Jack and Joe: Hunt for Jack Reacher Series (The Hunt for Jack Reacher Series Book 6) (18 page)

So Reacher and Summer were lovers. Together in Paris. Doing the quick math in my head, it had to have been around the same time Josephine Reacher died.

The last two photos were completely different. Different time, different place, different camera. Different subjects, too. Jarringly so.

The seventh photo was of a dead man seated on a kitchen floor, legs straight out, arms to his sides, hands resting on the floor, with a gunshot wound through the center of his forehead. Gray hair parted and combed to the side and a little too long around his ears. Steel-rimmed eyeglasses magnified his eyes, which were wide open as if he’d been well and truly shocked to see the bullet coming. Unlike the others, this photo had a date and military time stamp. 13-1-90. 1932.

The eighth and last photo was the backyard of a house on a residential street after dark. A single streetlight in the alley provided weak yellow illumination. The yard was messy. An old barbecue grill had been tossed on the ground in the middle of what might once have been a lawn. A big man wearing woodland-patterned BDUs and boots was in the process of walking out the back door when the photo was taken. The date and time stamp was 13-1-90. 1934.

“Where did these come from?” Gaspar asked after a while.

“I found another envelope in Finlay’s chair, but I didn’t see it until after the room service guy left.” My stomach growled loud enough to be heard all the way to Paris. I grabbed my phone and took pictures of the photos and sent them to my personal server.

“Let’s eat.” Gaspar walked toward the sitting room. “We can talk at the same time. The Boss and Finlay already know all of this, so if you missed any bugs during your search of the rooms earlier, they wouldn’t hear anything new.”

Our food had been sent up inside one of those carts that keeps everything warm until you’re ready and then it opens into a table. Gaspar pulled the plates out and I poured the water. I handed him the wine bottle and the corkscrew.

Once we were sorted, I said, “So Reacher and Summer-the-sanctimonious-bulldog had an affair, maybe on Uncle Sam’s dime, and General Clifton and Joe probably knew about it. Who else knew?”

Gaspar chewed his steak like a man just released from indenture. “Maybe no one. At least, not back then. Because Reacher was Summer’s CO, too. The Army still takes a dim view of that kind of fraternizing.”

“Looks like they were already in all kinds of deep shit, though. I mean, what kind of Army grunt can afford to stay at the Georges V? That’s the place Princess Diana stayed. Royalty and business tycoons and wealthy oil sheiks sleep there. Hell, two nights in that place and you’d have to mortgage all five of your kids to pay the bill, Chico.”

Gaspar grinned. “A little bit like either of us trying to pay for this suite, eh?”

“It explains why the Boss thought Reacher might show up at Fort Bird, though. I mean, Summer was supposed to be there to tell me all about it, remember?”

“It was a one-night stand, Suzy Wong. Not
Casablanca
. He wouldn’t care if we found out about the whole thing after all this time.” Gaspar cut off another chunk of the steak and stuck it in his mouth. “Didn’t she tell you she hadn’t seen Reacher in twenty years? Kind of suggests he never saw her again after he left Fort Bird, anyway.”

“Yeah, well, by all accounts they weren’t sleeping together in the most expensive hotel in Paris, either.” I’d been pushing my food around on the plate, but that wasn’t helping my grouchy stomach. So I ate. The veal piccata was excellent, if a little cold.

“Drink some more wine.” He grinned and refilled my glass. What he meant was that I should chill out. These photos were decades old. Summer was dead and Reacher was, well, not around. So far. How could their affair and who funded it possibly matter now?

Which was exactly the problem. The affair shouldn’t have mattered. But somehow, it did. Mattered enough that Finlay left that envelope with the photos in it. Or the Boss sent them up with the room service guy. Or someone else made sure we found them. Either way, the clear message was that the old affair was important.

I played with the veal and capers and thought about why that might be.

