The Affair: A Reacher Novel

note was about.”
    “Are you still mad about it?”
    “I’m sad about it,” I said.
    “Why?”
    “This mission was a mistake,” I said. “They shouldn’t have put me on the outside. Not for this kind of thing. It’s making me think of them as
… them
. Not
us
anymore.”
    * * *
    Later we had a languid conversation about whether she should go back to her own room. Reputations. Voters. I said the old guy had come upstairs for me when Garber had called. He had gotten a good look inside the room. She said if that happened again I could delay a second and she could hide in the bathroom. She said they rarely knocked on her door. And if by some chance they did the next morning and there was no reply, they would assume she was out on a case. Which would be entirely plausible. She wasn’t short of work to do, after all.
    Then she said, “Maybe Janice Chapman was doing what we just did. With the gravel scratches, I mean. With her boyfriend, whoever he was. Out in her back yard, at midnight. Under the stars. The railroad track is pretty close by. Must be amazing out of doors.”
    “It must be,” I said. “I was right next to the track at midnight last night. It’s like the end of the world.”
    “Would the timing work? With the scabs?”
    “If she had sex at midnight she was killed about four in the morning. What time was she found?”
    “Ten the next evening. That’s eighteen hours. I guess there would have been some decomposition by then.”
    “Probably. But bled-out bodies can look pretty weird. It would have been fairly hard to tell. And your department doctor isn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes.”
    “So it’s possible?”
    “We’d have to explain why she put on a nice dress and pantyhose sometime between midnight and four in the morning.”
    We pondered that for a moment. Then we surrendered to inertia. We said nothing more, about dresses or pantyhose, or voters or rooms or reputations, and then we fell asleep, in each other’s arms, outside the covers, naked, in the still silence of the Mississippi night.
    Four hours later I was awake again and confirming my longest-held belief: there is no better time than the second time. All the first time’ssemi-formal niceties can be forgotten. All the first time tricks we use to impress each other can be abandoned. There’s new familiarity, and no loss of excitement. There’s a general sense of what works and what doesn’t. Second time around, you’re ready to rock and roll.
    And we did.
    Afterward Deveraux yawned and stretched and said, “You’re not bad for a soldier boy.”
    I said, “You’re excellent for a Marine.”
    “We better be careful. We might develop feelings for each other.”
    “What are those?”
    “What are what?”
    “Feelings.”
    She paused a beat.
    She said, “Men should be more in touch with their feelings.”
    I said, “If I ever have one, you’ll be the first to know, I promise.”
    She paused again. Then she laughed. Which was good. This was already 1997, remember. It was touch and go in those days.
    I woke up for the second time at seven o’clock in the morning, thinking about pregnancy.

Chapter
45
    Elizabeth Deveraux was sitting upright in the bed when I woke. She was on my left, in the center of her space, facing me, back straight, legs crossed, like yoga. She was naked and unselfconscious. She was very beautiful. Just spectacularly good looking. One of the best looking women I had ever seen, and certainly the best looking I had ever seen naked, and definitely the best looking I had ever slept with.
    But by that point she was mentally preoccupied. Seven o’clock in the morning. The start of the work day. No third time lucky for me. Not right then. She said, “They must have had something else in common. Those three women, I mean.”
    I said nothing.
    “Beauty is too nebulous,” she said. “It’s too subjective. It’s just an opinion.”
    I said nothing.
    She said, “What?”
    “It’s not just an opinion,” I said. “Not with those three.”
    “Then we’re looking for two factors. Two things that interacted. They were beautiful and they were also something else.”
    “Maybe they were pregnant,” I said.
    * * *
    We examined the proposition. They were girlfriend material. It was a base town. These things happen. Mostly by accident, but sometimes on purpose. Sometimes women think that moving from one base town to another with a baby is better than living alone in the base town where they were born. A