The Affair: A Reacher Novel Read online

  “I don’t know how much it costs.”

  “Pay phones cost a quarter,” I said. “Suppose I left a dollar a call?”

  “That would be too much.”

  “Long distance,” I said.

  “Whatever you think is right. I’m going outside again.”

  I waited until I saw him emerge in the front yard. He took up a position near the fence, just standing there, watching the street, infinitely patient. Some kind of a perpetual vigil. I tucked a dollar bill between the phone’s plastic casing and the wall and took the receiver off the hook. I dialed the call I needed to make. Stan Lowrey, back on our shared home base. I went through his sergeant and a minute later he came on the line.

  I said, “Well, there’s a surprise. You’re still there. You’ve still got a job.”

  He said, “I think I’m safer than you are right now. Frances Neagley just reported back.”

  “She worries too much.”

  “You don’t worry enough.”

  “Is Karla Dixon still working financial stuff?”

  “I could find out.”

  “Ask her a question for me. I want to know if I should be concerned about money coming in from a place called Kosovo. Like gangsters laundering bales of cash. That kind of a thing.”

  “Doesn’t sound very likely. That’s the Balkans, right? They’re middle class if they own a goat. Rich, if they own two. Not like America.”

  I looked out the window and said, “Not so very different from parts of it.”

  Lowrey said, “I wish I was working financial stuff. I might have picked up some necessary skills. Like how to have savings.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll get unemployment. For a spell, at least.”

  “You sound cheerful.”

  “I’ve got a lot to be cheerful about.”

  “Why? What’s going on down there?”

  “All kinds of wonderful things,” I said, and hung up. Then I trapped a second dollar bill between the phone and the wall and dialed the call I wanted to make. I used the Treasury Department’s main switchboard and got a woman who sounded middle-aged and elegant. She asked, “How may I direct your inquiry?”

  I said, “Joe Reacher, please.”

  There was some scratching and clicking and a minute of dead air. No hold music at Treasury, either, back in 1997. Then a woman picked up and said, “Mr. Reacher’s office.” She sounded young and bright. Probably a magna cum laude graduate from a prestigious college, full of shining eyes and idealism. Probably good looking, too. Probably wearing a short plaid skirt and a white turtleneck sweater. My brother knew how to pick them.

  I asked, “Is Mr. Reacher there?”

  “I’m afraid he’s out of the office for a few days. He had to go to Georgia.” She said it like she would have said Saturn or Neptune. An incomprehensible distance, and barren when you got there. She asked, “May I take a message?”

  “Tell him his brother called.”

  “How exciting. He never mentioned he had brothers. But actually, you sound just like him, did you know that?”

  “So people say. There’s no message. Tell him I just wanted to say hello. To touch base, you know. To see how he is.”

  “Will he know which brother?”

  “I hope so,” I said. “He’s only got one.”

  I left immediately after that. Shawna’s brother did not break his lonely vigil. I waved and he waved back, but he didn’t move. He just kept on watching the far horizon. I hiked back to the Kelham road and turned left for town. I got some of the way toward the railroad and heard a car behind me, and a blip of a siren, like a courtesy. I turned and Deveraux pulled up right alongside me, neat and smooth. A short moment later I was in her front passenger seat, with nothing between us except her holstered shotgun.

  Chapter

  34

  The first thing I said was, “Long lunch.” Which was supposed to be just a descriptive comment, but she took it as more. She said, “Jealous?”

  “Depends what you ate. I had a cheeseburger.”

  “We had rare roast beef and horseradish sauce. With roast potatoes. It was very good. But you must know that. You must eat in the OC all the time.”

  “How was the conversation?”

  “Challenging.”

  “In what way?”

  “First tell me what you’ve been doing.”

  “Me? I’ve been eating humble pie. Metaphorically, at least.”

  “How so?”

  “I went back to the wrecked car. I was under orders to destroy the license plate. But it was already gone. The debris field had been picked clean, very methodically. There was a big force out there at some point this morning. So I think you’re right. There are boots on the ground outside Kelham’s fence. They’re operating an exclusion zone. They were diverted to the clean up because someone at the Pentagon didn’t trust me to do it.”

  Deveraux didn’t answer.

  “Then I took a long walk,” I said.

  Deveraux asked, “Did you see the gravel pile?”

  “I saw it this morning,” I said. “I went back for a closer look.”

  “Thinking about Janice May Chapman?”

  “Obviously.”

  “It’s a coincidence,” she said. “Black-on-white rapes are incredibly rare in Mississippi. No matter what folks want to believe.”

  “A white guy could have taken her there.”

  “Unlikely. He’d have stuck out like a sore thumb. He’d have been risking a hundred witnesses.”

  “Shawna Lindsay’s body was found there. I talked to her kid brother.”

  “Where else would it be found? It’s a vacant lot. That’s where bodies get dumped.”

  “Was she killed there?”

  “I don’t think so. There was no blood.”

  “At the scene or inside her?”

  “Neither one.”

  “What do you make of that?”

  “Same guy.”

  “And?”

