by Lee Child
* * *
Whole episodes of TV cop shows could have run before the real-life cops even arrived. DNA could have been extracted and analysed, matches could have been made, perpetrators could have been hunted and caught and tried and sentenced. But eventually six officers came down the stairs. They were in caps and vests and they had drawn their weapons. NYPD patrolmen on the night shift, probably out of the 14th Precinct on West 35th Street, the famous Midtown South. They ran along the platform and started checking the train from the front. I got up again and watched through the windows above the couplers, down the whole length of the train, like peering into a long lit-up stainless steel tunnel. The view got murky farther down, due to dirt and green impurities in the layers of glass. But I could see the cops opening doors car by car, checking, clearing, turning the passengers out and hustling them upstairs to the street. It was a lightly loaded night train and it didn’t take long for them to reach us. They checked through the windows and saw the body and the gun and tensed up. The doors hissed open and they swarmed on board, two through each set of doors. We all raised our hands, like a reflex.
One cop blocked each of the doorways and the other three moved straight towards the dead woman. They stopped and stood off about six feet. Didn’t check for a pulse or any other sign of life. Didn’t hold a mirror under her nose, to check for breathing. Partly because it was obvious she wasn’t breathing, and partly because she didn’t have a nose. The cartilage had torn away, leaving jagged splinters of bone between where the internal pressure had popped her eyeballs out.
A big cop with sergeant’s stripes turned around. He had gone a little pale but was otherwise well into a pretty good impersonation of just another night’s work. He asked, ‘Who saw what happened here?’
There was silence at the front of the car. The Hispanic woman, the man in the NBA shirt, and the African lady. They were all sitting tight and saying nothing. Point eight: a rigid stare ahead.
They were all doing it. If I can’t see you, you can’t see me. The guy in the golf shirt said nothing. So I said, ‘She took the gun out of her bag and shot herself.’
‘Just like that?’
‘More or less.’
‘Why?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Where and when?’
‘On the run-in to the station. Whenever that was.’
The guy processed the information. Suicide by gunshot. The subway was the NYPD’s responsibility. The deceleration zone between 41st and 42nd was the 14th Precinct’s turf. His case. No question. He nodded. Said, ‘OK, please all of you exit the car and wait on the platform. We’ll need names and addresses and statements from you.’
Then he keyed his collar microphone and was answered by a loud blast of static. He answered that in turn with a long stream of codes and numbers. I guessed he was calling for paramedics and an ambulance. After that it would be up to the transportation people to get the car unhooked and cleaned and the schedule back on track. Not difficult, I thought. There was plenty of time before the morning rush hour.
We got out into a gathering crowd on the platform. Transport cops, more regular cops arriving, subway workers clustering all around, Grand Central personnel showing up. Five minutes later an FDNY paramedic crew clattered down the stairs with a gurney. They came through the barrier and stepped on the train and the first-response cops stepped off. I didn’t see what happened after that because the cops started moving through the crowd, looking around, making ready to find a passenger each and walk them away for further inquiries. The big sergeant came for me. I had answered his questions on the train. Therefore he made me first in line. He led me deep into the station and put me in a hot stale white-tiled room that could have been part of the transport police facility. He sat me down alone in a wooden chair and asked me for my name.
‘Jack Reacher,’ I said.
He wrote it down and didn’t speak again. Just hung around in the doorway and watched me. And waited. For a detective to show up, I guessed.
SEVEN
The detective who showed up was a woman and she came alone. She was wearing pants and a grey short- sleeved shirt. Maybe silk, maybe man-made. Shiny, anyway. It was untucked and I guessed the tails were hiding her gun and her cuffs and whatever else she was carrying. Inside the shirt she was small and slim. Above the shirt she had dark hair tied back and a small oval face. No jewellery. Not even a wedding band. She was somewhere in her late thirties. Maybe forty. An attractive woman. I liked her immediately. She looked relaxed and friendly. She showed me her gold shield and handed me her business card. It had numbers on it for her office and her cell. It had an NYPD e-mail address. She said the name on it out loud for me. The name was Theresa Lee, with the T and the h pronounced together, like theme or therapy. Theresa. She wasn’t Asian. Maybe the Lee came from an old marriage or was an Ellis Island version of Leigh, or some other longer and more complicated name. Or maybe she was descended from Robert E.
She said ‘Can you tell me exactly what happened?’
She spoke softly, with raised eyebrows and in a breathy voice brimming with care and consideration, like her primary concern was my own post-traumatic stress. Can you tell me? Can you? Like, can you bear to relive it? I smiled, briefly. Midtown South was down to low single-digit homicides per year, and even if she had dealt with all of them by herself since the first day she came on the job, I had still seen more corpses than she had. By a big multiple. The woman on the train hadn’t been the most pleasant of them, but she had been a very long way from the worst.
So I told her exactly what had happened, all the way up from Bleecker Street, all the way through the eleven-point list, my tentative approach, the fractured conversation, the gun, the suicide.
Theresa Lee wanted to talk about the list.
‘We have a copy,’ she said. ‘It’s supposed to be confidential.’
‘It’s been out in the world for twenty years,’ I said. ‘Everyone has a copy. It’s hardly confidential.’
