by Dan Ames
“Indeed.”
“Maybe she can take his place,” Silvestri said. “I know it’s the obvious solution, but it’s also one that requires no effort or involvement on our part.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Edgar replied. “She might even be an improvement. And best of all, we remain hands-off.”
“For now,” Jacobs added. “I found out a little bit more about the car bomb that took out our friend. It was a device that had actually been stolen from a military warehouse here in the States. From my discussion with the commanding officer there, it was the only thing taken.”
“Great,” Silvestri said. “Untraceable.”
The three sat in silence for a moment.
“You know, we’re not really hands-off. Remember Michael Tallon,” Silvestri pointed out. “We already got that ball rolling. And now we don’t need him. This is why patience is so goddamned important.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Edgar said. “He has a history with Pauling, which works in our favor. The two of them could make a formidable team.”
“Tallon makes me nervous,” Jacobs said. “I did some intel work on him beyond what we already know. Impressive. Not to be taken lightly.”
A second uneasy silence fell between them. The office was empty, the only sound the occasional ticking of the wall clock, or a buzz from one of their cell phones. Edgar’s phone did just that, putting an end to the quiet.
He picked up the phone and glanced at the screen.
“Okay, then,” he said. He turned to show the image on display to Silvestri and Jacobs.
It showed a woman closer to fifty than forty. Quite pretty, with light-colored hair and a serious expression. It appeared to be the security camera facing the entrance to a hospital.
“That’s Pauling?” Silvestri asked.
“Yes. She’s at the hospital.”
“She works fast.”
Edgar nodded.
“Let’s hope she’s good, too.”
Chapter Thirteen
Luckily, there had been an earlier morning flight out of LaGuardia, which allowed Pauling to fly to Virginia, rent a car, and drive to the hospital that sat just outside the small city of Norfolk.
It was an overcast day with a chill in the air, and the hospital did nothing to add cheer to the gloom. It was the worst kind of government architecture: a concrete box that looked more like a prison than a place of healing.
Pauling parked her car and entered the hospital, glad she had made it there before noon when people would start taking their lunch break.
After providing a photo ID and getting her photo taken, she was given a day pass which was a label with her name and photo. She stuck it on the front of her shirt, hoping it wouldn’t ruin her blouse when she tore it off.
As much as she admired the men and women who worked as physicians and nurses, Pauling wasn’t a big fan of hospitals. She’d been in many of them over her career as an FBI agent. Still, she knew the people who really ran a hospital were the charge nurses. They usually oversaw a team of a dozen or so nurses, sometimes divided by room numbers or floors. They tended to know exactly what was going on with everyone at any given moment.
Pauling started on the first floor. The charge nurse was named Angela, and she was short, with her black hair pinned back in a bun, and the woman wore a no-nonsense expression.
“I’m looking for a patient who may have been here recently,” Pauling explained. “His name is Jack Reacher. Currently, you’re not showing him as a patient, but sometimes, because of his line of work, he doesn’t always use that name.”
The nurse looked at her strangely, but as a military hospital, this kind of thing did occasionally happen.
“Are you family?” the nurse asked, glancing at Pauling’s ID.
“I’m the closest thing he has to family, yes,” she said. A bit presumptuous, but she needed the nurse’s help.
“Well, how can I help you find him if you don’t know the name he might be using?”
Pauling smiled. “He’s a very distinctive man. At least 6’ 5” with huge shoulders and arms. Sometimes people tease him and call him Bigfoot or Sasquatch. He wears his hair short, light sandy brown. He’s been through a lot, has some scars and even a bullet wound or two.”
Angela cocked her head and thought for a moment, but then slowly turned to a head shake indicating the negative. “Sorry, I don’t have any patients who fit that description. You’ll have to check with each charge nurse. We do it by the floor here.”
Pauling nodded. That had been her plan.
She repeated the same procedure on the second floor with no luck.
On the third floor, she got an answer.
“Oh yes, the mystery man!” the charge nurse said. Her name was Cathy. She was tall, with thick glasses and a welcoming smile.
“So he was here?” Pauling asked, unable to keep the eagerness from her voice.
“Definitely. As soon as you talked about the shoulders, I knew who you meant.”
“So what name is he registered under and what’s his room number?” Pauling felt the drumbeat of excitement in her chest. She was excited to see Reacher again.
“Oh, he’s not here anymore. He disappeared.”
Pauling felt her hopes die within her.
“Disappeared? That’s why you called him the mystery man?”
“Yeah, it was the strangest thing,” Cathy explained. “He had been in a pretty bad accident. Had some surgeries to stop internal bleeding, and then he was gone. No one saw him leave. According to the hospital records, he never left. But his room was empty.”
Pauling hung her head in frustration.
Now what, she wondered.
Chapter Fourteen
The wonderful thing about incredibly pale, alabaster skin was the shocking contrast it made when sliced open, revealing the blood-red meat inside.
He took his time with Dawn.
