Ли Чайлд: No Middle Name

Reacher said, ‘To talk about the case.’

‘It’s a state matter.’

‘Not if it was a simple mugging.’

‘It wasn’t.’

‘You believe that?’

‘It was a credible way to beat surveillance.’

‘What about me as the second secret ingredient?’

‘That’s credible too.’

‘It would have been a miracle of coordination. Wouldn’t it? Exactly the right place, at exactly the right time.’

‘You could have been waiting there for hours.’

‘But was I? What do your witnesses say?’

Aaron didn’t reply.

Reacher said, ‘Check the timing on the tape. You and me talking. Picture the sequence. Delaney got a hard-on for me because of something he heard.’

Aaron nodded. ‘Your lawyer already passed that on. The homeless patsy. Didn’t convince me then, doesn’t convince me now.’

‘Beyond a reasonable doubt?’ Reacher asked.

‘I’m a detective. Reasonable doubt is for the jury.’

‘You happy for an innocent man to go to prison?’

‘Guilt and innocence is for the jury.’

‘Suppose I get acquitted? You happy to see your case go down in flames?’

‘Not my case. It’s a state matter.’

Reacher said, ‘Listen to the tape again. Time it out.’

‘I can’t,’ Aaron said. ‘There is no tape.’

‘You told me there was.’

‘We’re the county police. We can’t record a state interview. Not our jurisdiction. So the recording was discontinued.’

‘It was before that. When you and I were talking.’

‘That part got screwed up. The previous stuff got erased when the recording was stopped.’

‘It got?’

‘Accidents happen.’

‘Who pressed the stop button?’

Aaron didn’t answer.

‘Who was it?’ Reacher said.

‘Delaney,’ Aaron said. ‘When he took over from me. He apologized. He said he wasn’t familiar with our equipment.’

‘You believed him?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

Reacher said nothing.

‘Accidents happen,’ Aaron said again.

‘You sure it was an accident? You sure they weren’t making a silk purse out of a pig’s ear? You sure they weren’t covering their tracks?’

Aaron said nothing.

Reacher said, ‘You never saw such a thing happen?’

‘What do you want me to say? He’s a fellow cop.’

‘So am I.’

‘You were, once upon a time. Now you’re just a guy passing by.’

‘One day you will be, too. You want all these years to count for nothing?’

Aaron didn’t answer.

Reacher said, ‘Right back at the beginning you told me juries don’t always like police testimony. Why would that be? Are those juries always wrong?’

No response.

Reacher said, ‘Can’t you remember what we said on the tape?’

‘Even if I could, it would be my word against the state. And it ain’t exactly a smoking gun, is it?’

Reacher said nothing. Aaron gazed through the bars a minute more, and then he left again.

Reacher lay on his back on the narrow bed with one elbow jammed against the wall and his head resting on his cupped hand. Check the timing on the tape , he had said. He ran through what he remembered of his first conversation with Aaron. In the green bunker-like room. The witness statement. The preamble. Name, date of birth, Social Security number. Then his address. No fixed abode, and so on and so forth. He pictured Delaney listening in. A tinny loudspeaker in another room. In other words you’re homeless , Aaron had said. Delaney had heard him say it. Loud and clear. How long did he take to spot his opportunity and come barging in?

Too long, Reacher thought.

There had been the bravura bullshit about PTSD and the 110th, and some lengthy dickering from Aaron about whether his testimony would be helpful or hurtful, and then the testimony itself, careful, composed, coherent, detailed, clear and slow. Then the private chat afterwards. After Bush had left the room. The speculation, and the semantic analysis backing it up. You said, Thank you very much for helping us out with that . And so on. All that stuff. Altogether seven minutes, maybe. Or eight, or nine.

Or ten.

Too much time.

Delaney had reacted to something else.

Something he heard later.

At ten o’clock in Reacher’s head there was the heavy tramp of footsteps in the corridor outside the steel door. The door opened and people came in. Six of them. Different uniforms. State Police. Prisoner escorts. They had Mace and pepper spray and tasers on their belts. Handcuffs and shackles and thin metal chains. They knew what they were doing. They made Reacher back up against the bars and stick his hands out behind him, through the meal slot. They cuffed his wrists, and held tight to the link, and squatted down and put their hands in through the bars, the same way he had poured his coffee, but in reverse. They put shackles around his ankles, and linked them together, and ran a chain up to his handcuffs. Then they unlocked his gate and slid it open. He shuffled out, small clinking steps, and they stopped him at the booking desk, where they retrieved his possessions from a drawer. His passport, his ATM card, his toothbrush, his seventy bucks in bills, his seventy-five cents in quarters, and his shoelaces. They put them all in a khaki envelope and sealed the flap. Then they escorted him out of the cell block, three ahead, three behind. They walked him around the dogleg corners, under the low concrete ceilings, and out to the lot. There was a grey-painted school bus with wire on the windows parked next to the wrecked SUV in the far corner. They pushed him inside and planted him on a bench seat in back. There were no other passengers. One guy drove and the other five sat close together up front.

They got to Warren just before midnight. The prison was visible from a mile away, with bright pools of arc light showing through the mist. The bus waited at the gate, idling with a heavy diesel clatter, and spotlights played over it, and the gate ground open, and the bus drove inside. It waited again for a second gate, and then shut down in a brightly lit space near an iron door marked Prisoner Intake . Reacher was led through it, and down the right-hand spur of a Y-shaped junction, to the holding pen for inmates as yet unconvicted. His cuffs and chains and shackles were removed. His possessions in their khaki envelope were filed away, and he was issued with a white jumpsuit uniform and blue shower shoes. He was led to a cell more or less identical to the one he had just left. The gate was slid shut, and the key was turned. His escort left, and a minute later the light clicked off and the block was plunged into noisy and restless darkness.

The lights came back on at six in the morning. Reacher heard a guard in the corridor, unlocking one gate after another. Eventually the guy showed up at Reacher’s door. He was a mean-looking man about thirty. He said, ‘Go get your breakfast now.’

Breakfast was in a large low room that smelled of boiled food and disinfectant. Reacher lined up with about twelve other guys. The kid in the black sweatshirt was not among them. Still in Bangor, Reacher figured, at the state DEA’s HQ. Maybe talking, maybe not. Reacher arrived at the serving station and got a spoonful of bright yellow mush that might have been scrambled eggs, served on a slice of what might have been white bread, with a melamine mug half full of what might have been coffee. Or the water left over from washing the previous night’s dishes. He sat on a bench at an empty table and ate. The inmates all around him were a mixed bunch, mostly squirrelly and furtive. The back part of Reacher’s brain ran an automatic threat assessment, and found nothing much to worry about, unless tooth decay was contagious.