3
THEY PARKED UNDERGROUND someplace south of
mid-town and forced him out of the car into a white-painted garage
full of bright light and dark sedans. The woman turned a full
circle on the concrete floor with her shoes scraping in the
silence. She was examining the whole crowded space. A cautious
approach. Then she pointed toward a single black elevator door
located in a distant corner. There were two more guys waiting
there. Dark suits, white shirts, quiet ties. They watched the woman
and the sandy guy all the way in across the diagonal. There was
deference in their faces. They were junior guys. But they were also
comfortable, and a little proud. Like they were some kind of
hosts. Reacher suddenly understood the
woman and the sandy guy were not New York agents. They were
visitors from somewhere else. They were on somebody else’s turf.
The woman hadn’t examined the whole garage simply because she was
cautious. She had done it because she didn’t know where the
elevator was.
They put Reacher in the center of the elevator car
and crowded in around him. The woman, the sandy guy, the driver,
the two local boys. Five people, five weapons. The four men took a
corner each and the woman stood in the center, close to Reacher,
like she was claiming him as hers. One of the local boys touched a
button and the door rolled shut and the elevator took off.
It traveled upward for a long time and stopped hard
with 21 showing on the floor indicator. The
door thumped back and the local boys led the way out into a blank
corridor. It was gray. Thin gray carpet, gray paint, gray light. It
was quiet, like everyone except the hard-core enthusiasts had gone
home hours before. There were closed doors spaced along the
corridor wall. The guy who had driven the sedan down from Garrison
paused in front of the third and opened it up. Reacher was
maneuvered to the doorway and looked in at a bare space, maybe
twelve by sixteen, concrete floor, cinder-block walls, all covered
in thick gray paint like the side of a battleship. The ceiling was
unfinished, and the ducting was all visible, square trunking made
from thin flecked metal. Fluorescent fittings hung from chains and
threw a flat glare across the gray. There was a single plastic
garden chair in the corner. It was the only thing in the
room.
“Sit down,” the woman said.
Reacher walked away from the chair to the opposite
corner and sat on the floor, wedged into the angle of the
cinder-block walls. The cinder block was cold and the paint was
slick. He folded his arms over his chest and stretched his legs out
straight and crossed his ankles. Rested his head on the wall,
forty-five degrees to his shoulders, so he was gazing straight at
the people standing by the door. They backed out into the corridor
and closed the door on him. There was no sound of a lock turning,
but there didn’t need to be, because there was no handle on the
inside.
He felt the faint shudder of footsteps receding
through the concrete floor. Then he was left with nothing but
silence floating on a whisper of air from the vents above his head.
He sat in the silence for maybe five minutes and then he felt more
footsteps outside and the door opened again and a man stuck his
face inside the room and stared straight in at him. It was an older
face, big and red and bloated with strain and puffy with blood
pressure, full of hostility, and its frank stare said so you’re the guy, huh? The stare lasted three or
four long seconds and then the face ducked back out and the door
slammed and the silence came back again.
The same thing happened over again five minutes
later. Footsteps in the corridor, a face around the door, the same
frank stare. So you’re the guy. This time
the face was leaner and darker. Younger. Shirt and tie below it, no
jacket. Reacher stared back, three or four seconds. The face
disappeared and the door slammed.
This time the silence lasted longer, somewhere
around twenty minutes. Then a third face came to stare. Footsteps,
the rattle of the handle, the door opening, the stare. This is the guy, huh? This third face was older
again, a man somewhere in his fifties, a competent expression, a
thatch of gray hair. He wore thick glasses and behind them his eyes
were calm. Serious speculation in both of them. He looked like a
guy with responsibilities. Maybe some kind of a Bureau chief.
Reacher stared back at him, wearily. No words were spoken. No
communication took place. The guy just stared for a spell and then
his face disappeared and the door closed again.
Whatever was happening outside kept on happening
for the best part of an hour. Reacher was left alone in the room,
sitting comfortably on the floor, just waiting. Then the waiting
was over. A whole crowd of people came back together, noisy in the
corridor, like an anxious herd. Reacher felt the stamp and shuffle
of footsteps. Then the door opened and the gray-haired guy with the
eyeglasses stepped into the room. He kept his trailing foot near
the threshold and leaned his weight inside at an angle.
“Time to talk,” he said.
The two junior agents pushed in behind him and took
up station like an escort. Reacher waited a beat and then he jacked
himself upright and stepped away from his corner.
“I want to make a call,” he said.
The gray-haired guy shook his head.
“Calling comes later,” he said. “Talking comes
first, OK?”
