The Affair: A Reacher Novel

throat?”
    “No.”
    “You ever seen it done?”
    She shook her head.
    “No,” she said.
    “The blood doesn’t just seep out like you slit your wrists in the bathtub. It comes out like a fire hose. It sprays everywhere, ten feet or more, great gouts of it, splattering all over the place. I’ve seen it on ceilings, even. Crazy patterns, like someone took a paint can and threw it around. Like that guy, Jackson Pollock. The painter.”
    Deveraux said nothing.
    I said, “There would have been blood all over the alley. On the loan office’s wall, for sure. And on the bar’s wall, and maybe on the pharmacy’s wall. On the floor, too, yards away. Crazy thin patterns. Not a neat pool right underneath her. That’s just not possible. She wasn’t killed there.”
    Deveraux linked her hands on the table and bowed her head over them. She was doing something I had never seen a person do before. Not literally. She was hanging her head. She breathed in, breathed out, and five seconds later she looked up again and said, “I’m an idiot. I suppose I must have known all that, but I didn’t remember it. I just didn’t see it.”
    “Don’t feel bad,” I said. “You never saw it happen, so you don’t have anything to remember.”
    “No, it’s basic,” she said. “I’m an idiot. I’ve wasted days.”
    “It gets worse,” I said. “There’s more.”
    She didn’t want to hear about how it got worse. She didn’t want more. Not immediately. Not right then. She was still beating herselfup for missing the thing with the blood. I had seen that kind of reaction many times. I had
had
that kind of reaction many times. Smart, conscientious people hate making mistakes. Not just because of ego. Because mistakes of a certain type have the kind of consequences that people with consciences don’t like to live with.
    She frowned and ground her teeth and growled at herself for a minute, and then she shook her head and stopped and came up with a brave smile, tighter and grimmer than her normal sunny radiance. She said, “OK, tell me more. Tell me how it gets worse. But not in here. I have to eat here three times a day. I don’t want the associations.”
    So we paid for our breakfasts and stepped out to the sidewalk. We stood there for a long moment, near her car, saying nothing. I could tell by her body language she wasn’t going to invite me to her office. She didn’t want me near the Sheriff’s Department. This wasn’t a democracy. In the end she said, “Let’s go back to the hotel. We can use the lounge. We’re guaranteed privacy there, after all. Since we’re the only two guests.”
    We walked back down the street, and up the shaky steps, and across the old veranda. We went in and used the door on the left of the lobby. I smelled the same damp and dust and mildew as the night before. In the daylight the humped shapes I had seen in the dark turned out to be armchairs, as I had thought. There were twelve of them, grouped in various combinations, twos and fours. We took a matched pair, either side of a cold fireplace.
    I asked her, “Why do you live here?”
    “Good question,” she said. “I thought it would be a month or two. But it extended.”
    “What about your old man’s house?”
    “Rented,” she said. “The lease died with him.”
    “You could rent another one. Or buy one. Isn’t that what people do?”
    She nodded. “I looked at some. Couldn’t pull the trigger. Have you seen the houses around here?”
    I said, “Some of them look OK.”
    “Not to me,” she said. “I wasn’t ready, anyway. I hadn’t decidedhow long I was going to stay. Still haven’t, really. No doubt it will turn out to be the rest of my life, but I guess I don’t want to admit that to myself. I’d rather let it creep up on me day by day, I suppose.”
    I thought about my pal Stan Lowrey, and his want ads. There was a lot more to leaving the service than getting a job. There were houses, and cars, and clothes. There were a hundred strange, unknown details, like the customs of a remote foreign tribe, glimpsed only in passing, and never fully understood.
    Deveraux said, “So let’s hear it.”
    I said, “Her throat
was
cut, right? We’re clear on that?”
    “Definitely. Unmistakably.”
    “And that was the only wound?”
    “The doctor says so.”
    “So somewhere there’s blood all over the place. Wherever it was actually done. In a room, maybe, or out in the woods. It’s impossible to clean up properly.