THE JACK REACHER FILES: THE GIRL FROM THE WRONG SIDE OF CORDIAL (with Bonus Thriller THE BLOOD NOTEBOOKS)

by Jude Hardin

  About THE GIRL FROM THE WRONG SIDE OF CORDIAL

  Diana Dawkins…

  A lead operative with the ultra-clandestine federal agency called The Circle. Smart, beautiful, deadly.

  Sent to Cordial, Kentucky to verify the identity of a murder victim.

  Sent to verify that the victim is Jack Reacher.

  Cordial is certainly Reacher’s kind of town, but Diana knows right away that the dead man in the crime scene photographs is someone else. Who is he? Why was he killed? Does the suspect in custody know more than she’s willing to say?

  As Diana delves deeper into the investigation, it soon becomes clear that—despite its name—Cordial is not a very welcoming place.

  In fact, it’s downright deadly.

  THE JACK REACHER FILES

  THE GIRL FROM THE WRONG SIDE OF CORDIAL

  JUDE HARDIN

  Table of Contents

  About THE GIRL FROM THE WRONG SIDE OF CORDIAL

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  4

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  9

  Sample: COLT

  THE BLOOD NOTEBOOKS

  PROLOGUE

  Part 1 Thrasher

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  2

  3

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  7

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  10

  11

  12

  Part 2 Retro

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  1

  The corpse was missing a face and both hands, but it didn’t matter. Diana Dawkins knew right away that it wasn’t Jack Reacher. The height and weight were right, but Reacher had some very distinctive scars on his torso. The man in the photographs didn’t.

  “It’s not him,” Diana said.

  She passed the black and white prints back across the desk to Chief Kearning, the man in charge of the Cordial Police Department.

  “How do you know it’s not him?” Kearning said.

  As an operative for a secret government agency called The Circle, Diana’s mission was to find, monitor, and eliminate any person or group of people on US soil who posed a threat to the nation. It had never been conclusively proven that Reacher was a threat, but he was high on The Circle’s list of people to watch. They had been monitoring his actions for several years. That was how Diana knew.

  But of course she didn’t tell Kearning that. After a detailed briefing from The Director, the man in charge of The Circle, Diana had traveled to Cordial, Kentucky with some very convincing military police credentials, hoping that she could take some blood and tissue samples back to the lab in Colorado for DNA analysis, hoping that she could close out the Reacher case for good.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  “I did some research before I drove down here,” she said. “Reacher has lived a violent life. Some of it while he was in the military, and some of it since he’s been out. He’s been shot and stabbed and hit with shrapnel. The guy in the picture has perfect skin on his chest and abdomen. He looks like he could have posed for the cover of a bodybuilding magazine—before someone went to work on him with a shotgun, that is.”

  “Why would she have lied about his name?” Kearning said, referring to the suspect in custody.

  “I don’t know. I’ll need to talk to her.”

  Kearning swiveled his chair to the side and started tapping on his computer keyboard.

  “You can try,” he said. “But she’s been refusing to talk to anyone except her lawyer. She’s in the interview room with him right now. You want to wait?”

  “Maybe I’ll grab some lunch and come back in a little while. Care to join me?”

  “Can’t. One of our officers took a personal day today, so we’re short-staffed. I’ll probably just grab something out of the vending machines.”

  “Any suggestions on a place to get a sandwich or something?”

  “We have all the usual fast food places. Or you could try the diner. It’s over by the railroad tracks, just a couple of blocks from here.”

  “Close enough to walk to?”

  “Yeah. But you might want to take an umbrella. We’re supposed to get some rain this afternoon.”

  “All right. Thanks. I’ll be back in a little while.”

  Diana got up and exited the cramped little office, walked down a long hallway to the front door. She nodded to the desk sergeant on her way outside, stepped over to the curb where her car was parked and fed some quarters into the meter. It seemed like a ridiculous thing for a visiting investigator to have to do, but there were only ten spaces in the lot behind the station, and all of them had been occupied when Diana arrived. Kearning had told her that there were times when even he had to park on the street. He always kept a bunch of quarters in his center console just in case, he’d said.

  There was a bank across the street from the police station, and next door to the bank there was a twenty-four hour pharmacy, one of the big chain stores. Diana looked at the sky, thought about taking the chief’s advice and walking over there and buying an umbrella, finally decided not to. It probably wasn’t going to rain in the next hour. And if it did, she could just duck under one of the awnings that jutted out over the storefronts along Main Street and wait it out. Umbrellas were cumbersome and they dripped all over the place when you walked inside. Diana didn’t like them. She hadn’t used one since she was fourteen. Twenty years. Probably some kind of world record. She continued on toward the diner, noticing the rows of bungalows down the side streets as she walked along Main. Every house seemed to be meticulously maintained, every yard beautifully landscaped. Green grass and tulips and sculpted hedges, everything thriving despite the unseasonable springtime chill. Children on shiny new bicycles, a mailman strolling along the sidewalk at a leisurely pace. Everything looked nice and everyone seemed happy. Like a scene from a classic television show.

