Cleaning the Gold

by Karin Slaughter

  Reacher started pulling off his tattered gloves. “You ever hear of Blind Blake?”

  “The blues singer?”

  Reacher nodded. “My brother told me that Blake died in Margrave. Actually, he died in Wisconsin, but I never got the chance to tell him.”

  Will slowly edged back against the wall. He had the fleeting thought that maybe Reacher was taking off his gloves so he could beat Will to death with his bare hands.

  Reacher said, “The eyewitness to the shooting. Her name was Beatrice Collins. She was violently raped by Deacon. And badly beaten. Twice. And he made it clear he was going to do it to her again. He told her he really enjoyed it. He told her it got his motor running in a real special way.”

  Will felt gut-punched.

  . . . a wife and teenage boy at home, a married daughter with his first grandchild on the way . . . a violent rapist who had terrorized a woman, probably not just one woman, because Deacon had a badge and a squad car and a boss who always made the point to look the other way . . .

  Reacher said, “The first time he raped her, Beatrice was dumb enough to file a report direct with the sheriff. The second time, she was doubly dumb enough to go back to the sheriff again. He told Deacon to take care of the problem. Best all around just to shut her up.”

  Will’s teeth started to ache from clenching his jaw.

  . . . Deacon’s grandchild was lucky his grandfather had never held him. His son was lucky he had never seen his father in the stands. His wife was lucky that Deacon had never kissed her again, or forced himself on her or preyed on another woman ever again . . .

  Reacher said, “I found all this out later. My friend Neagley was starting up a detective agency. It was her first case. She filed a very comprehensive report. As it happened, my brother was in Margrave at that time. He was working. He looked just like me. Actually an inch taller and a tick lighter, but you’d have to see us side by side. He was ex-Army too. He looked like a squared-away guy. Like the Lone Ranger come to town. Beatrice Collins went to him for help. She didn’t want to cause trouble. She just wanted it to stop. They were going to meet at the library. Public place. Neutral territory. She was scared. Scratch that. She was terrified. She was a small-town girl with no money and nowhere to turn. The police weren’t going to help her. The sheriff once told her he would rape her himself if she told another living soul.”

  Will knew the crooked bastard of a sheriff was exactly the kind of man who would keep a sexual predator on his payroll. “I’m assuming the sheriff made Beatrice lie in her statement about the shooting. But we’re two decades past that. Her partner didn’t mention any of this. They were together for fifteen years.”

  “Victims don’t talk about that stuff sometimes, even to their partners. They want to put it behind them. They don’t want people to feel sorry for them, or worse, to be blamed.” Reacher painted the picture, “Hero cop accused of rape by a grocery store cashier who has a juvenile record for stealing her uncle’s car. Whose side do you think the town would’ve been on?”

  Will couldn’t argue. People were assholes. “April 16, 1997.”

  Reacher shoved the cotton gloves into his back pocket. “Beatrice was late getting to the library. She was nervous. Understandably. My brother was waiting outside when she arrived. Deacon pulled up on the librarian’s 9–1–1 call. He grabbed Beatrice and tried to force her into the back of his squad car. My brother didn’t like that.”

  “He shot Deacon in the head.”

  “Beatrice told Neagley the gun went off by accident.”

  “Twice,” Will said. “That’s some accident.”

  Reacher did not address the inconsistency.

  This was where Will and Reacher parted philosophical ways. He said, “Most of the people who get murdered aren’t good people. There’s a reason they’re in a bad situation.”

  “That’s for damn sure.”

  Will said, “Murder is still murder. ‘He deserved to die’ is not a valid defense in the state of Georgia.”

  “I hear it still holds up in Texas.”

  “What if your brother was wrong about Deacon? What if Beatrice lied?”

  “He wasn’t and she didn’t.”

  Will wasn’t going to lecture a vigilante on the arrogant immorality of vigilantism. “Your brother killed a man in cold blood.”

