I said, "Well, there's a surprise. You're still there. You've still got a job."
He said, "I think I'm safer than you are right now. Frances Neagley just reported back."
"She worries too much."
"You don't worry enough."
"Is Karla Dixon still working financial stuff?"
"I could find out."
"Ask her a question for me. I want to know if I should be concerned about money coming in from a place called Kosovo. Like gangsters laundering bales of cash. That kind of a thing."
"Doesn't sound very likely. That's the Balkans, right? They're middle class if they own a goat. Rich, if they own two. Not like America."
I looked out the window and said, "Not so very different from parts of it."
Lowrey said, "I wish I was working financial stuff. I might have picked up some necessary skills. Like how to have savings."
"Don't worry," I said. "You'll get unemployment. For a spell, at least."
"You sound cheerful."
"I've got a lot to be cheerful about."
"Why? What's going on down there?"
"All kinds of wonderful things," I said, and hung up. Then I trapped a second dollar bill between the phone and the wall and dialed the call I wanted to make. I used the Treasury Department's main switchboard and got a woman who sounded middle-aged and elegant. She asked, "How may I direct your inquiry?"
I said, "Joe Reacher, please."
There was some scratching and clicking and a minute of dead air. No hold music at Treasury, either, back in 1997. Then a woman picked up and said, "Mr. Reacher's office." She sounded young and bright. Probably a magna cum laude graduate from a prestigious college, full of shining eyes and idealism. Probably good looking, too. Probably wearing a short plaid skirt and a white turtleneck sweater. My brother knew how to pick them.
I asked, "Is Mr. Reacher there?"
"I'm afraid he's out of the office for a few days. He had to go to Georgia." She said it like she would have said Saturn or Neptune. An incomprehensible distance, and barren when you got there. She asked, "May I take a message?"
"Tell him his brother called."
"How exciting. He never mentioned he had brothers. But actually, you sound just like him, did you know that?"
"So people say. There's no message. Tell him I just wanted to say hello. To touch base, you know. To see how he is."
"Will he know which brother?"
"I hope so," I said. "He's only got one."
I left immediately after that. Shawna's brother did not break his lonely vigil. I waved and he waved back, but he didn't move. He just kept on watching the far horizon. I hiked back to the Kelham road and turned left for town. I got some of the way toward the railroad and heard a car behind me, and a blip of a siren, like a courtesy. I turned and Deveraux pulled up right alongside me, neat and smooth. A short moment later I was in her front passenger seat, with nothing between us except her holstered shotgun.
34
The first thing I said was, "Long lunch." Which was supposed to be just a descriptive comment, but she took it as more. She said, "Jealous?"
"Depends what you ate. I had a cheeseburger."
"We had rare roast beef and horseradish sauce. With roast potatoes. It was very good. But you must know that. You must eat in the OC all the time."
"How was the conversation?"
"Challenging."
"In what way?"
"First tell me what you've been doing."
"Me? I've been eating humble pie. Metaphorically, at least."
"How so?"
"I went back to the wrecked car. I was under orders to destroy the license plate. But it was already gone. The debris field had been picked clean, very methodically. There was a big force out there at some point this morning. So I think you're right. There are boots on the ground outside Kelham's fence. They're operating an exclusion zone. They were diverted to the clean up because someone at the Pentagon didn't trust me to do it."
Deveraux didn't answer.
"Then I took a long walk," I said.
Deveraux asked, "Did you see the gravel pile?"
"I saw it this morning," I said. "I went back for a closer look."
"Thinking about Janice May Chapman?"
"Obviously."
"It's a coincidence," she said. "Black-on-white rapes are incredibly rare in Mississippi. No matter what folks want to believe."
"A white guy could have taken her there."
"Unlikely. He'd have stuck out like a sore thumb. He'd have been risking a hundred witnesses."
"Shawna Lindsay's body was found there. I talked to her kid brother."
"Where else would it be found? It's a vacant lot. That's where bodies get dumped."
"Was she killed there?"
"I don't think so. There was no blood."
"At the scene or inside her?"
"Neither one."
"What do you make of that?"
"Same guy."
"And?"
"Addiction to risk," she said. "June, November, March, the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, then the middle, then the top. By Carter County standards, that is. He started safe and got progressively riskier. No one cares about poor black girls. Chapman was the first really visible victim."
"You care about poor black girls."
"But you know how it is. An investigation can't sustain itself all on its own. It needs an external source of energy. It needs outrage."
"And there wasn't any?"
"There was pain, obviously. And sorrow, and suffering. But mostly there was resignation. And familiarity. Business as usual. If all the murdered women of Mississippi rose up tonight and marched through town, you'd notice two things. It would be a very long parade, and most of the marchers would be black. Poor black girls have been getting killed here forever. White women with money, not so often."
"What was the McClatchy girl's name?"
"Rosemary."
"Where was her body found?"
"In the ditch near the crossing. The other side of the tracks."
"Any blood?"
"None at all."
"Was she raped?"
"No."
"Was Shawna Lindsay?"
"No."
"So Janice May Chapman was another kind of escalation."
"Apparently."
"Did Rosemary McClatchy have a connection with Kelham?"
"Of course she did. You saw her photograph. Kelham guys were lining up at her door with their tongues hanging out. She stepped out with a string of them."
"Black guys or white guys?"
"Both."
"Officers or enlisted men?"
"Both."
"Any suspects?"
"I had no probable cause even to ask questions. She wasn't seen with anyone from Kelham for at least two weeks before she was killed. My jurisdiction ends at Kelham's fence. They wouldn't have let me through the gate."
"They let you through the gate today."
"Yes," she said. "They did."
"What is Munro like?" I asked.
"Challenging," she said again.
We thumped up over the tracks and parked just beyond them, with the straight road west in front of us, and the ditch where Rosemary McClatchy had been found on our right, and the turn into Main Street ahead and on our left. A standard cop instinct. If in doubt, pull over and park where people can see you. It feels like doing something, even when it isn't.