We put the car out of sight behind the lounge bar and walked across the lot to the diner. Its windows were misted by the cooking steam. There was hot white light inside. It looked like a Hopper painting. My sergeant was alone at a booth in back. We walked in and sat down beside her. She hauled a grocery bag up off the floor. It was full of stuff.
“First things first,” she said.
She put her hand in the bag and came out with a bullet. She stood it upright on the table in front of me. It was a standard nine-millimeter Parabellum. Standard NATO load. Full metal jacket. For a sidearm or a submachine gun. The shiny brass casing had something scratched on it. I picked it up. Looked at it. There was a word engraved there. It was rough and uneven. It had been done fast and by hand. It said: Reacher.
“A bullet with my name on it,” I said.
“From Delta,” my sergeant said. “Hand-delivered, yesterday.”
“Who by?”
“The young one with the beard.”
“Charming,” I said. “Remind me to kick his ass.”
“Don’t joke about it. They’re awful stirred up.”
“They’re looking at the wrong guy.”
“Can you prove that?”
I paused. Knowing and proving were two different things. I dropped the bullet into my pocket and put my hands on the table.
“Maybe I can,” I said.
“You know who killed Carbone too?” Summer said.
“One thing at a time,” I said.
“Here’s your money,” my sergeant said. “It’s all I could get.”
She went into her bag again and put forty-seven dollars on the table.
“Thanks,” I said. “Call it I owe you fifty. Three bucks interest.”
“Fifty-two,” she said. “Don’t forget the babysitter.”
“What else have you got?”
She came out with a concertina of printer paper. It was the kind with faint blue rulings and holes in the sides. There were lines and lines of numbers on it.
“The phone records,” she said.
Then she gave me a sheet of army memo paper with a 202 number on it.
“The Jefferson Hotel,” she said.
Then she gave me a roll of curled fax paper.
“Major Marshall’s personal file,” she said.
She followed that with an army phone book. It was thick and green and had numbers in it for all our posts and installations worldwide. Then she gave me more curled fax paper. It was Detective Clark’s street canvass results, from New Year’s Eve, up in Green Valley.
“Franz in California told me you wanted it,” she said.
“Great,” I said. “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”
She nodded. “You better believe I’m better than the day guy. And someone better be prepared to say so when they start with the force reduction.”
“I’ll tell them,” I said.
“Don’t,” she said. “Won’t help a bit, coming from you. You’ll either be dead or in prison.”
“You brought all this stuff,” I said. “You haven’t given up on me yet.”
She said nothing.
“Where did Vassell and Coomer park their car?” I asked.
“On the fourth?” she said. “Nobody knows for sure. The first night patrol saw a staff car backed in all by itself at the far end of the lot. But you can’t take that to the bank. Patrol didn’t get a plate number, so it’s not a positive ID. And the second patrol can’t remember it at all. Therefore it’s one guy’s report against another’s.”
“What exactly did the first guy see?”
“He called it a staff car.”
“Was it a black Grand Marquis?”
“It was a black something,” she said. “But all staff cars are black or green. Nothing unique about a black car.”
“But it was out of the way?”
She nodded. “On its own, far end of the lot. But the second guy can’t confirm it.”
“Where was Major Marshall on the second and the third?”
“That was easier,” she said. “Two travel warrants. To Frankfurt on the second, back here on the third.”
“An overnight in Germany?”
She nodded again. “There and back.”
We sat quiet. The counterman came over with a pad and a pencil. I looked at the menu and the forty-seven dollars on the table and ordered less than two bucks’ worth of coffee and eggs. Summer took the hint and ordered juice and biscuits. That was about as cheap as we could get, consistent with staying vertical.
“Am I done here?” my sergeant asked.
I nodded. “Thanks. I mean it.”
Summer slid out to let her get up.
“Kiss your baby for me,” I said.
My sergeant just stood there, all bone and sinew. Hard as woodpecker lips. Staring straight at me.
“My mom just died,” I said. “One day your son will remember mornings like these.”
She nodded once and walked to the door. A minute later we saw her in her pickup truck, a small figure all alone at the wheel. She drove off into the dawn mist. A rope of exhaust followed behind her and then drifted away.
I shuffled all the paper into a logical pile and started with Marshall’s personal file. The quality of the fax transmission wasn’t great, but it was legible. There was the usual mass of information. On the first page I found out that Marshall had been born in September of 1958. Therefore he was thirty-one years old. He had no wife and no children. No ex-wives either. He was wedded to the military, I guessed. He was listed at six-four and two hundred twenty pounds. The army needed to know that to keep their quartermaster percentiles up to speed. He was listed as right-handed. The army needed to know that because bolt-action sniper rifles are made for right-handers. Left-handed soldiers don’t usually get assigned as snipers. Pigeonholing starts on day one in the military.
I turned the page.
Marshall had been born in Sperryville, Virginia, and had gone all the way through kindergarten and grade school and high school there.