‘Where did you see it?’
‘In Israel,’ I said. ‘Just after it was written.’
‘How?’
So I ran through my résumé for her. The abridged version. The U.S. Army, thirteen years a military policeman, the elite 110th investigative unit, service all over the world, plus detached duty here and there, as and when ordered. Then the Soviet collapse, the peace dividend, the smaller defence budget, suddenly getting cut loose.
‘Officer or enlisted man?’ she asked.
‘Final rank of major,’ I said.
‘And now?’
‘I’m retired.’
‘You’re young to be retired.’
‘I figured I should enjoy it while I can.’
‘And are you?’
‘Never better.’
‘What were you doing tonight? Down there in the Village?’
‘Music,’ I said. ‘Those blues clubs on Bleecker.’
‘And where were you headed on the 6 train?’
‘I was going to get a room somewhere or head over to the Port Authority to get a bus.’
‘To where?’
‘Wherever.’
‘Short visit?’
‘The best kind.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Nowhere. My year is one short visit after another.’
‘Where’s your luggage?’
‘I don’t have any.’
Most people ask follow-up questions after that, but Theresa Lee didn’t. Instead her eyes changed focus again and she said, ‘I’m not happy that the list was wrong. I thought it was supposed to be definitive.’ She spoke inclusively, cop to cop, as if my old job made a difference to her.
‘It was only half wrong,’ I said. ‘The suicide part was right.’
‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘The signs would be the same, I guess. But it was still a false positive.’
‘Better than a false negative.’
‘I suppose so,’ she said again.
I asked
, ‘Do we know who she was?’
‘Not yet. But we’ll find out. They tell me they found keys and a wallet at the scene. They’ll probably be definitive. But what was up with the winter jacket?’
I said, ‘I have no idea.’
She went quiet, like she was profoundly disappointed. I said, ‘These things are always works in progress. Personally I think we should add a twelfth point to the women’s list, too. If a woman bomber takes off her headscarf, there’s going to be a suntan clue, the same as the men.’
‘Good point,’ she said.
‘And I read a book that figured the part about the virgins is a mistranslation. The word is ambiguous. It comes in a passage full of food imagery. Milk and honey. It probably means raisins. Plump, and possibly candied or sugared.’
‘They kill themselves for raisins?’
‘I’d love to see their faces.’
‘Are you a linguist?’
‘I speak English,’ I said. ‘And French. And why would a woman bomber want virgins anyway? A lot of sacred texts are mistranslated. Especially where virgins are concerned. Even the New Testament, probably. Some people say Mary was a first-time mother, that’s all. From the Hebrew word. Not a virgin. The original writers would laugh, seeing what we made of it all.’
Theresa Lee didn’t comment on that. Instead she asked, ‘Are you OK?’
I took it to be an inquiry as to whether I was shaken up. As to whether I should be offered counselling. Maybe because she took me for a taciturn man who was talking too much. But I was wrong. I said, ‘I’m fine,’ and she looked a little surprised and said, ‘I would be regretting the approach, myself. On the train. I think you tipped her over the edge. Another couple of stops and she might have gotten over whatever was upsetting her.’
We sat in silence for a minute after that and then the big sergeant stuck his head in and nodded Lee out to the corridor. I heard a short whispered conversation and then Lee came back in and asked me to head over to West 35th Street with her. To the precinct house.
I asked, ‘Why?’
She hesitated.
‘Formality,’ she said. ‘To get your statement typed up, to close the file.’
‘Do I get a choice in the matter?’
‘Don’t go there,’ she said. ‘The Israeli list is involved. We could call this whole thing a matter of national security. You’re a material witness, we could keep you until you grew old and died. Better just to play ball like a good citizen.’
So I shrugged and followed her out of the Grand Central labyrinth to Vanderbilt Avenue, where her car was parked. It was an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria, battered and grimy, but it worked OK. It got us over to West 35th just fine. We went in through the grand old portal and she led me upstairs to an interview room. She stepped back and waited in the corridor and let me go in ahead of her. Then she stayed in the corridor and closed the door behind me and locked it from the outside.
EIGHT
Theresa Lee came back twenty minutes later with the beginnings of an official file and another guy. She put the file on the table and introduced the other guy as her partner. She said his name was Docherty. She said he had come up with a bunch of questions that maybe should have been asked and answered at the outset.
‘What questions?’ I asked.
First she offered me coffee and the bathroom. I said yes to both. Docherty escorted me down the corridor and when we got back there were three foam cups on the table, next to the file. Two coffees, one tea. I took a coffee and tried it. It was OK. Lee took the tea. Docherty took the second coffee and said, ‘Run through it all again.’
So I did, concisely, bare bones, and Docherty fussed a bit about how the Israeli list had produced a false positive, the same way that Lee had. 1 answered him the same way I had answered her, that a false positive was better than a false negative, and that looking at it from the dead woman’s point of view, whether she was heading for a solo exit or planning to take a crowd with her might not alter the personal symptoms she would be displaying. For five minutes we had a collegiate atmosphere going, three reasonable people discussing an interesting phenomenon.
