Lee Child: Gone Tomorrow

She said ‘Can you tell me exactly what happened?’

She spoke softly, with raised eyebrows and in a breathy voice brimming with care and consideration, like her primary concern was my own post-traumatic stress. Can you tell me? Can you? Like, can you bear to relive it? I smiled, briefly. Midtown South was down to low single-digit homicides per year, and even if she had dealt with all of them by herself since the first day she came on the job, I had still seen more corpses than she had. By a big multiple. The woman on the train hadn’t been the most pleasant of them, but she had been a very long way from the worst.

So I told her exactly what had happened, all the way up from Bleecker Street, all the way through the eleven-point list, my tentative approach, the fractured conversation, the gun, the suicide.

Theresa Lee wanted to talk about the list.

‘We have a copy,’ she said. ‘It’s supposed to be confidential.’

‘It’s been out in the world for twenty years,’ I said. ‘Everyone has a copy. It’s hardly confidential.’

‘Where did you see it?’

‘In Israel,’ I said. ‘Just after it was written.’

‘How?’

So I ran through my résumé for her. The abridged version. The U.S. Army, thirteen years a military policeman, the elite 110th investigative unit, service all over the world, plus detached duty here and there, as and when ordered. Then the Soviet collapse, the peace dividend, the smaller defence budget, suddenly getting cut loose.

‘Officer or enlisted man?’ she asked.

‘Final rank of major,’ I said.

‘And now?’

‘I’m retired.’

‘You’re young to be retired.’

‘I figured I should enjoy it while I can.’

‘And are you?’

‘Never better.’

‘What were you doing tonight? Down there in the Village?’

‘Music,’ I said. ‘Those blues clubs on Bleecker.’

‘And where were you headed on the 6 train?’

‘I was going to get a room somewhere or head over to the Port Authority to get a bus.’

‘To where?’

‘Wherever.’

‘Short visit?’

‘The best kind.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Nowhere. My year is one short visit after another.’

‘Where’s your luggage?’

‘I don’t have any.’

Most people ask follow-up questions after that, but Theresa Lee didn’t. Instead her eyes changed focus again and she said, ‘I’m not happy that the list was wrong. I thought it was supposed to be definitive.’ She spoke inclusively, cop to cop, as if my old job made a difference to her.

‘It was only half wrong,’ I said. ‘The suicide part was right.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘The signs would be the same, I guess. But it was still a false positive.’

‘Better than a false negative.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said again.

I asked, ‘Do we know who she was?’

‘Not yet. But we’ll find out. They tell me they found keys and a wallet at the scene. They’ll probably be definitive. But what was up with the winter jacket?’

I said, ‘I have no idea.’

She went quiet, like she was profoundly disappointed. I said, ‘These things are always works in progress. Personally I think we should add a twelfth point to the women’s list, too. If a woman bomber takes off her headscarf, there’s going to be a suntan clue, the same as the men.’

‘Good point,’ she said.

‘And I read a book that figured the part about the virgins is a mistranslation. The word is ambiguous. It comes in a passage full of food imagery. Milk and honey. It probably means raisins. Plump, and possibly candied or sugared.’

‘They kill themselves for raisins?’

‘I’d love to see their faces.’

‘Are you a linguist?’

‘I speak English,’ I said. ‘And French. And why would a woman bomber want virgins anyway? A lot of sacred texts are mistranslated. Especially where virgins are concerned. Even the New Testament, probably. Some people say Mary was a first-time mother, that’s all. From the Hebrew word. Not a virgin. The original writers would laugh, seeing what we made of it all.’

Theresa Lee didn’t comment on that. Instead she asked, ‘Are you OK?’

I took it to be an inquiry as to whether I was shaken up. As to whether I should be offered counselling. Maybe because she took me for a taciturn man who was talking too much. But I was wrong. I said, ‘I’m fine,’ and she looked a little surprised and said, ‘I would be regretting the approach, myself. On the train. I think you tipped her over the edge. Another couple of stops and she might have gotten over whatever was upsetting her.’

We sat in silence for a minute after that and then the big sergeant stuck his head in and nodded Lee out to the corridor. I heard a short whispered conversation and then Lee came back in and asked me to head over to West 35th Street with her. To the precinct house.

I asked, ‘Why?’

She hesitated.

‘Formality,’ she said. ‘To get your statement typed up, to close the file.’

‘Do I get a choice in the matter?’

‘Don’t go there,’ she said. ‘The Israeli list is involved. We could call this whole thing a matter of national security. You’re a material witness, we could keep you until you grew old and died. Better just to play ball like a good citizen.’

So I shrugged and followed her out of the Grand Central labyrinth to Vanderbilt Avenue, where her car was parked. It was an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria, battered and grimy, but it worked OK. It got us over to West 35th just fine. We went in through the grand old portal and she led me upstairs to an interview room. She stepped back and waited in the corridor and let me go in ahead of her. Then she stayed in the corridor and closed the door behind me and locked it from the outside.

THERESA LEE CAME BACK TWENTY MINUTES LATER WITH the beginnings of an official file and another guy. She put the file on the table and introduced the other guy as her partner. She said his name was Docherty. She said he had come up with a bunch of questions that maybe should have been asked and answered at the outset.

‘What questions?’ I asked.

First she offered me coffee and the bathroom. I said yes to both. Docherty escorted me down the corridor and when we got back there were three foam cups on the table, next to the file. Two coffees, one tea. I took a coffee and tried it. It was OK. Lee took the tea. Docherty took the second coffee and said, ‘Run through it all again.’

So I did, concisely, bare bones, and Docherty fussed a bit about how the Israeli list had produced a false positive, the same way that Lee had. 1 answered him the same way I had answered her, that a false positive was better than a false negative, and that looking at it from the dead woman’s point of view, whether she was heading for a solo exit or planning to take a crowd with her might not alter the personal symptoms she would be displaying. For five minutes we had a collegiate atmosphere going, three reasonable people discussing an interesting phenomenon.

Then the tone changed.

Docherty asked, ‘How did you feel?’

I asked, ‘About what?’

‘While she was killing herself.’

‘Glad that she wasn’t killing me.’

Docherty said, ‘We’re homicide detectives. We have to look at all violent deaths. You understand that, right? Just in case.’

I said, ‘Just in case of what?’

‘Just in case there’s more than meets the eye.’

‘There isn’t. She shot herself.’

‘Says you.’

‘No one can say different. Because that’s what happened.’

Docherty said, ‘There are always alternative scenarios.’

‘You think?’