Killing Floor

“That would make him what, about six-six?” he asked.

“Right,” I said. “About two hundred pounds, maybe.”

Finlay wrote it all down.

“And he shaved his head?” he said.

“Not the last time I saw him,” I said. “He had hair like anybody else.”

“Seven years ago, right?” Finlay said.

I shrugged.

“Maybe he started going bald,” I said. “Maybe he was vain about it.”

Finlay nodded.

“What was his job?” he asked.

“Last I heard, he worked for the Treasury Department,” I said. “Doing what, I’m not sure.”

“What was his background?” he asked. “Was he in the service too?”

I nodded.

“Military Intelligence,” I said. “Quit after a while, then he worked for the government.”

“He wrote you that he had been here, right?” he asked.

“He mentioned the Blind Blake thing,” I said. “Didn’t say what brought him down here. But it shouldn’t be difficult to find out.”

Finlay nodded.

“We’ll make some calls first thing in the morning,” he said. “Until then, you’re sure you got no idea why he should be down here?”

I shook my head. I had no idea at all why he had come down here. But I knew Hubble did. Joe had been the tall investigator with the shaved head and the code name. Hubble had brought him down here and Hubble knew exactly why. First thing to do was to find Hubble and ask him about it.

“Did you say you couldn’t find Hubble?” I asked Finlay.

“Can’t find him anywhere,” he said. “He’s not up at his place on Beckman Drive and nobody’s seen him around town. Hubble knows all about this, right?”

I just shrugged. I felt like I wanted to keep some of the cards pretty close to my chest. If I was going to have to squeeze Hubble for something he wasn’t very happy to talk about, then I wanted to do it in private. I didn’t particularly want Finlay watching over my shoulder while I was doing it. He might think I was squeezing too hard. And I definitely didn’t want to have to watch anything over Finlay’s shoulder. I didn’t want to leave the squeezing to him. I might think he wasn’t squeezing hard enough. And anyway, Hubble would talk to me faster than he would talk to a policeman. He was already halfway there with me. So exactly how much Hubble knew was going to stay my secret. Just for now.

“No idea what Hubble knows,” I said. “You’re the one claims he fell apart.”

Finlay just grunted again and looked across the desk at me. I could see him settling into a new train of thought. I was pretty sure what it was. I’d been waiting for it to surface. There’s a rule of thumb about homicide. It comes from a lot of statistics and a lot of experience. The rule of thumb says: when you get a dead guy, first you take a good look at his family. Because a hell of a lot of homicide gets done by relatives. Husbands, wives, sons. And brothers. That was the theory. Finlay would have seen it in action a hundred times in his twenty years up in Boston. Now I could see him trying it out in his head down in Margrave. I needed to run interference on it. I didn’t want him thinking about it. I didn’t want to waste any more of my time in a cell. I figured I might need that time for something else.

“You’re happy with my alibi, right?” I said.

He saw where I was going. Like we were colleagues on a knotty case. He flashed me a brief grin.

“It held up,” he said. “You were in Tampa when this was going down.”

“OK,” I said. “And is Chief Morrison comfortable with that?”

“He doesn’t know about it,” Finlay said. “He’s not answering his phone.”

“I don’t want any more convenient mistakes,” I said. “The fat moron said he saw me up there. I want him to know that won’t fly anymore.”

Finlay nodded. Picked up the phone on the desk and dialed a number. I heard the faint purr of the ring tone from the earpiece. It rang for a long time and cut off when Finlay put the phone back down.

“Not at home,” he said. “Sunday, right?”

Then he pulled the phone book out of a drawer. Opened it to H. Looked up Hubble’s number on Beckman Drive. Dialed it and got the same result. A lot of ring tone and nobody home. Then he tried the mobile number. An electronic voice started to tell him the phone was switched off. He hung up before it finished.

“I’m going to bring Hubble in, when I find him,” Finlay said. “He knows stuff he should be telling us. Until then, not a lot I can do, right?”

I shrugged. He was right. It was a pretty cold trail. The only spark that Finlay knew about was the panic Hubble had shown on Friday.

“What are you going to do, Reacher?” he asked me.

“I’m going to think about that,” I said.

Finlay looked straight at me. Not unfriendly, but very serious, like he was trying to communicate an order and an appeal with a single stern eye-to-eye gaze.

“Let me deal with this, OK?” he said. “You’re going to feel pretty bad, and you’re going to want to see justice done, but I don’t want any independent action going on here, OK? This is police business. You’re a civilian. Let me deal with it, OK?”

I shrugged and nodded. Stood up and looked at them both.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said.

I LEFT THE TWO OF THEM THERE AND STROLLED THROUGH the squad room. Pushed out through the glass doors into the hot afternoon. Wandered through the parking lot and crossed the wide lawn in front, over as far as the bronze statue. It was another tribute to Caspar Teale, whoever the hell he had been. Same guy as on the village green on the southern edge of town. I leaned up against his warm metal flank and thought.

The United States is a giant country. Millions of square miles. Best part of three hundred million people. I hadn’t seen Joe for seven years, and he hadn’t seen me, but we’d ended up in exactly the same tiny spot, eight hours apart. I’d walked within fifty yards of where his body had been lying. That was one hell of a big coincidence. It was almost unbelievable. So Finlay was doing me a big favor by treating it like a coincidence. He should be trying to tear my alibi apart. Maybe he already was. Maybe he was already on the phone to Tampa, checking again.

But he wouldn’t find anything, because it was a coincidence. No point going over and over it. I was only in Margrave because of a crazy last-minute whim. If I’d taken a minute longer looking at the guy’s map, the bus would have been past the cloverleaf and I’d have forgotten all about Margrave. I’d have gone on up to Atlanta and never known anything about Joe. It might have taken another seven years before the news caught up with me. So there was no point getting all stirred up about the coincidence. The only thing I had to do was to decide what the hell I was going to do about it.

I was about four years old before I caught on to the loyalty thing. I suddenly figured I was supposed to watch out for Joe the way he was watching out for me. After a while, it became second nature, like an automatic thing. It was always in my head to scout around and check he was OK. Plenty of times I would run out into some new schoolyard and see a bunch of kids trying it on with the tall ski

But now he was dead. He wasn’t anywhere. I leaned up against the statue in front of the station house and listened to the tiny voice inside my head saying: you’re supposed to do something about that.