  “There’s no such thing as cold blood,” Reacher said. “Blood is always warm, to a degree. A police officer was stopped from raping a woman for the third time. Maybe worse than that. And exponentially onward, into the future.”

  Will said nothing.

  “My brother is dead anyway,” Reacher said. “He was murdered a month later. Also in Margrave, as a matter of fact. No doubt connected to his business there a month before. So you’re not going to get your man, however hard you try.”

  “I didn’t find any record—”

  “The Margrave sheriff’s department didn’t keep records of their own crimes,” Reacher said. “At that point my brother was working for Treasury. He was a heavyweight figure by then. They took the body away and cleaned up the mess. A week later it was like nothing had ever happened.”

  Will studied Reacher’s face for any signs of deception, but it didn’t matter. They both knew he would check out the story.

  Reacher said, “Familial DNA.”

  The guy didn’t have a cellphone, but he knew that the similarities in the Y chromosomes of two different males could be used to establish a blood relationship.

  Reacher said, “I’m the only one left in my family. I know that my brother was a good man. I don’t want to see his name dragged through the mud. But you’ve made it pretty clear you’re not going to drop this case. And I’m not going to get in the way of an honest copper doing his work. Not my thing. So, here.”

  Reacher had the toothbrush in his hand.

  The bristles were crushed from being in his back pocket. Will stared at the tiny sliver of handle sticking out of Reacher’s massive paw.

  The right thing to do was to collect the evidence, see the investigation through to its logical end, then close the case. Will knew his boss would say the same thing. Just like he knew that she would also say it was a waste of resources working a case where the suspect was dead and the victim was equally dead, and also a brutal rapist.

  There was a reason why Bond needed an M.

  Will crossed his arms over his chest, leaving the toothbrush hanging. “Don’t you think it’s unsanitary to keep a toothbrush in your pocket all day?”

  Reacher returned the toothbrush to its place.

  “This one’s a mistake,” he said. “Usually they come with a cover. Or hotels have them free at the front desk. Like, every day, you can have a new one straight out of the wrapper. Don’t worry about my personal standards.”

  “Sure.” Will was suddenly mindful he was lecturing a guy about hygiene when, just this morning, he had eaten the sweat-melted wad of Lukather’s Skittles in his pocket.

  Reacher began the Sisyphean task of putting on his cotton gloves.

  Will leaned down and grabbed two bars of gold. “What do you think is going to happen to Lukather?”

  Reacher grabbed six bars, three and three, and waited for Will to stack his. “That’s a great question. I heard she’s already flipped on Baldani. I heard they’re going to give her a deal to testify about the whole scheme.”

  “Why? They don’t need her to make the case. They’ve got them both dead to rights. They’ve got the USB and the cash and the bad guy from the bar.” Will tried not to groan as he lifted two bars of gold. He thought about Baldani’s habit of flicking cigarettes on the ground. The butts were teeming with his DNA. He could take that back to Georgia. And if CODIS returned a hit on Baldani, all the better.

  Suddenly he stopped lifting.

  He asked Reacher, “How long have you been working here?”

  “Twelve days.” Reacher disappeared into the vault. “Why?”

  “And you work fast.”

  “I
try to give value.”

  “Therefore you’ve seen a lot of gold.” Will got going again, and stacked his bars on top of the others. They were all stamped with the same seal of the United States Treasury, their individual numbers likely matching the numbers in the plastic envelopes hanging from the ribbons on the doors.

  Numbers that hadn’t been checked against the gold bars inside.

  Gold bars that had been weighed with stray cotton fuzz and strands of hair that would throw the number on the scale over by a few ounces every time.

  “It’s weird,” Will said. “But the thing is, I could swear I’ve seen these serial numbers before. As in yesterday in the other vault.”

  “You’ve seen a lot of numbers,” Reacher said. He stacked his bars on top of Will’s. “Sixteen digits each. You and I have stacked and re-stacked 38,492 bars of gold so far. That’s 615,872 separate integers. Literally trillions of potential combinations.”

