Lee Child - The Affair

There was silence in the small room for a moment, and thenEmmeline McClatchy said, “A mother can always tell. She looked different. She acted different. She even smelled different. At first she was happy, and then later she was miserable. I didn’t ask her anything. I thought she would come to me on her own. You know, in her own good time. But she didn’t get the chance.”

Munro was quiet for a beat, like a mark of respect, and then he asked, “Did you ever see Captain Riley again after that?”

Emmeline McClatchy nodded. “He came by to offer his condolences, a week after her body was found.”

“Do you think he killed her?”

“You’re the policeman, young man, not me.”

“I think a mother can always tell.”

“Rosemary said his father was an important man. She wasn’t sure where or how. Politics, perhaps. Something where image matters. I think a black girlfriend was a good thing for Captain Riley, but a pregnant girlfriend wasn’t.”

Emmeline McClatchywouldn’t be pushed any further. We said our goodbyes and walked back to the Humvee. Munro said, “This is looking real bad.”

I asked him, “Did you speak to Shawna Lindsay’s mother too?”

“She wouldn’t say a word to me. She chased me away with a stick.”

“How solid is the information about Sheriff Deveraux?”

“Rock solid. They dated, he ended it, she wasn’t happy. Then Rosemary McClatchy was next up, as far as I can piece it together.”

“Was it his car that got wrecked on the track?”

“According to the Oregon DMV it was. Via the plate you found. A blue ’57 Chevy. A piece of shit, not a show car.”

“Did he have an explanation?”

“No, he had a lawyer.”

“Can you prove he was Janice Chapman’s boyfriend too?”

“Not beyond a reasonable doubt. She was a party girl. She was seen with a lot of guys. She can’t have been dating all of them.”

“She was known as a party girl at Tulane, too.”

“Is that where she went?”

“Apparently.”

He smiled. “If all the Tulane coeds were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.”

“Did you know she wasn’t really Janice Chapman?”

“What do you mean?”

“She was born Audrey Shaw. She changed her name three years ago.”

“Why?”

“Politics,” I said. “She was coming off a two-year affair with Carlton Riley.”

I left him withthat piece of information, and walked away south. He drove away north. This time I didn’t cut through anyone’s yard. I walked around the block, like a responsible citizen, and stepped over the wire and hiked across the field and found the dirt track through the trees. I was back on Main Street less than twenty minutes later. Five minutes after that I was inside the Sheriff’s Department. One minute after that I was in Deveraux’s office. She was behind her desk. The desk was covered in a sea of paper.

I said, “We need to talk.”

Deveraux looked up at me, a little alarmed. Something inmy voice, maybe. She said, “Talk about what?”

I asked her, “Did you ever date a guy from the base?”

“What base? You mean Kelham?”

“Yes, Kelham.”

“That’s kind of personal, isn’t it?”

“Did you?”

“Of course not. Are you crazy? Those guys are my biggest problem. You know how it is between a military population and local law enforcement. It would have been the worst kind of conflict of interest.”

“Do you socialize with any of them?”

“No, for the same reason.”

“Do you know any of them?”

“Barely,” she said. “I’ve toured the base and met some of the senior officers, in a formal way. Which is to be expected. They’re trying to deal with the same kind of problems I am.”

“OK,” I said.

“Why are you asking?”

“Munro was at the McClatchy place. Rosemary McClatchy and Shawna Lindsay seem to have dated the same guy. Janice Chapman also, probably. Munro heard you had dated the guy too.”

“That’s bullshit. I haven’t dated a guy in two years. Couldn’t you tell?”

I sat down.

“I had to ask,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Who was the guy?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“You have to tell me. Don’t you think? McClatchy and Lindsay are my cases. Therefore it’s relevant information. And I have a right to know if some guy is taking my name in vain.”

“Reed Riley,” I said.

“Never heard of him,” she said.

Then she said, “Wait a minute. Did you say Riley?”

I didn’t answer.

She said, “Oh my God. Carlton Riley’s son? He’s at Kelham? I had no idea.”

I said nothing.

“Oh my God,” she said again. “That explains a whole lot.”

I said, “It was his car on the railroad track. And Emmeline McClatchy thinks he got Rosemary pregnant. I didn’t ask her. She came right out with it.”

“I need to talk to him.”

“You can’t. They just choppered him out of there.”

“To where?”

“What’s the most remote army post in the world?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. But a buck gets ten that’s where he’ll be tonight.”

“Why would he say he dated me?”

“Ego,” I said. “Maybe he wanted his pals to believe he had collected the whole set. The four most beautiful women in Carter Crossing. The Brannan brothers at the bar told me he was a big dog and always had arm candy.”

“I’m not arm candy.”

“Maybe not on the inside.”

“His father probably knows the guy Janice Chapman had the affair with. They’re right there in the Senate together.”

I said nothing.

She looked right at me.

She said, “Oh, no.”

I said, “Oh, yes.”

“The same woman? Father and son? That’s seriously messed up.”

“Munro can’t prove it. Neither can we.”

“We can infer it. This all is way too much hoopla for a theoretical worry about blowback in general.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. Who knows how these people think?”

“Whatever, you can’t go to D.C. Not now. It’s far too dangerous. You’ll be walking around with the world’s biggest target on your back. Senate Liaison has got a lot invested in Carlton Riley. They won’t let you screw things up. Believe me, you’re nothing to them compared to a good relationship with the Armed Services Committee.”

She said all that and then her phone rang and she picked up and listened for a minute. She covered the mouthpiece with her palm and said, “This is the Oxford PD asking about the dead journalist. I want to tell them the proven perpetrator was shot to death by police after resisting arrest, case closed.”

I said, “Fine with me.”

So she told them that, and then she had to call a whole long list of state departments and county authorities, so I wandered out of her office and she got so busy I didn’t talk to her again until dinner at nine o’clock.

At dinner we talkedabout her father’s house. She ordered her cheeseburger and I got a roast beef sandwich and I asked her, “What was it like growing up here?”

“It was weird,” she said. “Obviously I didn’t have anything to compare it to, and we didn’t get television until I was ten, and we never went to the movies, but even so I sensed there had to be more out there. We all did. We all had island fever.”

Then she asked where I grew up, so I went through as much of the long list as I could remember. Conceived in the Pacific, born in West Berlin when my father was assigned to the embassy there, a dozen different bases before elementary school, education all over the world, cuts and bruises picked up fighting in hot wet alleys in Manila healing days later in cold wet quarters in Belgium, near NATO headquarters, then running across the original assailants a month later in San Diego and resuming the conflict. Then eventually West Point, and a restless, always-moving career of my own, in some of the same places but in many new and different places too, in that the army’s global footprint was not identical to the Marine Corps’.