Lee Child - Killing Floor

FINLAY DROVE STRAIGHT THROUGH MARGRAVE AND PARKED up outside the station house. Right at the curb opposite the big plate-glass entrance doors. He and Roscoe got out of the car and stood there waiting for me, just like Baker and Stevenson had forty-eight hours before. I got out and joined them in the noontime heat. We stood there for a moment and then Finlay pulled open the heavy door and we went inside. Walked back through the empty squad room to the big rosewood office.

Finlay sat at the desk. I sat in the same chair I’d used on Friday. Roscoe pulled a chair up and put it next to mine. Finlay rattled open the desk drawer. Took out the tape recorder. Went through his routine of testing the microphone with his fingernail. Then he sat still and looked at me.

“I’m very sorry about your brother,” he said.

I nodded. Didn’t say anything.

“I’m going to have to ask you a lot of questions, I’m afraid,” he said.

I just nodded again. I understood his position. I’d been in his position plenty of times myself.

“Who would be his next of kin?” he asked.

“I am,” I said. “Unless he got married without telling me.”

“Do you think he might have done that?” Finlay asked me.

“We weren’t close,” I said. “But I doubt it.”

“Your parents dead?”

I nodded. Finlay nodded. Wrote me down as next of kin.

“What was his full name?”

“Joe Reacher,” I said. “No middle name.”

“Is that short for Joseph?”

“No,” I said. “It was just Joe. Like my name is just Jack. We had a father who liked simple names.”

“OK,” Finlay said. “Older or younger?”

“Older,” I said. I gave him Joe’s date of birth. “Two years older than me.”

“So he was thirty-eight?”

I nodded. Baker had said the victim had been maybe forty. Maybe Joe hadn’t worn well.

“Do you have a current address for him?”

I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “Washington, D.C., somewhere. Like I said, we weren’t close.”

“OK,” he said again. “When did you last see him?”

“About twenty minutes ago,” I said. “In the morgue.”

Finlay nodded gently. “Before that?”

“Seven years ago,” I said. “Our mother’s funeral.”

“Have you got a photograph of him?”

“You saw the stuff in the property bag,” I said. “I haven’t got a photograph of anything.”

He nodded again. Went quiet. He was finding this difficult.

“Can you give me a description of him?”

“Before he got his face shot off?”

“It might help, you know,” Finlay said. “We need to find out who saw him around, when and where.”

I nodded.

“He looked like me, I guess,” I said. “Maybe an inch taller, maybe ten pounds lighter.”

“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?”