narrow as the one in the entrance to the officers’ mess, swung inward. Standing in the hallway, I considered what was revealed.
A bunk along the far wall, cabinets mounted three feet above its surface. A man-sized locker was set in the wall next to the pillow. To the right of the door, a writing hutch was framed by more cabinets. The desk’s surface was clear except for a brown blotter and a stack of manila folders in one corner, and a straight-backed metal chair was pushed under it.
To the left of where the captain’s legs would have fit sat a safe. Its bottom and back were welded to the floor and wall.
The bunk was made, a coarse gray blanket pulled up to a pillow-width strip of crisp, white sheets. Except for the safe, all the surfaces in the room had been milled from the same fake-wood tree as the paneling in the hallway.
There were a couple of pictures hanging on the shadowy wall over the bunk. I could see the light glinting on the glass, but couldn’t make out the frames’ contents. A few more pictures were scattered on the walls— submarines, uniformed men, a North Korean flag.
“You gonna go in?”
“Give me a second, Campbell.”
Was this a crime scene? Could I traipse about in Yoon’s bedroom, trying to gather a scrap of evidence that… oh, hell, let’s face it: I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I wanted to talk to a dead man, and the items he left behind might let me do that.
I could do it on shore.
But I had the time to do it now. And the curiosity. That was what pushed me into the spartan living area.
I took a picture through the doorway before I stepped inside. And once I stood in Yoon’s quarters — the dimensions were about the same as a king-sized mattress — I documented its contents as well.
“Do you need me to—”
“Could you just stand outside for now? There’s not much room to maneuver in here.” I sighed, turning to him as I heard the harshness in my voice. “Sorry. I don’t think there’s space enough for both of us to stand without tripping over each other.”
“No problem. I’ll just hang out here.” He took a step back into the hallway and draped his forearms across the top of his rifle.
The safe was begging for my attention. But there were other, less obvious things to examine first.
I pulled prints from all the cabinet handles in the room. The lift sheets showed concentrations of prints; whoever opened these doors grasped the same part of the handle each time. Holding the sheets up to the light, I could see that the few discernible prints in the muddle were similar, if not identical. Another one for the lab to verify.
Snapping on a fresh pair of latex gloves, I pulled at the cabinets over the bunk. Nothing. There was a polished metal lock on each set of doors. I didn’t feel like forcing one open, not when there was more to explore in the room.
I just about fell over, however, when the cabinet over the desk swung open, the force of my unresisted tug causing me to take a few unsteady steps backward. I heard Campbell shuffle toward me.
“You OK?”
“Just lost my balance for a second.” I already was leaning forward, shining my flashlight into the cabinet’s interior.
A squat bottle of brownish liquid sat on the far left-hand side. The label was just a confusion of Korean characters to me, but there was a faint odor wafting from it that made the packaging irrelevant: whiskey.
Stacked next to the bottle, filling up that half of the cabinet, were a collection of hardbound books. A few had English titles, too-the captain was a Stephen King fan. I took a picture of the open cabinet.
The other half held file folders separated by black metal slats. Each folder had a colored label on its outer edge marked by a few characters. I looked down at the desk. The folders it held were identified the same way.
I reached for the desktop files but stopped myself and took a picture first. Using tweezers, I opened the cover of the top file. It was some kind of an official report-or maybe it wasn’t; it could have been a collection of Korean nursery rhymes and I wouldn’t have been able to tell. But it was laid out with several headers above the body text and a series of numbers across the top of the page. If there were no other leads to be found, I could give these papers to Campbell and ask him what the subjects of each were.
Turning 180 degrees, I walked a few steps to the opposite wall and the locker set in it.
“What about the safe? Aren’t you going to…?”
“Just wait,” I said, scrutinizing the locker’s latch mechanism. It looked like it had a hole for a padlock but featured no other means of security. “It’s not going anyplace.”
I took a picture of the locker closed, slipped a pen under the door handle, opened it and took another picture. The interior was about eighteen inches wide and divided into three sections. The top and middle sections were open, but the bottom portion contained two closed drawers.
The highest shelf was about the size of a shoebox. An array of hygiene implements was scattered on it, including a shaver, toothpaste, brushes, a mirror and soap. The middle area was maybe three feet deep. A dress uniform top and pants hung there, as did three pairs of khaki pants and shirts. A pair of spit-polished shoes sat beneath them.
Using the pen again, I pulled the top drawer open. It held shirts and underwear, each white item folded with razor creases. The clothes were stacked to the top of the drawer, smelling of soap and starch spray.
I pushed it closed and opened the bottom drawer. Socks and some folded civilian clothes-jeans and T-shirts — filled its interior.
Well, why not? The underwear drawer had always, for some reason, been a popular place to stash valuables.
Using a ruler, I lifted each item of clothing up and looked beneath it. Nothing was stacked between the socks, jeans or shirts, and the bottom of the drawer was bare. I measured its depth and compared it to the exterior… nope. No false bottom. The top drawer also held clothes but no clues.
So. The safe.
It had a lock mechanism about the same diameter as a can of soda. A vertical handle was mounted beneath it, and I could see from scrape marks on the weathered gray metal to its left that it swung in an arc in that direction.