Never Go Back: (Jack Reacher 18)

back to sleep.

    They got a final half-hour, and then the fourth call of the morning came in, at a quarter after six local time, and it came direct from Major Sullivan at JAG. She said, ‘I just spent three hours in the archive, and I’m afraid your theory is a little off the mark. The Big Dog’s claim was not litigated sixteen years ago, nor has it been at any time since.’
    Reacher paused a beat.
    ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Understood. Thanks for trying.’
    ‘Now do you want the good news?’
    ‘Is there any?’
    ‘It wasn’t litigated, but it was investigated very thoroughly.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘It was a fraud, from beginning to end.’

FIFTY-EIGHT

    SULLIVAN SAID, ‘ SOMEONE really went to bat for you. You must have been very well respected, major. It wasn’t a class action thing. There was no new policy regarding ambulance chasers. This was all about you. Someone wanted to clear your name.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The hard work was done by a captain from the 135th MP, name of Granger.’
    ‘Man or woman?’
    ‘A man, based on the West Coast. Don Granger.’
    ‘Never heard of him.’
    ‘All his notes were copied to an MP two-star, name of Garber.’
    ‘Leon Garber,’ Reacher said. ‘He was my rabbi, more or less. I owe him a lot. Even more than I thought, clearly.’
    ‘I guess so. He must have driven the whole thing. And you must have been his blue-eyed boy, because this was one hell of a full court press. But you owe Granger, too. He worked his butt off for you, and he saw something everyone else missed.’
    ‘What was the story?’
    ‘You guys generate a lot of complaints. Your branch’s standard operating procedure is play dumb and hope they go away, which they often do, but if they don’t, then they’re defended, with historically mixed results. That’s how it went for many years. Then the ones that went away started to cause a problem, ironically. You all had old unproven allegations on file. Most of them were obvious bullshit, quite rightly ignored, but some were marginal. And promotions boards saw them. And they started wondering about smoke without fire, and people weren’t getting ahead, and it became an issue. And the Big Dog’s complaint was worse than most. I guess General Garber felt it was too toxic to ignore, even if it might have gone away by itself. He didn’t want to leave it sitting there on the record. It was way too smoky.’
    ‘He could have asked me about it direct.’
    ‘Granger asked him why he didn’t.’
    ‘And what was the answer?’
    ‘Garber thought you might have done it. But he didn’t want to hear it direct.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘He thought you might have gotten upset at the thought of SAWs on the streets of Los Angeles.’
    ‘That was the LAPD’s problem, not mine. All I wanted was a name.’
    ‘Which you got, and he didn’t really see how else you could have gotten it.’
    ‘He didn’t talk to me afterwards, either.’
    ‘He was afraid you’d stop by and put a bullet in the lawyer’s head.’
    ‘I might have.’
    ‘Then Garber was a wise man. His strategy was immaculate. He put Granger on it, and the first thing Granger didn’t like was the Big Dog, and the second thing he didn’t like was the lawyer. But there were no cracks anywhere, and he knew you had been with the guy moments before he was beaten, and the affidavit was what it was, so he was stuck. He came up with the same thing you did, which was some other dude did it, or dudes, maybe a delegation sent over by a disgruntled customer, which in that context meant a gang, either Latino like Rodriguez or black, but he didn’t make any progress on his own. So next he went to the LAPD, but the cops had nothing to offer, either. Which Granger didn’t necessarily regard as definitive, because at the relevant time the cops had been up to their eyes in racial sensitivity issues, like the LAPD often was back then, and they were nervous about discussing gangs with a stranger, in case the stranger was really a journalist who believed gang issues were code words for racial insensitivity. So Granger went back to the gang idea on his own, and he checked the record for who had been armed and dangerous at the time, as a kind of starting point, and he found no one had been armed and dangerous at the time. There was a seventy-two-hour period without a single gang crime reported anywhere. So initially Granger concluded gangs were on the wane in LA, and he better look elsewhere, but he had no luck, and