The Affair: A Reacher Novel

side of the issue was Elizabeth Deveraux.
    Like every summary I had ever read this one began with a bald narrative of events, written neutrally and patiently, without implication or interpretation, in language anxious to be clear. The story was fairly simple. Like a subplot from daytime TV. Elizabeth Deveraux and Paul Evers were dating, and then they weren’t, and then Paul Evers and Alice Bouton were dating, and then Paul’s car got trashed, and then Alice got dishonorably discharged after a financial irregularity came to light.
    That was the narrative of events.
    Next came a digression into Alice Bouton’s situation. Like a sidebar. Alice was indisputably guilty, in General Dyer’s opinion. The facts were clear. The evidence was there. The case was solid. The prosecution had been fair. The defense had been conscientious. The verdict had been unanimous. The amount in question had been less than four hundred dollars. In cash, taken from an evidence locker. Proceeds from an illegal weapons sale, confiscated, bagged up, logged in, and awaiting exhibition in an upcoming court martial. Alice Bouton had taken it and spent it on a dress, a purse, and a pair of shoes, in a store close to where she was based. The store remembered her. Four hundred bucks was a lot of money for a jarhead to spend on an outfit, back in 1992. Some of the larger denomination bills were still in the store’s register when the MPs came calling, and the serial numbers matched the evidence log.
    Case closed.
    Sidebar over.
    Next up was General Dyer’s interpretation of the three-way turmoil. It was painstaking. It was prefaced with a cast-iron guarantee that all conclusions were amply supported by data. Conversations had been had, interviews had been conducted, information had been gathered, witnesses had been consulted, and then everything had been cross-referenced and cross-checked, and anything supported by fewer than two independent sources had been omitted. A full court press, in other words. You could take it to the bank. The guarantee ended with a long emphasized paragraph. I could picture the IBM machine bucking and rocking on the desk as the golf ball slammed back and forth, supplying the furious underline. The paragraph confirmed Dyer’s belief that everything about to be described was courtroom-ready, should further action be deemed necessary or desirable.
    I turned the page and started in on the analysis. Dyer wrote in a plain style, and did not inject himself into the narrative. Given the preceding page, any reader would understand that the content might not be one-hundred-percent forensically proven fact, but that equally it was very far from scuttlebutt or rumor. It was solid information. It was known as much as anything was knowable. Hence Dyer never wrote
I believe
or
I think
or
It seems likely
. He just told the story.
    Which went like this: Elizabeth Deveraux had been seriously pissed when Paul Evers dumped her for Alice Bouton. She had felt slighted, disregarded, disrespected, and insulted. She was a woman scorned, and her subsequent behavior seemed determined to prove the cliché true in every respect. She victimized the new couple by bad-mouthing them everywhere she could, and by manipulating workloads whenever she could, to stop them getting down time together.
    Then she drove Paul Evers’s car off a bridge.
    Evers’s car was nothing special, but it represented a significant investment on his part, and it was essential to his social life, given that no one wants to stay on post all the time. Deveraux had retained a key for it, and late one night had driven it away and steered it carefully beyond a bridge abutment and let it roll over a thirty-foot drop into aconcrete flood sluice. The impact had almost totaled the car, and heavy rain later that night had finished the job.
    Then Deveraux had turned her attention to Alice Bouton.
    She had started by breaking her arm.
    General Dyer’s two-independent-sources rule meant that the circumstances were not precisely described, because the attack had not been witnessed, but Bouton claimed Deveraux had been the assailant, and Deveraux had never denied it. The medical facts were beyond dispute. Bouton’s left elbow had been dislocated and both bones in her left forearm had been snapped. She had been in a hard cast for six long weeks.
    And Deveraux had spent those six long weeks pursuing the theft allegation with demonic intensity. Except that
pursuing
was the wrong word,