The only motive that made sense was blackmail. Summer had spent her career ferreting out corruption. Yet she’d been AWOL at the Army’s expense in Paris while sleeping with her commanding officer. How much more against the rules could her behavior have possibly been?

If this evidence of criminal and ethical misbehavior was made public now, she’d have been reprimanded, at the very least. She might even have been busted back, the way Reacher had been. Conduct unbecoming and all of that. Given the Army’s constant force reductions, she might have been encouraged to retire, too. Maybe she’d have paid to keep the truth under wraps. The blackmailer might have tried Reacher, too, assuming he could find Reacher. But Reacher had nothing to lose and Summer had everything to lose. She was the logical target.

The only problem with the blackmail theory was that it’s impossible to blackmail a dead woman.

Which meant sending us the photos now, when Summer was already dead, had to be motivated by something else entirely.

CHAPTER 24

We took a nonstop from Dallas to Raleigh the next morning and collected another Crown Vic at the airport that Gaspar had somehow acquired. With Gaspar behind the wheel, we traveled the Interstate south this time. The same route Summer would have taken on the day she died. Gaspar drove the speed limit, which gave me a chance to observe the terrain, had there been anything to see.

We rode most of the distance with our own thoughts and no conversation, which was fine with me. I’ve never understood why two people alone in a car or a room necessarily had to talk to each other.

North of the exit for New Haven,
The Lucky Bar’s
neon signs flashed blindingly. Which probably meant they were once again open for business.

Gaspar said, “Do we have time to look around at the truck stop?”

“After. I want to have plenty of time for mile marker #224.”

The Crown Vic was cruising at the posted speed limit of seventy miles an hour when we passed the truck stop. We had been gradually gaining elevation and ten miles further along, we began our descent. The road wasn’t particularly dangerous. It wound through picturesque mountainous woodland from well before the truck stop all the way past Fort Bird.

“Around that blind curve is the spot. Right lane.”

At mile marker #224, the pavement curved a wide left bank and disappeared around the mountain.

Gaspar slowed well below the minimum speed and turned on his flashers as if he was having engine problems. The incline had been gradual, but the descent was steeper. Warning signs were posted before the curve and more lined the guardrail along the big bend.

The blind curve was perfectly safe at the posted speed limit, which was reduced to fifty miles an hour. At eighty miles an hour, it would be maybe half as safe.

I wasn’t driving this time, which meant I could take my eyes off the road to scan the area thoroughly.

The right side guardrail was damaged. Whether from Summer’s crash or an earlier one was impossible to say.

After the shoulder on the far right southbound lane, the mountain fell away. Nothing but treetops filled the void. An involuntary shudder ran through me when I peered over the guardrail down the steep incline on the right.

“So the first rig was either slowed or stopped ahead and Summer had no time to avoid the crash,” Gaspar said.

“That’s what the report says, and how it probably unfolded based on the photo as well as the newscast videos we’ve seen.”

“Why did the tanker in front of Summer stop along here? Anybody would recognize the danger. Semi drivers are pros. They wouldn’t create a potential safety disaster like that.”

“He says he had already slowed due to the weather conditions. When he came around the blind curve, there were two deer crossing the road and he downshifted and braked to slow further. He said he was moving when she hit him, but not fast enough to avoid the collision.”

“Could have happened that way. Any reason to believe otherwise?”

“Not that I’ve heard. Finlay’s photo was snapped pretty quickly and shows no deer on the roadway. But deer are fast and there’s no traffic cam video, either. So the story hasn’t been confirmed or disproved.”

“What happened to the traffic cams?”

Good question. I craned my neck to peer at the top of the utility poles where the traffic cams were perched, as they should have been. “Malfunction, I guess.”

Gaspar snorted. “All of them? Only in this one spot? Unlikely. Another question for the Boss.”

There was no place to pull off the road or move into the median to stop for a closer look at the scene, so Gaspar turned off the flashers and increased speed on the other side of the curve.