  “Addiction to risk,” she said. “June, November, March, the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, then the middle, then the top. By Carter County standards, that is. He started safe and got progressively riskier. No one cares about poor black girls. Chapman was the first really visible victim.”

  “You care about poor black girls.”

  “But you know how it is. An investigation can’t sustain itself all on its own. It needs an external source of energy. It needs outrage.”

  “And there wasn’t any?”

  “There was pain, obviously. And sorrow, and suffering. But mostly there was resignation. And familiarity. Business as usual. If all the murdered women of Mississippi rose up tonight and marched through town, you’d notice two things. It would be a very long parade, and most of the marchers would be black. Poor black girls have been getting killed here forever. White women with money, not so often.”

  “What was the McClatchy girl’s name?”

  “Rosemary.”

  “Where was her body found?”

  “In the ditch near the crossing. The other side of the tracks.”

  “Any blood?”

  “None at all.”

  “Was she raped?”

  “No.”

  “Was Shawna Lindsay?”

  “No.”

  “So Janice May Chapman was another kind of escalation.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Did Rosemary McClatchy have a connection with Kelham?”

  “Of course she did. You saw her photograph. Kelham guys were lining up at her door with their tongues hanging out. She stepped out with a string of them.”

  “Black guys or white guys?”

  “Both.”

  “Officers or enlisted men?”

  “Both.”

  “Any suspects?”

  “I had no probable cause even to ask questions. She wasn’t seen with anyone from Kelham for at least two weeks before she was killed. My jurisdiction ends at Kelham’s fence. They wouldn’t hav
e let me through the gate.”

  “They let you through the gate today.”

  “Yes,” she said. “They did.”

  “What is Munro like?” I asked.

  “Challenging,” she said again.

  We thumped up over the tracks and parked just beyond them, with the straight road west in front of us, and the ditch where Rosemary McClatchy had been found on our right, and the turn into Main Street ahead and on our left. A standard cop instinct. If in doubt, pull over and park where people can see you. It feels like doing something, even when it isn’t.

  Deveraux said, “Obviously I started out with the baseline assumption that Munro would be lying through his teeth. Job one for him is to cover the army’s ass. I understand that, and I don’t blame him for it. He’s under orders, the same way you are.”

  “And?”

  “I asked him about the exclusion zone. He denied it, of course.”

  “He would have to,” I said.

  She nodded. “But then he went ahead and tried to prove it to me. He toured me all over. That’s why I was gone so long. He’s running a very tight ship. Every last man is confined to quarters. There are MPs everywhere. The MPs are watching each other, as well as everyone else. The armory is under guard. The logs show no weapons in or out for two solid days.”

  “And?”

  “Well, naturally I assumed I was getting conned big time. And sure enough, there were two hundred empty beds. So naturally I assumed they’ve got a shadow force bivouacked in the woods somewhere. But Munro said no, that’s a full company currently deployed elsewhere for a month. He swore blind. And I believed him, ultimately, because like everyone else I’ve heard the planes come in and out, and I’ve seen the faces come and go.”

  I nodded. Alpha Company, I thought. Kosovo.

  She said, “So in the end it all added up. Munro showed me a lot of evidence and it was all very consistent. And no one can run a con that perfect. So there is no exclusion zone. I was wrong. And you must be wrong about the debris field. It must have been local kids, scavenging.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It looked like a very organized search.”

  She paused a beat. “Then maybe the 75th is sending people directly from Benning. Which is entirely possible. Maybe they’re living in the woods around the fence. All Munro proved is that no one is leaving Kelham. He could be one of those guys who tells you a small truth in order to hide a bigger lie.”

  “Sounds like you didn’t like him much.”

  “I liked him well enough. He’s smart and he’s loyal to the army. But if we’d both been Marine MPs at the same time I’d have been worried. I’d have seen him as a serious rival. There’s something about him. He’s the type of guy you don’t want to see moving into your office. He’s too ambitious. And too good.”

  “What did he say about Janice May Chapman?”

  “He gave me what appeared to be a very expert summary of what appeared to be a very expert investigation which appeared to prove no one from Kelham was ever involved with anything.”

  “But you didn’t believe it?”

  “I almost did,” she said.

  “But?”

  “He couldn’t hide the rivalry. He made it clear. It’s him against me. It’s the army against the local sheriff. That’s the challenge. He wants the world to think the bad guy is on my side of the fence. But I wasn’t born yesterday. What the hell else would he want the world to think?”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “He doesn’t respect the Marines, either. Him against me means the army against the Corps. Which is a bad fight to pick. So if he wants rivalry, I want to give it right back. I want to take him on. I want to beat him like a rented mule. I want to find the truth somehow and stick it up his ass.”

  “Do you think you can do that?”

  She said, “I can if you help me.”

  Chapter

  35

  We sat in the idling Caprice for a long minute, saying nothing. The car must have had ten thousand hours of stake-out duty on it. From its previous life, in Chicago or New Orleans or wherever. Every pore of every interior surface was thick with sweat and odor and exhaustion. Grime was crusted everywhere. The floor mats had separated into hard tufts of fiber, each one like a flattened pearl.

