The Affair_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [48]
I helped Merriam put the guy on a canvas gurney, and then we loaded him in the back of the truck. Merriam drove him away, and Deveraux spent five minutes on the radio in her car. I stood around with Pellegrino. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. Then Deveraux got out of her car again and sent him about his business. He drove away, and Deveraux and I were alone once more, except for the blasted tree and a patch of dark tone on the ground, where the dead guy’s blood had soaked into the soil.
Deveraux said, “Butler claims no one came out of Kelham’s main gate at any time this morning.”
I said, “Who’s Butler?”
“My other deputy. Pellegrino’s opposite number. I’ve had him stationed outside the base. I wanted a quick warning, in case they cancel the lockdown. There’s going to be all kinds of tension. People are very upset about Chapman.”
“But not about the first two?”
“Depends who you ask, and where. But the soldiers never stop short of the tracks. The bars are all on the other side.”
I said nothing.
She said, “There must be more gates. Or holes in the fence. It’s got to be, what? Thirty miles long? And it’s fifty years old. Got to be weak spots. Someone came out somewhere, that’s for sure.”
“And went back in again,” I said. “If you’re right, that is. Someone went back in bloody to the elbows, with a dirty knife, and at least one round short in his magazine.”
“I am right,” she said.
“I never heard of a quarantine zone before,” I said. “Not inside the United States, anyway. I just don’t buy it.”
“I buy it,” she said.
Something in her tone. Something in her face.
I said, “What? Did the Marines do this once?”
“It was no big thing.”
“Tell me all about it.”
“Classified information,” she said.
“Where was it?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“When was it?”
“I can’t tell you that either.”
I paused a beat and asked, “Have you spoken to Munro yet? The guy they sent to the base?”
She nodded. “He called and left a message when he arrived. First thing. As a courtesy. He gave me a number to reach him.”
“Good,” I said. “Because now I need to speak to him.”
We drove back together, across Clancy’s land, out his gate, south on the washboard two-lane, then west through the black half of town, away from Kelham, toward the railroad. I saw the same old women on the same front porches, and the same kids on the same bikes, and men of various ages moving slow between unknown starting points and unknown destinations. The houses leaned and sagged. There were abandoned work sites. Slabs laid, with no structures built on them. Tangles of rusted rebar. Weedy piles of bricks and sand. All around was flat tilled dirt and trees. There was a kind of hopeless crushed torpor in the air, like there probably had been every day for the last hundred years.
“My people,” Deveraux said. “My base. They all voted for me. I mean it, practically a hundred percent. Because of my father. He was fair to them. They were voting for him, really.”
I asked, “How did you do with the white folks?”
“Close to a hundred percent with them too. But that’s all going to change, on both ends of the deal. Unless I get some answers for all concerned.”
“Tell me about the first two women.”
Her response to that was to brake sharply and twist in her seat and back up twenty yards. Then she nosed into the turning she had just passed. It was a dirt track, well smoothed and well scoured. It had a humped camber and shallow bar ditches left and right. It ran straight north, and was lined on both sides with what might once have been slave shacks. Deveraux passed by the first ten or so, passed by a gap where one had burned out, and then she turned into a yard I recognized from the third photograph I had seen. The poor girl’s house. The unadorned neck and ears. The amazing beauty.