by Jude Hardin
Natalie answered on the third ring.
“Where are you?” Wahlman said.
“I’m at home,” Natalie said. “Packing some things to take back to the dorm.”
“Great. I’ll be there in a little while. I’m going to help you take your stuff over there, and then I’m going to need to take the car.”
“Why can’t I keep it for a while?”
“Because that would only leave your mother and me with one vehicle,” Wahlman said. “We’ve talked about this before.”
“I need my own car,” Natalie said.
“What for?”
“To go places.”
“All of your classes are within walking distance from the dorm. I can take you wherever else you need to go.”
Natalie didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Wahlman could hear her exhaling through her nostrils.
“Maybe I should just forget about college,” she said. “Maybe I should—”
“Maybe you should stop being ridiculous,” Wahlman said. “I’ll be there in a little while. Okay?”
“Fine.”
Natalie disconnected.
Wahlman slid the phone back into his pocket and slid the car into gear and headed for home.
8
Janelle Pierce slid her phone into her pocket and slid the car she’d rented into gear and headed for home.
Her real home.
In Jeffersonville, Indiana.
It was supposed to have been a surprise visit, but the word had gotten out, as it always did. Now her parents—and the rest of the world—knew she was coming. And thanks to a certain entertainment columnist who seemed downright obsessed with Janelle, they even knew why. Not that it would have taken a great deal of imagination to figure it out. Not if you knew that Janelle owned a thoroughbred named T. J. Ricochet, and not if you knew that T. J. Ricochet would be running in the fifth race at River City Downs this evening.
Now Janelle wouldn’t be able to spend the night in her old room, as she’d originally planned to do, because spending the night in her old room meant that a hundred or more people would be standing on her parents’ front lawn by morning. Friends from grade school, and friends of friends from grade school, and the paparazzi, and other complete strangers who seemed to think that it was perfectly acceptable to invade your privacy on a regular basis just because you were a major hit at the box office. Just because you made more money last year than most people will make in a lifetime.
All of the attention was silly, and annoying, but it had somehow become the norm for Janelle, and she figured she might as well get used to it. She figured it wasn’t likely to go away anytime soon.
She steered out of the hotel parking lot and took the ramp to the interstate. Traffic was heavy around the airport, but it started to clear as she made her way downtown and across the bridge to Indiana. Once she made it to the Jeffersonville exit, it was smooth sailing all the way to her parents’ driveway.
Janelle had offered to move her parents to California, to buy them a house out there, but they had refused, saying that this was their home, that this was where they intended to stay for the rest of their lives. The house was modest, but nice, three bedrooms and two baths with a big kitchen and a living room and a den, everything recently updated, inside and out, thanks to Janelle, who’d also insisted on paying off the mortgage. Now her dad worked sixty hours a week because he wanted to, not because he had to.
Her mother stepped out onto the porch. Janelle climbed out of the SUV and trotted to where she was standing and gave her a hug.
“So good to see you,” her mother said. “How was your flight?”
“It was good.”
“First class?”
“Yes, Mom. First class.”
“Well, you can afford it.”
“I suppose,” Janelle said, staring down at the painted concrete.
“You should never be embarrassed about how successful you’ve become,” her mother said.
“I’m not embarrassed,” Janelle said. “Not exactly. But sometimes I think about how many homeless people a ticket like that could feed.”
“You’ve given a lot of money to a lot of charities. You’ve helped a lot of people. I’m very proud of you.”
“Thanks.”
Her mother gestured toward the SUV.
“That’s a nice car you rented,” she said.
“It cost a bundle too,” Janelle said. “But I figured you and Dad would want to go to Louisville with me this evening, and I wanted everyone to be comfortable.”
“Oh, yes, we definitely want to go. It’s all your father has been talking about. We can’t wait!”
“Is Dad home?” Janelle said.
“He’s still at work,” her mother said. “But he’s taking off early today. Should be home soon. Come on in and I’ll fix you something to eat.”
“I had a soda and some French fries a while ago. So I’m really not very—”
“That’s not a meal. I’m going to fix you something decent. Come on.”
Janelle followed her mother across the porch and through the front door and into the foyer. As soon as she stepped inside, she could tell by the wonderful aroma that her mother had been baking something for dessert.
Apple pie.
Janelle’s favorite.
9
In 1983, seventy-four years before Rock Wahlman was born, a United States Army officer named Jack Reacher was transported to an Air Force base in Germany and treated for injuries sustained during an attack in Lebanon. Based on his own experiences in such settings, Wahlman imagined that Reacher had been in a lot of pain, and that the hospital food had sucked, and that it had been difficult to get any rest, with multiple doctors and nurses and other staff members marching into the ward and poking and prodding and asking questions around the clock.