Reacher shrugged. The problem with getting your
rights abused was that somebody had to witness it for it to mean
anything. Somebody had to see it happen. And the two young agents
were seeing nothing. Or maybe they were seeing Moses himself coming
down and reading the whole Constitution off of big tablets of
stone. Maybe that’s what they would swear to later.
“So let’s go,” the gray-haired guy said.
Reacher was crowded out into the gray corridor and
into a big knot of people. The woman was there, and the sandy guy
with the mustache, and the older guy with the blood pressure, and
the younger guy with the lean face and the shirtsleeves. They were
buzzing. It was late in the evening, but they were all pumped up
with excitement. They were up on their toes, weightless with the
intoxication of progress. It was a feeling
Reacher recognized. It was a feeling he had experienced, more times
than he cared to remember.
But they were divided. There were two clear teams.
There was tension between them. It became obvious as they walked.
The woman stuck close to his left shoulder, and the sandy guy and
the blood pressure guy stuck close to her. That was one team. On
his right shoulder was the guy with the lean face. He was the
second team, alone and outnumbered and unhappy about it. Reacher
felt his hand near his elbow, like he was ready to make a grab for
his prize.
They walked down a narrow gray corridor like the
bowels of a battleship and spilled into a gray room with a long
table filling most of the floor space. The table was curved on both
long edges and chopped off straight at the ends. On one long side,
backs to the door, were seven plastic chairs in a line, well spaced
out, with the curve of the table edge focusing them all across
toward a single identical chair placed in the exact center of the
opposite side.
Reacher paused in the doorway. Not too difficult to
work out which chair was his. He looped around the end of the table
and sat down in it. It was flimsy. The legs squirmed under his
weight and the plastic dug into the muscle under his shoulder
blades. The room was cinder block, painted gray like the first one,
but this ceiling was finished. There was stained acoustic tile in
warped framing. There was track lighting bolted to it, with large
can-shaped fixtures angled down and toward him. The tabletop was
cheap mahogany, thickly lacquered with shiny varnish. The light
bounced off the varnish and came up into his eyes from below.
The two junior agents had taken up position against
the walls at opposite ends of the table, like sentries. Their
jackets were open and their shoulder holsters were visible. Their
hands were folded comfortably at their waists. Their heads were
turned, watching him. Opposite him, the two teams were forming up.
Seven chairs, five people. The gray-haired guy took the center
chair. The light caught his eyeglasses and turned them into blank
mirrors. Next to him on his right-hand side was the guy with the
blood pressure, and next to him was the woman, and next to her was
the sandy guy. The guy with the lean face and the shirtsleeves was
alone in the middle chair of the left-hand three. A lop-sided
inquisition, hunching toward him, indistinct through the glare of
the lights.
The gray-haired guy leaned forward, sliding his
forearms onto the shiny wood, claiming authority. And
subconsciously separating the factions to his left and right.
“We’ve been squabbling over you,” he said.
“Am I in custody?” Reacher asked.
The guy shook his head. “No, not yet.”
“So I’m free to go?”
The guy looked over the top of his eyeglasses.
“Well, we’d rather you stayed right here, so we can keep this whole
thing civilized for a spell.”
There was silence for a long moment.
“So make it civilized,” Reacher said. “I’m Jack
Reacher. Who the hell are you?”
“What?”
“Let’s have some introductions. That’s what
civilized people do, right? They introduce themselves. Then they
chat politely about the Yankees or the stock market or
something.”
More silence. Then the guy nodded.
“I’m Alan Deerfield,” he said. “Assistant Director,
FBI. I run the New York Field Office.”
Then he turned his head to his right and stared at
the sandy guy on the end of the line and waited.
“Special Agent Tony Poulton,” the sandy guy said,
and glanced to his left.
“Special Agent Julia Lamarr,” the woman said, and
glanced to her left.
“Agent-in-Charge Nelson Blake,” the guy with the
blood pressure said. “The three of us are up here from Quantico. I
run the Serial Crimes Unit. Special Agents Lamarr and Poulton work
for me there. We came up here to talk to you.”
There was a pause and the guy called Deerfield
turned the other way and looked toward the man on his left.
“Agent-in-Charge James Cozo,” the guy said.
“Organized Crime, here in New York City, working on the protection
rackets.”
More silence.
“OK now?” Deerfield asked.
Reacher squinted through the glare. They were all
looking at him. The sandy guy, Poulton. The woman, Lamarr. The
hypertensive, Blake. All three of them from Serial Crimes down in
Quantico. Up here to talk to him. Then
Deerfield, the New York Bureau chief, a heavyweight. Then the lean
guy, Cozo, from Organized Crime, working on the
protection rackets. He glanced slowly left to right, and right
to left, and finished up back on Deerfield. Then he nodded.
