The Affair: A Reacher Novel

them seemed to have mixed with rain or dew to form a weak adhesive. I made a furrow about an inch wide and an inch deep, and then I turned my hand over.
    I pressed the back of my hand into the pile and held it there for a minute. Then I looked at the result. Small white marks, but no indentations, because there was no real flesh on the back of my hand. So I pulled up my sleeve and pressed the inside of my forearm against the pile. I put the flat of my other hand on it and leaned on it hard. I bounced it up and down a couple of times, and scrabbled it around. Then I looked at it.
    The result was some small red marks, some small white marks, and a whole lot of dust, dirt, and mud. I spat on my arm and wiped it on my pants and the resulting clean stripe looked both very like and very unlike the small of Janice May Chapman’s back. Another Rorschach test. Inconclusive.
    But I did come to one minor conclusion. I cleaned up my arm as well as I could, which was not perfectly, and I decided that whatever gravel patch Chapman had been raped on, she had not only dressed afterward, but showered too.
    I walked on and found the wider street where Shawna Lindsay had lived. The second victim. The middle class girl, comparatively. Her baby brother was still in his yard. Sixteen years old. The ugly boy. He was just standing there. Doing nothing. Watching the street. Watching me approach. His eyes tracked me all the way. I stepped up on the shoulder and came to a stop face to face with him, with only his low picket fence between us.
    I said, “How’s life, kid?”
    He said, “My mom’s out.”
    “Good to know,” I said. “But that wasn’t what I asked.”
    “Life’s a bitch,” he said.
    “And then you die,” I said. Which I regretted, instantly. Insensitive, given his family’s recent history. But he took no notice. Which I was glad about. I said, “I need to talk to you.”
    “Why? You earning a whitey merit badge? You need to find a black person to talk with today?”
    “I’m in the army,” I said. “Which means half my friends are black, and more importantly it means half my bosses are black. I talk to black people all the time, and they talk to me. So don’t give me that ghetto shit.”
    The boy was quiet for a second. Then he asked, “What part of the army are you in?”
    “Military Police.”
    “Is that a tough job?”
    “Tougher than tough,” I said. “Think about it logically. Any soldier could kick your ass, and I could kick any soldier’s ass.”
    “For real?”
    “More than real,” I said. “Real is for other people. Not for us.”
    He asked, “What do you want to talk about?”
    “A hunch.”
    “What kind?”
    I said, “My guess is no one ever talked to you about your sister’s death.”
    He looked down.
    I said, “Normally with a homicide victim, they talk to everyone who knew her. They ask for insights and opinions. They want to know what kinds of things she did, where she went, who she hung with. Did they ever talk to you about that kind of stuff?”
    “No,” he said. “Nobody ever talked to me.”
    “They should have,” I said. “I would have. Because brothers know things about sisters. Especially at the ages you two were. I bet you knew things about Shawna that no one else did. I bet she told youthings she couldn’t tell your mom. And I bet you figured out some stuff on your own.”
    The kid shuffled in place a little. Bashful, and a little proud. Like saying:
Yeah, maybe I did figure some things out
. Out loud he said, “No one ever talks to me about anything.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because I’m deformed. They think I’m slow, too.”
    “Who says you’re deformed?”
    “Everybody.”
    “Even your mom?”
    “She doesn’t say it, but she thinks it.”
    “Even your friends?”
    “I don’t have any friends. Who would want to be friends with me?”
    “They’re all wrong,” I said. “You’re not deformed. You’re ugly, but you’re not deformed. There’s a difference.”
    He smiled. “That’s what Shawna used to tell me.”
    I pictured the two of them together. Beauty and the beast. A tough life, for both of them. Tough for him, with the endless implied comparisons. Tough for her, with the endless need for tact and patience. I said, “You should join the army. You’d look like a movie star compared to half the people I know. You should see the guy that sent me here.”
    “I’m going to join the army,” he said. “I talked to someone about