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Deveraux left for Kelham in her car and I was left alone on the sidewalk I walked past the vacant lot to the diner Lunch, for one I ordered the cheeseburger again, and then stepped over to the phone by the door and called the Pentagon Colonel John Ja I asked hienius decided to classify that plate number?"

He said, "I can&039;t tell you that"

"Whoever, it was a bad uy It was practically a public announcement"

"We had no alternative We couldn&039;t put it in the public dootten it five minutes after local law enforcement We couldn&039;t allow that"

"Now it sounds like you&039;re telling uy"

"I&039; But believe me, we had no choice The consequences would have been catastrophic"

So in his voice

"Please tell ht now you&039;reit sound like it was Reed Riley&039;s own personal vehicle"

No response

I asked, "Was it?"

No answer

"Was it?"

"I can&039;t confirain And don&039;t use that naain, either Not on an unsecured line"

"Does the officer in question have an explanation?"

"I can&039;t co out of control, Frazer You need to rethink The cover up is alorse than the criative on that, Reacher There&039;s a plan in place, and it will stay in place"

"Does the plan include an exclusion zone around Kelham? Maybe for journalists especially?"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"I&039;ve got circuround outside of Kelham&039;s fence Part of the circu you, this thing is out of control now"

"Who&039;s the corpse?"

"A scrappy uy"

"A journalist?"

"I don&039;t kno to recognize a journalist by sight alone Maybe that&039;s a skill they teach to the infantry, but they don&039;t teach it to MPs"

"No ID on him?"

"We haven&039;t looked yet The doctor hasn&039;t finished with him"

Frazer said, "There is no exclusion zone around Fort Kelham That would be a al"

"Agreed And stupid And counterproductive It isn&039;t happening It never has"

"I think the Marine Corps did it once"

"When?"

"Within the last twenty years"

"Well, Marines They do all kinds of things"

"You should check it out"

"How? You think they put it in their official history?"

"Do it obliquely Look for an officer who got canned overnight with no other explanation Maybe a colonel"

I hung up with Frazer and ate er and drank some coffee and then I set out to do what Garber had ordered , which was to return to the wreck and destroy the offending license plate I turned east on the Kelham road and then north on the railroad ties I passed by the old water tower Its elephant&039;s trunk was one all perished and patchy with age The whole thing aying a little in a soft southerly breeze I walked on fifty yards and then stepped off the line and headed for where I had seen the half-buried buone

It was nowhere to be seen It had been dug up and taken away The hole its lance-like point had made had been filled with earth, which had been stamped down by boot soles and then tamped flat by the backs of shovels

The boot prints were like nothing I had ever seen in the military But the shoveltools It was difficult to be sure Couldn&039;t rule it out, couldn&039;t rule it in

I walked on, deeper into the debris field It had all been tampered with It had been sifted, and examined, and turned over, and checked, and evaluated Almost two hundred linear yards Maybe a thousand individual fragments had been displaced No doubt ten times astask A lot of work Slow and painstaking Sixin a line, under effective coreat precision

With military precision

I walked back the way I had co and saw a car in the east, co froht road Sht itback after lunch, but it wasn&039;t It was a black car, and big, and fast, and sht out on the crown of the road, straddling the line, staying well away fro and wandering

I came off the track on the Kelham side and stood in theand obvious I let the car get within a hundred yards and then I crossed my arms above my head and waved the universal distress semaphore I knew the driver would stop This was 1997, re tio A much less suspicious world

The car slowed and stopped in front of ht, around the hood, down the flank, toward the driver&039;s , holding back a little, trying to perfect ured he would be in the back, on the far side, with the front passenger seat scooted forward for leg roos were done I had been in town cars before Once or twice

The driver&039;scame down I bent forward frouy with the kind of belly that forced his knees wide apart He earing a black chauffeur&039;s cap and a black jacket and a black tie He had watery eyes He said, "Can we help you?"

I said, "I&039;ht you were so"

"Sure," the guy said "No problem" His ent back up and I stepped aside and the car drove on

The passenger had been ray haired, prosperous, in a fine suit made of wool There had been a leather briefcase on the seat beside hiht

31

I was facing east, toward the black part of town, and there were things over there that I wanted to see again, so I set off walking in that direction The road felt good under lory days of the railroad it had been a simple dirt track, but it had been updated since then, almost certainly in the 1950s, almost certainly on the DoD&039;s di down, for arhtened, because if an arht road is what appears on the ground I had walked on many DoD roads There are a lot of the the long and spectacular blaze of Americanwe couldn&039;t or wouldn&039;t do I was a product of that era, but not a part of it I was nostalgic for soht about er place near where ere based Changes were coht road through the low Mississippi forest was helping me The sun was out, and the air arm There were miles behind me, and miles ahead, and plenty of time on the clock I had no ambitions and very few needs I would be OK, whatever came next No choice I would have to be