“OK,” he said. “Pleased to meet you all. So what
about those Yankees? You think they need to trade?”
Five different people facing him, five different
expressions of annoyance. Poulton turned his head like he had been
slapped. Lamarr snorted, a contemptuous sound in her nose. Blake
tightened his mouth and got redder. Deerfield stared and sighed.
Cozo glanced sideways at Deerfield, lobbying for
intervention.
“We’re not going to talk about the Yankees,”
Deerfield said.
“So what about the Dow? We going to see a big crash
anytime soon?”
Deerfield shook his head. “Don’t mess with me,
Reacher. Right now I’m the best friend you got.”
“No, Ernesto A. Miranda is the best friend I got,”
Reacher said. “Miranda versus Arizona, Supreme Court decision in
June of 1966. They said his Fifth Amendment rights were infringed
because the cops didn’t warn him he could stay silent and get
himself a lawyer. ”
“So?”
“So you can’t talk to me until you read me my
Miranda rights. Whereupon you can’t talk to me anyway because my
lawyer could take some time to get here and then she won’t let me
talk to you even when she does.”
The three agents from Serial Crime were smiling
broadly. Like Reacher was busy proving something to them.
“Your lawyer is Jodie Jacob, right?” Deerfield
asked. “Your girlfriend?”
“What do you know about my girlfriend?”
“We know everything about your girlfriend,”
Deerfield said. “Just like we know everything about you,
too.”
“So why do you need to talk to me?”
“She’s at Spencer Gutman, right?” Deerfield said.
“Big reputation as an associate. They’re talking about a
partnership for her, you know that?”
“So I heard.”
“Maybe real soon.”
“So I heard,” Reacher said again.
“Knowing you isn’t going to help her, though.
You’re not exactly the ideal corporate husband, are you?”
“I’m not any kind of a husband.”
Deerfield smiled. “Figure of speech, is all. But
Spencer Gutman is a real white-shoe operation. They consider stuff
like that, you know. And it’s a financial firm, right? Real big in
the world of banking, we all know that. But not much expertise in
the field of criminal law. You sure you want her for your attorney?
Situation like this?”
“Situation like what?”
“Situation you’re in.”
“What situation am I in?”
“Ernesto A. Miranda was a moron, you know that?”
Deerfield said. “A couple of smokes short of a pack? That’s why the
damn court was so soft on him. He was a subnormal guy. He needed
the protection. You a moron, Reacher? You a subnormal guy?”
“Probably, to be putting up with this shit.”
“Rights are for guilty people, anyway. You already
saying you’re guilty of something?”
Reacher shook his head. “I’m not saying anything.
I’ve got nothing to say.”
“Old Ernesto went to jail anyhow, you know that?
People tend to forget that fact. They retried him and convicted him
just the same. He was in jail five years. Then you know what
happened to him?”
Reacher shrugged. Said nothing.
“I was working in Phoenix at the time,” Deerfield
said. “Down in Arizona. Homicide detective, for the city. Just
before I made it to the Bureau. January of 1976, we get a call to a
bar. Some piece of shit lying on the floor, big knife handle
sticking up out of him. The famous Ernesto A. Miranda himself,
bleeding all over the place. Nobody fell over themselves rushing to
call any medics. Guy died a couple minutes after we got
there.”
“So?”
“So stop wasting my time. I already wasted an hour
stopping these guys fighting over you. So now you owe me. So you’ll
answer their questions, and I’ll tell you when and if you need a
damn lawyer.”
“What are the questions about?”
Deerfield smiled. “What are any questions about?
Stuff we need to know, is what.”
“What stuff do you need to know?”
“We need to know if we’re interested in you.”
“Why would you be interested in me?”
“Answer the questions and we’ll find out.”
Reacher thought about it. Laid his hands palms up
on the table.
“OK,” he said. “What are the questions?”
“You know Brewer versus Williams, too?” the guy
called Blake said. He was old and overweight and unfit, but his
mouth worked fast enough.
“Or Duckworth versus Eagan?” Poulton asked.
Reacher glanced across at him. He was maybe
thirty-five, but he looked younger, like one of those guys who stay
looking young forever. Like some kind of a graduate student,
preserved. His suit was an awful color in the orange light, and his
mustache looked false, like it was stuck on with glue.
“You know Illinois and Perkins?” Lamarr
asked.
Reacher stared at them both. “What the hell is
this? Law school?”
“What about Minnick versus Mississippi?” Blake
asked.