Even though he chose his victims carefully, she was special. Even better than Jessica Halbert, although that wasn’t an accurate comparison.
He imagined Dawn could have been a supermodel, or a movie star, or if nothing else, the world’s most highly paid porn star with a face and body like she had. He wondered again how the hell Doug Franzen had wound up with her. The guy’s brain was as nimble as a sack of cement.
Dawn really had been an incredibly sexy young woman.
Emphasis on had, he thought, and chuckled.
Her face was now a mess, thanks to the frenzied beating he’d given her after he’d raped her repeatedly, finishing with a particularly vicious sodomizing.
He’d then performed surgery on the body most women would kill for. He smiled again both at the play on words and the idea that what he’d done with his knife could be considered surgical.
Yeah, only if the surgeon was out of his mind on Ecstasy or PCP and doing his most to inflict the greatest damage possible to Dawn’s beautiful young body.
She had put up very little fight, thanks to a chloroform cloth he’d slapped over her mouth once they’d gotten Doug loaded onto the tailgate of his truck. The dosage for her was less than Doug’s though. He wanted her semi-conscious for the sex, but not awake enough to fight him and risk leaving physical evidence like hair or DNA.
It had all gone very smoothly.
Once she was dead, he carefully arranged the scene, putting the knife in Doug’s hands, making sure Doug’s prints were all over the blade. He even used Dawn’s fingernails to dig ragged furrows into the sides of Doug’s face.
A lover’s quarrel turned very violent.
How sad.
Two people with bright futures, maybe even a family down the road. Now it was all lost. Why couldn’t people just get along and let the little things go?
If he was really lucky, Doug and Dawn might have had sex earlier in the day, before they’d decided to go out for a night of drinking and partying. Maybe when they’d gotten all gussied up for their night out, Doug couldn’t help himself and had asked for a quickie.
If that turned out to be the case, Doug’s DNA would be inside the victim. Along with plenty of his, that was for sure.
Perfect.
He’d chosen the scene of the crime carefully, allowing him the opportunity to leave Doug’s truck with its crackerjack prizes inside and follow a footpath not visible from the road, back to his car.
Things were really coming together nicely. Doug had been so drunk that he wouldn’t remember the buddy who bought him a shot of tequila and their interaction had been so brief, witnesses wouldn’t be able to recall them being together.
He’d been exactingly deliberate not to leave any evidence for law enforcement.
All in all, it had been an excellent night.
Now he would go to a new hotel and get some sleep, for once, looking forward to climbing into bed.
Whenever he killed, the sleep that followed was blissfully peaceful. No nightmares.
No memories of what he’d been put through.
He would awaken tomorrow morning with a smile on his face.
And focused on the next one.
Chapter Fifteen
“Yes, it’s very unusual,” the hospital’s administrator told Pauling. Her name was Dr. Conrad, and she wore a white lab coat over a blouse with a muted floral pattern. She was well into her fifties with close-cropped silvery hair, and frameless eyeglasses. The eyes behind the lenses were alert and intelligent.
“At the same time, patients are under no obligation to remain with us,” Conrad said. Pauling instantly knew that the matter of a patient disappearing had been discussed with the hospital’s legal team and Dr. Conrad was speaking carefully along prepared lines.
Nothing scares a hospital more than a lawsuit, and losing track of a patient would certainly qualify.
“In fact, patients check themselves out of our facility more regularly than you might think,” Dr. Conrad continued. “As a military hospital, we often have patients who are aggressive and not afraid to take matters into their own hands, including their own healthcare. It’s a constant challenge but one we’ve learned to handle quite well over the years.”
Except for the patient you just lost, Pauling thought.
“Was there an investigation?” she asked.
Dr. Conrad pondered the question for a moment. “No, I would say there was simply a confirmation the patient had left. A new bed had opened up, and we put it to use right away.”
“Was the patient’s name Jack Reacher?” Pauling asked. She was hoping the direct approach would work best.
“It would be a violation of hospital policy to divulge the names of our patients. All I can tell you is that we have not had a patient with that name, nor do we have one now.”
Pauling decided to let the matter rest. She thanked Dr. Conrad, walked down to the main entrance, through the doors and out to her car.
She peeled off her temporary ID – it didn’t ruin her blouse – and dropped it into the cupholder.
Dead end, she thought.
Pauling knew it would take a warrant to gain access to any kind of security footage the hospital had. That would require a police report, which would mean proof would have to be provided that a crime had been committed. And according to the hospital, there hadn’t been.
A patient had left under his own power.
It happens, according to the hospital’s chief administrator.
Unless family members came forward and claimed their loved one had been abducted, the mysterious sender of the package was gone.
Yet a man fitting Reacher’s physical description had been a patient. And someone using Jack Reacher’s name had mailed her a package from the hospital.
It didn’t take long for Pauling to realize that her options were limited. She put the car in gear, drove back to the airport and caught a flight back to New York. When the plane landed, she used an Uber ride to get her back to her condo.
