by Lee Child
“Is it worth chasing?”
“Nobody knows,” I said again. “Except the guy who wrote it, and he’s dead. And Vassell and Coomer. They must have seen it. They probably helped with it.”
“Vassell and Coomer went back to Germany. This morning. First flight out of Dulles. The staffers here were talking about it.”
“You ever met this new guy Willard?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Try not to. He’s an asshole.”
“Thanks for the warning. What did we do to deserve him?”
“I have no idea,” I said. We hung up and I dialed the Virginia number and asked for Detective Clark. I got put on hold. Then I heard a click and a second’s worth of squad room sounds and a voice came on the line.
“Clark,” it said.
“Reacher,” I said. “U.S. Army, down at Fort Bird. Did you want me?”
“You wanted me, as I recall,” Clark said. “You wanted a progress report on Mrs. Kramer. But there isn’t any progress. We’re looking at a brick wall here. We’re looking for help, actually.”
“Nothing I can do. It’s your case.”
“I wish it wasn’t,” he said.
“What have you got?”
“Lots of nothing. The perp was in and out without maybe touching a thing. Gloves, obviously. There was a light frost on the ground. We’ve got some residual grit from the driveway and the path, but we’re not even close to a footprint.”
“Neighbors see anything?”
“Most of them were out, or drunk. It was New Year’s Eve. I’ve had people up and down the street canvassing, but nothing’s jumping out at me. There were some cars around, but there would be anyway, on New Year’s Eve, with folks heading back and forth to parties.”
“Any tire tracks on the driveway?”
“None that mean anything.”
I said nothing.
“The victim was killed with a crowbar,” Clark said. “Probably the same tool as was used on the door.”
“I figured that,” I said.
“After the attack the perp wiped it on the rug and then washed it clean in the kitchen sink. We found stuff in the pipe. No prints on the faucet. Gloves, again.”
I said nothing.
“Something else we haven’t got,” Clark said. “There’s nothing much to say your general ever really lived there.”
“Why?”
“We gave it the full-court press, forensically. We printed the whole place, we took hair and fiber from everywhere including the sink and shower traps, like I said. Everything belonged to the victim except a couple of stray prints. Bingo, we thought, but the database brought them back as the husband’s. And the ratio of hers to his suggests he was hardly there over the last five years or so. Is that usual?”
“He’ll have stayed on-post a lot,” I said. “But he should have been home for the holidays every year. The story here is that the marriage wasn’t so great.”
“People like that should just go ahead and get divorced,” Clark said. “I mean, that’s not a deal-breaker even for a general, right?”
“Not that I’ve heard,” I said. “Not anymore.”
Then he went quiet for a minute. He was thinking.
“How bad was the marriage?” he asked. “Bad enough that we should be looking at the husband for the doer?”
“The timing doesn’t work,” I said. “He was dead when it happened.”
“Was there money involved?”
“Nice house,” I said. “Probably hers.”
“So what about a paid hit, maybe set up way ahead of time?”
Now he was really clutching at straws.
“He’d have arranged it for when he was away in Germany.”
Clark said nothing to that.
“Who called you for this progress report?” I asked him.
“You did,” he said. “An hour ago.”
“I don’t recall doing that.”
“Not you personally,” he said. “Your people. It was the little black chick I met at the scene. Your lieutenant. I was too busy to talk. She gave me a number, but I left it somewhere. So I called back on the number you gave me originally. Did I do wrong?”
“No,” I said. “You did fine. Sorry we can’t help you.”
We hung up. I sat quiet for a moment and then I buzzed my corporal.
“Ask Lieutenant Summer to come see me,” I said.
Summer showed up inside ten minutes. She was in BDUs and between her face and her body language I could see she was feeling a little nervous of me and a little contemptuous of me all at the same time. I let her sit down and then I launched right into it.
“Detective Clark called back,” I said.
She said nothing.
“You disobeyed my direct order,” I said.
She said nothing.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why did you give me the order?”
“Why do you think?”
“Because you’re toeing Willard’s line.”
“He’s the CO,” I said. “It’s a good line to toe.”
“I don’t agree.”
“You’re in the army now, Summer. You don’t obey orders just because you agree with them.”
“We don’t cover things up just because we’re told to either.”
“We do,” I said. “We do that all the time. We always have.”
“Well, we shouldn’t.”
“Who made you Chief of Staff?”
“It’s unfair to Carbone and Mrs. Kramer,” she said. “They’re innocent victims.”
I paused. “Why did you start with Mrs. Kramer? You see her as more important than Carbone?”
Summer shook her head. “I didn’t start with Mrs. Kramer. I got to her second. I had already started on Carbone. I went through the personnel lists and the gate log and marked who was here at the time and who wasn’t.”
“You gave me that paperwork.”
“I copied it first.”
“You’re an idiot,” I said.
