The Affair (17 page)

Merriam checked pulse and heartbeat and poked around the wound for a minute. He said, “This man bled out through his femoral artery. Death by gunshot.” Which was obvious, but then he added something interesting. He teased up the slit edge of the guy’s pants leg and said, “Wet denim is not easy to cut. Someone used a very sharp knife.”

I helped Merriam put
the guy on a canvas gurney, and then we loaded him in the back of the truck. Merriam drove him away, and Deveraux spent five minutes on the radio in her car. I stood around with Pellegrino. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. Then Deveraux got out of her car again and sent him about his business. He drove away, and Deveraux and I were alone once more, except for the blasted tree and a patch of dark tone on the ground, where the dead guy’s blood had soaked into the soil.

Deveraux said, “Butler claims no one came out of Kelham’s main gate at any time this morning.”

I said, “Who’s Butler?”

“My other deputy. Pellegrino’s opposite number. I’ve had him stationed outside the base. I wanted a quick warning, in case they cancel the lockdown. There’s going to be all kinds of tension. People are very upset about Chapman.”

“But not about the first two?”

“Depends who you ask, and where. But the soldiers never stop short of the tracks. The bars are all on the other side.”

I said nothing.

She said, “There must be more gates. Or holes in the fence. It’s got to be, what? Thirty miles long? And it’s fifty years old. Got to be weak spots. Someone came out somewhere, that’s for sure.”

“And went back in again,” I said. “If you’re right, that is. Someone went back in bloody to the elbows, with a dirty knife, and at least one round short in his magazine.”

“I am right,” she said.

“I never heard of a quarantine zone before,” I said. “Not inside the United States, anyway. I just don’t buy it.”

“I buy it,” she said.

Something in her tone. Something in her face.

I said, “What? Did the Marines do this once?”

“It was no big thing.”

“Tell me all about it.”

“Classified information,” she said.

“Where was it?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“When was it?”

“I can’t tell you that either.”

I paused a beat and asked, “Have you spoken to Munro yet? The guy they sent to the base?”

She nodded. “He called and left a message when he arrived. First thing. As a courtesy. He gave me a number to reach him.”

“Good,” I said. “Because now I need to speak to him.”

We drove back together
, across Clancy’s land, out his gate, south on the washboard two-lane, then west through the black half of town, away from Kelham, toward the railroad. I saw the same old women on the same front porches, and the same kids on the same bikes, and men of various ages moving slow between unknown starting points and unknown destinations. The houses leaned and sagged. There were abandoned work sites. Slabs laid, with no structures built on them. Tangles of rusted rebar. Weedy piles of bricks and sand. All around was flat tilled dirt and trees. There was a kind of hopeless crushed torpor in the air, like there probably had been every day for the last hundred years.

“My people,” Deveraux said. “My base. They all voted for me. I mean it, practically a hundred percent. Because of my father. He was fair to them. They were voting for him, really.”

I asked, “How did you do with the white folks?”

“Close to a hundred percent with them too. But that’s all going to change, on both ends of the deal. Unless I get some answers for all concerned.”

“Tell me about the first two women.”

Her response to that was to brake sharply and twist in her seat and back up twenty yards. Then she nosed into the turning she had just passed. It was a dirt track, well smoothed and well scoured. It had a humped camber and shallow bar ditches left and right. It ran straight north, and was lined on both sides with what might once have been slave shacks. Deveraux passed by the first ten or so, passed by a gap where one had burned out, and then she turned into a yard I recognized from the third photograph I had seen. The poor girl’s house. The unadorned neck and ears. The amazing beauty. I recognized the shade tree she had been sitting under, and the white wall that had reflected the setting sun softly and obliquely into her face.

We parked on a patch of grass and got out. A dog barked somewhere, and its chain rattled. We walked under the limbs of the shade tree and knocked on the back door. The house was small, not much bigger than a cabin, but it was well tended. The white siding was not new, but it had been frequently painted. It was stained auburn at the bottom, the color of hair, where heavy rains had bounced up out of the mud.

The back door was opened by a woman not much older than either Deveraux or me. She was tall and thin and she moved slow, with a kind of sun-beat languor, and with the kind of iron stoicism I imagined all her neighbors shared. She smiled a resigned smile at Deveraux, and shook her hand, and asked her, “Any news about my baby?”

Deveraux said, “We’re still working on it. We’ll get there in the end.”

The bereaved mother was too polite to respond to that. She just smiled her wan smile again and turned to me. She said, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

I said, “Jack Reacher, ma’am,” and shook her hand. She said, “I’m Emmeline McClatchy. I’m delighted to meet you, sir. Are you working with the Sheriff’s Department?”

“The army sent me to help.”

“Now they did,” she said. “Not nine months ago.”

I didn’t answer that.

The woman said, “I have some deer meat in the pot. And some tea in the pitcher. Would you two care to join me for lunch?”

Deveraux said, “Emmeline, I’m sure that’s your dinner, not your lunch. We’ll be OK. We’ll eat in town. But thanks anyway.”

It was the answer the woman seemed to have been expecting. She smiled again and backed away into the gloom behind her. We walked back to the car. Deveraux backed out to the street, and we drove away. Further down the row was a shack much like the others, but it had electric beer signs in the windows. A bar of some kind. Maybe music. We threaded through a matrix of dirt streets. I saw another abandoned construction project. Knee-high foundation walls had been built out of cinder blocks, and four vertical wooden posts had been raised at the corners. But that was all. Building materials were scattered around the rest of the lot in untidy piles. There were surplus cinder blocks, there were bricks, there was a pile of sand, there was a stack of bagged cement, gone all smooth and rigid with dew and rain.

There was also a pile of gravel.