  Will had to take him at his word. He was pretty good at math, but he wasn’t a quantum computer. Though, he did have an incredibly good memory for numbers, and his memory was telling him that the numbers on the bars looked damn familiar.

  “I could swear,” he said again.

  “You good with numbers?”

  “In a weird way.”

  “What was on the second-last bar you just stacked?”

  Will recited sixteen digits from memory. Fast and confident. And exactly correct.

  Reacher was clearly silently checking him, also from memory. Apparently, he was good with numbers too, in a weird way. He said, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “What?” Will said.

  “Are you a good reader?”

  Will didn’t answer.

  Reacher said, “It often doesn’t go together. I knew a few guys. I knew one guy who could tell you the square root of the distance to the sun, but he couldn’t read a lick.”

  “Can you?” Will asked.

  Reacher nodded. “I was fortunate. I can read pretty good.”

  Will didn’t answer.

  “I agree about the numbers,” Reacher said. “They got me thinking. First of all, about how you got here.”

  “My boss pulled strings.”

  “How did he know where I was?”

  “She.”

  “How?”

  “I put your name in the system,” Will said. “A cold case report.”

  “The GBI system, right? Proudly local. Right now we’re in Kentucky.”

  “Someone made a match.”

  Reacher nodded.

  “Now I’m wondering who,” he said. “I’m thinking maybe a kid in a suit. From where the true power is. Which might not be the three-letter agencies anymore. These days it might be the congressional staffs. With seats on all kinds of intelligence subcommittees. Maybe there’s a congressman from Georgia. The local half of his brain wants to see the GBI do well, so he lends a helping hand, with information out of the federal half of his brain.”

  “Which begs a huge question,” Will said.

  “Exactly. Why send you here in person? A Kentucky SWAT team could have done the job. I could have been extradited. What’s another couple months? Your case is already twenty-two years old. Or the MPs could have got me. Why is your actual presence necessary, doing this dumb job as cover?”

  Will didn’t answer, but he was beginning to think he knew.

  “Exactly,” Reacher said again. “Because you’re good with numbers. Maybe you try to hide it, but you can’t. They know. Same with me. They didn’t write their program to look for a strong guy. They looked for a guy good with numbers.”

  Will was quiet a long moment. Then he said, “Did you know that the vault has only been opened to the public one time?”

  “1974,” Reacher said. “As a matter of fact, the kid in the suit talked about it. A DC attorney named Peter David Beter circulated the theory that the gold had been removed by the Deep State.”

  “Right, the Deep State. Those guys really get around.”

  “Do the math,” Reacher said. “There’s $350 billion worth of precious metals stored here, but the national debt is over twenty trillion. That’s already less than two cents on the dollar.” Reacher stacked his bars. “This gold is just a symbol. Apparently good enough of a symbol right now. Based on folk memories of 1974. But if people thought even half of these vaults had been emptied out since then, the entire US economy—the world economy—would go into free fall. There’d be rioting in the streets. The banks would fail.”

  Will passed Reacher on his way to the pallet. They were back on the timing belt. “What I’d do is set up a domino effect.”

  Reacher caught his meaning. “Night crew moves the gold two doors down. Then we move it two doors down the next day. Same gold. Double-blind. Neither crew knows the other crew is doing it.”

  Will stood up from the pallet. His kidney screamed around an elbow-sized bruise. Sweat formed a river down his back. They had at least another six hours to go.

  He said, “We were sent here to find out.”

  “I agree,” Reacher said. “An obscure congressman from Georgia went to a lot of trouble to bring us here, so we would . . . know, I guess . . . that the nation’s gold reserves are terminally depleted, and that fact is being actively hidden by a game of three-card monte. I guess for some reason the guy wants at least one person out there in the world, with that knowledge.”

  “Two people.”

  “Only one of us was supposed to survive. Either you would bust me, or I would kill you and escape. He didn’t care which, by the way. He was hedging his bets.”

