Jack and Joe: Hunt for Jack Reacher Series (The Hunt for Jack Reacher Series Book 6) (16 page)

I was visualizing the fight in my head. I saw Reacher cocking one giant foot and driving his heel into Alvin Barry’s right kneecap with every ounce of force his two hundred thirty pounds could deliver, blasting right through him hard enough to shatter the patella and fold the man’s leg backward. Alvin would have fallen forward. Reacher would have smiled. Maybe even thought to himself something like
he shoots, he scores
.

Alvin Barry must have felt like a Mack truck ran him down. A Broken bone, torn cartilage, ripped ligaments. I remembered Junior’s anger and vows of revenge. I shuddered.

But Clifton’s reaction confused me because he’d said
people
were unhappy with Reacher’s abuse of Alvin, but I got the feeling that Clifton was ambivalent. “So, you think what Reacher did was okay, or not okay?”

He flashed the withering stare he’d used to quell armed combat troops at fifty paces. “Reacher was wearing his Class As at the time. Complete with name tag. Everyone standing around watching knew exactly who he was. An officer. In the U.S. Army. He disgraced us all.”

The way he delivered this made it abundantly clear that what Reacher did would have been okay with General Matthew Clifton if only he’d done it while wearing jeans and a T-shirt, so nobody knew he was supposed to act like an officer and a gentleman. I shuddered again. Good to know.

“When did you see Reacher last?”

“When he was offered the opportunity to retire. Offered against my advice, by the way. He’d earned his way back. I’d have kept him on. I have no idea what he’s doing now or where he’s doing it or to whom. I couldn’t help you find him if I wanted to. Which I don’t. Pass that along to Cooper and Finlay for me. Tell them they’re barking up the wrong tree and to stay out of my way.” He grabbed his hat off the desk and strode toward the exit.

“One more thing, General.” He stopped at the threshold and glanced back. “When was the last time you saw Joe Reacher?”

The question seemed to surprise and soften him some. His tone was slightly less hostile when he replied. “Couple of weeks before he died. We had dinner in DC. Damn shame about Joe. He was a hell of a man. Anything else?”

Clifton was about to walk out on us. I wanted to shake him up. I guessed Tony Clifton had some reason for sending me in this direction and Tony knew what my assignment was, but I didn’t see any connection between the Reacher file and Matthew Clifton at all.

So I thought about the timing. I remembered how close Joe’s ex-wife said the Reacher brothers were. How they were both officers in the Army back in 1990. Joe in Military Intelligence. Jack in Special Investigations. Summer right there with Jack.

Now, Joe was dead and Jack was missing.

Summer was the thread I needed to unravel.

From there, the Boss had expected me to dig into things and follow the trail to find out something Matthew Clifton might be hiding.

What was I supposed to uncover? And, once found, what was I supposed to do about it?

I still didn’t know enough. But I knew Summer was involved in the old JAG case and I added two plus two and took a wild zag. To get his attention. Maybe shake something loose. Shake him up, if nothing else.

“Did Joe tell you about the affair with Eunice Summer?”

I meant the situation with Summer. But he interpreted the word differently.

He reared back a little as though startled to have the subject raised, then shrugged. “As far as I know, it wasn’t a big thing,” he said. “A couple of days in Paris at Uncle Sam’s expense. Believe me, he’s done much worse.”

I blinked and shook my head to clear the cobwebs. What the hell was he talking about? Joe Reacher had a
love affair
with Eunice Summer? When did
that
happen? “I thought you said Joe was a hell of a man. Globetrotting with a lover at government expense doesn’t seem like the behavior of a straight-up guy to me, General.”

This time, he blinked. Then he smiled. “You’re right. Not the sort of thing Joe Reacher would have done at all. My sergeant will see you out.”

After he had left, Gaspar turned to me and said, “What a load of bullshit.”

I nodded, but my head was still spinning. I’d been half a second too slow and now the opportunity was lost.

