The Affair: A Reacher Novel

arched and her throat is presented as the lowest point.”
    We sat in the shadowed silence for a minute, not saying a word. I guessed Deveraux was picturing the scene. I sure was. A clearing in the woods somewhere, remote and lonely, or a room far from anywhere, with improvised equipment, or a hut or a shack with roof beams, Janice May Chapman hanging upside down, her hands hauled up behind her back, toward her feet, her shoulders straining, her back curving painfully. She was probably gagged, too, the gag tied to a third rope looped over the trestle’s top rail. That third rope must have been pulled tight, arching her head up and back, keeping it well out of the way, leaving her throat completely accessible.
    I asked, “How did she wear her hair?”
    “Short,” Deveraux said. “It wouldn’t have gotten in the way.”
    I said nothing.
    Deveraux asked, “Do you really think that’s how it was done?”
    I nodded. “Any other method, she wouldn’t have bled out all the way. Not white as a sheet. She would have died, and her heart would have stopped pumping, and there would have been something left inside her. Two, three pints, maybe. It was being upside down that finished the job. Gravity, plain and simple.”
    “The ropes would have left marks, wouldn’t they?”
    “What did the medical examiner say? Have you had his report?”
    “We don’t have a medical examiner. Just the local doctor. One step up from when all we had was the local undertaker, but not a very big step.”
    Not a democracy
. I said, “You should go take a look for yourself.”
    She said, “Will you come with me?”
    We walked back to the diner and took Deveraux’s car from the curb and U-turned and headed back down Main Street, past the hotel again, past the pharmacy and the hardware store, and onward to where Main Street turned into a wandering rural route. The doctor’s place was half a mile south of the town. It was a regular clapboard house, painted white, set in a large untidy yard, with a shingle next to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. The name on the shingle was Merriam, and it was lettered crisply in black over a rectangle of white paint that was brighter and newer than the surrounding surface. A new arrival, not long in town, new to the community.
    The house had its ground floor given over to the medical practice. The front parlor was a waiting room, and the back room was where patients were examined and treated. We found Merriam in there, at a desk, doing paperwork. He was a florid man close to sixty. New in town, perhaps, but not new to doctoring. His greeting was languid and his pace was slow. I got the impression he regarded the Carter Crossing position as semi-retirement, maybe after a pressurized career in a big-city practice. I didn’t like him much. A snap judgment, maybe, but generally those are as good as any other kind.
    Deveraux told the guy what we wanted to see and he got up slowly and led us through the house to what might once have been a kitchen. It was now tiled in cold white, and it had no-nonsense medical-style sinks and cupboards all over it. In the center of the floor it had a stainless steel mortuary table, and on the table was a corpse. The light over it was bright.
    The corpse was Janice May Chapman. She had a tag on her toe with her name written on it in a spidery hand. She was naked. Pellegrino had called her as white as a sheet, but by that point she was pale blue and light purple, blotched and mottled with the characteristic marbling of the truly bloodless. She had been perhaps five feet seven inches tall, and she might once have weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds, neither fat nor excessively thin. She had dark hair bobbed short. It was thick and heavy, well cut, and still in good condition. Pellegrino had called her pretty, and it didn’t require much imagination to agree. The flesh on her face was collapsed and empty, but her bone structure was good. Her teeth were white and even.
    Her throat was a mess. It was laid open from side to side and the wound had dried to a rubbery gape. Flesh and muscle had shrunk back, and tendons and ligaments had curled, and empty veins and arteries had retracted. White bone was visible, and I could see a single horizontal score mark on it.
    The knife had been substantial, the blade had been sharp, and the killing stroke had been forceful, confident, and fast.
    Deveraux said, “We need to examine her wrists and ankles.”
    The doctor made a
have