  “Plus Lukather,” Will said. “She must know. She was in charge. Probably she gamed out the way the dominos have to fall so no one person can put together the truth. That’s how she’s getting her deal. She’s trading her silence for her freedom.”

  “I guess,” Reacher said. “So now there are three of us who know.”

  “The question is why?” Will said. “I mean, okay, we’re out there in the world, with the knowledge. So what? What are we supposed to do with it?”

  Neither one of them knew.

  An Excerpt from The Last Widow

  Read on for a sneak peek at

  Karin Slaughter’s new Will Trent thriller

  THE LAST WIDOW

  On sale August 2019

  Part One

  Sunday, July 7, 2019

  Prologue

  Michelle Spivey jogged through the back of the store, frantically scanning each aisle for her daughter, panicked thoughts circling her brain: How did I lose sight of her I am a horrible mother my baby was kidnapped by a pedophile or a human trafficker should I flag store security or call the police or—

  Ashley.

  Michelle stopped so abruptly that her shoe snicked against the floor. She took a sharp breath, trying to force her heart back into a normal rhythm. Her daughter was not being sold into slavery. She was at the make-up counter trying on samples.

  The relief started to dissipate as the panic burned off.

  Her eleven-year-old daughter.

  At the make-up counter.

  After they had told Ashley that she could not under any circumstances wear make-up until her twelfth birthday, and then it would only be blush and lip gloss, no matter what her friends were doing, end of story.

  Michelle pressed her hand to her chest. She slowly walked up the aisle, giving herself time to transition into a reasoned and logical person.

  Ashley’s back was to Michelle as she examined lipstick shades. She twisted the tubes with an expert flick of her wrist because of course when she was with her friends, Ashley tried on all their make-up and they practiced on each other because that was what girls did.

  Some girls, at least. Michelle had never felt that pull toward primping. She could still recall her own mother’s screeching tone when Michelle had refused to shave her legs: You’ll never be able to wear pantyhose!

  Michelle’s response: Thank God!

  That was
years ago. Her mother was long gone. Michelle was a grown woman with her own child and like every woman, she had vowed not to make her mother’s mistakes.

  Had she over-corrected?

  Were her general tomboyish tendencies punishing her daughter? Was Ashley really old enough to wear make-up, but because Michelle had no interest in eyeliners and bronzers and whatever else it was that Ashley watched for endless hours on YouTube, she was depriving her daughter of a certain type of girl’s passage into womanhood?

  Michelle had done the research on juvenile milestones. Eleven was an important age, a so-called benchmark year, the point at which children had attained roughly 50 percent of the power. You had to start negotiating rather than simply ordering them around. Which was very well-reasoned in the abstract but in practice was terrifying.

  “Oh!” Ashley saw her mother and frantically jammed the lipstick into the display. “I was—”

  “It’s all right.” Michelle stroked back her daughter’s long hair. So many bottles of shampoo in the shower, and conditioner, and soaps and moisturizers when Michelle’s only beauty routine involved sweat-proof sunscreen.

  “Sorry.” Ashley wiped at the smear of lip gloss on her mouth.

  “It’s pretty,” Michelle tried.

  “Really?” Ashley beamed at her in a way that tugged every string of Michelle’s heart. “Did you see this?” She meant the lip gloss display. “They have one that’s tinted, so it’s supposed to last longer. But this one has cherry flavoring, and Hailey says b—”

  Silently, Michelle filled in the words, boys like it more.

  The assorted Hemsworths on Ashley’s bedroom walls had not gone unnoticed.

  Michelle asked, “Which do you like most?”

  “Well . . .” Ashley shrugged, but there was not much an eleven-year-old did not have an opinion on. “I guess the tinted type lasts longer, right?”

  Michelle offered, “That makes sense.”

  Ashley was still weighing the two items. “The cherry kind of tastes like chemicals? Like, I always chew—I mean, if I wore it, I would probably chew it off because it would irritate me?”