Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “OK,” she said. “You need anything?”

  “I’ll need that arrest report from Florida,” I said.

  “For Sherman Stoller?” she said. “That’s two years old.”

  “Got to start somewhere,” I said.

  “OK, I’ll ask for it,” she shrugged. “I’ll call Florida. Anything else?”

  “I need a gun,” I said.

  She didn’t reply. I dropped a twenty on the laminate tabletop and we slid out and stood up. Walked out to the unmarked car.

  “I need a gun,” I said again. “This is a big deal, right? So I’ll need a weapon. I can’t just go to the store and buy one. No ID, no address.”

  “OK,” she said. “I’ll get you one.”

  “I’ve got no permit,” I said. “You’ll have to do it on the quiet, OK?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s OK,” she said. “There’s one nobody else knows about.”

  WE KISSED A LONG HARD KISS IN THE STATION HOUSE LOT. Then we got out of the car and went in through the heavy glass door. More or less bumped into Finlay rounding the reception counter on his way out.

  “Got to go back to the morgue,” he said. “You guys come with me, OK? We need to talk. Lot to talk about.”

  So we went back out into the dull morning. Got back into Roscoe’s Chevy. Same system as before. She drove. I sat across the back. Finlay sat in the front passenger seat, twisted around so he could look at the both of us at once. Roscoe started up and headed south.

  “Long call from the Treasury Department,” Finlay said. “Must have been twenty minutes, maybe a half hour. I was nervous about Teale.”

  “What did they say?” I asked him.

  “Nothing,” he said. “They took a half hour to tell me nothing.”

  “Nothing?” I said. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “They wouldn’t tell me anything,” he said. “They want a shitload of formal authorization from Teale before they say word one.”

  “They confirmed Joe worked there, right?” I said.

  “Sure, they went that far,” he said. “He came from Military Intelligence ten years ago. They headhunted him. Recruited him specially.”

  “What for?” I asked him.

  Finlay just shrugged.

  “They wouldn’t tell me,” he said. “He started some new project exactly a year ago, but the whole thing is a total secret. He was some kind of a very big deal up there, Reacher, that’s for sure. You should have heard the way they were all talking about him. Like talking about God.”

  I went quiet for a while. I had known nothing about Joe. Nothing at all.

  “So that’s it?” I said. “Is that all you got?”

  “No,” he said. “I kept pushing until I got a woman called Molly Beth Gordon. You ever heard that name?”

  “No,” I said. “Should I have?”

  “Sounds like she was very close to Joe,” Finlay said. “Sounds like they may have had a thing going. She was very upset. Floods of tears.”

  “So what did she tell you?” I asked him.

  “Nothing,” Finlay said. “Not authorized. But she promised to tell you what she can. She said she’ll step out of line for you, because you’re Joe’s little brother.”

  I nodded.

  “OK,” I said. “That’s better. When do I speak to her?”

  “Call her about one thirty,” he said. “Lunch break, when her office will be empty. She’s taking a big risk, but she’ll talk to you. That’s what she said.”

  “OK,” I said again. “She say anything else?”

  “She let one little thing slip,” Finlay said. “Joe had a big debrief meeting scheduled. For next Monday morning.”

  “Monday?” I said. “As in the day after Sunday?”

  “Correct,” he said. “Looks like Hubble was right. Something is due to happen on or before Sunday. Whatever the hell he was doing, it looks like Joe knew he would have won or lost by then. But she wouldn’t say anything more. She was out of line talking to me at all and she sounded like she was being overheard. So call her, but don’t pin your hopes on her, Reacher. She may not know anything. Left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing up there. Big-time secrecy, right?”

  “Bureaucracy,” I said. “Who the hell needs it? OK, we have to assume we’re on our own here. At least for a while. We’re going to need Picard again.”

  Finlay nodded.

  “He’ll do what he can,” he said. “He called me last night. The Hubbles are secure. Right now, he’s sitting on it, but he’ll stand up for us if we need him.”

