The Affair: A Reacher Novel

formal way. Which is to be expected. They’re trying to deal with the same kind of problems I am.”
    “OK,” I said.
    “Why are you asking?”
    “Munro was at the McClatchy place. Rosemary McClatchy and Shawna Lindsay seem to have dated the same guy. Janice Chapman also, probably. Munro heard you had dated the guy too.”
    “That’s bullshit. I haven’t dated a guy in two years. Couldn’t you tell?”
    I sat down.
    “I had to ask,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
    “Who was the guy?”
    “I can’t tell you.”
    “You have to tell me. Don’t you think? McClatchy and Lindsay are my cases. Therefore it’s relevant information. And I have a right to know if some guy is taking my name in vain.”
    “Reed Riley,” I said.
    “Never heard of him,” she said.
    Then she said, “Wait a minute. Did you say Riley?”
    I didn’t answer.
    She said, “Oh my God. Carlton Riley’s son? He’s at Kelham? I had no idea.”
    I said nothing.
    “Oh my God,” she said again. “That explains a whole lot.”
    I said, “It was his car on the railroad track. And Emmeline McClatchy thinks he got Rosemary pregnant. I didn’t ask her. She came right out with it.”
    “I need to talk to him.”
    “You can’t. They just choppered him out of there.”
    “To where?”
    “What’s the most remote army post in the world?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Neither do I. But a buck gets ten that’s where he’ll be tonight.”
    “Why would he say he dated me?”
    “Ego,” I said. “Maybe he wanted his pals to believe he had collected the whole set. The four most beautiful women in Carter Crossing. The Brannan brothers at the bar told me he was a big dog and always had arm candy.”
    “I’m not arm candy.”
    “Maybe not on the inside.”
    “His father probably knows the guy Janice Chapman had the affair with. They’re right there in the Senate together.”
    I said nothing.
    She looked right at me.
    She said, “Oh, no.”
    I said, “Oh, yes.”
    “The same woman? Father and son? That’s seriously messed up.”
    “Munro can’t prove it. Neither can we.”
    “We can infer it. This all is way too much hoopla for a theoretical worry about blowback in general.”
    “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. Who knows how these people think?”
    “Whatever, you can’t go to D.C. Not now. It’s far too dangerous. You’ll be walking around with the world’s biggest target on your back. Senate Liaison has got a lot invested in Carlton Riley. They won’t let you screw things up. Believe me, you’re nothing to them compared to a good relationship with the Armed Services Committee.”
    She said all that and then her phone rang and she picked up and listened for a minute. She covered the mouthpiece with her palm and said, “This is the Oxford PD asking about the dead journalist. I want to tell them the proven perpetrator was shot to death by police after resisting arrest, case closed.”
    I said, “Fine with me.”
    So she told them that, and then she had to call a whole long list of state departments and county authorities, so I wandered out of her office and she got so busy I didn’t talk to her again until dinner at nine o’clock.
    At dinner we talked about her father’s house. She ordered her cheeseburger and I got a roast beef sandwich and I asked her, “What was it like growing up here?”
    “It was weird,” she said. “Obviously I didn’t have anything to compare it to, and we didn’t get television until I was ten, and we never went to the movies, but even so I sensed there had to be more out there. We all did. We all had island fever.”
    Then she asked where I grew up, so I went through as much of thelong list as I could remember. Conceived in the Pacific, born in West Berlin when my father was assigned to the embassy there, a dozen different bases before elementary school, education all over the world, cuts and bruises picked up fighting in hot wet alleys in Manila healing days later in cold wet quarters in Belgium, near NATO headquarters, then running across the original assailants a month later in San Diego and resuming the conflict. Then eventually West Point, and a restless, always-moving career of my own, in some of the same places but in many new and different places too, in that the army’s global footprint was not identical to the Marine Corps’.
    She asked, “What’s the longest you were ever in one spot?”
    I said, “Less than six months, probably.”
    “What was your dad like?”
    “He