by Lee Child
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.
“I’m very sorry about your brother,” he said.
I nodded. Didn’t say anything.
“I’m going to have to ask you a lot of questions, I’m afraid,” he said.
I just nodded again. I understood his position. I’d been in his position plenty of times myself.
“Who would be his next of kin?” he asked.
“I am,” I said. “Unless he got married without telling me.”
“Do you think he might have done that?” Finlay asked me.
“We weren’t close,” I said. “But I doubt it.”
“Your parents dead?”
I nodded. Finlay nodded. Wrote me down as next of kin.
“What was his full name?”
“Joe Reacher,” I said. “No middle name.”
“Is that short for Joseph?”
“No,” I said. “It was just Joe. Like my name is just Jack. We had a father who liked simple names.”
“OK,” Finlay said. “Older or younger?”
“Older,” I said. I gave him Joe’s date of birth. “Two years older than me.”
“So he was thirty-eight?”
I nodded. Baker had said the victim had been maybe forty. Maybe Joe hadn’t worn well.
“Do you have a current address for him?”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “Washington, D.C., somewhere. Like I said, we weren’t close.”
“OK,” he said again. “When did you last see him?”
“About twenty minutes ago,” I said. “In the morgue.”
Finlay nodded gently. “Before that?”
“Seven years ago,” I said. “Our mother’s funeral.”
“Have you got a photograph of him?”
“You saw the stuff in the property bag,” I said. “I haven’t got a photograph of anything.”
He nodded again. Went quiet. He was finding this difficult.
“Can you give me a description of him?”
“Before he got his face shot off?”
“It might help, you know,” Finlay said. “We need to find out who saw him around, when and where.”
I nodded.
“He looked like me, I guess,” I said. “Maybe an inch taller, maybe ten pounds lighter.”
“That would make him what, about six-six?” he asked.
“Right,” I said. “About two hundred pounds, maybe.”
Finlay wrote it all down.
“And he shaved his head?” he said.
“Not the last time I saw him,” I said. “He had hair like anybody else.”
“Seven years ago, right?” Finlay said.
I shrugged.
“Maybe he started going bald,” I said. “Maybe he was vain about it.”
Finlay nodded.
“What was his job?” he asked.
“Last I heard, he worked for the Treasury Department,” I said. “Doing what, I’m not sure.”
“What was his background?” he asked. “Was he in the service too?”
I nodded.
“Military Intelligence,” I said. “Quit after a while, then he worked for the government.”
“He wrote you that he had been here, right?” he asked.
“He mentioned the Blind Blake thing,” I said. “Didn’t say what brought him down here. But it shouldn’t be difficult to find out.”
Finlay nodded.
“We’ll make some calls first thing in the morning,” he said. “Until then, you’re sure you got no idea why he should be down here?”
I shook my head. I had no idea at all why he had come down here. But I knew Hubble did. Joe had been the tall investigator with the shaved head and the code name. Hubble had brought him down here and Hubble knew exactly why. First thing to do was to find Hubble and ask him about it.
“Did you say you couldn’t find Hubble?” I asked Finlay.
“Can’t find him anywhere,” he said. “He’s not up at his place on Beckman Drive and nobody’s seen him around town. Hubble knows all about this, right?”
I just shrugged. I felt like I wanted to keep some of the cards pretty close to my chest. If I was going to have to squeeze Hubble for something he wasn’t very happy to talk about, then I wanted to do it in private. I didn’t particularly want Finlay watching over my shoulder while I was doing it. He might think I was squeezing too hard. And I definitely didn’t want to have to watch anything over Finlay’s shoulder. I didn’t want to leave the squeezing to him. I might think he wasn’t squeezing hard enough. And anyway, Hubble would talk to me faster than he would talk to a policeman. He was already halfway there with me. So exactly how much Hubble knew was going to stay my secret. Just for now.
“No idea what Hubble knows,” I said. “You’re the one claims he fell apart.”
Finlay just grunted again and looked across the desk at me. I could see him settling into a new train of thought. I was pretty sure what it was. I’d been waiting for it to surface. There’s a rule of thumb about homicide. It comes from a lot of statistics and a lot of experience. The rule of thumb says: when you get a dead guy, first you take a good look at his family. Because a hell of a lot of homicide gets done by relatives. Husbands, wives, sons. And brothers. That was the theory. Finlay would have seen it in action a hundred times in his twenty years up in Boston. Now I could see him trying it out in his head down in Margrave. I needed to run interference on it. I didn’t want him thinking about it. I didn’t want to waste any more of my time in a cell. I figured I might need that time for something else.
“You’re happy with my alibi, right?” I said.
He saw where I was going. Like we were colleagues on a knotty case. He flashed me a brief grin.
“It held up,” he said. “You were in Tampa when this was going down.”
“OK,” I said. “And is Chief Morrison comfortable with that?”
“He doesn’t know about it,” Finlay said. “He’s not answering his phone.”
“I don’t want any more convenient mistakes,” I said. “The fat moron said he saw me up there. I want him to know that won’t fly anymore.”