  “He should start tracing Joe,” I said. “Joe must have used a car. Probably flew down from Washington, into Atlanta, got a hotel room, rented a car, right? We should look for the car. He must have driven it down here Thursday night. It must have been dumped somewhere in the area. It might lead us back to the hotel. Maybe there would be something in Joe’s hotel room. Files, maybe.”

  “Picard can’t do that,” Finlay said. “FBI isn’t equipped to go looking for abandoned rental cars. And we can’t do it ourselves, not with Teale around.”

  I shrugged.

  “We’ll have to,” I said. “No other way. You can sell Teale some story. You can double bluff him. Tell him you figure the escaped con who he says did the Morrison thing must have been in a rental car. Tell him you need to check it out. He can’t say no to that, or else he’s undermining his own cover story, right?”

  “OK,” Finlay said. “I’ll try it. Might work, I guess.”

  “Joe must have had phone numbers,” I said. “The number you found in his shoe was torn off a computer printout, right? So where’s the rest of the printout? I bet it’s in his hotel room, just sitting there, covered with phone numbers, with Hubble’s number torn off the top. So you find the car, then you twist Picard’s arm to trace the hotel through the rental company, OK?”

  “OK,” he said. “I’ll do my best.”

  IN YELLOW SPRINGS WE SLIPPED INTO THE HOSPITAL ENTRANCE lane and slowed over the speed bumps. Nosed around to the lot in back. Parked near the morgue door. I didn’t want to go inside. Joe was still in there. I started to think vaguely about funeral arrangements. I’d never had to do it before. The Marine Corps handled my father’s. Joe arranged my mother’s.

  But I got out of the car with the two of them and we walked through the chill air to the door. Found our way back to the shabby office. The same doctor was at the desk. Still in a white coat. Still looking tired. He waved us in and we sat down. I took one of the stools. I didn’t want to sit next to the fax machine again. The doctor looked at all of us in turn. We looked back at him.

  “What have you got for us?” Finlay said.

  The tired man at the desk prepared to answer. Like preparing for a lecture. He picked up three files from his left and dropped them on his blotter. Opened the top one. Pulled out the second one and opened that, too.

  “Morrison,” he said. “Mr. and Mrs.”

  He glanced around the three of us again. Finlay nodded to him.

  “Tortured and killed,” the pathologist said. “The sequence is pretty clear. The woman was restrained. Two men, I’d say, one on each arm, gripping and twisting. Heavy bruising on the forearms and the upper arms, some ligament damage from twisting the arms up her back. Obviously the bruising continued to develop from the time she was first seized until the time she died. The bruising stops developing when the circulation stops, you understand?”

  We nodded. We understood.

  “I’d put it at about ten minutes,” he said. “Ten minutes, beginning to end. So the woman was being held. The man was being nailed to the wall. I’d guess both were naked by then. They were in nightwear before the attack, right?”

  “Robes,” Finlay said. “They were having breakfast.”

  “OK, the robes came off early on,” the doctor said. “The man was nailed to the wall, technically to the floor also, through the feet. His genital area was attacked. The scrotum was severed. Post
mortem evidence suggests that the woman was persuaded to swallow the amputated testicles.”

  The office was silent. Silent as a tomb. Roscoe looked at me. Stared at me for a while. Then she looked back at the doctor.

  “I found them in her stomach,” the doctor said.

  Roscoe was as white as the guy’s coat. I thought she was going to pitch forward off her stool. She closed her eyes and hung on. She was hearing about what somebody had planned for us last night.

  “And?” Finlay said.

  “The woman was mutilated,” the doctor said. “Breasts severed, genital area attacked, throat cut. Then the man’s throat was cut. That was the last wound inflicted. You could see the arterial spray from his neck overlaying all the other bloodstains in the room.”

  There was dead silence in the room. Lasted quite a while.

  “Weapons?” I asked.

  The guy at the desk swiveled his tired gaze toward me.

  “Something sharp, obviously,” he said. A slight grin. “Straight, maybe five inches long.”

