Killing Floor (12 page)

“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.

“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 through 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.