I’d made two mistakes. I’d phrased my question sloppily. I’d asked about the Summer affair when I’d simply meant the Summer situation.

But Clifton interpreted the word in the sexual sense
because he knew Summer had a love affair
.

My second mistake was to quickly assume Joe Reacher was Summer’s lover because we’d been discussing Clifton’s last meal with Joe. And because Jack hadn’t been in the frame for a long, long time before I showed up in Clifton’s office.

Which was a stupid leap and I should have known it.

But now I knew something I hadn’t known before. Jack Reacher and Eunice Summer were lovers once. Which probably didn’t matter to anyone at the time.

I now understood why the Boss had sent me to interview Summer. He knew she was in trouble, and figured Reacher, with his connections, might’ve known about it, too. He thought Reacher might show up to take care of the problem. But if Reacher was coming, he was already too late to help Summer if that’s what he meant to do.

I shook my head again as if I could rearrange my gray cells into a coherent picture. It didn’t work.

What the hell was going on here? Was Reacher the cause or the effect of this situation? And why did the Boss and Finlay care?

CHAPTER 22

At the Fort Herald exit gate, Gaspar handed our visitor’s pass to the sentry.

“Thanks.” The sentry passed a flat manila envelope to Gaspar.

He looked at the envelope and asked, “Where’d this come from?”

“It was here when I came on duty, sir.”

Gaspar nodded and passed the envelope to me. It was exactly like the previous envelope I’d received from the sentry at Fort Bird. Flat, manila, letter-sized. My name was printed on the front like before.

Gaspar reached into his pocket and handed me his knife. The sentry raised the gate and Gaspar rolled through.

I slit the bottom edge of the envelope with the knife and pushed the sides together to look inside. A written report. The title of which was
Eunice Summer Autopsy
.

Waiting for proper documenting of the envelope’s contents was less important to me than reading the report. I grabbed a tissue and pulled the report out carefully without touching it. Three pages. But the most important information was near the top. My breath drew sharply and painfully into my lungs.

Cause of Death: Gunshot
.

“What is it?” Gaspar glanced toward me for an instant. Traffic was heavy and drivers seemed a little crazy around here. He kept both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road.

I shook my head in reply, opened my personal phone and found the number I’d stored there. Then I pulled a burner cell phone out of my bag and dialed. It rang four times.

“Agent Otto.” Lamont Finlay’s rich Boston accent was unmistakable. “Can you join me at the Dallas Four Seasons? We have much to discuss.”

“Affirmative,” I replied and disconnected.

Calling was a necessary risk. The burner cell was not on the Boss’s watch list yet and by the time he discovered the number, I’d have ditched it. But the rental Crown Vic was equipped with all manner of tracking and listening devices he could hack into. Not to mention the secure cell phones we carried in the vehicle, which might even be able to read our minds by this point for all I knew.

I read the rest of the autopsy report quickly.

When Gaspar merged onto the Interstate, moving smoothly with the flow of traffic, I said, “Take the spur into the city. We need to get some dinner before we fly back to New Haven.”

He asked no further questions. He’d be no more anxious to have the Boss’s nose in that report than I was. We’d discuss it soon enough.

The report’s physical description haunted me. In life, Eunice Summer had been barely larger than me. She’d weighed 120 pounds, fully dressed. She was short and slender, but O’Connor said she’d carried herself like a catwalk model. Even in the autopsy photos, her skin was the color of finely burnished mahogany.

In death, well, there wasn’t much left of her to weigh and measure after they finally extracted her body from the tortured metal. It was a minor miracle that he’d found evidence of the gunshot wound to her head, given the condition of her body, the medical examiner said. He must have done some kind of skull fragment reconstruction or computer modeling or something.

No bullet was recovered from the body or the wreckage or at the scene. Probably because no one had been looking for bullets. The crash had been more than enough to have killed her. Most times, the obvious cause is enough. There’d have been no reason for the crime scene techs to suspect another mechanism in play.