  “A razor?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Certainly something as sharp as a razor, but rigid, not folding, and double-edged.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “There’s evidence it was used back and forth,” the guy said. He swished his hand back and forth in a tiny arc. “Like this. On the woman’s breasts. Cutting both ways. Like filleting a salmon.”

  I nodded. Roscoe and Finlay were silent.

  “What about the other guy?” I said. “Stoller?”

  The pathologist pushed the two Morrison files to one side and opened up the third. Glanced through it and looked across at me. The third file was thicker than the first two.

  “His name was Stoller?” he said. “We’ve got him down as John Doe.”

  Roscoe looked up.

  “We sent you a fax,” she said. “Yesterday morning. We traced his prints.”

  The pathologist rooted around on the messy desk. Found a curled-up fax. Read it and nodded. Crossed out “John Doe” on the folder and wrote in “Sherman Stoller.” Gave us his little grin again.

  “I’ve had him since Sunday,” he said. “Been able to do a more thorough job, you know? A bit chewed up by the rats, but not pulped like the first guy, and altogether a lot less mess than the Morrisons.”

  “So what can you tell us?” I said.

  “We’ve talked about the bullets, right?” he said. “Nothing more to add about the exact cause of death.”

  “So what else do you know?” I asked him.

  The file was too thick for just the shooting and running and bleeding to death bits. This guy clearly had more to tell us. I saw him put his fingers on the pages and press lightly. Like he was trying to get vibrations or read the file in Braille.

  “He was a truck driver,” he said.

  “He was?” I said.

  “I think so,” the guy said. Sounded confident.

  Finlay looked up. He was interested. He loved the process of deduction. It fascinated him. Like when I’d scored with those long shots about Harvard, his divorce, quitting smoking.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “OK, briefly,” the pathologist said. “I found certain persuasive factors. A sedentary job, because his musculature was slack, his posture poor, flabby buttocks. Slightly rough hands, a fair bit of old diesel fuel ingrained in the skin. Also traces of old diesel fuel on the soles of his shoes. Internally, a poor diet, high in fat, plus a bit too much hydrogen sulfide in the blood gases and the tissues. This guy spent his life on the road, sniffing other people’s catalytic converters. I make him a truck driver, because of the diesel fuel.”

  Finlay nodded. I nodded. Stoller had come in with no ID, no history, nothing but his watch. This guy was pretty good. He watched us nod our approval. Looked pleased. Looked like he had more to say.

  “But he’s been out of work for a while,” he said.

  “Why?” Finlay asked him.

  “Because all that evidence is old,” the doctor said. “Looks to me like he was driving a lot for a long period, but then he stopped. I think he’s done very little driving for nine months, maybe a year. So I make him a truck driver, but an unemployed truck driver.”

  “OK, doc, good work,” Finlay said. “You got copies of all that for us?”

  The doctor slid a large envelope across the desk. Finlay stepped over and picked it up. Then we all stood up. I wanted to get out. I didn’t want to go back to the cold store again. I didn’t want to see any more damage. Roscoe and Finlay sensed it and nodded. We hustled out like we were ten minutes late for something. The guy at the desk let us go. He’d seen lots of people rushing out of his office like they were ten minutes late for something.

  We got into Roscoe’s car. Finlay opened the big envelope and pulled out the stuff on Sherman Stoller. Folded it into his pocket.

  “That’s ours, for the time being,” he said. “It might get us somewhere.”

  “I’ll get the arrest report from Florida,” Roscoe said. “And we’ll find an address for him somewhere. Got to be a lot of paperwork on a trucker, right? Union, medical, licenses. Should be easy enough to do.”

  We rode the rest of the way back to Margrave in silence. The station house was deserted, apart from the desk guy. Lunch break in Margrave, lunch break in Washington, D.C. Same time zone. Finlay handed me a scrap of paper from his pocket and stood guard on the door to the rosewood office. I went inside to call the woman who may have been my brother’s lover.