“Why? Because I’m not chicken?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“OK,” I said. “So next year you’ll be twenty-six. You’ll be a twenty-six-year-old black woman with a dishonorable discharge from the only career you’ve ever had. Meanwhile the civilian job market will be flooded because of force reduction and you’ll be competing with people with chests full of medals and pockets full of testimonials. So what are you going to do? Starve? Go work up at the strip club with Sin?”
She said nothing.
“You should have left it to me,” I said.
“You weren’t doing anything.”
“I’m glad you thought so,” I said. “That was the plan.”
“What?”
“I’m going to take Willard on,” I said. “It’s going to be him or me.”
She said nothing.
“I work for the army,” I said. “Not for Willard. I believe in the army. I don’t believe in Willard. I’m not going to let him trash everything.”
She said nothing.
“I told him not to make an enemy out of me. But he didn’t listen.”
“Big step,” she said.
“One that you already took,” I said.
“Why did you cut me out?”
“Because if I blow it I don’t want to take anyone down with me.”
“You were protecting me.”
I nodded.
“Well, don’t,” she said. “I can think for myself.”
I said nothing.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Twenty-nine,” I said.
“So next year you’ll be thirty. You’ll be a thirty-year-old white man with a dishonorable discharge from the only job you’ve ever had. And whereas I’m young enough to start over, you’re not. You’re institutionalized, you’ve got no social skills, you’ve never been in the civilian world, and you’re good for nothing. So maybe it should be you laying in the
weeds, not me.”
I said nothing.
“You should have talked it over,” she said.
“It’s a personal choice,” I said.
“I already made my personal choice,” she said. “Seems like you know that now. Seems like Detective Clark accidentally ratted me out.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” I said. “One stray phone call and you could be out on the street. This is a high-stakes game.”
“And I’m right here in it with you, Reacher. So bring me up to speed.”
Five minutes later she knew what I knew. All questions, no answers.
“Garber’s signature was a forgery,” she said.
I nodded.
“So what about Carbone’s, on the complaint? Is that forged too?”
“Maybe,” I said. I took the copy that Willard had given me out of my desk drawer. Smoothed it out on the blotter and passed it across to her. She folded it neatly and put it in her inside pocket.
“I’ll get the writing checked,” she said. “Easier for me than you, now.”
“Nothing’s easy for either of us now,” I said. “You need to be very clear about that. So you need to be very clear about what you’re doing.”
“I’m clear,” she said. “Bring it on.”
I sat quiet for a minute. Just looked at her. She had a small smile on her face. She was plenty tough. But then, she had grown up poor in an Alabama shack with churches burning and exploding all around her. I guessed watching her back against Willard and a bunch of Delta vigilantes might represent progress, of a sort, in her life.
“Thank you,” I said. “For being on my side.”
“I’m not on your side,” she said. “You’re on mine.”
My phone rang. I picked it up. It was the Louisiana corporal, calling from his desk outside my door.
“North Carolina State Police on the line,” he said. “They want a duty officer. You want to take it?”
“Not really,” I said. “But I guess I better.”
There was a click and some dead air and another click. Then a dispatcher came on the line and told me a trooper in an I-95 patrol car had found an abandoned green canvas briefcase on the highway shoulder. He told me it had a wallet inside that identified the owner as a General Kenneth R. Kramer, U.S. Army. He told me he was calling Fort Bird because he figured it was the closest military installation to where the briefcase had been found. And he was calling to tell me where the briefcase was currently being held, in case I was interested in having someone sent out to pick it up.
twelve
Summer drove. We took the Humvee I had left at the curb. We didn’t want to take time to sign out a sedan. It cramped her style a little. Humvees are big slow trucks that are good for a lot of things, but covering paved roads fast isn’t one of them. She looked tiny behind the wheel. The vehicle was full of noise. The engine was thrashing and the tires were whining loud. It was four o’clock on a dull day and it was starting to go dark.
We drove north to Kramer’s motel and turned east through the cloverleaf and then north on I-95 itself. We covered fifteen miles and passed a rest area and started looking for the right State Police building. We found it twelve miles farther on. It was a long low one-story brick structure with a forest of tall radio masts bolted to its roof. It was maybe forty years old. The brick was dull tan. It was impossible to say whether it had started out yellow and then faded in the sun or whether it had started out white and gotten dirty from the traffic fumes. There were stainless-steel letters in an art deco style spelling out North Carolina State Police all along its length.
We pulled in and parked in front of a pair of glass doors. Summer shut the Humvee down and we sat for a second and then slid out. Crossed a narrow sidewalk and pulled the doors and stepped inside the facility. It was a typical police place, built for function and floored with linoleum, which was shined every night whether it needed it or not. The walls had many layers of slick paint directly over concrete blocks. The air was hot and smelled faintly of sweat and stewed coffee.
