Chapter

76

Senator Carlton Riley’s impending visit kept the town very quiet. It was as if Kelham’s gates were locked again. I doubted that the leave order had been formally rescinded, but Rangers are good soldiers, and I was sure the base commander had dropped heavy hints about hundred-percent participation in the hoopla. I left the diner and found Main Street back to its previous torpor. My borrowed Buick was the only car parked on the block behind. It looked lonely and abandoned. I unlocked it and drove it around to the hotel and retrieved my toothbrush and settled my account at the desk. Then I got back behind the wheel and went exploring.

I started opposite the vacant lot between the diner and the Sheriff’s Department. I headed south from there for two hundred yards, to where Main Street started to bend, driving fast but not stupid fast. I made the left into Deveraux’s childhood street, and hustled along to her old house, fourth on the right. Total elapsed time, forty-five seconds.

I turned in over the dried mud puddle and drove down the overgrown driveway, past the tumbledown house, through the back yard, past the wild hedge, to the deer trestle. I swung left and backed up and popped the trunk and got out.

Total elapsed time, a minute and fifteen seconds.

There were trees to my left and trees to my right and trees ahead of me. A lonely spot, even in the bright daylight. I mimed supporting a body’s weight, cutting the wrist straps, cutting the ankle ties, carrying the body to the car, lowering it into the trunk. I fiddled around four more times, taking off imaginary pads and straps and belts and scarves from two wrists and two ankles. I stepped back to the trestle and picked up an imaginary bucket of blood and heaved it over to the car and wedged it in the trunk alongside the body.

I closed the trunk lid and got back in the driver’s seat.

Total elapsed time, three minutes and ten seconds.

I backed up and turned and drove the length of the driveway again and headed back to Main Street. I drove the same two hundred yards I had driven before and stopped on the curb between the hardware store and the pharmacy. Right at the mouth of the alley.

Total elapsed time, four minutes and twenty-five seconds.

Plus one minute to put the blood in the alley.

Plus another minute to put Janice May Chapman in the alley.

Plus fifteen seconds to get back where I started.

Total elapsed time, six minutes and forty seconds.

Touch and go.

Maybe long enough to stick in someone’s mind, in a social situation, or maybe not.

I rewound the clock in my head to four minutes and twenty-five seconds and drove on north and then east, to the railroad crossing. I came to a stop right on top of it. New total, four minutes and fifty-five seconds. Plus a minute to carry Rosemary McClatchy to the ditch, and thirty seconds to get back to the car, and twenty seconds to get back where I started.

Total elapsed time, six minutes and forty-five seconds.

Fractionally longer, but in the same ballpark.

I didn’t drive up to where Shawna Lindsay had been dumped, on the pile of gravel. No point. That destination was in a whole different category. That was a twenty-minute excursion, right there. It was the sole exception to the hurry-up rule. Therefore it had been undertaken under different circumstances. No company. No social situation. Plenty of time to thread cautiously along dark dirt roads between ditches, turning right, turning left, doing the deed, and then coming back again, just as slow, just as cautious.

But what was interesting about Shawna Lindsay’s resting place was the car that carried her there. What kind of car could get through that neighborhood twice, without attracting notice or comment? What kind of car was entitled to be there at that time of night?

I sat in the Buick for a spell and then I parked it outside the diner and went in and bought a new roll of quarters for the phone. I tried Neagley first and found her at her desk.

I said, “You’re late to work today.”

She said, “But not by much. I’ve been here half an hour.”

“I’m sorry about the bus.”

“It was OK,” she said. Public transportation was tough for Neagley. Too much chance of inadvertent human contact.

I asked, “Did you get a message from Stan Lowrey?”

“Yes, and I already traced the name for you.”

“In half an hour?”

“It was easy, I’m afraid. Paul Evers died a year ago.”

“How?”

“Nothing dramatic. It was an accident. A helicopter crashed at Lejeune. It was in the newspaper, actually. A Sea Hawk lost a rotor blade. Two pilots and three passengers died, one of which was Evers.”

I said, “OK, plan B. The other name I want is Alice Bouton.” I spelled it out. I said, “She’s been a civilian for the last five years. She was discharged from the Corps without honor. So you better call Stan back. He’s better than you at this kind of stuff.”

“The only thing Lowrey has that I don’t is a friend at a bank.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s why you need to call him. Corporations know about civilians better than we do.”

“Why are we doing this?”

“I’m checking a story.”

“No, you’re clutching at straws. That’s what you’re doing.”

“You think?”

“Elizabeth Deveraux is as guilty as sin, Reacher.”

“You’ve seen the file?”

“Only the carbons.”

I said, “But with a thing like this, you have to flip a coin.”

“As in?”

“As in, maybe she did it, maybe she didn’t. We don’t know yet.”

“We know, Reacher.”

“Not for sure.”

Neagley said, “It’s a good thing you don’t own a car.”

I hung up with her and before I was a step away the phone rang on the wall, with the first good news of the day.