Poulton smiled. “McNeil and Wisconsin?”
“Arizona and Fulminante?” Lamarr said.
“You know what those cases are?” Blake asked.
Reacher looked for the trick, but he couldn’t see
it.
“More Supreme Court decisions,” he said. “Following
on from Miranda. Brewer was 1977, Duckworth 1989, Perkins 1990,
Minnick 1990, McNeil 1991, Fulminante 1991, all of them modifying
and restating the original Miranda decision.”
Blake nodded. “Very good.”
Lamarr leaned forward. The light scatter off the
shiny tabletop lit her face from below, like a skull.
“You knew Amy Callan pretty well, didn’t you?” she
asked.
“Who?” Reacher said.
“You heard, you son of a bitch.”
Reacher stared at her. Then a woman called Amy
Callan came back at him from the past and slowed him just enough to
allow a contented smile to settle on Lamarr’s bony face.
“But you didn’t like her much, did you?” she
said.
There was silence. It built around him.
“OK, my turn,” Cozo said. “Who are you working
for?”
Reacher swung his gaze slowly to his right and
rested it on Cozo.
“I’m not working for anybody,” he said.
“Don’t start a turf war with
us,” Cozo quoted. “Us is a plural word.
More than one person. Who is us,
Reacher?”
“There is no us.”
“Bullshit, Reacher. Petrosian put the arm on that
restaurant, but you were already there. So who sent you?”
Reacher said nothing.
“What about Caroline Cooke?” Lamarr called. “You
knew her too, right?”
Reacher turned slowly back to face her. She was
still smiling.
“But you didn’t like her either, did you?” she
said.
“Callan and Cooke,” Blake repeated. “Give it up
Reacher, from the beginning, OK?”
Reacher looked at him. “Give what up?”
More silence.
“Who sent you to the restaurant?” Cozo asked again.
“Tell me right now, and maybe I can cut you a deal.”
Reacher turned back the other way. “Nobody sent me
anywhere.”
Cozo shook his head. “Bullshit, Reacher. You live
in a half-million-dollar house on the river in the Garrison and you
drive a six-month-old forty-five-thousand-dollar sport-utility
vehicle. And as far as the IRS knows, you haven’t earned a cent in
nearly three years. And when somebody wanted Petrosian’s best boys
in the hospital, they sent you to do it. Put all that together,
you’re working for somebody, and I want to know who the hell it
is.”
“I’m not working for anybody,” Reacher said
again.
“You’re a loner, right?” Blake asked. “Is that what
you’re saying?”
Reacher nodded. “I guess.”
He turned his head. Blake was smiling,
satisfied.
“I thought so,” he said. “When did you come out of
the Army?”
Reacher shrugged. “About three years ago.”
“How long were you in?”
“All my life. Officer’s kid, then an officer
myself.”
“Military policeman, right?”
“Right.”
“Several promotions, right?”
“I was a major.”
“Medals?”
“Some.”
“Silver Star?”
“One.”
“First-rate record, right?”
Reacher said nothing.
“Don’t be modest,” Blake said. “Tell us.”
“Yes, my record was good.”
“So why did you muster out?”
“That’s my business.”
“Something to hide?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Blake smiled. “So, three years. What have you been
doing?”
Reacher shrugged again. “Nothing much. Having fun,
I guess.”
“Working?”
“Not often.”
“Just bumming around, right?”
“I guess.”
“Doing what for money?”
“Savings.”
“They ran out three months ago. We checked with
your bank.”
“Well, that happens with savings, doesn’t
it?”
“So now you’re living off of Ms. Jacob, right? Your
girlfriend, who’s also your lawyer. How do you feel about
that?”
Reacher glanced through the glare at the worn
wedding band crushing Blake’s fat pink finger.
“No worse than your wife does, living off of you, I
expect,” he said.
Blake grunted and paused. “So you came out of the
Army, and since then you’ve done nothing much, right?”
“Right.”
“Mostly on your own.”
“Mostly.”
“Happy with that?”
“Happy enough.”
“Because you’re a loner.”
“Bullshit, he’s working for somebody,” Cozo
said.
“The man says he’s a loner, damn it,” Blake
snarled.
Deerfield’s head was turning left and right between
them, like a spectator at a tennis game. The reflected light was
flashing in the lenses of his glasses. He held up his hands for
silence and fixed Reacher with a quiet gaze.
“Tell me about Amy Callan and Caroline Cooke,” he
said.
“What’s to tell?” Reacher asked.
“You knew them, right?”
“Sure, way back. In the Army.”
“So tell me about them.”
