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The Affair: A Reacher Novel

The Affair: A Reacher Novel

Titel: The Affair: A Reacher Novel Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Lee Child
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all what I’m used to.”
    I nodded. Said nothing.
    Then she said, “Actually I couldn’t buy it even if I wanted to. We don’t know who the next of kin is. I wouldn’t know who to talk to.”
    “No will?”
    “She was twenty-seven years old.”
    “No paperwork anywhere?”
    “We haven’t found any so far.”
    “No mortgage?”
    “Nothing on record with the county.”
    “No family?”
    “No one recalls her mentioning any.”
    “So what are you going to do?”
    “I don’t know.”
    I moved on down the hallway.
    “Look around,” Deveraux called after me. “Feel free. Make yourself at home. But tell me if you find something I should see.”
    I walked from room to room, feeling the kind of trespass feelings I get every time I walk through a dead person’s house. There were minor examples of disarray here and there, the kind of things that would have been cleaned up and tidied away before an expected guest’s arrival. They humanized the place a little, but on the whole it was a bland and soulless home. There was too much uniformity. All the furniture matched. It looked like it had been selected from the same range from the same manufacturer, all at the same time. All the rugs went well together. All the paint was the same color. There were no pictures on the walls, no photographs on the shelves. No books. No souvenirs, no prized possessions.
    The bathroom was clean. The tub and the towels were dry. The medicine cabinet above the sink had a mirrored door, and behind it were over-the-counter analgesics, and toothpaste, and tampons, and dental floss, and spare soap and shampoo. The main bedroom had nothing of interest in it except a bed, which was made, but not well. The second bedroom had a narrower bed that looked like it had never been used.
    The kitchen was fitted out with a range of useful stuff, but on balance I doubted that Chapman had been a gourmet cook. Her pocketbook was stowed neatly on the counter, resting upright against the side of the refrigerator. It was basically a small leather pouch, with a flap lid designed to close magnetically. It was navy blue in color, which might or might not have been the reason it had been left behind. I wasn’t sure of the current protocol involved in matching a blue bag with a yellow dress. Maybe not permitted. Although plenty of medals had blue and yellow in their ribbons, and the women soldiers I knew would have killed to get one, literally.
    I opened the flap and looked in the bag. There was a slim leather wallet, dark red, and a convenience pack of tissues, unopened, and a pen, and some coins, and some crumbs, and a car key. The car key had a long serrated shaft, and a black plastic head molded to feel good to the thumbs, and embossed with a large letter
H
.
    “Honda,” Deveraux said, beside me. “A Honda Civic. Bought new three years ago from a dealer in Tupelo. All up to date in terms of maintenance.”
    “Where is it?” I asked.
    Deveraux pointed to a door. “In her garage.”
    I took the wallet out of the bag. It had nothing in it except cash money and a Mississippi driver’s license, issued three years before. The picture on it dimmed about half of Chapman’s allure, but it was still well worth looking at. The money added up to less than thirty dollars.
    I put the wallet back and restacked the bag where it had been, next to the refrigerator. I opened the door Deveraux had pointed out, and behind it I found a tiny mud room that had two more doors in it, one letting out to the back yard on my left, and another to the garage straight ahead. The garage was completely empty apart from the car. The Honda. A small import, silver in color, clean and undamaged, sitting there cold and patient and smelling faintly of oil and unburned hydrocarbons. All around it was nothing but empty swept concrete. No unopened moving boxes, no chairs with the stuffing coming out, no abandoned projects, no junk, no clutter.
    Nothing at all.
    Unusual.
    I opened the door to the back yard and stepped out. Deveraux came out with me and asked, “So, was there anything in there I should have seen?”
    “Yes,” I said. “There were things in there anyone should have seen.”
    “So what did I miss?”
    “Nothing,” I said. “They weren’t there to
be
seen. That’s my point. We should have seen certain things, but we didn’t. Because certain things were missing.”
    “What things?” she asked.
    “Later,” I said, because by that point I had seen something

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