Twelve miles farther down the road was the exit for Fort Bird. Gaspar exited the highway, turned left at the end of the ramp, and reentered the highway on the other side.

When we approached the accident scene headed north, we were on the inside traffic lanes, hugging the jagged wall of mountain rock that abutted the far right northbound lane.

The blind curve ahead seemed like driving into empty air from this direction as if we were continuing based on nothing but faith in American highway engineering.

The only additional safety features of the northbound side were the solid mountain on the right and the climbing elevation that slowed traffic.

When we were well past mile marker #224, I unbuckled my seatbelt and crabbed into the back seat to retrieve the Boss’s padded envelope. When I re-settled into the front passenger seat, I ripped open the envelope and powered up the secure cell phone.

“Need a charger?” Gaspar asked.

I gave him my best imitation of a teenagers’ total exasperation with the stupidity of parents. “Oh, please. Seriously? This phone came from the Boss and you think it could possibly be less than ready?”

He grinned. “Right. What was I thinking?”

We drove back to the New Haven exit, left the highway, and did the circuit again. By that time, I’d found the video camera on the secure cell phone and flipped it to record from a mile north of the scene.

I panned the area, documenting everything as well as possible. When we’d traveled a mile past the point of impact, I stopped recording and sent the video to my secure server via satellite. I repeated the process on the way back.

We didn’t speak because we wanted no audio on the recording.

After the second recording was secure, Gaspar said, “Send a text. Tell him the video is on the way and send it to him.”

I’d already started the process. I tossed him a scathing glance. “You think you’re the only one in this vehicle who wants to save our skin, Che?”

“Very often, Helga, that’s precisely what I think.” He only called me Helga when what he meant was that I was as stubborn as any German on the planet.
Damn straight
.

We continued the rest of the way to the New Haven exit in silence. Instead of turning right toward
The Lucky Bar
and the Grand Lodge, the GPS directed Gaspar to turn left.

We had traveled five miles before we reached the New Haven Hospital, where Sheriff Taylor had said the local pathologist doubled as the local medical examiner.

Taylor’s empty cruiser was parked near the side entrance. Gaspar parked the Crown Vic next to Taylor’s and we hustled out. I placed the flat of my palm on the hood of Taylor’s cruiser as we passed. He must have arrived only a few minutes before we did because the hood of the cruiser was still warm.

We found him inside the modern autopsy room decorated with easy-to-clean shiny surfaces, talking with a man wearing green hospital scrubs.

“Sheriff Taylor, this is my partner, Agent Carlos Gaspar,” I said as we walked up to the two men standing over a steel shelf that had been pulled out from a refrigerator in the wall.

Taylor nodded to Gaspar and introduced the pathologist, Dr. Smith. The unrecognizably mangled body on the steel shelf had once been Eunice Summer, but the only way I could confirm that was by reading the toe tag. Somehow, her body hadn’t seemed quite so mangled in the photographs I’d already seen.

“You’ve read the autopsy report?” Dr. Smith asked. “Not much more to add, I’m afraid. Cause of death was definitely the gunshot wound to her head though she’d have died on impact with that tanker if she hadn’t been dead already.”

The matter-of-fact delivery style was one I’d encountered from medical examiners before. A coping mechanism or something. No human being charged with caring for the sick could possibly be so lacking in sensitivity otherwise.

“How can you be sure about the gunshot?” Gaspar asked. “There’s not much evidence here to work with.”

“Dumb luck, actually.” Dr. Smith pointed to a sharp skull fragment over Summer’s right ear. The bony fragment was less than an inch wide and maybe half again as long. “See this here? It’s a fragment. But it’s the size and shape a bullet normally makes when it hits this location on the human skull. Nothing else can cause that precise type of hole in that particular bone.”

“If you say so,” I replied. Because the whole body was such a mess that the thing he said was a bullet hole looked like another shard to me.