Then the tone changed.
Docherty asked, ‘How did you feel?’
I asked, ‘About what?’
‘While she was killing herself.’
‘Glad that she wasn’t killing me.’
Docherty said, ‘We’re homicide detectives. We have to look at all violent deaths. You understand that, right? Just in case.’
I said, ‘Just in case of what?’
‘Just in case there’s more than meets the eye.’
‘There isn’t. She shot herself.’
‘Says you.’
‘No one can say different. Because that’s what happened.’
Docherty said, ‘There are always alternative scenarios.’
‘You think?’
‘Maybe you shot her.’
Theresa Lee gave me a sympathetic look. I said, ‘I didn’t.’
Docherty said, ‘Maybe it was your gun.’
I said, ‘It wasn’t. It was a two-pound piece. I don’t have a bag.’
‘You’re a big guy. Big pants. Big pockets.’
Theresa Lee gave me another sympathetic look. Like she was saying, I’m sorry.
I said, ‘What is this? Good cop, dumb cop?’
Docherty said, ‘You think I’m dumb?’
‘You just proved it. If I shot her with a .357 Magnum, I’d have residue on me up to my elbow. But you just stood outside the men’s room while I washed my hands. You’re full of shit. You haven’t fingerprinted me and you haven’t Mirandized me. You’re blowing smoke.’
‘We’re obliged to make certain.’
‘What does the medical examiner say?’
‘We don’t know yet.’
‘There were witnesses.’
Lee shook her head. ‘No use. They didn’t see anything.’
‘They must have.’
‘Their view was blocked by your back. Plus they weren’t looking, plus they were half asleep, and plus they don’t speak much English. They had nothing to offer. Basically I think they wanted to get going before we started checking green cards.’
‘What about the other guy? He was in front of me. He was wide awake. And he looked like a citizen and an English speaker.’
‘What other guy?’
‘The fifth passenger. Chinos and a golf shirt.’
Lee opened the file. Shook her head. ‘There were only four passengers, plus the woman.’
NINE
Lee took a sheet of paper out of the file and reversed it and slid it halfway across the table. It was a handwritten list of witnesses. Four names. Mine, plus a Rodriguez, a Flrlujlov, and an Mbele.
‘Four passengers,’ she said again.
I said, ‘I was on the train. I can count. I know how many passengers there were.’ Then I re-ran the scene in my head.
Stepping off the train, waiting among the small milling crowd. The arrival of the paramedic crew. The cops, stepping off the train in turn, moving through the throng, taking an elbow each, leading the witnesses away to separate rooms. I had gotten grabbed first, by the big sergeant. Impossible to say whether four cops had followed behind us, or only three.
I said, ‘He must have slipped away.’
Docherty asked, ‘Who was he?’
‘Just a guy. Alert, but nothing special about him. My age, not poor.’
‘Did he interact in any way with the woman?’
‘Not that I saw.’
‘Did he shoot her?’
‘She shot herself.’
Docherty shrugged. ‘So he’s just a reluctant witness. Doesn’t want paperwork showing he was out and about at two in the morning. Probably cheating on his wife. Happens all the time.’
‘He ran. But you’re giving him a free pass and looking at me instead?’
‘You just testified that he wasn’t involved.’
‘I wasn’t involved either.’
&
nbsp; ‘Says you.’
‘You believe me about the other guy but not about myself?’
‘Why would you lie about the other guy?’
I said, ‘This is a waste of time.’ And it was. It was such an extreme, clumsy waste of time that I suddenly realized it wasn’t for real. It was stage managed. I realized that in fact, in their own peculiar way, Lee and Docherty were doing me a small favour.
There’s more than meets the eye.
I said, ‘Who was she?’
Docherty said, ‘Why should she be someone?’
‘Because you made the ID and the computers lit up like Christmas trees. Someone called you and told you to hold on to me until they get here. You didn’t want to put an arrest on my record so you’re stalling me with all this bullshit.’
‘We didn’t particularly care about your record. We just didn’t want to do the paperwork.’
‘So who was she?’
‘Apparently she worked for the government. A federal agency is on its way to question you. We’re not allowed to say which one.’
* * *
They left me locked in the room. It was an OK space. Grimy, hot, battered, no windows, out-of-date crime prevention posters on the walls and the smell of sweat and anxiety and burnt coffee in the air. The table, and three chairs. Two for the detectives, one for the suspect. Back in the day maybe the suspect got smacked around and tumbled out of the chair. Maybe he still did. It’s hard to say exactly what happens, in a room with no windows.
I timed the delay in my head. The clock had already been running about an hour, since Theresa Lee’s whispered talk in the Grand Central corridor. So I knew it wasn’t the FBI coming for me. Their New York field office is the largest in the nation, based down in Federal Plaza, near City Hall. Ten minutes to react, ten minutes to assemble a team, ten minutes to drive uptown with lights and sirens. The FBI would have arrived long ago. But that left a whole bunch of other three-letter agencies. I made a bet with myself that whoever was heading my way would have IA as the last two letters on their badges. CIA, DIA. Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency. Maybe others recently invented and hitherto unpublicized. Middle-of-the-night panics were very much their style.