Based on what Wahlman had been told, and backed by some of the research he’d conducted, one of the Army phlebotomists had stepped up to Reacher’s bed and had tied a tourniquet around his arm and had drawn some blood one morning, just like one of the Army phlebotomists had done every morning there at the hospital in Germany, only this time, unbeknownst to Reacher, the Army phlebotomist had drawn an extra redtop, a vial that was shipped, along with thirty-nine other vials from thirty-nine other military patients, to a secret underground laboratory in Colorado. The samples were analyzed, and then they were cryogenically preserved.
Decades later, a group of independent scientists had gotten the greenlight—from the three-star general who’d been in charge of the lab at the time—to use the specimens for a top secret and altogether illegal human cloning experiment. While a total of eighty fetuses were produced, only two survived, both of them grown from cells taken from the officer named Reacher. The Army ended up bailing on the project and the babies were given fake identities and fake backstories and sent to separate orphanages in separate states.
Wahlman had been one of those babies.
He was thinking about all of that as he steered into his driveway on Fifth Street. He didn’t have a father, or a mother who was actually related to him. No blood relatives of any kind, except for the other clone, who was dead now, murdered by a rogue pair of senior Army officers who’d tried to kill Wahlman as well.
All in the name of progress.
Or, more specifically, in the name of the billions of privately-pledged research dollars that would supposedly lead to the so-called progress.
Rock Wahlman was an exact genetic duplicate of Jack Reacher, which meant that the only family history he would ever have to go on was Jack Reacher’s family history, and he didn’t really know much about it. He wanted to know more. He was going to be forty-four years old soon. Maybe there were medical issues that he needed to be aware of. Maybe there were other issues.
Natalie walked out to the driveway as he was climbing out of the car.
“Cool!” she said. “Did you buy this?”
“I borrowed it from Charlie,” Wahlman said. “I have to ta
ke it back this evening.”
“You should just go ahead and buy it from him.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. You should buy it from him and then give it to me.”
“Keep dreaming,” Wahlman said.
“Can I at least drive it around the block?”
“Better not. Got all your stuff packed yet?”
“Most of it,” Natalie said. “I can’t believe I’m going to be stuck on campus with no transportation.”
“More time for studying,” Wahlman said. “I’ve been thinking about taking some classes myself. Maybe we could meet at the library sometimes and—”
“Please tell me you’re not serious,” Natalie said.
Wahlman laughed.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Even if I do take some classes, I won’t make you study with me. Come on. Let’s start loading your stuff into the car.”
“I talked to Mom a while ago.” Natalie said.
“You did?”
“Yeah. She told me about your client. Or your almost-client, or whatever. Does she really look like Janelle Pierce?”
Apparently Natalie hadn’t heard the news. Wahlman wondered if he should tell her. He decided that he might as well. She was going to hear about it eventually anyway.
“They found her in the park this morning,” he said. “She’s dead.”
“Janelle Pierce?”
“No. My almost-client.”
“What happened?”
“Someone stabbed her to death.”
“That’s terrible,” Natalie said. “Do they know who did it?”
“Not yet,” Wahlman said. “Let’s get your stuff loaded.”
Natalie turned and started walking toward the porch.
“She’s in town,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“Who?” Wahlman said.
“Janelle Pierce. The real Janelle Pierce. That’s what I heard, anyway.”
“What else did you hear?”
“Nothing. Just that she might be at the track tonight.”
“Churchill Downs?”
“River City. I think she owns one of the horses racing over there.”
Wahlman’s heart skipped a beat. Everything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours started swirling through his head like a plaid flannel tornado.
“Go on inside,” he said. “I’ll be there shortly.”
Natalie walked inside. Wahlman opened the driver side door of the car he’d borrowed, reached in and grabbed the plastic bag with the Daily Racing Form in it. He unzipped the bag and pulled the paper out and frantically started shuffling through the pages.
It took him a couple of minutes to find the horse. The column had been circled in pencil, several times, and some notations had been scribbled into the margins.
T. J. Ricochet.
A filly. Scheduled to run in the fifth race at River City Downs today.
And the race was scheduled to start in ten minutes.
Wahlman trotted up the sidewalk and slung the front door open and told Natalie that he wasn’t going to be able to help her move her stuff after all.
10
Janelle steered into the parking area that was reserved for owners and trainers, stopped at the security shack and presented her official River City Downs identification badge to the guy at the window. The guy handed her a laminated parking pass to hang on her rearview mirror and told her to have a nice day. She found a place to park and switched the engine off, and then she and her parents climbed out and started walking toward the stables.
“We need to hurry,” Janelle said. “The race starts in a few minutes.”
“Smells like horse shit back here,” her father said.
