I glanced up. Campbell was standing in the door, looking down at me and the safe.
“Think it’ll open?” His voice was tinged with an enthusiasm that he tried to hide behind a blank expression.
I shrugged, grasped the handle and pulled. Nothing.
“Evidently not. But the captain wouldn’t be much of an officer if he just left the boat’s safe unlocked, would he?” I stood. “Ten bucks says the key is in his pocket. I’ll go down and search him after they get this engine room business straightened out.”
He took a step back as I moved into the hallway again. I chewed on my lower lip, then spoke.
“Larsen said the dead guy in the torpedo room was the executive officer. Would his room be around here anyplace?”
“What was his name?” Campbell asked, looking at the closed doors again.
“Lee.” I dug in my bag for the dossiers. “Lee something. Tae-Uk. Lee Tae-Uk.”
“Yeah, I think the XO’s quarters should be off this passageway. Lee… Lee…” He walked down the hall, then stopped at the door just aft of the mess room. “This is it.”
As I swung the door open, I was struck by how similar this room was to the captain’s. It might have been tighter by a few square feet, but the layout was the same. A locker against the aft wall, a bunk, cabinets above it, and more cabinets hanging over a desk. No safe, though.
The wall over the bunk had twice as many pictures mounted on it. More framed photos of landscapes and ships were visible on other surfaces. A snapshot of a smiling man in uniform, his arm around a petite, striking woman, was taped to the bulkhead over the desk’s writing surface. I paused, trying to take it all in.
“Hey, what are you doing to your hand?” Campbell said.
“Nothing. Just thinking. It’s a rubber band I wear on my wrist.” I had decided what I wanted to look at first.
Walking over to the bunk, I could see that the pictures next to it were of the same woman, with or without the man, who I now recognized as Lee. The photos told silent, one-frame stories of happy times. I moved back a few feet and captured the whole scene in a digital image. Using lift sheets, I took prints from all the room’s handles. As had been the case in Yoon’s quarters, there were clusters of similar — if not identical — prints on all the surfaces.
And like the captain’s locker, Lee’s was not secured. I opened it the same way. The top shelf held shaving and cleaning items. Uniforms, both dress and daily, hung in the middle area. The top drawer held olive socks and white underwear; the bottom one contained assorted non-military garb and a stack of white undershirts.
I closed both, then sighed and crouched again.
It was a waste of time to poke through this stuff. The underwear drawer held nothing but undergarments. The other drawer held only… wait. As I lifted up the pair of slacks at the bottom of the pile, I could see the spine of a thin, leather-bound book.
Using the ruler, I kept the book visible without touching it and with my other hand took a picture of where I had found it. Then I reached in and pulled it free.
“What? Did you find something?” Campbell moved into the room behind me.
“Maybe. It was hidden, so it probably has stuff in it that he didn’t want other people to find. That could be something that answers some of my questions about what happened on the boat… or it could be gossip about the enlisted men. Hey, could you step into the doorway?”
“Oh, sorry,” Campbell said, shuffling back out of my way.
I stood up and opened it to the first page.
The book was about the size of a postcard and maybe a finger-width thick. The pages inside were white and unlined. The first was filled with spidery Korean handwriting, as were the next few.
“It’s a log or a diary. Not official, I’m guessing.”
I closed it again and checked the back cover. It also was unmarked, brown leather. But about two-thirds of the way through the book there seemed to be a gap, from which protruded the edge of another sheet.
When I opened it to that page, a folded piece of paper fell out and fluttered to the floor.
“Shit,” I said.
I made sure to mark the place in the book where it had fallen from with my finger. Leaning over, I could see that the white paper was blank on the sides facing us. But the faint impressions of Korean characters were visible through the thin, pale material.
“Is it a letter or something?”
“I don’t know. We’re going to leave it folded up for the time being.” I picked the white square up with tweezers and placed it back in the book.
“You’re just ignoring that book? What if it’s-”
“Calm down. The locker was the first thing I examined. Should we just forget about all the cabinets and other stuff in the room now?” My voice was loud, louder than I intended. The crime scene was my domain, and his inexpert advice grated on my professional nerves.
“Whatever,” he said, raising his palms in mock surrender. “You stay in here, I’ll stay out there.”
“Sorry… Campbell? I didn’t mean to snap at you. I’m just trying to concentrate here, and you have to trust me when I say it would be a mistake to get too fixated on this book. It could cause us to overlook something more important. OK?”
“Sure. You’re the expert,” he said. “Don’t want to get in the way.”
Annoyance still permeated his words, but he was just going to have to get over it.
Putting the book on the lower shelf of the locker, I focused on the desk area. The desk had only one ornament: another framed picture of the woman I had seen in the photos by the bunk. This was a black-and-white head shot with a soft filter that turned the woman’s porcelain skin cloudy.
Her eyes looked out over a desktop calendar blotter, each of its days crossed off in red ink. It looked like it belonged on the desk of a CEO, not a submariner. Notes and numbers were crammed into each date box and in the margins.
But my gaze kept coming back to the woman. I didn’t remember seeing spouses listed for any of the officers. A girlfriend? I checked the dossier again and found that I was correct: Lee was unmarried. It said he had two brothers living in South Korea, but they were his sole relatives, according to the dossier.
I walked back over to his bunk and re-examined the pictures there. The backgrounds were nondescript in most, just a jumble of urban scenery or pastoral countryside. But several included recognizable North Korean landmarks.
Lee had some pretty strong feelings for someone he was leaving behind forever in a hostile country.
Campbell’s curiosity had overcome his bruised ego.
“Is there some clue in the pictures?” he asked.
I turned and smiled at him, hearing the change in his tone. He was standing in the doorway again. “Most of the guys on the Dragon have few if any ties to the PRK. But Lee seems to have quite a fascination with a North Korean lass.”
“He’s a traitor! I knew it. Lieutenant Larsen said the same thing, that Lee was found with a gun in his hand.”
“We don’t know he’s a traitor. Come on, we have to be careful not to jump to conclusions here,” I said. “At this point, it’s interesting-but that’s it. She could be, I don’t know, a prostitute. There are lots of possibilities.”
Campbell wanted to say something but kept silent as I continued to explain my work to him. He didn’t look annoyed anymore. He looked interested, an expression that didn’t seem to be in the rest of the SEALs’ repertoire.
“What’s your first name?” I asked.
He blinked. “Uh… what?”
“Your first name. I’m not a SEAL. I’m allowed to act like you’re a person.”
“Oh. It’s Brandon. Brandon Campbell. Everyone calls me Campbell, though.”
“OK, Brandon, it’s like a puzzle,” I said, but he was right. “Campbell” just seemed more natural. “If we try to make the pieces fit some preconceived image, we could force them to be something they’re not. See what I’m saying?”