Second Son_ A Reacher Story - Lee Child [16]
Reacher asked, “Where did you find it?”
One of the MPs said, “Under a bed in the second bedroom. The boys’ room.”
No kind of a criminal mastermind.
The major from Intelligence asked, “Is it the code book?”
Reacher shook his head.
“No,” he said. “It’s the test answers from the school.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“So why call us?”
“This has to be handled by the Corps. Not by the school. You need to go up to the hospital and talk to the kid and his father together. You need to get a confession. Then you need to tell the school. What you do to the kid after that is your business. A warning will do it, probably. He won’t trouble us again anyway.”
“What exactly happened here?”
“It was my brother’s fault,” Reacher said. “In a way, anyway. The kid from down the street started hazing us, and Joe stepped up and did really well. Smart mouth, fast answers, the whole nine yards. It was a great performance. Plus, Joe is huge. Gentle as a lamb, but the kid didn’t know that, obviously. So he decided to duck the physical route, in terms of revenge. He decided to go another way. He figured out that Joe was uptight about the test. Maybe he had heard us talking. But anyway, he followed Joe up to the school yesterday and stole the answers. To discredit him.”
“Can you prove that?”
“Circumstantially,” Reacher said. “The kid didn’t go to the ballgame. He wasn’t on the bus. So he was in town all day. And Joe washed his hands and took a shower when he got back. Which is unusual for Joe, in the afternoon. He must have felt dirty. And my guess is he felt dirty because he had been smelling that kid’s stink all day, from behind him and around corners.”
“Very circumstantial,” the major said.
“Ask the kid,” Reacher said. “Lean on him, in front of his dad.”
“Then what happened?”
“The kid made up a scenario where Joe memorized the answers and then burned the book. Which would be plausible, for a guy who wanted to cheat on a test. And it was trash night, which was convenient. The plan was the kid would burn the book in his own back yard, and then sneak into ours during the night and dump the metal part in our incinerator, among our ashes, so the evidence would be right there. But we had no ashes. We missed trash night. We had to be up at the airport instead. So the kid had to abort the plan. He just snuck away again. And I heard him. Early hours of the morning. I thought it was a cat or a rat.”
“Any trace evidence?”
“You might find footprints out there,” Reacher said. “The yard was swept at some point, but there’s always dust. Especially after trash night.”
The MPs went away and took a look at the yard, and then they came back with quizzical expressions on their faces, as if to say, the kid could be right.
The Intelligence major got a look on his own face, like I can’t believe I’m about to say this to a thirteen-year-old, and then he asked, “Do you know where the code book is too?”
“No,” Reacher said. “Not for sure. But I could make a pretty good guess.”
“Where?”
“Help my brother out with the school, and then we’ll talk.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The three Marines came back ninety minutes later. One of the MPs said, “You bust that kid up pretty good, didn’t you?”
“He’ll live,” Reacher said.
The other MP said, “He confessed. It went down like you figured. How did you know?”
“Logic,” Reacher said. “I knew Joe wouldn’t have done it, so clearly someone else did. It was just a question of who. And how, and why.”
The Intelligence major said, “We squared things away with the school. Your brother is in the clear.” Then the guy smiled. He said, “But there’s one unfortunate consequence.”
“Which is what?”
“They don’t have the answers anymore, so the test has been canceled.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Every silver lining has a cloud.”
“Did you see the questions?”
The major nodded. “Reading, writing, adding, subtracting. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“No general knowledge?”
“No.”
“No baseball?”
“Not even a hint.”
“No statistics?”
“Percentages, maybe, in the math section. Odds and probabilities, that