I smiled. Summer looked at me, questions in her eyes. I separated the pages and slid them across to her and stretched over and used my finger to point out the relevant lines. Then I slid her the memo paper with the Jefferson Hotel number on it.
“Go find a phone,” I said.
She found one just inside the door, on the wall, near the register. I saw her put two quarters in, and dial, and talk, and wait. I saw her give her name and rank and unit. I saw her listen. I saw her talk some more. I saw her wait some more. And listen some more. She put more quarters in. It was a long call. I guessed she was getting transferred all over the place. Then I saw her say thank you. I saw her hang up. I saw her come back to me, looking grim and satisfied.
“He had a room,” she said. “In fact he made the booking himself, the day before. Three rooms, for him, and Vassell, and Coomer. And there was a valet parking charge.”
“Did you speak to the valet station?”
She nodded. “It was a black Mercury. In just after lunch, out again at twenty to one in the morning, back in again at twenty past three in the morning, out again finally after breakfast on New Year’s Day.”
I riffed through the pile of paper and found the fax from Detective Clark in Green Valley. The results of his house-to-house canvass. There was a fair amount of vehicle activity listed. It had been New Year’s Eve and lots of people were heading to and from parties. There had been what someone thought was a taxi on Mrs. Kramer’s road, just before two o’clock in the morning.
“A staff car could be mistaken for a taxi,” I said. “You know, a plain black sedan, clean condition but a little tired, a lot of miles on it, the same shape as a Crown Victoria.”
“Plausible,” Summer said.
“Likely,” I said.
We paid the check and left a dollar tip and counted what was left of my sergeant’s loan. Decided we were going to have to keep on eating cheap, because we were going to need gas money. And phone money. And
some other expenses.
“Where to now?” Summer asked me.
“Across the street,” I said. “To the motel. We’re going to hole up all day. A little more work, and then we sleep.”
We left the Chevy hidden behind the lounge bar and crossed the street on foot. Woke the skinny guy in the motel office and asked him for a room.
“One room?” he said.
I nodded. Summer didn’t object. She knew we couldn’t afford two rooms. And we weren’t new to sharing. Paris had worked out OK for us, as far as nighttime arrangements were concerned.
“Fifteen bucks,” the skinny guy said.
I gave him the money and he smiled and gave me the key to the room Kramer had died in. I figured it was an attempt at humor. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t mind. I figured a room a guy had died in was better than the rooms that rented by the hour.
We walked together down the row and unlocked the door and stepped inside. The room was still dank and brown and miserable. The corpse had been hauled away, but other than that it was exactly the same as when I had first seen it.
“It ain’t the George V,” Summer said.
“That’s for damn sure,” I said.
We put our bags on the floor and I put my sergeant’s paperwork on the bed. The counterpane felt slightly damp. I fiddled with the heater under the window until I got some warmth out of it.
“What next?” Summer asked.
“The phone records,” I said. “I’m looking for a call to a 919 area code.”
“That’ll be a local call. Fort Bird is 919 too.”
“Great,” I said. “There’ll be a million local calls.”
I spread the printout on the bed and started looking. There weren’t a million local calls. But there were certainly hundreds. I started at midnight on New Year’s Eve and worked forward from there. I ignored the numbers that had been called more than once from more than one phone. I figured those would be cab companies or clubs or bars. I ignored the numbers that had the same exchange code as Fort Bird. Those would be off-post housing, mainly. Soldiers on duty would have been calling home in the hour after midnight, wishing their spouses and children a happy new year. I concentrated on numbers that stood out. Numbers in other North Carolina cities. In particular I was looking for a number in another city that had been called once only maybe thirty or forty minutes after midnight. That was my target. I went through the printout, patiently, line by line, page by page, looking for it. I was in no hurry. I had all day.
I found it after the third concertina fold. It was listed at twelve thirty-two. Thirty-two minutes after 1989 became 1990. That was right about when I would have expected it. It was a call that lasted nearly fifteen minutes. That was about right too, in terms of duration. It was a solid prospect. I scanned ahead. Checked the next twenty or thirty minutes. There was nothing else there that looked half as good. I went back and put my finger under the number I liked. It was my best bet. Or my only hope.
“Got a pen?” I said.
Summer gave me one from her pocket.
“Got quarters?” I said.
She showed me fifty cents. I wrote the best-bet number on the army memo paper right underneath the D.C. number for the Jefferson Hotel. Passed it to her.
“Call it,” I said. “Find out who answers. You’ll have to go back across the street to the diner. The motel phone is busted.”
She was gone about eight minutes. I spent the time cleaning my teeth. I had a theory: If you can’t get time to sleep, a shower is a good substitute. If you can’t get time to shower, cleaning your teeth is the next best thing.
I left my toothbrush in a glass in the bathroom and Summer came through the door. She brought cold and misty air in with her.
“It was a golf resort outside of Raleigh,” she said.
