The Affair_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [31]
We walked back down the street, and up the shaky steps, and across the old veranda. We went in and used the door on the left of the lobby. I smelled the same damp and dust and mildew as the night before. In the daylight the humped shapes I had seen in the dark turned out to be armchairs, as I had thought. There were twelve of them, grouped in various combinations, twos and fours. We took a matched pair, either side of a cold fireplace.
I asked her, “Why do you live here?”
“Good question,” she said. “I thought it would be a month or two. But it extended.”
“What about your old man’s house?”
“Rented,” she said. “The lease died with him.”
“You could rent another one. Or buy one. Isn’t that what people do?”
She nodded. “I looked at some. Couldn’t pull the trigger. Have you seen the houses around here?”
I said, “Some of them look OK.”
“Not to me,” she said. “I wasn’t ready, anyway. I hadn’t decided how long I was going to stay. Still haven’t, really. No doubt it will turn out to be the rest of my life, but I guess I don’t want to admit that to myself. I’d rather let it creep up on me day by day, I suppose.”
I thought about my pal Stan Lowrey, and his want ads. There was a lot more to leaving the service than getting a job. There were houses, and cars, and clothes. There were a hundred strange, unknown details, like the customs of a remote foreign tribe, glimpsed only in passing, and never fully understood.
Deveraux said, “So let’s hear it.”
I said, “Her throat was cut, right? We’re clear on that?”
“Definitely. Unmistakably.”
“And that was the only wound?”
“The doctor says so.”
“So somewhere there’s blood all over the place. Wherever it was actually done. In a room, maybe, or out in the woods. It’s impossible to clean up properly. Literally impossible. So there’s evidence out there, just waiting for you.”
“I can’t search the base. They won’t let me. It’s a jurisdiction thing.”
“You don’t know for sure it happened on the base.”
“She was raped on the base.”
“It’s not impossible she was raped on the base. That’s not quite the same thing.”
“I can’t search five hundred square miles of Mississippi, either.”
“So zoom in on the perpetrator. Narrow it down.”
“How?”
“No woman can bleed out twice,” I said. “Her throat was cut in some unknown location, blood sprayed everywhere, she died, and that’s all she wrote. Then she was dumped in the alley. But whose blood was she lying in? Not her own, because she’d left it all back in the unknown location.”
“Oh, God,” Deveraux said. “Don’t tell me the guy collected it and brought it with him.”
“Possible,” I said. “But a little unlikely. It would be tricky to cut someone’s throat while simultaneously dancing around with a bucket, trying to catch the spray.”
“There could have been two guys.”
“Possible,” I said again. “But still unlikely. It’s like a fire hose, flipping all around. Here, there, and everywhere. The second guy would be lucky to gather a pint.”
“So what are you saying? Whose blood was it?”
“An animal’s, possibly. Maybe a deer. Freshly slaughtered, but not quite fresh enough. There was some time lag. That blood was already congealing. A gallon of liquid blood would have spread much farther than that pile of sand. A little goes a long way, where blood is concerned.”
“A hunter?”
“That’s my guess.”
“Based on not very much. You didn’t see the blood. You didn’t test it. It could have been fake blood from a joke store. Or it could have been hers. Someone might have figured out a way to collect it. Just because you can’t see a way doesn’t mean a way doesn’t exist. Or they could have bled her out first and then cut her throat afterward.”
“Still a hunter,” I said.
“Why?”
“There’s more,” I said. “It continues to get worse.”
Chapter
18
At that point the old lady I had seen in the diner stuck her head in the door. The hotel’s co-owner. She asked if she could bring us anything. Elizabeth Deveraux shook her head. I asked for coffee. The old lady said sorry, she didn’t have any. She said I could get it to go from the diner, if I