Карин Слотер - Cleaning the Gold

Will knew the crooked bastard of a sheriff was exactly the kind of man who would keep a sexual predator on his payroll. “I'm assuming the sheriff made Beatrice lie in her statement about the shooting. But we're two decades past that. Her partner didn't mention any of this. They were together for fifteen years.”

“Victims don't talk about that stuff sometimes, even to their partners. They want to put it behind them. They don't want people to feel sorry for them, or worse, to be blamed.” Reacher painted the picture, “Hero cop accused of rape by a grocery store cashier who has a juvenile record for stealing her uncle's car. Whose side do you think the town would've been on?”

Will couldn't argue. People were assholes. “April 16, 1997.”

Reacher shoved the cotton gloves into his back pocket. “Beatrice was late getting to the library. She was nervous. Understandably. My brother was waiting outside when she arrived. Deacon pulled up on the librarian's 9-1-1 call. He grabbed Beatrice and tried to force her into the back of his squad car. My brother didn't like that.”

“He shot Deacon in the head.”

“Beatrice told Neagley the gun went off by accident.”

“Twice,” Will said. “That's some accident.”

Reacher did not address the inconsistency.

This was where Will and Reacher parted philosophical ways. He said, “Most of the people who get murdered aren't good people. There's a reason they're in a bad situation.”

“That's for damn sure.”

Will said, “Murder is still murder. ‘He deserved to die' is not a valid defense in the state of Georgia.”

“I hear it still holds up in Texas.”

“What if your brother was wrong about Deacon? What if Beatrice lied?”

“He wasn't and she didn't.”

Will wasn't going to lecture a vigilante on the arrogant immorality of vigilantism. “Your brother killed a man in cold blood.”

“There's no such thing as cold blood,” Reacher said. “Blood is always warm, to a degree. A police officer was stopped from raping a woman for the third time. Maybe worse than that. And exponentially onward, into the future.”

Will said nothing.

“My brother is dead anyway,” Reacher said. “He was murdered a month later. Also in Margrave, as a matter of fact. No doubt connected to his business there a month before. So you're not going to get your man, however hard you try.”

“I didn't find any record—”

“The Margrave sheriff's department didn't keep records of their own crimes,” Reacher said. “At that point my brother was working for Treasury. He was a heavyweight figure by then. They took the body away and cleaned up the mess. A week later it was like nothing had ever happened.”

Will studied Reacher's face for any signs of deception, but it didn't matter. They both knew he would check out the story.

Reacher said, “Familial DNA.”

The guy didn't have a cellphone, but he knew that the similarities in the Y chromosomes of two different males could be used to establish a blood relationship.

Reacher said, “I'm the only one left in my family. I know that my brother was a good man. I don't want to see his name dragged through the mud. But you've made it pretty clear you're not going to drop this case. And I'm not going to get in the way of an honest copper doing his work. Not my thing. So, here.”

Reacher had the toothbrush in his hand.

The bristles were crushed from being in his back pocket. Will stared at the tiny sliver of handle sticking out of Reacher's massive paw.

The right thing to do was to collect the evidence, see the investigation through to its logical end, then close the case. Will knew his boss would say the same thing. Just like he knew that she would also say it was a waste of resources working a case where the suspect was dead and the victim was equally dead, and also a brutal rapist.

There was a reason why Bond needed an M.

Will crossed his arms over his chest, leaving the toothbrush hanging. “Don't you think it's unsanitary to keep a toothbrush in your pocket all day?”

Reacher returned the toothbrush to its place.

“This one's a mistake,” he said. “Usually they come with a cover. Or hotels have them free at the front desk. Like, every day, you can have a new one straight out of the wrapper. Don't worry about my personal standards.”

“Sure.” Will was suddenly mindful he was lecturing a guy about hygiene when, just this morning, he had eaten the sweat-melted wad of Lukather's Skittles in his pocket.

Reacher began the Sisyphean task of putting on his cotton gloves.

Will leaned down and grabbed two bars of gold. “What do you think is going to happen to Lukather?”

Reacher grabbed six bars, three and three, and waited for Will to stack his. “That's a great question. I heard she's already flipped on Baldani. I heard they're going to give her a deal to testify about the whole scheme.”

“Why? They don't need her to make the case. They've got them both dead to rights. They've got the USB and the cash and the bad guy from the bar.” Will tried not to groan as he lifted two bars of gold. He thought about Baldani's habit of flicking cigarettes on the ground. The butts were teeming with his DNA. He could take that back to Georgia. And if CODIS returned a hit on Baldani, all the better.

Suddenly he stopped lifting.

He asked Reacher, “How long have you been working here?”

“Twelve days.” Reacher disappeared into the vault. “Why?”

“And you work fast.”

“I try to give value.”

“Therefore you've seen a lot of gold.” Will got going again, and stacked his bars on top of the others. They were all stamped with the same seal of the United States Treasury, their individual numbers likely matching the numbers in the plastic envelopes hanging from the ribbons on the doors.

Numbers that hadn't been checked against the gold bars inside.

Gold bars that had been weighed with stray cotton fuzz and strands of hair that would throw the number on the scale over by a few ounces every time.

“It's weird,” Will said. “But the thing is, I could swear I've seen these serial numbers before. As in yesterday in the other vault.”

“You've seen a lot of numbers,” Reacher said. He stacked his bars on top of Will's. “Sixteen digits each. You and I have stacked and re-stacked 38,492 bars of gold so far. That's 615,872 separate integers. Literally trillions of potential combinations.”

Will had to take him at his word. He was pretty good at math, but he wasn't a quantum computer. Though, he did have an incredibly good memory for numbers, and his memory was telling him that the numbers on the bars looked damn familiar.

“I could swear,” he said again.

“You good with numbers?”

“In a weird way.”

“What was on the second-last bar you just stacked?”

Will recited sixteen digits from memory. Fast and confident. And exactly correct.

Reacher was clearly silently checking him, also from memory. Apparently, he was good with numbers too, in a weird way. He said, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“What?” Will said.

“Are you a good reader?”

Will didn't answer.

Reacher said, “It often doesn't go together. I knew a few guys. I knew one guy who could tell you the square root of the distance to the sun, but he couldn't read a lick.”

“Can you?” Will asked.

Reacher nodded. “I was fortunate. I can read pretty good.”

Will didn't answer.

“I agree about the numbers,” Reacher said. “They got me thinking. First of all, about how you got here.”

“My boss pulled strings.”

“How did he know where I was?”

“She.”

“How?”

“I put your name in the system,” Will said. “A cold case report.”