He said, “I broke up with Shawna weeks before she died. How do you explain that?”

“You ask them back, they come running, right?”

No answer.

I said, “And you put Janice Chapman behind a bar for the same reason. She was a party girl. And maybe you set yourself a little extra challenge that night. Third time lucky. Variety is the spice of life. Maybe you told the guys you were hitting the head, and you snuck out and did it in the same time you need to take a leak. Six minutes and forty seconds would be my guess. Which is not plausible. Not for Deveraux. That’s where the alternative theory starts to falter. Did nobody think about how she’s built? She couldn’t lift a full-grown woman off a deer trestle. She couldn’t carry a corpse to a car.”

Senator Riley said, “The file is genuine.”

I said, “It started out with its feet on the ground. Someone thought up a neat little story. The jealous woman, the broken arm. The missing four hundred dollars. It was quite subtle. Conclusions would be drawn by the reader. But then someone chickened out. They didn’t want subtle anymore. They wanted a flashing red light. So you retyped the whole thing to include a car. Then you got on the phone and told your son to go put his own car on the train track.”

“That’s crazy.”

“There was no other reason behind the stuff with the car. The car was senseless. It served no other purpose. Other than to nail the lid shut on Deveraux as soon as anyone opened that file.”

“That file is genuine.”

“They went too far with the dead people. James Dyer, maybe. We could buy that. He was a senior officer. Health maybe not the best. But Paul Evers? Too convenient. As if you were scared of people asking questions. Dead people can’t answer. Which brings us to Alice Bouton. Is she going to be dead too? Or is she going to be still alive? In which case, what would she tell us if we asked her about her broken arm?”

“The file is completely genuine, Reacher.”

“Can you read, senator? If so, read this for me.” I slid the folded diner check from my pocket and tossed it in his lap.

He said, “I’m not allowed to move.”

I said, “You can pick it up.”

He picked it up. It shook in his hand. He looked at the back. He looked at the front. He turned it right way up. He took a breath. He asked, “Have you read it? Do you know what it says?”

I said, “No, I haven’t looked at it. I don’t need to know. Either way I’ve got enough to nail you.”

He hesitated.

I said, “But don’t fake anything. I’ll read it right after you, just to check.”

He took a breath.

He read out, “Per United States Marine Corps Personnel Command.”

He stopped.

He said, “I need to know this is not classified material.”

“Does it matter?”

“You’re not cleared for classified material. Neither is my son.”

“It’s not classified material,” I said. “Keep reading.”

He said, “Per United States Marine Corps Personnel Command there was no Marine named Alice Bouton.”

I smiled.

“They invented her,” I said. “She didn’t exist. Very sloppy work. It makes me wonder if I was wrong. Maybe you watered down the subtlety in two separate stages. And maybe the car came first. Maybe it was Alice Bouton you wrote in at the last minute. Without enough time to steal a real identity.”

The old guy said, “The army had to be protected. You must understand that.”

“The army’s loss is the Marine Corps’ gain. And you’re their granddaddy too. So professionally you didn’t give a damn. It was your son you were protecting.”

“It could have been anyone in his unit. We’d do this for anyone at all.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “This was a fantastic amount of corruption. This was exceptional. This was unprecedented. This was about the two of you, and no one else.”

No answer.

I said, “By the way, it’s me who’s protecting the army.”

I didn’t want to shoot them, obviously. Not that there would be much left for the pathologist to examine, but a cautious man takes no unnecessary risks. So I dropped the gun on the seat beside me and came forward with my right hand open, and I got it flat on the back of the senator’s head, and I heaved it forward and bounced it off the dashboard rail. Pretty hard. The human arm can pitch a baseball at a hundred miles an hour, so it might get close to thirty with a human head. And the seat belt people tell us that an untethered impact at thirty miles an hour can kill you. Not that I needed the senator dead. I just needed him out of action for a minute and a half.

I moved my right hand over and got it under Reed Riley’s chin. His hands came down off his head to tear at my wrist and I replaced them with my own left hand, open, jamming down hard on the top of his head. Push and pull, up and down, left hand and right hand, like a vise. I was crushing his head. Then I slid my right hand up over his chiseled chin until the heel of my hand lodged there and I clamped my palm over his mouth. His skin was like fine sandpaper. He had shaved early that morning, and now it was close to midnight. I slid my left hand over his brow until its heel caught on the ridge below his hairline. I stretched down and clamped his nose between my finger and thumb.

And then it was all about human nature.

He thought he was suffocating. First he tried to bite my palm, but he couldn’t get his mouth open. I was clamping too hard. Jaw muscles are strong, but only when they’re closing. Opening was never an evolutionary priority. I waited him out. He clawed at my hands. I waited him out. He scrabbled in his seat and drummed his heels. I waited him out. He arched his back. I waited him out. He stretched his head up toward me.

I changed my grip and twisted hard and broke his neck.

It was a move I had learned from Leon Garber. Maybe he had seen it somewhere. Maybe he had done it somewhere. He was capable of it. The suffocation part makes it easy. They always stretch their heads up. Some kind of a bad instinct. They put their necks on the line all by themselves. Garber said it never fails, and it never has for me.

And it succeeded again a minute later, with the senator. He was weaker, but his face was slick with blood from where I had broken his nose on the dashboard rail, so the effort expended was very much the same.

Chapter

88

I got out of the car at eleven twenty-eight exactly. The train was thirty-two miles south of us. Maybe just crossing under Route 78 east of Tupelo. I closed my door but left all the windows open. I tossed the key into Reed Riley’s lap. I turned away.

And sensed a figure wide on my left.

And another, wide on my right.

Good moves by someone. I had the Beretta, and I could hit one or the other of them, but not both of them. Too much lateral travel between rounds.

I waited.

Then the figure on my right spoke.

She said, “Reacher?”

I said, “Deveraux?”

The figure on my left said, “And Munro.”

I said, “What the hell are you two doing here?”

They converged on me, and I tried to push them away from the car. I said, “Why are you here?”

Deveraux said, “Did you really think I was going to let him keep me in the diner?”

“I wish he had,” I said. “I didn’t want either of you to hear anything about this.”

“You made Riley open the windows. You wanted us to hear.”

“No, I wanted fresh air. I didn’t know you were there.”

“Why shouldn’t we hear?”

“I didn’t want you to know what they were saying about you. And I wanted Munro to go back to Germany with a clear conscience.”

Munro said, “My conscience is always clear.”

“But it’s easier to play dumb if you really don’t know the answer.”

“I never had a problem playing dumb. Some folks think I am.”