  Deveraux said, “I apologize.”

  I said, “For what?”

  “For asking you to help me. It wasn’t fair. Forget I said anything.”

  “OK.”

  “Can I let you out somewhere?”

  I said, “Let’s go talk to Janice May Chapman’s nosy neighbors.”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t let you do that. I can’t let you turn against your own people.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t be turning against my own people,” I said. “Maybe I would be doing exactly what my own people wanted me to do all along. Because maybe I would be helping Munro, not you. Because he might be right, you know. We still have no idea who did what here.”

  We. She didn’t correct me. Instead she said, “But what’s your best guess?”

  I thought about the limousines scurrying in and out of Fort Kelham, carrying expensive lawyers. I thought about the exclusion zone, and the panic in John James Frazer’s voice, on the phone from the Pentagon. Senate Liaison. I said, “My best guess is it was a Kelham guy.”

  “You sure you want to take the risk of finding out for sure?”

  “Talking to a man with a gun is a risk. Asking questions isn’t.”

  I believed that then, back in 1997.

  Janice May Chapman’s house was a hundred yards from the railroad track, one of the last three dwellings on a dead-end lane a mile south and east of Main Street. It was a small place, set back in a wedge-shaped yard off of a circular bulge where traffic could turn around at the end of the street. It was facing two other houses, as if it was nine o’clock on a dial and they were two and four. It was maybe fifty years old, but it had been updated with new siding and a new roof and some diligent landscaping. Both of its neighbors were in a similar state of good repair, as had been all the previous houses on the street. Clearly this was Carter Crossing’s middle class enclave. Lawns were green and weed free. Driveways were paved and uncracked. Mailbox posts were exactly vertical. The only real-estate negative was the train, but there was only one of those a day. One minute out of fourteen hundred and forty. Not a bad deal.

  Chapman’s house had a full-width front porch, roofed over for shade, railed in with fancy millwork spindles, and equipped with a matched pair of white rocking chairs and a rag mat in various muted colors. Both her neighbors had the exact same thing going on, the only difference being that both their porches were occupied, each by a white-haired old lady wearing a floral-print housedress and sitting bolt upright in a rocker and staring at us.

  We sat in the car for a minute and then Deveraux rolled forward and parked right in the middle of the turnaround. We got out and stood for a second in the afternoon light.

  “Which one first?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Deveraux said. “Whichever, the other one will be right over within about thirty seconds.”

  Which is exactly what happened. We chose the right-hand house, the one at four o’clock on the dial, and before we were three steps onto its porch the neighbor from the two o’clock house was right behind us. Deveraux made the introductions. She gave the ladies my name and said I was an investigator from the army. Up close the ladies were slightly different from one another. One was older, the other was thinner. But they were broadly similar. Thin necks, pursed lips, haloes of white hair. They welcomed me respectfully. They were from a generation that liked the army, and knew something about it. No question they had had husbands or brothers or sons in uniform, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam.

  I turned and checked the view from the porch. Chapman’s house was neatly triangulated by her two neighbors. Like a foca
l point. Like a target. The two neighbors’ porches were exactly where the infantry would set up machine gun nests for effective enfilade fire.

  I turned back and Deveraux ran through what she had already discussed. She asked for confirmation of every point and got it. All negative. No, neither of the two ladies had seen Chapman leave her house on the day she had died. Not in the morning, not in the afternoon, not in the evening. Not on foot, not in her car, not in anybody else’s car. No, nothing new had come to either one of them. They had nothing to add.

  The next question was tactically difficult, so Deveraux left it to me. I asked, “Were there intervals when something could have happened that you didn’t see?” In other words: Just exactly how nosy are you? Were there moments when you weren’t staring at your neighbor?

  Both ladies saw the implication, of course, and they clucked and pursed and fussed for a minute, but the gravity of the situation meant more to them than their wounded feelings, and they came out and admitted that no, they had the situation pretty much sewn up around the clock. Both liked to sit on their porches when they weren’t otherwise occupied, and they tended to be otherwise occupied at different times. Both had bedrooms at the front of their houses, and neither tried to sleep until the midnight train had passed, and then afterward both were light sleepers anyway, so not much escaped them at night, either.

  I asked, “Was there usually much coming and going over there?”

  The ladies conferred and launched a long, complicated narrative that threatened to go all the way back to the American Revolution. I started to tune it out until I realized they were describing a fairly active social calendar that about half a year ago had settled into a month-on, month-off pattern, first of social frenzy, and then of complete inactivity. Feast or famine. Chapman was either never out, or always out, first four or five weeks in one condition, and then four or five weeks in the other.

  Bravo Company, in Kosovo.

  Bravo Company, at home.

  Not good.

  I asked, “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  She had several, they said, with prim delight. Sometimes all at once. Practically a parade. They listed sequential glimpsed sightings, all of polite young men with short hair, all in what they called dungaree pants, all in what they called undershirts, some in what they called motorcycle coats.