“Callan was small and dark, Cooke was tall and
blond. Callan was a sergeant, Cooke was a lieutenant. Callan was a
clerk in Ordnance, Cooke was in War Plans.”
“Where was this?”
“Callan was at Fort Withe near Chicago, Cooke was
at NATO headquarters in Belgium.”
“Did you have sex with either of them?” Lamarr
asked.
Reacher turned to stare at her. “What kind of a
question is that?”
“A straightforward one.”
“Well, no, I didn’t.”
“They were both pretty, right?”
Reacher nodded. “Prettier than you, that’s for damn
sure.”
Lamarr looked away and went quiet. Blake turned
dark red and stepped into the silence. “Did they know each
other?”
“I doubt it. There’s a million people in the Army,
and they were serving four thousand miles apart at different
times.”
“And there was no sexual relationship between you
and either of them?”
“No, there wasn’t.”
“Did you attempt one? With either of them?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Why not? Afraid they’d rebuff you?”
Reacher shook his head. “I was with somebody else
on both occasions, if you really want to know, and one at a time is
usually enough for me.”
“Would you like to have had sex with them?”
Reacher smiled, briefly. “I can think of worse
things.”
“Would they have said yes to you?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“What’s your best guess?”
“Were you ever in the Army?”
Blake shook his head.
“Then you don’t know how it is,” Reacher said.
“Most people in the Army would have sex with anything that
moves.”
“So you don’t think they’d have rebuffed
you?”
Reacher kept his gaze tight on Blake’s eyes. “No, I
don’t think it would have been a serious worry.”
There was a long pause.
“Do you approve of women in the military?”
Deerfield asked.
Reacher’s eyes moved across to him. “What?”
“Answer the question, Reacher. You approve of women
in the military?”
“What’s not to approve?”
“You think they make good fighters?”
"Stupid question,” Reacher said. “You already know
they do.”
“I do?”
“You were in ’Nam, right?”
“I was?”
“Sure you were,” Reacher said. “Homicide detective
in Arizona in 1976? Made it to the Bureau shortly afterward? Not
too many draft dodgers could have managed that, not there, not back
then. So you did your tour, maybe 1970, 1971. Eyesight like that,
you weren’t a pilot. Those eyeglasses probably put you right in the
infantry. In which case you spent a year getting your ass kicked
all over the jungle, and a good third of the people kicking it were
women. Good snipers, right? Very committed, the way I heard
it.”
Deerfield nodded slowly. “So you like women
fighters? ”
Reacher shrugged. “You need fighters, women can do
it the same as anybody else. Russian front, World War Two? Women
did pretty well there. You ever been to Israel? Women in the front
line there too, and I wouldn’t want to put too many U.S. units up
against the Israeli defenses, at least not if it was going to be
critical who won.”
“So, you got no problems at all?”
“Personally, no.”
“You got problems otherwise than personally?”
“There are military problems, I guess,” Reacher
said. “Evidence from Israel shows an infantryman is ten times more
likely to stop his advance and help a wounded buddy if the buddy is
a woman rather than a man. Slows the advance right down. It needs
training out of them.”
“You don’t think people should help each other?”
Lamarr asked.
“Sure,” Reacher said. “But not if there’s an
objective to capture first.”
“So if you and I were advancing together, you’d
just leave me if I got wounded?”
Reacher smiled. “In your case, without a second
thought.”
“How did you meet Amy Callan?” Deerfield
asked.
“I’m sure you already know,” Reacher said.
“Tell me anyway. For the record.”
“Are we on the record?”
“Sure we are.”
“Without reading me my rights?”
“The record will show you had your rights, any old
time I say you had them.”
Reacher was silent.
“Tell me about Amy Callan,” Deerfield said
again.
“She came to me with a problem she was having in
her unit,” Reacher said.
“What problem?”
“Sexual harassment.”
“Were you sympathetic?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Why?”
“Because I was never abused because of my gender. I
didn’t see why she should have to be.”
“So what did you do?”
“I arrested the officer she was accusing.”
“And what did you do then?”
“Nothing. I was a policeman, not a prosecutor. It
was out of my hands.”
“And what happened?”
“The officer won his case. Amy Callan left the
service. ”
“But the officer’s career was ruined anyway.”
Reacher nodded. “Yes, it was.”
“How did you feel about that?”
Reacher shrugged. “Confused, I guess. As far as I
knew, he was an OK guy. But in the end I believed Callan, not him.
My opinion was he was guilty. So I guess I was happy he was gone.
But it shouldn’t work that way, ideally. A not-guilty verdict
shouldn’t ruin a career.”
“So you felt sorry for him?”