“What do you expect?” her mother said, laughing.
A few feet beyond the stables, there was a walkway that branched off in several different directions. You could go to the grandstands or the clubhouse and mingle with the general admission crowd, or you could go to the handling area and mingle with the jockeys and the trainers, or—if you were fabulously wealthy—you could swipe your official River City Downs identification badge and press your finger against the little glass window on the fingerprint scanner and take the stairs to the private suites on the second level and mingle with nobody.
Janelle veered toward the stairs.
“You rented a suite?” her father said. “How much did that set you back?”
Janelle started to answer. She started to say that it was a lot, but that it was worth every penny for the peace of mind, for the added security and privacy. She started to say that, but before the words actually left her mouth, she noticed a man standing at the foot of the stairwell.
The closer she got to the man, the more familiar he looked.
It couldn’t be.
But it was.
Not a friend from grade school this time, but from high school.
And not just a friend, but her boyfriend. Her high school sweetheart.
Junior and senior years.
Her date to every event, every ballgame, every dance.
An expression of great surprise washed across his face when he saw her coming. She walked up to him and gave him a hug, a loose and quick and rather unaffectionate one, the kind that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for anything other than what it was, the kind you feel obligated to give to an acquaintance you’d actually hoped never to see again.
Marshall had put on a little weight since high school, all of it muscle. Leaning into his chest and abdomen was like leaning into a brick wall.
“What are you doing here?” Janelle said.
“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” he said.
“Mom, Dad, you remember Marshall.”
“Of course,” Janelle’s mother said, stepping forward to shake Marshall’s hand.
Janelle’s father did not step forward to shake Marshall’s hand. Janelle’s father had never liked Marshall, and he’d never pretended to like him.
“We were just on our way upstairs,” Janelle said. “Kind of in a hurry, to tell you the truth. But it was nice to—”
“Isn’t this a restricted area?” Janelle’s father said, glaring at Marshall in a manner similar to the way he’d glared at him when Janelle was still a teenager.
“I was up in the clubhouse, decided to walk around a little bit,” Marshall said. “Must have taken a wrong turn.”
“Are you here by yourself?” Janelle’s mother said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You should join us upstairs in our suite for a while. That would be okay, wouldn’t it, Janelle?”
Janelle shrugged.
“Sure,” she said, glancing over at her father and noticing how clenched his jaw had become and how red his face had gotten and wishing once again that she and her parents had never run into Marshall in the first place.
“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Marshall said.
“Nonsense,” Janelle’s mother said. “Come on up. At least for one drink. Janelle’s horse is running in a few minutes. Did you know that?”
“I didn’t know that,” Marshall said. “How exciting.”
Janelle swiped her badge and pressed her right index finger on the scanner and led the way through the computer-controlled security gate. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, she thought. Maybe Marshall really would just have one drink and then head on back to the clubhouse.
Janelle thought about the very last night that she and Marshall were together.
The relationship hadn’t ended well.
It hadn’t ended well at all.
Marshall had a temper, and it had gotten progressively worse during the years that Janelle had been with him. He’d never actually hit Janelle, but he’d been verbally abusive, and he’d broken some things, and Janelle had figured that it was just a matter of time until he snapped. She’d walked away from him on graduation night, making it clear that it was over and that she was moving on.
The relentless onslaught of phone
calls and text messages that followed were not exactly unexpected, but horrifying nonetheless.
If Janelle’s mother ever found out about some of the things that Marshall had said to Janelle back then, she would probably never speak to him again.
If Janelle’s father ever found out about some of the things that Marshall had said to Janelle back then, he would probably kill him.
Janelle tried not to think about it.
Her mother said something to Marshall on the way up the stairs—teasing him a bit, but in a playful, lighthearted way. Something about the shirt he was wearing. She’d always found it amusing that he liked flannel so much, even in the summer.
11
River City Downs had opened for business in 2075, exactly two hundred years after the opening of the most famous thoroughbred racetrack in the world. It was fancy and modern and expensive. It was a nice place to spend an afternoon and a paycheck. Wahlman steered into the parking area that was reserved for owners and trainers, screeched to a stop at the security shack and spoke to the guy at the window.
“I’m looking for Janelle Pierce,” Wahlman said.
The guard laughed.
“You and about a million other people,” he said.
The guard wore khaki pants and a khaki shirt. His nametag said Moffit. There was a walkie-talkie clipped to his patent leather belt and a silver badge pinned to his left breast pocket. He didn’t appear to be armed.
“Is she here somewhere?” Wahlman said.
“I’m not at liberty to say,” Moffit said. “Is there something else I can help you with? If not, I’m going to have to ask you to—”
“I have reason to believe that her life might be in danger,” Wahlman said.
