by Lee Child
I nodded.
“How long was this one up there?” I said.
“Two or three days, maybe,” she said. “Finlay says it could have been a double homicide on Thursday night.”
I nodded again. Hubble did know something about it. This was the guy he had sent to meet with the tall investigator with the shaved head. He couldn’t figure out how the guy had gotten away with it. But the guy hadn’t gotten away with it.
I heard a car in the lot outside and then the big glass door sucked open. Finlay stuck his head in.
“Morgue, Roscoe,” he said. “You too, Reacher.”
We followed him back outside into the heat. We all got into Roscoe’s unmarked sedan. Left Finlay’s car where he’d parked it. Roscoe drove. I sat in the back. Finlay sat in the front passenger seat, twisted around so he could talk to the both of us at once. Roscoe nosed out of the police lot and headed south.
“I can’t find Hubble,” Finlay said. Looking at me. “There’s nobody up at his place. Did he say anything to you about going anywhere?”
“No,” I said. “Not a word. We hardly spoke all weekend.”
Finlay grunted at me.
“I need to find out what he knows about all this,” he said. “This is serious shit and he knows something about it, that’s for damn sure. What did he tell you about it, Reacher?”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t entirely sure whose side I was on yet. Finlay’s, probably, but if Finlay started blundering around in whatever Hubble was mixed up in, Hubble and his family were going to end up dead. No doubt about that. So I figured I should just stay impartial and then get the hell out of there as fast as possible. I didn’t want to get involved.
“You try his mobile number?” I asked him.
Finlay grunted and shook his head.
“Switched off,” he said. “Some automatic voice came on and told me.”
“Did he come by and pick up his watch?” I asked him.
“His what?” he said.
“His watch,” I said. “He left a ten-thousand-dollar Rolex with Baker on Friday. When Baker was cuffing us for the ride out to Warburton. Did he come pick it up?”
“No,” Finlay said. “Nobody said so.”
“OK,” I said. “So he’s got some urgent business some-where. Not even an asshole like Hubble’s going to forget about a ten-thousand-dollar watch, right?”
“What urgent business?” Finlay said. “What did he tell you about it?”
“He didn’t tell me diddly,” I said. “Like I told you, we hardly spoke.”
Finlay glared at me from the front seat.
“Don’t mess with me, Reacher,” he said. “Until I get hold of Hubble, I’m going to keep hold of you and sweat your ass for what he told you. And don’t make out he kept his mouth shut all weekend, because guys like that never do. I know that and you know that, so don’t mess with me, OK?”
I just shrugged at him. He wasn’t about to arrest me again. Maybe I could get a bus from wherever the morgue was. I’d have to pass on lunch with Roscoe. Pity.
“So what’s the story on this one?” I asked him.
“Pretty much the same as the last one,” Finlay said. “Looks like it happened at the same time. Shot to death, probably the same weapon. This one didn’t get kicked around afterward, but it was probably part of the same incident.”
“You don’t know who it is?” I said.
“His name is Sherman,” he said. “Apart from that, no idea.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. I was asking out of habit. Finlay thought for a moment. I saw him decide to answer. Like we were partners.
“Unidentified white male,” he said. “Same deal as the first one, no ID, no wallet, no distinguishing marks. But this one had a gold wristwatch, engraved on the back: to Sherman, love Judy. He was maybe thirty or thirty-five. Hard to tell, because he’d been lying there for three nights and he was well gnawed by the small animals, you know? His lips are gone, and his eyes, but his right hand was OK because it was folded up under his body, so I got some decent prints. We ran them an hour ago and something may come of that, if we’re lucky.”
“Gunshot wounds?” I asked him.
Finlay nodded.
“Looks like the same gun,” he said. “Small-caliber, soft-nose shells. Looks like maybe the first shot only wounded him and he was able to run. He got hit a couple more times but made it to cover under the highway. He fell down and bled to death. He didn’t get kicked around because they couldn’t find him. That’s how it looks to me.”