The shooter must have been counting on that because placing a bullet in her head under those conditions—small vehicle traveling fast, other vehicles around, icy roads, fog, wind, and rain? Not many assassins in the world could have done it.

There was a time when Jack Reacher possessed such skills. Safe to assume he still did.

Gaspar parked the Crown Vic and I gestured to leave our phones in the vehicle. The Boss would find us soon enough. We didn’t need a beacon to guide him.

Not until we were walking from the parking lot toward the Four Seasons entrance did Gaspar ask, “What’s going on here, Sunshine?”

I lowered my voice to blend in with ambient noises. “The envelope we just got didn’t come from the Boss. Finlay sent it. He might have sent the first one, too.”

Gaspar scowled. He trusted Finlay even less than he trusted the Boss. I handed him the envelope. He scanned the autopsy report as we walked.

Summer’s cause of death was first. When Gaspar saw it, his eyebrows shot up, but unlike me, he kept breathing even as he reached the next grabber.
Manner of death: Homicide
. His eyes moved quickly over the rest. When he finished, he folded the report lengthwise and tucked it into the breast pocket of his jacket.

I’d pulled the burner phone apart and dropped pieces of it into a series of trash barrels as we passed them.

We’d stepped five feet inside the lobby of the hotel when a dark-suited, well-proportioned man approached us. I’d seen hundreds of guys like him before. Unmistakably high-level government official security detail.

“Otto, Gaspar, this way, please.” We followed him into a crowded elevator and then down a long corridor on the top floor to Suite 4. He opened the door with a key and moved aside.

Lamont Finlay, Ph.D., stood across the open room looking exactly as he’d looked the last time I saw him. Like a prosperous financial planner to the rich and famous.

Tall, straight, solid. Close-cropped hair slightly gray at the temples. Eyes the color of cognac. Clean-shaven. Well dressed. Everything polished to high gloss. Distinguished. Experienced. Intimidating as hell.

A black man, but his ethnicity was not African-American. The file said his grandparents had emigrated from Trinidad to New York before settling in Boston, where he’d been educated at Harvard. The Boston accent had faded, but I could still hear it.

Finlay had been selected by the highest-ranking civilian responsible for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, placed one heartbeat away from the U.S. Commander-in-Chief. No watchdog kept tabs on him. He reported seldom and only through verbal briefing. No paper trail so much as named the missions he’d undertaken. Process, performance, results, also absent from the record.

Casualties, of course, never acknowledged. I’d heard rumors. Unconfirmed.

Everything I’d learned about Finlay marked him as dangerous. He deployed unique, unspecified skills in service to the country on unidentified missions. Like nuclear power, when properly harnessed he might be useful. But I’d found nothing restraining him. Not even his own word.

Was he friend or foe? Wiser to assume the worst was what Gaspar had declared the answer.

We entered Finlay’s suite and our escort closed the door behind him, presumably remaining in the corridor to guard the entrance.

As Gaspar bee-lined for the room service pastries and coffee Finlay had ordered, Finlay’s mouth lifted slightly at the corners. “Help yourself.”

Gaspar ignored him.

“What’s this about?” I asked. Finlay was at least as powerful as the Boss and could help me or hurt me at least as effectively. The last time I’d been in a similar hotel room with Finlay, I’d been nervous and intimidated, off my game. I’d vowed the next time I saw him would be different.

“You read the autopsy report. And saw the crash views. You know Colonel Summer was murdered. You must at least suspect that Cooper sent you to Fort Bird at that precise point in time because he knew the murder was planned. And he believed Reacher would be there. Maybe he believes Reacher killed her.”

“We’re not Western Union,” Gaspar said, munching. His patience for Finlay and for Finlay’s jousting with Cooper had been exhausted long ago. “You know more about it than we do. Ask him yourself.”

“I gave you the facts, questions, Gaspar.” Finlay remained unruffled, as always. Which was one of the things that made Gaspar suspicious of him. Finlay had something to hide, for sure. But then, who didn’t?