  The Director had hesitated to send Diana to Cordial based on the victim’s size alone, but she’d finally convinced him by reminding him that this was Reacher’s kind of town. Small. Middle of nowhere. And he would have been intrigued by the name. Cordial. Did they make fancy liqueurs here? Or was everyone just really friendly? It was the kind of thing he might have wondered about, the kind of thing that might have prompted him to disembark from the passenger train that made its way through town twice daily.

  Reacher would have been intrigued by the name, and then he would have been intrigued by all of the niceness. He might have checked into the hotel and stayed for a couple of days.

  But he didn’t.

  The man who’d been brutally murdered half a mile west of the tracks was definitely not Jack Reacher. Diana had ruled him out with one look at the crime scene photos. Ordinarily, that would have been that, and Diana would have been on her way. But Kearning was right. It seemed highly unlikely that the suspect would have come up with the name at random. Which might mean that she has some sort of connection with the real Jack Reacher, some sort of history. Or it might mean that the victim had been using the name as an alias. Either way, it wouldn’t hurt to stick around lon
g enough to ask the young woman in custody a few questions.

  Rae Derlin. Twenty-one years old, and probably destined to spend the rest of her life behind bars. What a waste, Diana thought.

  As she made her way closer to the restaurant, she saw that a freight train had stopped on the railroad tracks that separated the west side of Cordial from the east side. It looked like any train that you might see at any crossing anywhere in the country, except that one of the tanker cars had been coated with some sort of high-gloss paint. Red and white stripes. Like a candy cane. Or a barber’s pole. Diana wondered why. She wondered for about five seconds, and then she pulled the glass door open and stepped from the sidewalk into The Cordial Diner.

  Just past the entranceway there was a sign on a stand that said PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED. Diana surveyed the room. A few of the tables were occupied, along with several of the stools at the counter, but it was after two o’clock, so most of the workday lunch crowd that probably frequented a place like this had already come and gone. Diana saw the table she wanted, thought about walking on over there and sitting down, but she didn’t. She stood there and waited. It fascinated her that most people would do what a sign told them to do, even when it didn’t make much sense. Of course the servers had assigned sections, and they took turns taking customers, but Diana intended to sit where she wanted to regardless. With a dozen or so tables cleaned and vacant, it seemed inane to just stand there and stare into space, but it was what most people would have done, so it was what Diana did. She didn’t want to stand out, didn’t want to draw attention to herself.

  Espionage 101, Lesson One: blend in.

  A couple of minutes ticked off the big round clock behind the counter, and then a woman wearing a blue and white checkered dress and a white apron appeared from around the corner carrying a laminated menu and some silverware rolled in a napkin. Diana guessed her to be in her late forties or early fifties, but she appeared to be in excellent physical condition. Maybe she belonged to a gym, or maybe she stayed in shape by carrying heavy trays of food from the kitchen to the dining room hundreds of times every week. Whatever the case, she looked great for her age. Her nametag said Mattie.

  “How many?” she said.

  “It’s just me,” Diana said. “I’ll take the booth by the window back there in the corner, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure. You can hang your jacket on one of those hooks over there if you want to.”

  “I’ll keep it on. Thanks.”

  Diana followed Mattie to the booth in the corner, slid into the seat facing the front of the restaurant. From there she could see every table, and she could see everyone who came in or went out through the front door. Plus, she could look out the window and see Main Street, along with a good portion of the parking lot. Not that she was expecting any trouble. It was just a habit. In her profession, it was best to treat every situation as potentially threatening and be wrong most of the time. She ordered coffee and a turkey club.

  “New in town?” Mattie said.

  “Just here working for a couple of days.”

  “Yeah? What kind of work do you do?”

  Diana could have told her almost anything—just to placate her—but she didn’t.

  Espionage 101, Lesson Two: it’s usually best to stick with one lie at a time.

  “I’m with the army,” she said.

  “Really? We get soldiers in here all the time, but they’re always in uniform.”

  “I’m with SIU. We wear civilian clothes sometimes, even when we’re on duty.”

  Mattie nodded, although Diana doubted she knew anything about the army’s Special Investigations Unit, or even what the initials stood for. Most people wouldn’t.

  “I’ll be back with your coffee in a minute,” Mattie said. “And your food shouldn’t take long.”

  “Great.”

  Diana unzipped the pocket on the left side of her jacket, pulled out her cell phone and started thumbing in a message to The Director, informing him that the victim was definitely not Jack Reacher and that she would probably be on a flight back to Colorado sometime later that night. Before she finished, she noticed that a man sitting on a stool at the counter was staring at her. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. He had thick black hair that was fashionably mussed up and a long thin face that was fashionably covered with stubble. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt and a red ball cap, and what appeared to be a very expensive watch.