I thought about it. I’d walked right by there at eight o’clock on Friday morning. Right between the two bodies.
“And you figure he was called Sherman?” I said.
“His name was on his watch,” Finlay said.
“Might not have been his watch,” I said. “The guy could have stolen it. Could have inherited it, bought it from a pawnshop, found it in the street.”
Finlay just grunted again. We must have been more than ten miles south of Margrave. Roscoe was keeping up a fast pace down the old county road. Then she slowed and slid down a left fork which led straight to the distant horizon.
“Where the hell are we going?” I said.
“County hospital,” Finlay said. “Down in Yellow Springs. Next-but-one town to the south. Not long now.”
We drove on. Yellow Springs became a smudge in the heat haze on the horizon. Just inside the town limit was the county hospital, standing more or less on its own. Put there back when diseases were infectious and sick people were isolated. It was a big hospital, a warren of wide low buildings sprawled over a couple of acres. Roscoe slowed and swung into the entrance lane. We wallowed over speed bumps and threaded our way around to a spread of buildings clustered on their own in back. The mortuary was a long shed with a big roll-up door standing open. We stopped well clear of the door and left the car in the yard. We looked at each other and went in.
A MEDICAL GUY MET US AND LED US INTO AN OFFICE. HE sat behind a metal desk and waved Finlay and Roscoe to some stools. I leaned on a counter, between a computer terminal and a fax machine. This was not a big-budget facility. It had been cheaply equipped some years ago. Everything was worn and chipped and untidy. Very different from the station house up at Margrave. The guy at the desk looked tired. Not old, not young, maybe Finlay’s sort of age. White coat. He looked like the type of guy whose judgment you wouldn’t worry about too much. He didn’t introduce himself. Just took it for granted we all knew who he was and what he was for.
“What can I tell you folks?” he said.
He looked at all three of us in turn. Waited. We looked back.
“Was it the same incident?” Finlay asked. His deep Harvard tones sounded out of place in the shabby office. The medical guy shrugged at him.
“I’ve only had the second corpse for an hour,” he said. “But, yes, I would say it’s the same incident. It’s almost certainly the same weapon. Looks like small-caliber soft-nose bullets in both cases. The bullets were slow, looks like the gun had a silencer.”
“Small caliber?” I said. “How small?”
The doctor swiveled his tired gaze my way.
“I’m not a firearms expert,” he said. “But I’d vote for a twenty-two. Looks that small to me. I’d say we’re looking at soft-nose twenty-two-gauge shells. Take the first guy’s head, for example. Two small splintery entry wounds and two big messy exit wounds, characteristic of a small soft-nose bullet.”
I nodded. That’s what a soft-nose bullet does. It goes in and flattens out as it does so. Becomes a blob of lead about the size of a quarter tumbling through whatever tissue it meets. Rips a great big exit hole for itself. And a nice slow soft-nose .22 makes sense with a silencer. No point using a silencer except with a subsonic muzzle velocity. Otherwise the bullet is making its own sonic boom all the way to the target, like a tiny fighter plane.
“OK,” I said. “Were they killed up there where they were found?”
“No doubt about
it,” the guy said. “Hypostasis is clear in both corpses.”
He looked at me. Wanted me to ask him what hypostasis was. I knew what it was, but I felt polite. So I looked puzzled for him.
“Postmortem hypostasis,” he said. “Lividity. When you die, your circulation stops, right? Heart isn’t beating anymore. Your blood obeys the law of gravity. It settles to the bottom of your body, into the lowest available vessels, usually into the tiny capillaries in the skin next to the floor or whatever you’ve fallen down onto. The red cells settle first. They stain the skin red. Then they clot, so the stain is fixed, like a photograph. After a few hours, the stains are permanent. The stains on the first guy are entirely consistent with his position on the warehouse forecourt. He was shot, he fell down dead, he was kicked around in some sort of mad frenzy for a few minutes, then he lay there for around eight hours. No doubt about it.”
“What do you make of the kicking?” Finlay asked him.
The doctor shook his head and shrugged.