“Good enough for me,” I said.
“Brubaker,” she said. “That’s where Brubaker was. On vacation.”
“Probably dancing,” I said. “Don’t you think? At half past midnight on New Year’s Eve? The desk clerk probably had to drag him out of the ballroom to the phone. That’s why the call lasted a quarter of an hour. Most of it was waiting time.”
“Who called him?”
There were codes on the printout indicating the location of the originating phone. They meant nothing to me. They were just numbers and letters. But my sergeant had supplied a key for me. On the sheet after the last concertina fold was a list of the codes and the locations they stood for. She had been right. She was better than the day guy. But then, she was an E-5 sergeant and he was an E-4 corporal, and sergeants made the U.S. Army worth serving in.
I checked the code against the key.
“Someone on a pay phone in the Delta barracks,” I said.
“So a Delta guy called his CO,” Summer said. “How does that help us?”
“The timing is suggestive,” I said. “Must have been an urgent matter, right?”
“Who was it?”
“One step at a time,” I said.
“Don’t shut me out.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. You’re walling up.”
I said nothing.
“Your mom died, and you’re hurting, and you’re closing in on yourself. But you shouldn’t. You can’t do this alone, Reacher. You can’t live your whole life alone.”
I shook my head.
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s that I’m only guessing here. I’m holding my breath all the time. One long shot after another. And I don’t want to fall flat on my face. Not right in front of you. You wouldn’t respect me anymore.”
She said nothing.
“I know,” I said. “You already don’t respect me because you saw me naked.”
She paused. Then she smiled.
“But you need to get used to that,” I said. “Because it’s going to happen again. Right now, in fact. We’re taking the rest of the day off.”
The bed was awful. The mattress dipped in the middle and the sheets were damp. Maybe worse than damp. A place like that, if the room hadn’t been rented since Kramer died, I was pretty sure the bed wouldn’t have been changed either. Kramer had never actually gotten into it, but he had died right on top of it. He had probably leaked all kinds of bodily fluids. Summer didn’t seem to mind. But she hadn’t seen him there, all gray and white and inert.
But then I figured, What do you want for fifteen bucks? And Summer took my mind off the sheets. She distracted me big-time. We were plenty tired, but not too tired. We did well, second time around. The second time is often the best. That’s been my experience. You’re looking forward to it, and you’re not bored with it yet.
Afterward, we slept like babies. The heater finally put some temperature into the room. The sheets warmed up. The traffic sounds on the highway were soothing. Like white noise. We were safe. Nobody would think of looking for us there. Kramer had chosen well. It was a hideaway. We rolled down into the mattress dip together and held each other tight. I ended up thinking it was the best bed I had ever been in.
We woke up much later, very hungry. It was after six o’clock in the evening. Already dark outside the window. The January days were spooling by one after the other, and we weren’t paying much attention to them. We showered and dressed and headed across the street to eat. I took the army phone directory with me.
We went for the most calories for the fewest dollars but still ended up blowing more than eight bucks between us. I got my own back with the coffee. The diner had a bottomless cup policy and I exploited it ruthlessly. Then I camped out near the register and used the phone on the wall. Checked the number in the army book and called Sanchez down at Jackson.
“I hear you’re in the shit,” he said.
“Temporarily,” I said. “You heard anything more about Brubaker?”
“Like what?”
“Like, did they find his car yet?”
“Yes, they did. And it was a long way from Columbia.”
“Let me guess
,” I said. “Somewhere more than an hour due north of Fort Bird, and maybe east and a little south of Raleigh. How about Smithfield, North Carolina?”
“How the hell did you know that?”
“Just a feeling,” I said. “Had to be close to where I-95 meets U.S. 70. Right on a main drag. Do they think that’s where he was killed?”
“No question about it. Killed right there in his car. Someone shot him from the backseat. The windshield was blown out in front of the driver’s position and what was left of the glass was all covered in blood and brains. And there were spatters on the steering wheel that hadn’t been smudged. Therefore nobody drove the car after he died. Therefore that’s where he was killed. Right there in his car. Smithfield, North Carolina.”
“Did they find shell cases?”
“No shell cases. No significant trace evidence either, apart from the kind of normal shit they would expect to find.”
“Have they got a narrative theory?”
“It was an industrial unit parking lot. Big place, like a local landmark, with a big lot, busy in the daytime but deserted at night. They think it was a two-car rendezvous. Brubaker gets there first, the second car pulls up alongside, at least two guys get out of it, they get into Brubaker’s car, one in the front and one in the back, they sit a spell, maybe they talk a little, then the guy in the back pulls a gun and shoots. Which by the way is how they figure Brubaker’s watch got busted. They figure he had his left wrist up on the top of the wheel, the way guys do when they’re sitting in their cars. But whatever, he goes down and they drag him out and they put him in the trunk of the other car and they drive him down to Columbia and they leave him there.”
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