  He stood and fished some crumpled bills out of his pocket and left them there by his plate. On his way to the door, he stopped and got a toothpick from the dispenser by the cash register. Before he walked outside, he turned and looked back toward Diana’s table. Not just a glance. He stood there and stared for several seconds. He adjusted his hat, and then he looked at his watch and hurried through the door and trotted out to the parking lot and climbed into his pickup truck and sped away. Diana memorized the tag number, just in case she needed it for future reference. She’d resumed composing her message to The Director when another man walked up to her table. Young guy, probably in his early twenties.

  “Mind if I sit down?” he said.

  “Actually, I’m kind of busy. Is there something—”

  “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with Mattie. You’re with SIU?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you here about the guy who got his face blown off with a shotgun?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then I think we need to talk.”

  “Was he a friend of yours?”

  “No, but the woman who was arrested for killing him is.”

  “It’s an ongoing investigation,” Diana said. “I can’t discuss any of the—”

  “You can listen, can’t you?”

  Diana slid the phone back into her pocket.

  “All right,” she said. “Have a seat.”

  2

  Mattie brought Diana’s coffee, turned to the man sitting across from her and said, “You need anything?”

  “I’m all right,” he said. “I need to get going in a minute.”

  Mattie delivered a guest check to one of her other tables, and then she disappeared behind the stucco and lattice partition that divided the kitchen from the dining room.

  “I’m listening,” Diana said.

  “She’s innocent. She didn’t do it.”

  “If you have information that’s pertinent to the homicide investigation, I would suggest that you go by the station and talk to Chief Kearning. I came down here because we thought that the victim might have been a particular former army officer. That’s not the case, so my job is pretty much done here. I’ll probably be leaving Cordial later this evening.”

  “The police department here is a joke,” the man said. “Kearning isn’t going to do anything. As far as he’s concerned, it’s an open and shut case.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s a small town. Word gets around pretty fast.”

  Diana took a sip of her coffee.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  “Timothy Granniff.”

  “And what exactly is your relationship to the suspect?”

  “I knew her in high school. We’ve been friends for a long time. They found the guy on her living room floor and they found the shotgun on the couch with her fingerprints all over it, but that doesn’t mean that she was the one who pulled the trigger. Yes, it was her gun. And yes, the guy had been staying at her place for a while. And yes, the cops had been out there a few times for what you might call domestic disturbances. But I’m telling you, she wasn’t capable of doing what was done to that guy. That was some sort of professional hit. Whoever shot him obviously didn’t want him to be identified. His fingerprints were gone. Even his teeth. Why would she have done all that?”

  “Interesting point,” Diana said, although the perpetrator’s professional status wasn’t as clear-cut as Timothy made it out to be. Maybe the killer had been a hit man, maybe not. It cou
ld just as well have been Rae Derlin—or someone else—trying to make it appear as though a hired assassin was involved.

  “Kearning and his bunch already knew the guy’s name,” Timothy said. “You know, from the previous calls to the house. So why would Rae have tried to hide his identity all of a sudden? Doesn’t make sense.”

  “It might,” Diana said. “If the guy was using an alias.”

  “He had driver’s license that said his name was Jack Reacher. Are you saying that wasn’t his real name?”

  “I’ve probably said too much already,” Diana said. “Like I told you, it’s an ongoing investigation.”

  A driver’s license. Interesting. The police had found no identification on the man’s body, or anywhere in the house. Diana started thinking that maybe she should go over there and take a look around, just to make sure they didn’t miss anything.

  Mattie brought the turkey club sandwich.

  “Can I get you anything else right now?” she said.

  “No, this is fine,” Diana said. “Thank you.”

  Mattie smiled, turned and walked away.

  “I have to get to work,” Timothy said. “But if you really care anything about justice, you shouldn’t leave the investigation to the boneheads around here.”

  “I’ll take everything you told me into consideration,” Diana said.

  Timothy got up and walked away. A few seconds later, Mattie came by with a pot of coffee. She refilled Diana’s cup, set the guest check on the edge of the table.

  “Just pay me whenever you’re ready,” she said.

  “Thanks. How far is Maple Street from here?”

  “Just right across the tracks. There’s a little grocery store on the corner of Maple and Stewart. You can see it from the far end of the parking lot if there’s not a train in the way.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  Diana finished her sandwich, left some money on the table and exited the diner. When she got to the far side of the parking lot, she didn’t see the little grocery store Mattie had told her about, because there was indeed a train in the way. In fact, it was the same train that had been stopped there forty-five minutes ago. She knew it was the same one because of the strange looking tanker car blocking the Stewart Avenue crossing.