“Never seen anything like it,” he said. “I’ve read about it in the journals, time to time. Some kind of a psychopathic thing, obviously. No way to explain it. It didn’t make any difference to the dead guy. Didn’t hurt him, because he was dead. So it must have gratified the kicker somehow. Unbelievable fury, tremendous strength. The injuries are grievous.”
“What about the second guy?” Finlay asked.
“He ran for it,” the doctor said. “He was hit close up in the back with the first shot, but it didn’t drop him, and he ran. He took two more on the way. One in the neck, and the fatal shot in the thigh. Blew away his femoral artery. He made it as far as the raised-up section of highway, then lay down and bled to death. No doubt about that. If it hadn’t rained all night Thursday, I’m sure you’d have seen the trail of blood on the road. There must have been about a gallon and a half lying about somewhere, because it sure as hell isn’t inside the guy anymore.”
We all fell quiet. I was thinking about the second guy’s desperate sprint across the road. Trying to reach cover while the bullets smashed into his flesh. Hurling himself under the highway ramp and dying amid the quiet scuffling of the small night animals.
“OK,” Finlay said. “So we’re safe to assume the two victims were together. The shooter is in a group of three, he surprises them, shoots the first guy in the head twice, mean-while the second guy takes off and gets hit by three shots as he runs, right?”
“You’re assuming there were three assailants?” the doctor said.
Finlay nodded across to me. It was my theory, so I got to explain it.
“Three separate personality characteristics,” I said. “A competent shooter, a frenzied maniac, and an incompetent concealer.”
The doctor nodded slowly.
“I’ll buy that,” he said. “The first guy was hit at point-blank range, so maybe we should assume he knew the assailants and allowed them to get next to him?”
Finlay nodded.
“Had to be that way,” he said. “Five guys meeting together. Three of them attack the other two. This is some kind of a big deal, right?”
“Do we know who the assailants were?” the doctor asked.
“We don’t even know who the victims were,” Roscoe said.
“Got any theories on the victims?” Finlay asked the doctor.
“Not on the second guy, apart from the name on his watch,” the doctor said. “I only just got him on the table an hour ago.”
“So you got theories on the first guy?” Finlay said.
The doctor started shuffling some notes on his desk, but his telephone rang. He answered it and then held it out to Finlay.
“For you,” he said. Finlay crouched forward on his stool and took the call. Listened for a moment.
“OK,” he said into the phone. “Just print it out and fax it to us here, will you?”
Then he passed the phone back to the doctor and rocked back on his stool. He had the beginnings of a smile on his face.
“That was Stevenson, up at the station house,” he said. “We finally got a match on the first guy’s prints. Seems like we did the right thing to run them again. Stevenson’s faxing it through to us here in a minute, so tell us what you got, doc, and we’ll put it all together.”
The tired guy in the white coat shrugged and picked up a sheet of paper.
“The first guy?” he said. “I haven’t got much at all. The body was in a hell of a mess. He was tall, he was fit, he had a shaved head. The main thing is the dental work. Looks like the guy got his teeth fixed all over the place. Some of it is American, some of it looks American, some of it is foreign.”
Next to my hip, the fax machine started beeping and whirring. A sheet of thin paper fed itself in.
“So what do we make of that?” Finlay said. “The guy was foreign? Or an American who lived abroad or what?”
The thin sheet of paper fed itself out, covered in writing. Then the machine stopped and went quiet. I picked up the paper and glanced at it. Then I read it through twice. I went cold. I was gripped by an icy paralysis and I couldn’t move. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing on that piece of fax paper. The sky crashed in on me. I stared at the doctor and spoke.
“He grew up abroad,” I said. “He had his teeth fixed wherever he was living. He broke his right arm when he was eight and had it set in Germany. He had his tonsils out in the hospital in Seoul.”
The doctor looked up at me.
“They can tell all that from his fingerprints?” he said.
I shook my head.
“The guy was my brother,” I said.