Finlay nodded. Picked up the phone on the desk and dialed a number. I heard the faint purr of the ring tone from the earpiece. It rang for a long time and cut off when Finlay put the phone back down.
“Not at home,” he said. “Sunday, right?”
Then he pulled the phone book out of a drawer. Opened it to H. Looked up Hubble’s number on Beckman Drive. Dialed it and got the same result. A lot of ring tone and nobody home. Then he tried the mobile number. An electronic voice started to tell him the phone was switched off. He hung up before it finished.
“I’m going to bring Hubble in, when I find him,” Finlay said. “He knows stuff he should be telling us. Until then, not a lot I can do, right?”
I shrugged. He was right. It was a pretty cold trail. The only spark that Finlay knew about was the panic Hubble had shown on Friday.
“What are you going to do, Reacher?” he asked me.
“I’m going to think about that,” I said.
Finlay looked straight at me. Not unfriendly, but very serious, like he was trying to communicate an order and an appeal with a single stern eye-to-eye gaze.
“Let me deal with this, OK?” he said. “You’re going to feel pretty bad, and you’re going to want to see justice done, but I don’t want any independent action going on here, OK? This is police business. You’re a civilian. Let me deal with it, OK?”
I shrugged and nodded. Stood up and looked at them both.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said.
I LEFT THE TWO OF THEM THERE AND STROLLED THROUGH the squad room. Pushed out through the glass doors into the hot afternoon. Wandered thro
ugh the parking lot and crossed the wide lawn in front, over as far as the bronze statue. It was another tribute to Caspar Teale, whoever the hell he had been. Same guy as on the village green on the southern edge of town. I leaned up against his warm metal flank and thought.
The United States is a giant country. Millions of square miles. Best part of three hundred million people. I hadn’t seen Joe for seven years, and he hadn’t seen me, but we’d ended up in exactly the same tiny spot, eight hours apart. I’d walked within fifty yards of where his body had been lying. That was one hell of a big coincidence. It was almost unbelievable. So Finlay was doing me a big favor by treating it like a coincidence. He should be trying to tear my alibi apart. Maybe he already was. Maybe he was already on the phone to Tampa, checking again.
But he wouldn’t find anything, because it was a coincidence. No point going over and over it. I was only in Margrave because of a crazy last-minute whim. If I’d taken a minute longer looking at the guy’s map, the bus would have been past the cloverleaf and I’d have forgotten all about Margrave. I’d have gone on up to Atlanta and never known anything about Joe. It might have taken another seven years before the news caught up with me. So there was no point getting all stirred up about the coincidence. The only thing I had to do was to decide what the hell I was going to do about it.
I was about four years old before I caught on to the loyalty thing. I suddenly figured I was supposed to watch out for Joe the way he was watching out for me. After a while, it became second nature, like an automatic thing. It was always in my head to scout around and check he was OK. Plenty of times I would run out into some new schoolyard and see a bunch of kids trying it on with the tall skinny newcomer. I’d trot over there and haul them off and bust a few heads. Then I’d go back to my own buddies and play ball or whatever we were doing. Duty done, like a routine. It was a routine which lasted twelve years, from when I was four right up to the time Joe finally left home. Twelve years of that routine must have left faint tracks in my mind, because forever afterward I always carried a faint echo of the question: where’s Joe? Once he was grown up and away, it didn’t much matter where he was. But I was always aware of the faint echo of that old routine. Deep down, I was always aware I was supposed to stand up for him, if I was needed.
But now he was dead. He wasn’t anywhere. I leaned up against the statue in front of the station house and listened to the tiny voice inside my head saying: you’re supposed to do something about that.
THE STATION HOUSE DOOR SUCKED OPEN. I SQUINTED through the heat and saw Roscoe step out. The sun was behind her and it lit her hair like a halo. She scanned around and saw me leaning on the statue in the middle of the lawn. Started over towards me. I pushed off the warm bronze.
“You OK?” she asked me.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You sure?” she said.
“I’m not falling apart,” I said. “Maybe I should be, but I’m not. I just feel numb, to be honest.”
It was true. I wasn’t feeling much of anything. Maybe it was some kind of a weird reaction, but that was how I felt. No point in denying it.
“OK,” Roscoe said. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?”
Maybe Finlay had sent her out to keep track of me, but I wasn’t about to put up a whole lot of objections to that. She was standing there in the sun looking great. I realized I liked her more every time I looked at her.
“Want to show me where Hubble lives?” I asked her.
I could see her thinking about it.
“Shouldn’t we leave that to Finlay?” she said.
“I just want to see if he’s back home yet,” I said. “I’m not going to eat him. If he’s there, we’ll call Finlay right away, OK?”
“OK,” she said. She shrugged and smiled. “Let’s go.”
We walked together back over the lawn and got into her police Chevy. She started it up and pulled out of the lot. Turned left and rolled south through the perfect little town. It was a gorgeous September day. The bright sun turned it into a fantasy. The brick sidewalks were glowing and the white paint was blinding. The whole place was quiet and basking in the Sunday heat. Deserted.
