The Affair: A Reacher Novel

woman nor a large man. It was going to be something in between. A tall woman, or a short man.
    Or a teenager, maybe.
    Then I recognized the distorted proportions.
    And I started to run.
    At twenty yards out I was sure. At ten yards out I was certain. At ten feet out I had absolute visual confirmation. No possible doubt. It was Bruce Lindsay. The ugly boy. Sixteen years old. Shawna Lindsay’s little brother. He was on his front. His feet were apart. His hands were down by his sides. His giant head was turned toward me. His mouth was open. His deep-set eyes were dark and dead.
    We followed no kind of crime-scene protocol. Deveraux and I trampled the area and touched the corpse. We rolled it over and found an entry wound on the left side of the rib cage, up high, close to the armpit. No exit wound. The bullet had come in, shattered the heart, shattered the spine, and had deflected and tumbled and was still in there somewhere.
    I knelt up and scanned the horizon. If the kid had been walking east, he had been shot from the north, almost certainly by a rifleman who had exited Kelham’s fence line woods and had been patrolling the open belt of scrub. The quarantine zone.
    Deveraux said, “I talked to him this morning. Just a few hours ago. We had an appointment at his house. So why was he here?”
    Which was a question I didn’t want to answer. Not even to myself. I said, “He had a secret to keep, I guess. About Shawna. He knew you’d get it out of him. So he decided to be somewhere else this afternoon.”
    “Where? Where was he going?”
    “Kelham,” I said.
    “This is open country. If he was heading for Kelham he would have been on the road.”
    “He was shy about strangers seeing him. Because of the way he looked. I bet he never walked on the roads.”
    “If he was shy with strangers, why would he risk going to Kelham? There must be a dozen strangers in the guardhouse alone.”
    I said, “He went because I told him it would be OK. I told him soldiers would be different. I told him he’d be welcome there.”
    “Welcome there for what? They don’t offer guided tours.”
    The kid was wearing canvas pants, a little like mine, and a plain sweatshirt in navy blue, with a dark warm-up jacket over it. The jacket had fallen open when we rolled him. I saw folded paper in the inside pocket.
    I said, “Take a look at that.”
    Deveraux slid the paper out of the pocket. It looked like an official document, heavy stock, folded three times. It looked old, and I was sure it was. About sixteen years old, almost certainly. Deveraux unfolded it and scanned it and said, “It’s his birth certificate.”
    I nodded and took it from her. The State of Mississippi, a male child, family name Lindsay, given name Bruce, born in Carter Crossing. Born eighteen years ago, apparently. It might have withstood a hasty glance, but not further scrutiny. The alteration was not skillful, but it had been patient. Two digits had been carefully rubbed away, and then two others had been drawn in to replace them. The ink matched well, and the style matched well. Only the breached surface of the paper gave it away, but that was enough. It stood out. It drew the eye.
    “My fault,” I said. “My fault entirely.”
    “How?”
    Go straight to Kelham
, I had said.
There are recruiters on every post. As soon as you’ve got something in your hand that proves you’re eighteen years old, they’ll let you in and never let you out again
.
    The kid had taken it literally. I had meant he would have to wait. But he had gone ahead and made himself eighteen years old, rightthere and then. He had manufactured something to have in his hand. Probably at the same kitchen table where I had sat and talked and drank iced tea. I pictured him, head down, concentrating, tongue between his teeth, maybe wetting the paper with a drop of water, scraping the old numbers off with the tip of a dinner knife, blotting the damp patch, waiting for it to dry, finding the right pen, calculating, practicing, and then drawing in the new numbers. The numbers that would get him through Kelham’s gate. The numbers that would get him accepted.
    All on my dime.
    I started walking back toward the road.
    Deveraux came after me. I told her,
    “I need a gun.”
    She said, “Why?”
    I stopped again and turned and looked east and scoped it out. Fort Kelham was a giant rectangle north of the road and its fence ran through a broad belt of trees that extended a couple hundred yards each