I turned and looked at it as we drove past. Maybe two yards of it, the small sharp gray kind they mix with sand and cement to make into concrete. The pile had spread and wandered into a low hump about the size of a double bed, all weedy at the edges. It had pockmarks and divots in its top surface, as if kids had walked on it.

I didn’t say anything. Deveraux’s mind was already made up. She drove on and turned left into a broader street. Bigger houses, bigger yards. Picket fences, not hurricane wire. Cement paths to the doors, not beaten earth. She slowed and then eased to a stop outside a place twice the size of the shack we had just left. A decent one-story house. Expensive, if it had been in California. But shabby. The paint was peeling and the gutters were broken-backed. The roof was asphalt and some of the tiles had slipped. There was a boy in the yard, maybe sixteen years old. He was standing still and doing nothing. Just watching us.

Deveraux said, “This is the other one. Shawna Lindsay was her name. That’s her baby brother right there, staring at us.”

The baby brother was no oil painting. He had lucked out with the genetic lottery. That was for damn sure. He was nothing like his sister. Nothing at all. He had fallen out of the ugly tree, and hit every branch. He had a head like a bowling ball, and eyes like the finger holes, and about as close together.

I asked, “Are we going in?”

Deveraux shook her head. “Shawna’s mom told me not to come back until I could tell her who slit her first-born’s throat. Those were her words. And I can’t blame her for them. Losing a child is a terrible thing. Especially for people like this. Not that they thought their girls would grow up to be models and buy them a house in Beverly Hills. But to have something truly special meant a lot to them. You know, after having nothing else, ever.”

The boy was still staring. Quiet, baleful, and patient.

“So let’s go,” I said. “I need to use the phone.”

Chapter

28

Deveraux let me use the phone in her office. Not a democracy
, not yet, but we were getting there. She found the number Munro had left for her, and she dialed it for me, and she told whoever answered that Sheriff Elizabeth Deveraux was on the line for Major Duncan Munro. Then she handed the receiver to me and vacated her chair and the room.

I sat down behind her desk with nothing but dead air in my ear and the remnant of her body heat on my back. I waited. The silence hissed at me. The army did not play hold music. Not back in 1997. Then a minute later there was a plastic click and clatter as a handset was scooped up off a desk, and a voice said, “Sheriff Deveraux? This is Major Munro. How are you?”

The voice was hard, and brisk, and hyper-competent, but it had an undertone of good cheer in it. But then, I figured anyone would be happy to get a call from Elizabeth Deveraux.

I said, “Munro?”

He said, “I’m sorry, I was expecting Elizabeth Deveraux.”

“Well, sadly you didn’t get her,” I said. “My name is Reacher. I’m using the sheriff’s phone right now. I’m with the 396th, currently TDY with the 110th. We’re of equal rank.”

Munro said, “Jack Reacher? I’ve heard of you, of course. How can I help you?”

“Did Garber tell you he was sending an undercover guy to town?”

“No, but I guessed he would. That would be you, right? Tasked to snoop on the locals? Which must be going pretty well, seeing as you’re calling from the sheriff’s phone. Which must be fun, in a way. People here say she’s a real looker. Although they also say she’s a lesbian. You got an opinion on any of that?”

“That stuff is none of your business, Munro.”

“Call me Duncan, OK?”

“No, thanks. I’ll call you Munro.”

“Sure. How can I help you?”

“We’ve got shit happening out here. There was a guy shot to death this morning, close to your fence, northwestern quadrant. Unknown assailant, but probably a military round, and definitely a half-assed attempt to patch the fatal wound with a GI field dressing.”

“What, someone shot a guy and then gave him first aid? Sounds like a civilian accident to me.”

“I hoped you weren’t going to be that predictable. How do you explain the round and the dressing?”

“Remington .223 and a surplus store.”

“And two guys were beat up before that, by someone they swear was a soldier.”

“Not a soldier based at Kelham.”

“Really? How many Kelham personnel can you vouch for? In terms of their exact whereabouts this morning?”

“All of them,” Munro said.

“Literally?”

“Yes, literally,” he said. “We’ve got Alpha Company overseas as of five days ago, and I’ve got everyone else confined to quarters, or else sitting in the mess hall or the officers’ club. There’s a good MP staff here, and they’re watching everyone, while also watching each other. I can guarantee no one left the base this morning. Or since I got here, for that matter.”

“Is that your standard operating procedure?”

“It’s my secret weapon. Sitting down all day, no reading, no television, no nothing. Sooner or later someone talks, out of sheer boredom. Never fails. My arm-breaking days are over. I learned that time is my friend.”

“Tell me again,” I said. “This is very important. You’re absolutely sure no one left the base this morning? Or last night? Not even under secret orders, maybe local, or from Benning, or maybe even from the Pentagon? I’m serious here. And don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

“I’m sure,” Munro said. “I guarantee it. On my mother’s grave. I know how to do this stuff, you know. Give me that, at least.”

“OK,” I said.

Munro asked, “Who was the dead guy?”

“No ID at this time. Civilian, almost certainly.”

“Near the fence?”

“Same as the guys that got beat up. Like a quarantine zone.”

“That’s ridiculous. That’s not happening. I know that for sure.”

We both went quiet for a second, and then I asked, “What else do you know for sure?”

“I can’t tell you. Orders are to keep this thing tighter than a fish’s butt.”

“Let’s play Twenty Questions.”

“Let’s not.”

“The short version. Three questions. Yes or no answers.”

“Don’t put me on the spot, OK?”

“We’re both on the spot already. Don’t you see that? We’ve got a real mess here. And either it’s in there with you or it’s out here with me. So sooner or later one of us is going to have to help the other. We might as well start now.”