“No, I felt sorry for Callan. And I felt sorry for
the Army. The whole thing was a mess. Two careers were ruined,
where either way only one should have been.”
“What about Caroline Cooke?”
“Cooke was different.”
“Different how?”
“Different time, different place. It was overseas.
She was having sex with some colonel. Had been for a year. It
looked consensual to me. She only called it harassment later, when
she didn’t get promoted.”
“How is that different?”
“Because it was unconnected. The guy was screwing
her because she was happy to let him, and he didn’t promote her
because she wasn’t good enough at her job. The two things weren’t
connected.”
“Maybe she saw the year in bed as an implied
bargain. ”
“Then it was a contractual issue. Like a hooker who
gets bilked. That’s not harassment.”
“So you did nothing?”
Reacher shook his head. “No, I arrested the
colonel, because by then there were rules. Sex between people of
different rank was effectively outlawed.”
“And?”
“And he was dishonorably discharged and his wife
dumped him and he killed himself. And Cooke quit anyway.”
“And what happened to you?”
“I transferred out of NATO HQ.”
“Why? Upset?”
“No, I was needed someplace else.”
“You were needed? Why you?”
“Because I was a good investigator. I was wasted in
Belgium. Nothing much happens in Belgium.”
“You see much sexual harassment after that?”
“Sure. It became a very big thing.”
“Lots of good men getting their careers ruined?”
Lamarr asked.
Reacher turned to face her. “Some. It became a
witch-hunt. Most of the cases were genuine, in my opinion, but some
innocent people were caught up. Plenty of normal relationships were
suddenly exposed. The rules had suddenly changed on them. Some of
the innocent victims were men. But some were women, too.”
“A mess, right?” Blake said. “All started by pesky
little women like Callan and Cooke?”
Reacher said nothing. Cozo was drumming his fingers
on the mahogany.
“I want to get back to the business with
Petrosian,” he said.
Reacher swiveled his gaze the other way. “There is
no business with Petrosian. I never heard of anybody called
Petrosian.”
Deerfield yawned and looked at his watch. He pushed
his glasses up onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes with his
knuckles.
“It’s past midnight, you know that?” he said.
“Did you treat Callan and Cooke with courtesy?”
Blake asked.
Reacher squinted through the glare at Cozo and then
turned back to Blake. The hot yellow light from the ceiling was
bouncing off the red tint of the mahogany and making his bloated
face crimson.
“Yes, I treated them with courtesy.”
“Did you see them again after you turned their
cases over to the prosecutor?”
“Once or twice, I guess, in passing.”
“Did they trust you?”
Reacher shrugged. “I guess so. It was my job to
make them trust me. I had to get all kinds of intimate details from
them.”
“You had to do that kind of thing with many
women?”
“There were hundreds of cases. I handled a couple
dozen, I guess, before they set up special units to deal with them
all.”
“So give me a name of another woman whose case you
handled.”
Reacher shrugged again and scanned back through a
succession of offices in hot climates, cold climates, big desks,
small desks, sun outside the window, cloud outside, hurt and
outraged women stammering out the details of their betrayal.
“Rita Scimeca,” he said. “She would be a random
example.”
Blake paused and Lamarr reached down to the floor
and came up with a thick file from her briefcase. She slid it
sideways. Blake opened it and turned pages. Traced down a long list
with a thick finger and nodded.
“OK,” he said. “What happened with Ms.
Scimeca?”
“She was Lieutenant Scimeca,” Reacher said. “Fort
Bragg, North Carolina. The guys called it hazing, she called it
gang rape.”
“And what was the outcome?”
“She won her case. Three men spent time in military
prison and were dishonorably discharged.”
“And what happened to Lieutenant Scimeca?”
Reacher shrugged again. “At first she was happy
enough. She felt vindicated. Then she felt the Army had been ruined
for her. So she mustered out.”
“Where is she now?”
“I have no idea.”
“Suppose you saw her again someplace? Suppose you
were in some town somewhere and you saw her in a store or a
restaurant? What would she do?”
“I have no idea. She’d probably say hello, I guess.
Maybe we’d talk awhile, have a drink or something.”
“She’d be pleased to see you?”
“Pleased enough, I guess.”
“Because she would remember you as a nice
guy?”
Reacher nodded. “It’s a hell of an ordeal. Not just
the event itself, but the process afterward, too. So the
investigator has to build up a bond. The investigator has to be a
friend and a supporter.”
“So the victim becomes your friend?”
“If you do it right, yes.”
“What would happen if you knocked on Lieutenant
Scimeca’s door?”
“I don’t know where she lives.”
“Suppose you did. Would she let you in?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would she recognize you?”