Roscoe hung a right at the little village green and made the turn into Beckman Drive. Skirted around the square with the church on it. The cars were gone and the place was quiet. Worship was over. Beckman opened out into a wide tree-lined residential street, set on a slight rise. It had a rich feel. Cool and shady and prosperous. It was what real-estate people mean when they talk about location. I couldn’t see the houses. They were set far back behind wide grassy shoulders, big trees, high hedges. Their driveways wound out of sight. Occasionally I glimpsed a white portico or a red roof. The farther out we got, the bigger the lots became. Hundreds of yards between mailboxes. Enormous mature trees. A solid sort of a place. But a place with stories hiding behind the leafy facades. In Hubble’s case, some sort of a desperate story which had caused him to reach out to my brother. Some sort of a story which had got my brother killed.
Roscoe slowed at a white mailbox and turned left into the drive of number twenty-five. About a mile from town, on the left, its back to the afternoon sun. It was the last house on the road. Up ahead, peach groves stretched into the haze. We nosed slowly up a winding driveway around massed banks of garden. The house was not what I had imagined. I had pictured a big white place, like a normal house, but bigger. This was more splendid. A palace. It was huge. Every detail was expensive. Expanses of gravel drive, expanses of velvet lawn, huge exquisite trees, everything shining and dappled in the blazing sun. But there was no sign of the dark Bentley I’d seen up at the prison. It looked like there was nobody home.
Roscoe pulled up near the front door and we got out. It was silent. I could hear nothing except the heavy buzz of afternoon heat. We rang on the bell and knocked on the door. No response from inside. We shrugged at each other and walked across a lawn around the side of the house. There were acres of grass and a blaze of some kind of flowers surrounding a garden room. Then a wide patio and a long lawn sloping down to a giant swimming pool. The water was bright blue in the sun. I could smell the chlorine hanging in the hot air.
“Some place,” Roscoe said.
I nodded. I was wondering if my brother had been there.
“I hear a car,” she said.
We got back to the front of the house in time to see the big Bentley easing to a stop. The blond woman I’d seen driving away from the prison got out. She had two children with her. A boy and a girl. This was Hubble’s family. He loved them like crazy. But he wasn’t there with them.
The blond woman seemed to know Roscoe. They greeted each other and Roscoe introduced me to her. She shook my hand and said her name was Charlene, but I could call her Charlie. She was an expensive-looking woman, tall, slim, good bones, carefully dressed, carefully looked after. But she had a seam of spirit running through her face like a flaw. Enough spirit there to make me like her. She held on to my hand and smiled, but it was a smile with a whole lot of strain behind it.
“This hasn’t been the best weekend of my life, I’m afraid,” she said. “But it seems that I owe you a great deal of thanks, Mr. Reacher. My husband tells me you saved his life in prison.”
She said it with a lot of ice in her voice. Not aimed at me. Aimed at whatever circumstance it was forcing her to use the words “husband” and “prison” in the same sentence.
“No problem,” I said. “Where is he?”
“Taking care of some business,” Charlie said. “I expect him back later.”
I nodded. That had been Hubble’s plan. He’d said he would spin her some kind of a yarn and then try to settle things down. I wondered if Charlie wanted to talk about it, but the children were standing silently next to her, and I could see she wouldn’t talk in front of them. So I grinned at them. I hoped they would get all shy and run off somewhere, like children usually do with me, but they just grinned back.
“This is Ben,” Charlie said. “And this
is Lucy.”
They were nice-looking kids. The girl still had that little-girl chubbiness. No front teeth. Fine sandy hair in pigtails. The boy wasn’t much bigger than his little sister. He had a slight frame and a serious face. Not a rowdy hooligan like some boys are. They were a nice pair of kids. Polite and quiet. They both shook hands with me and then stepped back to their mother’s side. I looked at the three of them and I could just about see the terrible cloud hanging there over them. If Hubble didn’t take care, he could get them all as dead as he’d gotten my brother.
“Will you come in for some iced tea?” Charlie asked us.
She stood there, her head cocked like she was waiting for an answer. She was maybe thirty, similar age to Roscoe. But she had a rich woman’s ways. A hundred and fifty years ago, she’d have been the mistress of a big plantation.
“OK,” I said. “Thanks.”
The kids ran off to play somewhere and Charlie ushered us in through the front door. I didn’t really want to drink any iced tea, but I did want to stick around in case Hubble got back. I wanted to catch him on my own for five minutes. I wanted to ask him some pretty urgent questions before Finlay started in with the Miranda warnings.
IT WAS A FABULOUS HOUSE. HUGE. BEAUTIFULLY FURNISHED. Light and fresh. Cool creams and sunny yellows. Flowers. Charlie led us through to the garden room we’d seen from the outside. It was like something from a magazine. Roscoe went off with her to help fix the tea. Left me alone in the room. It made me uneasy. I wasn’t accustomed to houses. Thirty-six years old and I’d never lived in a house. Lots of service accommodations and a terrible bare dormitory on the Hudson when I was up at the Point. That’s where I’d lived. I sat down like an ugly alien on a flowered cushion on a cane sofa and waited. Uneasy, numb, in that dead zone between action and reaction.