10
ONCE I SAW A NAVY FILM ABOUT EXPEDITIONS IN THE FROZEN arctic. You could be walking over a solid glacier. Suddenly the ice would heave and shatter. Some kind of unimaginable stresses in the floes. A whole new geography would be forced up. Massive escarpments where it had been flat. Huge ravines behind you. A new lake in front of you. The world all changed in a second. That’s how I felt. I sat there rigid with shock on the counter between the fax machine and the computer terminal and felt like an Arctic guy whose whole world changes in a single step.
They walked me through to the cold store in back to make a formal identification of his body. His face had been blown away by the gunshots and all his bones were broken but I recognized the star-shaped scar on his neck. He’d got it when we were messing with a broken bottle, twenty-nine years ago. Then they took me back up to the station house in Margrave. Finlay drove. Roscoe sat with me in the back of the car and held my hand all the way. It was only a twenty-minute ride, but in that time I lived through two whole lifetimes. His and mine.
My brother, Joe. Two years older than me. He was born on a base in the Far East right at the end of the Eisenhowerera. Then I had been born on a base in Europe, right at the start of the Kennedy era. Then we’d grown up together all over the world inside that tight isolated transience that service families create for themselves. Life was all about moving on at random and unpredictable intervals. It got so that it felt weird to do more than a semester and a half in any one place. Several times we went years without seeing a winter. We’d get moved out of Europe at the start of the fall and go down to the Pacific somewhere and summer would begin all over again.
Our friends kept just disappearing. Some unit would get shipped out somewhere and a bunch of kids would be gone. Sometimes we saw them again months later in a different place. Plenty of them we never saw again. Nobody ever said hello or good-bye. You were just either there or not there.
Then as Joe and I got older, we got moved around more. The Vietnam thing meant the military started shuffling people around the world faster and faster. Life became just a blur of bases. We never owned anything. We were only allowed one bag each on the transport planes.
We were together in that blur for sixteen years. Joe was the only constant thing in my life. And I loved him like a brother. But that phrase has a very precise meaning. A lot of those stock sayings do. Like when people say
they slept like a baby. Do they mean they slept well? Or do they mean they woke up every ten minutes, screaming? I loved Joe like a brother, which meant a lot of things in our family.
The truth was I never knew for sure if I loved him or not. And he never knew for sure if he loved me or not, either. We were only two years apart, but he was born in the fifties and I was born in the sixties. That seemed to make a lot more than two years’ worth of a difference to us. And like any pair of brothers two years apart, we irritated the hell out of each other. We fought and bickered and sullenly waited to grow up and get out from under. Most of those sixteen years, we didn’t know if we loved each other or hated each other.
But we had the thing that army families have. Your family was your unit. The men on the bases were taught total loyalty to their units. It was the most fundamental thing in their lives. The boys copied them. They translated that same intense loyalty onto their families. So time to time you might hate your brother, but you didn’t let anybody mess with him. That was what we had, Joe and I. We had that unconditional loyalty. We stood back to back in every new schoolyard and punched our way out of trouble together. I watched out for him, and he watched out for me, like brothers did. For sixteen years. Not much of a normal childhood, but it was the only childhood I was ever going to get. And Joe was just about the beginning and end of it. And now somebody had killed him. I sat there in the back of the police Chevrolet listening to a tiny voice in my head asking me what the hell I was going to do about that.
FINLAY DROVE STRAIGHT THROUGH MARGRAVE AND PARKED up outside the station house. Right at the curb opposite the big plate-glass entrance doors. He and Roscoe got out of the car and stood there waiting for me, just like Baker and Stevenson had forty-eight hours before. I got out and joined them in the noontime heat. We stood there for a moment and then Finlay pulled open the heavy door and we went inside. Walked back through the empty squad room to the big rosewood office.
Finlay sat at the desk. I sat in the same chair I’d used on Friday. Roscoe pulled a chair up and put it next to mine. Finlay rattled open the desk drawer. Took out the tape recorder. Went through his routine of testing the microphone with his fingernail. Then he sat still and looked at me.