“Probably.”
“And she’d remember you as a friend?”
“I guess.”
“So you knock on her door, she’d let you in, right?
She’d open up the door and see this old friend of hers, so she’d
let you right in, offer you coffee or something. Talk a while,
catch up on old times.”
“Maybe,” Reacher said. “Probably.”
Blake nodded and stopped talking. Lamarr put her
hand on his arm and he bent to listen as she whispered in his ear.
He nodded again and turned to Deerfield and whispered in turn.
Deerfield glanced at Cozo. The three agents from Quantico sat back
as he did so, just an imperceptible movement, but with enough body
language in it to say OK, we’re interested.
Cozo stared back at Deerfield in alarm. Deerfield leaned forward,
staring straight through his glasses at Reacher.
“This is a very confusing situation,” he
said.
Reacher said nothing back. Just sat and
waited.
“Exactly what happened at the restaurant?”
Deerfield asked.
“Nothing happened,” Reacher said.
Deerfield shook his head. “You were under
surveillance. My people have been following you for a week. Special
Agents Poulton and Lamarr joined them tonight. They saw the whole
thing.”
Reacher stared at him. “You’ve been following me
for a week?”
Deerfield nodded. “Eight days, actually.”
“Why?”
“We’ll get to that later.”
Lamarr stirred and reached down again to her
briefcase. She pulled out another file. Opened it and took out a
sheaf of papers. There were four or five sheets clipped together.
They were covered in dense type. She smiled icily at Reacher and
reversed the sheets and slid them across the table to him. The air
caught them and riffed them apart. The clip dragged on the wood and
stopped them exactly in front of him. In them Reacher was referred
to as the subject. They were a list of
everything he had done and everywhere he had been in the previous
eight days. They were complete to the last second. And they were
accurate to the last detail. Reacher glanced from them to Lamarr’s
smiling face and nodded.
“Well, FBI tails are obviously pretty good,” he
said. “I never noticed.”
There was silence.
“So what happened in the restaurant?” Deerfield
asked again.
Reacher paused. Honesty is the
best policy, he thought. He scoped it out. Swallowed. Then he
nodded toward Blake and Lamarr and Poulton. “These law school buffs
would call it imperfect necessity, I guess.
I committed a small crime to stop a bigger one happening. ”
“You were acting alone?” Cozo asked.
Reacher nodded. “Yes, I was.”
“So what was don’t start a turf
war with us all about?”
“I wanted it to look convincing. I wanted Petrosian
to take it seriously, whoever the hell he is. Like he was dealing
with another organization.”
Deerfield leaned all the way over the table and
retrieved Lamarr’s surveillance log. He reversed it and riffed
through it.
“This shows no contact with anybody at all except
Ms. Jodie Jacob. She’s not running protection rackets. What about
the phone log?”
“You’re tapping my phone?” Reacher asked.
Deerfield nodded. “We’ve been through your garbage,
too.”
“Phone log is clear,” Poulton said. “He spoke to
nobody except Ms. Jacob. He lives a quiet life.”
“That right, Reacher?” Deerfield asked. “You live a
quiet life?”
“Usually,” Reacher said.
“So you were acting alone,” Deerfield said. “Just a
concerned citizen. No contact with gangsters, no instructions by
phone.”
He turned to Cozo, a question in his eyes. “You
comfortable with that, James?”
Cozo shrugged and nodded. “I’ll have to be, I
guess.”
“Concerned citizen, right, Reacher?” Deerfield
said.
Reacher nodded. Said nothing.
“Can you prove that to us?” Deerfield asked.
Reacher shrugged. “I could have taken their guns.
If I was connected, I would have. But I didn’t.”
“No, you left them in the Dumpster.”
“I disabled them first.”
“With grit in the mechanisms. Why did you do
that?”
“So nobody could find them and use them.”
Deerfield nodded. “A concerned citizen. You saw an
injustice, you wanted to set it straight.”
Reacher nodded back. “I guess.”
“Somebody’s got to do it, right?”
“I guess,” Reacher said again.
“You don’t like injustice, right?”
“I guess not.”
“And you can tell the difference between right and
wrong.”
“I hope so.”
“You don’t need the intervention of the proper
authorities, because you can make your own decisions.”
“Usually.”
“Confident with your own moral code.”
“I guess.”
There was silence. Deerfield looked through the
glare.
“So why did you steal their money?” he asked.
Reacher shrugged. “Spoils of battle, I guess. Like
a trophy.”
Deerfield nodded. “Part of the code, right?”
“I guess.”
“You play to your own rules, right?”
“Usually.”
