The Affair: A Reacher Novel

connection. Chapman wasn’t in the army, and there certainly aren’t any senators in the army.”
    I said nothing.
    “Did Chapman have a brother in the army? Is that it? A cousin? A relative of some kind? Jesus, is her
father
in the army? What would he be now, mid-fifties? The only reason to stay in at that age is if you’re having fun, and the only way to have fun at that age is to be a very senior officer. Is that what we’re saying here? Chapman was a general’s daughter? Or Shaw, or whatever her real name was?”
    I said nothing.
    She said, “Lowrey told you she got the intern job because of family connections, right? So what else can that mean? We’re talking about having an actual senator who owes you favors here. That’s a big deal. Her father must be a two-star at least.”
    I said nothing.
    She looked straight at me.
    “I can tell what you’re thinking,” she said.
    I said nothing.
    “I didn’t get it right,” she said. “That’s what you’re thinking. I’m on the wrong track. Chapman had no relatives in uniform. It’s something else.”
    I said nothing.
    She said, “Maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the senator is the one with a relative in uniform.”
    “You’re missing the point,” I said. “If Janice May Chapman was a sudden short-term problem who required a sudden short-term solution, why was she killed in exactly the same way as two other unconnected women four and nine months previously?”
    “Are you saying it’s a coincidence? Nothing to do with the senator connection?”
    “It could be that way,” I said.
    “Then why the big panic?”
    “Because they’re worried about blowback. In general. They don’t want any kind of taint coming near a particular unit.”
    “The one with the senator’s relative in it?”
    “Let’s not go there.”
    “But they weren’t worried about blowback before? Four and nine months ago?”
    “They didn’t know about four and nine months ago. Why would they? But Chapman jumped out at them. She had two kinds of extra visibility. Her name was in the files, and she was white.”
    “Suppose it wasn’t a coincidence?”
    “Then someone was very smart,” I said. “They took care of a sudden short-term problem by copycatting an MO that had been used before in two unconnected cases. Excellent camouflage.”
    “So you’re saying there could be two killers here?”
    “Possible,” I said. “Maybe McClatchy and Lindsay were regular everyday homicides, and Chapman was made to look like them. By someone else.”
    * * *
    We finished our desserts and drank our cups of coffee. Deveraux told me she had work to do. I asked her if she would mind if I went to see Emmeline McClatchy one more time.
    “Why?” she asked.
    “Boyfriends,” I said. “Apparently both Lindsay and Chapman were stepping out with a soldier who owned a blue car. I’m wondering if McClatchy is going to make it a trifecta.”
    “That’s a long walk.”
    “I’ll find a shortcut,” I said. I was beginning to piece together the local geography in my head. No need to walk three sides of a square, first north to the Kelham road, then east, then south again to the McClatchy shack. I was already roughly on the same latitude. I figured I could find a way across the railroad track well short of the official crossing. A straight shot east. One side of the square.
    Deveraux said, “Be gentle with her. She’s still very upset.”
    “I’m sure she always will be,” I said. “I imagine these things don’t fade too fast.”
    “And don’t say anything about pregnancy.”
    “I won’t,” I said.
    I headed south on Main Street, in the general direction of Dr. Merriam’s office, but I planned to turn east well before I got there. And I found a place to do just that within about three hundred yards. I saw the mouth of a dirt road nested in the trees. It had a rusted fire hydrant ten yards in, which meant there had to be houses somewhere farther on. I found the first one a hundred feet later. It was a tumbledown, swaybacked affair, but it had people living in it. At first I thought they were the McKinney cousins, because it was that kind of a place, and because it had a black brush-painted pick-up truck standing on a patch of dirt that might once have been a lawn. But it was a different make of truck. Different age, different size, but the same approach to maintenance. Clearly northeastern Mississippi was not fertile ground for spray-painting franchises.
    I passed two