By the time she had showered, changed into pajamas and climbed into bed, she was sure of two things.
One, someone, somewhere, desperately wanted her to investigate the murder of Jessica Halbert. Maybe it was Reacher, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe someone had discovered the file, saw Reacher’s name and learned of her past with him.
In any event, the file was there.
She had to decide if it was a case she thought worth pursuing. It would obviously have to be pro bono. There was no paying client here.
There was no client, period.
It was just the kind of thing she could technically afford to do if she sold her firm to her competitor. She would be set for life and could work cases that were all pro bono if she wanted to.
Pauling decided to get up early, brew a strong pot of coffee and read the file from front to back and then make her decision.
There was one more thing she was sure of.
She’d felt it at the hospital, on the drive back to the airport, and in the Uber on the way home.
At first, it had felt like paranoia.
But from the back of her Uber, using the camera on her phone to look behind her without turning her head, she had seen the big black SUV.
Someone was following her.
Chapter Sixteen
Every man or woman who has killed for their country must at some point face the moral dilemma within.
Are they a killer?
Do they enjoy taking the lives of others, even though it is in the service of a greater good?
When Doug Franzen stirred, forced his eyes open, and beheld the horror around him, he instantly knew the answer. He was sprawled in the front seat of his truck, and what was left of Dawn lay next to him. She was clearly dead, her nude body chopped and sliced into pieces.
His mouth was dry and he immediately vomited all over himself and the front seat of the truck. He pressed himself backward against the door.
His mind was screaming in panic.
He stumbled from the truck and wept on the ground. He couldn’t believe what he’d seen.
Franzen forced himself back to his feet. On your feet, soldier, he told himself. And glanced back inside the truck.
It wasn’t a dream.
He’d done it.
He’d killed her.
Probably in a drunken rage even though he never, ever got violent when he drank.
Now he knew.
He was a killer, plain and simple. Maybe he’d always known.
Because yes, he had enjoyed shooting bad guys overseas. Each time he put a bullet into an enemy combatant, he had felt a solid sense of satisfaction and looked forward to the next one.
Now, as he studied the bits of lifeless corpse of the woman he loved, he knew he had crossed the line. Maybe it had been the booze. Maybe they’d fought. He looked in the rearview mirror of his truck and saw the scratches down the side of his face.
He screamed until the screams became sobs.
He instantly knew what had happened.
They must have argued. Maybe Dawn had flirted with someone at the bar and he’d gotten jealous in his drunken stupor. Maybe he’d accused her of cheating on him. Things had escalated and she’d scratched him. And the careful control he’d always had over his own instincts had disappeared.
He’d killed Dawn.
And she was pregnant.
Which meant he’d also killed his unborn child.
Doug Franzen knew what he had to do. He’d made a career out of killing bad guys on behalf of the US military, and now he was the bad guy.
From beneath the seat of his truck, he found his gun. It was a small-framed .45 he kept for safety.
It was always there and always loaded.
He placed the muzzle beneath his chin, pointed up toward his brain.
And pulled the trigger.
Chapter Seventeen
Pauling began by shrugging off the idea that she’d been followed. It was possible, but she also considered that she’d spent the day traveling back and forth from Virginia, had been frustrated by the lack of success, and had maybe been overly
stressed.
There were probably tens of thousands of big black SUVs in New York.
Setting that issue aside, she settled into the case file that had been sent to her. It took Pauling several hours to read through the remaining witness statements and status reports in the army’s official Jessica Halbert murder file.
It was near the end of the last report when she received a shock.
She saw a name she recognized.
Michael Tallon.
It was included in a statement made by one of Halbert’s friends to the effect that the deceased had mentioned being attracted to a man named Michael Tallon. The friend didn’t know if it was anything more than that. She said Halbert hadn’t been around much during that time, but the friend had no idea where she was or who she might be with.
The investigator had done his due diligence and learned that Tallon was not in the country at the time of the murder so he hadn’t followed up. It was at that point Tallon’s name was officially removed from the list of suspects.
Pauling glanced at the clock on her phone. It was still early, but she knew Tallon would be up. Still, she decided to wait and see what else she could learn before she talked to him.
The last piece of paper in the file was confirmation the army’s investigative unit had officially declared the murder a cold case, and put it in a holding pattern pending the discovery of new evidence. Pauling thought the move was a bit premature. She knew the military had seen a lot of budget cuts and there had been some pretty serious downsizing; in fact, she believed Reacher had been one of those cutbacks. So maybe the army’s investigative branch was understaffed and overworked. Maybe they had a shorter window to close a case before it went into the cold file.
Or, maybe someone had wanted it to go away.
The other thing that gave Pauling pause was a clear and deliberate attempt to redact the name of the investigator. Save for the mention of Reacher on the first page, everywhere else the name of the person conducting interviews, gathering evidence, and filing reports was missing.