  THE NUMBER FINLAY HAD HANDED ME REACHED MOLLY Beth Gordon’s private line. She answered on the first ring. I gave her my name. It made her cry.

  “You sound so much like Joe,” she said.

  I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to get into a whole lot of reminiscing. Neither should she, not if she was stepping out of line and was in danger of being overheard. She should just tell me what she had to tell me and get off the line.

  “So what was Joe doing down here?” I asked her.

  I heard her sniffing, and then her voice came back clear.

  “He was running an investigation,” she said. “Into what, I don’t know specifically.”

  “But what sort of a thing?” I asked her. “What was his job?”

  “Don’t you know?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “We found it very hard to keep in touch, I’m afraid. You’ll have to start from the beginning for me.”

  There was a long pause on the line.

  “OK,” she said. “I shouldn’t tell you this. Not without clearance. But I will. It was counterfeiting. He ran the Treasury’s anticounterfeiting operation.”

  “Counterfeiting?” I said. “Counterfeit money?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He was head of the department. Ran the whole show. He was an amazing guy, Jack.”

  “But why was he down here in Georgia?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t. What I aim to do is find out for you. I can copy his files. I know his computer password.”

  There was another pause. Now I knew something about Molly Beth Gordon. I’d spent a lot of time on computer passwords. Any military cop does. I’d studied the pyschology. Most users make bad choices. A lot of them write the damn word on a Post-it note and stick it on the monitor case. The ones who are too smart to do that use their spouse’s name, or their dog’s name, or their favorite car or ball player, or the name of the island where they took their honeymoon or balled their secretary. The ones who think they’re really smart use figures, not words, but they choose their birthday or their wedding anniversary or something pretty obvious. If you can find something out about the user, you’ve normally got a better than even chance of figuring their password.

  But that would never work with Joe. He was a professional. He’d spent important years in Military Intelligence. His password would be a random mixture of numbers, letters, punctuation marks, upper and lower case. His password would be unbreakable. If Molly Beth Gordon knew what it
was, Joe must have told her. No other way. He had really trusted her. He had been really close to her. So I put some tenderness into my voice.

  “Molly, that would be great,” I said. “I really need that information.”

  “I know you do,” she said. “I hope to get it tomorrow. I’ll call you again, soon as I can. Soon as I know something.”

  “Is there counterfeiting going on down here?” I asked her. “Is that what this could be all about?”

  “No,” she said. “It doesn’t happen like that. Not inside the States. All that stuff about little guys with green eye-shades down in secret cellars printing dollar bills is all nonsense. Just doesn’t happen. Joe stopped it. Your brother was a genius, Jack. He set up procedures years ago for the special paper sales and the inks, so if somebody starts up, he gets nailed within days. One hundred percent foolproof. Printing money in the States just doesn’t happen anymore. Joe made sure of that. It all happens abroad. Any fakes we get here are shipped in. That’s what Joe spent his time chasing. International stuff. Why he was in Georgia, I don’t know. I really don’t. But I’ll find out tomorrow, I promise you that.”

  I gave her the station house number and told her to speak to nobody except me or Roscoe or Finlay. Then she hung up in a hurry like somebody had just walked in on her. I sat for a moment and tried to imagine what she looked like.

  TEALE WAS BACK IN THE STATION HOUSE. AND OLD MAN Kliner was inside with him. They were over by the reception counter, heads together. Kliner was talking to Teale like I’d seen him talking to Eno at the diner. Foundation business, maybe. Roscoe and Finlay were standing together by the cells. I walked over to them. Stood between them and talked low.

  “Counterfeiting,” I said. “This is about counterfeit money. Joe was running the Treasury Department’s defense for them. You know anything about that sort of a thing down here? Either of you?”

  They both shrugged and shook their heads. I heard the glass door suck open. Looked up. Kliner was on his way out. Teale was starting in toward us.

  “I’m out of here,” I said.

  I brushed past Teale and headed for the door. Kliner was standing in the lot, next to the black pickup. Waiting for me. He smiled. Wolf’s teeth showing.