I made the same turn Deveraux had made in her car, south on the dirt road between the bar ditches and the slave shacks Toward E different things than from the car Poverty, mostly, and up close There were patched clothes on lines, washed so thin they were almost transparent There were no new cars There were chickens in so There werewire fixes everywhere, to electric lines, to rain gutters, to pluree There were barefoot children briefly visible, staring at ers in their ht by anxious mothers ouldn&039;tand passed by Emmeline McClatchy&039;s place I didn&039;t see her I didn&039;t see anybody on that stretch of the road No kids, no adults Nobody I passed by the house with the beer signs in theI followed the saht and left, until I found the abandoned work site and its pile of gravel

The house planned for the lot was s to ancient practice and wisdo breezes and to avoid the full impact of the southwestern sun in the summer The foundation itself was built of recycled blocks and sand-heavy cehed in The corner posts were already weathering Nothing else had been coravel in the pile aiting to be round floor of the new place was supposed to be a solid slab, not boards Maybe there were advantages to doing it that way, perhaps related to termites I had no idea I had never built a house I had never had to consider housing-related issues

The gravel pile itself had spread and settled during the idle es where it was thin It was knee-high over most of its area, and up close it was about the size of a queen bed The divots and the pockmarks in its top surface were like a Rorschach test It was entirely possible to see the and sto It was equally possible to see the thron and raped, in a violent flurry of knees and elbows and backs

I squatted down and ran a fingertip through the tiny stones They were surprisingly hard to ht, and some kind of a dusty residue on them seemed to have mixed with rain or dew to form a weak adhesive I made a furrow about an inch wide and an inch deep, and then I turned my hand over

I pressed the back of my hand into the pile and held it there for a minute Then I looked at the result Small white marks, but no indentations, because there was no real flesh on the back of my hand So I pulled up ainst the pile I put the flat of my other hand on it and leaned on it hard I bounced it up and down a couple of times, and scrabbled it around Then I looked at it

The result was some small red marks, some small white marks, and a whole lot of dust, dirt, and mud I spat onclean stripe looked both very like and very unlike the small of Janice May Chapman&039;s back Another Rorschach test Inconclusive

But I did come to one minor conclusion I cleaned up my arm as well as I could, which was not perfectly, and I decided that whatever gravel patch Chapman had been raped on, she had not only dressed afterward, but showered too

I walked on and found the wider street where Shawna Lindsay had lived The second victiirl, comparatively Her baby brother was still in his yard Sixteen years old The ugly boy He was just standing there Doing nothing Watching the street Watching me approach His eyes tracked me all the way I stepped up on the shoulder and came to a stop face to face with him, with only his low picket fence between us

I said, "How&039;s life, kid?"

He said, "My mom&039;s out"

"Good to know," I said "But that wasn&039;t what I asked"

"Life&039;s a bitch," he said

"And then you die," I said Which I regretted, instantly Insensitive, given his family&039;s recent history But he took no notice Which I was glad about I said, "I need to talk to you"

"Why? You earning a whitey e? You need to find a black person to talk with today?"

"I&039;m in the army," I said "Which means half my friends are black, and more importantly it means half my bosses are black I talk to black people all the tihetto shit"

The boy was quiet for a second Then he asked, "What part of the army are you in?"

"Military Police"

"Is that a tough job?"

"Tougher than tough," I said "Think about it logically Any soldier could kick your ass, and I could kick any soldier&039;s ass"

"For real?"

"More than real," I said "Real is for other people Not for us"

He asked, "What do you want to talk about?"

"A hunch"

"What kind?"

I said, "My guess is no one ever talked to you about your sister&039;s death"

He looked down

I said, "Normally with a homicide victihts and opinions They want to knohat kinds of things she did, where she went, who she hung with Did they ever talk to you about that kind of stuff?"

"No," he said "Nobody ever talked to me"

"They should have," I said "I would have Because brothers know things about sisters Especially at the ages you tere I bet you knew things about Shawna that no one else did I bet she told you things she couldn&039;t tell your ured out some stuff on your own"

The kid shuffled in place a little Bashful, and a little proud Like saying: Yeah, s out Out loud he said, "No one ever talks to "

"Why not?"

"Because I&039;m deformed They think I&039;m slow, too"

"Who says you&039;re deformed?"

"Everybody"

"Even your mom?"

"She doesn&039;t say it, but she thinks it"

"Even your friends?"

"I don&039;t have any friends Who would want to be friends with ," I said "You&039;re not deforly, but you&039;re not deformed There&039;s a difference"

He smiled "That&039;s what Shawna used to tell ether Beauty and the beast A tough life, for both of theh for her, with the endless need for tact and patience I said, "You should join the army You&039;d look like a movie star couy that sentto join the army," he said "I talked to someone about it"

"Who did you talk to?"

"Shawna&039;s last boyfriend," he said "He was a soldier"

32

The kid invited me inside His erator The house was dim and shuttered It smelled stale It was mean and narrow inside, but it had plenty of roouessed were three bedrooms in back Space for two parents and two kids, except I saw no sign of a father, and Shaas never coain