“You wouldn’t mug an old lady, but it was OK to
take money off of a couple of hard men.”
“I guess.”
“When they step outside what’s acceptable to you,
they get what they get, right?”
“Right.”
“A personal code.”
Reacher said nothing. The silence built.
“You know anything about criminal profiling?”
Deerfield asked suddenly.
Reacher paused. “Only what I read in the newspaper.
”
“It’s a science,” Blake said. “We developed it at
Quantico, over many years. Special Agent Lamarr here is currently
our leading exponent. Special Agent Poulton is her
assistant.”
“We look at crime scenes,” Lamarr said. “We look at
the underlying psychological indicators, and we work out the type
of personality which could have committed the crime.”
“We study the victims,” Poulton said. “We figure
out to whom they could have been especially vulnerable.”
“What crimes?” Reacher asked. “What scenes?”
“You son of a bitch,” Lamarr said.
“Amy Callan and Caroline Cooke,” Blake said. “Both
homicide victims.”
Reacher stared at him.
“Callan was first,” Blake said. “Very distinctive
MO, but one homicide is just one homicide, right? Then Cooke was
hit. With the exact same MO. That made it a serial
situation.”
“We looked for a link,” Poulton said. “Between the
victims. Not hard to find. Army harassment complainants who
subsequently quit.”
“Extreme organization at the crime scene,” Lamarr
said. “Indicative of military precision, maybe. A bizarre, coded
MO. Nothing left behind. No clues of any kind. The perpetrator was
clearly a precise person, and clearly a person familiar with
investigative procedures. Possibly a good investigator
himself.”
“No forced entry at either abode,” Poulton said.
“The killer was admitted to the house in both cases, by the
victims, no questions asked.”
“So the killer was somebody they both knew,” Blake
said.
“Somebody they both trusted,” Poulton said.
“Like a friendly visitor,” Lamarr said.
There was silence in the room.
“That’s what he was,” Blake said. “A visitor.
Somebody they regarded as a friend. Somebody they felt a bond
with.”
“A friend, visiting,” Poulton said. “He knocks on
the door, they open it up, they say hi, so nice to see you
again.”
“He walks in,” Lamarr said. “Just like that.”
There was silence in the room.
“We explored the crime, psychologically,” Lamarr
said. “Why were those women making somebody mad enough to kill
them? So we looked for an Army guy with a score to settle. Maybe
somebody outraged by the idea of pesky women ruining good soldiers’
careers, and then quitting anyway. Frivolous women, driving good
men to suicide?”
“Somebody with a clear sense of right and wrong,”
Poulton said. “Somebody confident enough in his own code to set
these injustices right by his own hand. Somebody happy to act
without the proper authorities getting in the way, you know?”
“Somebody both women knew,” Blake said. “Somebody
they knew well enough to let right in the house, no questions
asked, like an old friend or something.”
“Somebody decisive,” Lamarr said. “Maybe like
somebody organized enough to think for a second and then go buy a
label machine and a tube of glue, just to take care of a little
ad hoc problem.”
More silence.
“The Army ran them through their computers,” Lamarr
said. “You’re right, they never knew each other. They had very few
mutual acquaintances. Very few. But you were one of them.”
“You want to know an interesting fact?” Blake said.
“Perpetrators of serial homicide used to drive Volkswagen Bugs.
Almost all of them. It was uncanny. Then they switched to minivans.
Then they switched to sport-utilities. Big four-wheel-drives,
exactly like yours. It’s a hell of an indicator.”
Lamarr leaned across and pulled the sheaf of papers
back from Deerfield’s place at the table. She tapped them with a
finger.
“They live solitary lives,” she said. “They
interact with one other person at most. They live off other people,
often relatives or friends, often women. They don’t do much normal
stuff. Don’t talk much on the phone, they’re quiet and
furtive.”
“They’re law enforcement buffs,” Poulton said.
“They know all kinds of stuff. Like all kinds of obscure legal
cases defining their rights.”
More silence.
“Profiling,” Blake said. “It’s an exact science.
It’s regarded as good enough evidence to get an arrest warrant in
most states of the Union.”
“It never fails,” Lamarr said. She stared at
Reacher and then she sat back with her crooked teeth showing in a
satisfied smile. Silence settled over the room.
“So?” Reacher said.
“So somebody killed two women,” Deerfield
said.
“And?”
Deerfield nodded to his right, toward Blake and
Lamarr and Poulton. “And these agents think it was somebody exactly
like you.”
“So?”
“So we asked you all those questions.”
“And?”
“And I think they’re absolutely right. It was
somebody exactly like you. Maybe it even was you.”