The Affair_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [152]
“Ready?” I asked him.
He said he was.
I said, “A tragedy occurred late last night in sleepy Carter Crossing, Mississippi, when a car carrying United States Senator Carlton Riley was struck by a passing train. The car was being driven by the senator’s son, U.S. Army Captain Reed Riley, who was based at nearby Fort Kelham, Mississippi. Senator Riley, of Missouri, was chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, and Captain Riley, described by the army as a rising star, was in command of an infantry unit regularly deployed on missions of great sensitivity. Both men died instantly in the accident. Carter County Sheriff Elizabeth Deveraux confirmed that local drivers regularly attempt to beat the train across the road junction, in order to avoid a long and inconvenient delay, and it is believed that Captain Riley, recently posted to the area and adventurous in spirit, simply mistimed his approach to the crossing.”
I paused.
“Got that,” the lieutenant said, in my ear.
“Second paragraph,” I said. “The senator and his son were returning to Fort Kelham after helping the nearby town celebrate Sheriff Deveraux’s successful resolution of a local homicide investigation. The killing spree had lasted nine months and the five victims included three local women in their twenties, a local teenage boy, and a journalist from nearby Oxford, Mississippi. The male perpetrator, responsible for all five deaths, is described as a militia member and a white supremacist from neighboring Tennessee, and was shot to death earlier in the week, in a wooded area close to Fort Kelham, by local police, while resisting arrest.”
“Got that,” the lieutenant said again.
“Start typing,” I said, and hung up.
Eleven forty-two in the evening. The train was eighteen miles away.
Room seventeen was as plain as room twenty-one had been. Deveraux had made no attempt to personalize it. She had two battered suitcases propped open for clothes storage, and a spare uniform was hanging off the curtain rail, and there was a book on the night table. And that was it.
We sat side by side on her bed, a little shell shocked, and she said, “You did everything you could. Justice is done all around, and the army doesn’t suffer. You’re a good soldier.”
I said, “I’m sure they’ll find something to complain about.”
“But I’m disappointed with the Marine Corps. They shouldn’t have cooperated. They stabbed me in the back.”
“Not really,” I said. “They tried their best. They were under tremendous pressure. They pretended to play ball, but they put in a bunch of coded messages. Two dead people and an invented one? That thing with your rank? Those mistakes had to be deliberate. They made it so the file wouldn’t stand up. Not for long. Same with Garber. He was ranting and raving about you, but really he was acting a part. He was acting out what the reaction was supposed to be. He was challenging me to think.”
“Did you believe the file, when you first saw it?”
“Honest answer?”
“That’s what I expect from you.”
“I didn’t instantly reject it. It took me a few hours.”
“That’s slow for you.”
“Very,” I said.
“You asked me all kinds of weird questions.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Silence.
The train was fifteen miles away.
She said, “Don’t be sorry. I might have believed it myself.”
Which was kind of her. She leaned over and kissed me. I went and washed the last dry traces of Carlton Riley’s blood off my hands, and then we made love for the sixth time, and it worked out perfectly. The room began to shake right on cue, and the glass on her bathroom shelf began to tinkle, and her floor quivered, and her room door creaked, and our abandoned shoes hopped and moved, and her bed shook and bounced and walked tiny fractions.