There was a desk guy behind a reception counter. We were in battledress uniform and our Humvee was visible behind us through the doors, so he made the connection fast enough. He didn’t ask for ID or inquire why we were there. He didn’t speculate as to why General Kramer hadn’t shown up himself. He just glanced at me and spent a little longer looking at Summer and then leaned down under his counter and came back up with the briefcase. It was in a clear plastic bag. Not an evidence bag. Just some kind of a shopping bag. It had a store’s name printed across it in red.
The briefcase itself matched Kramer’s suit carrier in every way. Same color, same design, same age, same level of wear and tear, no monogram. I opened it and looked inside. There was a wallet. There were plane tickets. There was a passport. There was a paper-clipped itinerary three sheets thick. There was a hardcover book.
There was no conference agenda.
I closed the case up again and laid it down on the counter. Butted it square with the edge. I was disappointed, but not surprised.
“Was it in the plastic bag when the trooper found it?” I asked.
The desk guy shook his head. He was looking at Summer, not me.
“I put it in the bag myself,” he said. “I wanted to keep it clean. I wasn’t sure how soon someone would get here.”
“Where exactly was it found?” I asked him.
He paused a beat and looked away from Summer and ran a thick fingertip down a desk ledger and across a line to a mile marker code. Then he turned around and used the same fingertip on a map. The map was a large-scale plan of North Carolina’s portion of I-95 and was long and narrow, like a ribbon five inches wide. It showed every mile of the highway from where it entered from South Carolina and exited again into Virginia. The guy’s finger hovered for a second and then came down, decisively.
“Here,” he said. “Northbound shoulder, a mile past the rest area, about eleven miles south of where we are right now.”
“Any way of knowing how long it had been there?”
“Not really,” he said. “We’re not out there specifically looking for trash on the shoulders. Stuff can be there a month.”
“So how was it found?”
“Routine traffic stop. The trooper just saw it there, walking from his car to the car he had stopped.”
“When was this exactly?”
“Today,” the guy said. “Start of the second watch. Not long after noon.”
“It wasn’t there a month,” I said.
“When did he lose it?”
“New Year’s Eve,” I said.
“Where?”
“It was stolen from where he was staying.”
“Where was he staying?”
“A motel about thirty miles south of here.”
“So the bad guys were coming back north.”
“I guess,” I said.
The guy looked at me like he was asking permission and then picked the case up with both hands and looked at it like he was a connoisseur and it was a rare piece. He turned it in the light and stared at it from every angle.
“January,” he said. “We’ve got a little night dew right now. And it’s cold enough that we’re worried about ice. So we’ve got salt down. Things age fast, this time of year on the highway shoulder. And this looks old and worn, but not very deteriorated. It’s got some grit on it, in the weave of the canvas. But not very much. It hasn’t been out there since New Year’s Eve, that much is for damn sure. Less than twenty-four hours, I’d say. One night, not more.”
“Can you be certain?” Summer asked.
He shook his head. Put the case back on the counter.
“Just a guess,” he said.
“OK,” I said. “Thanks.”
“You’ll have to sign for it.”
I nodded. He reversed the desk ledger and pushed it toward me. I had Reacher in a subdued-pattern stencil above my right breast pocket, but I figured he hadn’t paid much attention to it. He ha
d spent most of his time looking at Summer’s pockets. So I scrawled K. Kramer on the appropriate line in the book and picked up the briefcase and turned away.
“Funny sort of burglary,” the desk guy said. “There’s an Amex card and money still in the wallet. We inventoried the contents.”
I didn’t reply. Just went out through the doors, back to the Humvee.
Summer waited for a gap in the traffic and then drove across all three lanes and bounced straight onto the soft grass median. She went down a slope and through a drainage ditch and straight up the other side. Paused and waited and turned left back onto the blacktop and headed south. That was the kind of thing a Humvee was good for.
“Try this,” she said. “Last night Vassell and Coomer leave Bird at ten o’clock with the briefcase. They head north for Dulles or D.C. They extract the agenda and throw the case out the car window.”
“They were in the bar and the dining room their whole time at Bird.”
“So one of their dinner companions passed it on. We should check who they ate with. Maybe one of the women on the Humvee list was there.”
“They were all alibied.”
“Only superficially. New Year’s Eve parties are pretty chaotic.”
I looked out the window. Afternoon was fading fast. Evening was coming on. The world looked dark and cold.
“Sixty miles,” I said. “The case was found sixty miles north of Bird. That’s an hour. They would have grabbed the agenda and ditched the case faster than that.”
Summer said nothing.
“And they would have stopped at the rest area to do it. They would have put the case in a garbage can. That would have been safer. Throwing a briefcase out of a car window is pretty conspicuous.”
“Maybe there really wasn’t an agenda.”
“It would be the first time in military history.”
“Then maybe it really wasn’t important.”
“They ordered bag lunches at Irwin. Two-stars, one-stars, and colonels were planning to work through their lunch hour. That might be the first time in military history too. That was an important conference, Summer, believe me.”
She said nothing.
“Do that U-turn thing again,” I said. “Across the median. Then go back north a little. I want to look at the rest area.”