“I’m very pleased to meet you, too,” Reacher said.
“I’m Detective Brenda Amos,” the woman said. “Happy to help. Anything you need.”
Her accent was from the south. A drawl, but no longer honeyed. It was roughed up by exposure. She was ten years younger than Shaw, maybe five-six, and slender. She had blonde hair and cheekbones and sleepy green eyes that said, don’t mess with me.
“Ma’am, thank you,” he said. “But really, this is no kind of a big deal. I don’t know exactly what Mr. Carrington told you, but all I need is some ancient history. Which probably isn’t there anyway. From eighty years ago. It’s not even a cold case.”
Shaw said, “Mr. Carrington mentioned you were an MP.”
“Long ago.”
“That buys you ten minutes with a computer. That’s all it’s going to take.”
They led him back through thigh-high mahogany gates, to an open area full of plain-clothed people sitting face to face at paired desks. The desks were loaded with phones and flat screens and keyboards and wire baskets of paper. Like any office anywhere, except for a weary air of grime and burden, that made it unmistakably a cop shop. They turned a corner, into a corridor with offices either side. They stopped at the third on the left. It was Amos’s. She ushered Reacher in, and Shaw said goodbye and walked on, as if all appropriate courtesies had been observed, and his job was therefore done. Amos followed Reacher inside and closed the door. The outer structure of the office was old and traditional, but everything in it was sleek and new. Desk, chairs, cabinets, computer.
Amos said, “How can I help you?”
He said, “I’m looking for the surname Reacher, in old police reports from the 1920s and 30s and 40s.”
“Relatives of yours?”
“My grandparents and my father. Carrington thinks they dodged the census because they had federal warrants.”
“This is a municipal department. We don’t have access to federal records.”
“They might have started small. Most people do.”
Amos pulled the keyboard close and started tapping away. She asked, “Were there any alternative spellings?”
He said, “I don’t think so.”
“First names?”
“James, Elizabeth, and Stan.”
“Jim, Jimmy, Jamie, Liz, Lizzie, Beth?”
“I don’t know what they called each other. I never met them.”
“Was Stan short for Stanley?”
“I never saw that. It was always just Stan.”
“Any known aliases?”
“Not known to me.”
She typed some more, and clicked, and waited.
She didn’t speak.
He said, “I’m guessing you were an MP, too.”
“What gave me away?”
“First your accent. It’s the sound of the U.S. Army. Mostly southern, but a little mixed up. Plus most civilian cops ask about what we did and how we did it. Because they’re professionally curious. But you aren’t. Most likely because you already know.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“How long have you been out?”
“Six years,” she said. “You?”
“Longer than that.”
“What unit?”
“The 110th, mostly.”
“Nice,” she said. “Who was the CO when you were there?”
“I was,” he said.
“And now you’re retired and into genealogy.”
“I saw a road sign,” he said. “That’s all. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t.”
She looked back at the screen.
“We have a hit,” she said. “From seventy-five years ago.”
Chapter 8
Brenda Amos clicked twice and typed in a passcode. Then she clicked again and leaned forward and read out loud. She said, “Late one September evening in 1943 a youth was found unconscious on the sidewalk of a downtown Laconia street. He had been beaten up. He was identified as a local twenty-year-old, already known to the police department as a loudmouth and a bully, but untouchable, because he was the son of the local rich guy. Therefore I guess there would have been much private celebration inside the department, but obviously for the sake of appearances they had to open an investigation. They had to go through the motions. It says here they went house to house the next day, not expecting to get much. But actually they got a lot. They got an old lady who had seen the whole thing through binoculars. The victim started an altercation with two other youths, clearly expecting to win, but the way it turned out he got his butt kicked instead.”
Reacher said, “Why was the old lady using binoculars late in the evening?”
“It says here she was a birdwatcher. She was interested in nighttime migration and continuous flight. She said she could make out the shapes against the sky.”
Reacher said nothing.
Amos said, “She identified one of the two other youths as a fellow member of a local birdwatching club.”
Reacher said, “My dad was a birdwatcher.”
Amos nodded. “The old lady identified him as a local youth personally known to her, name of Stan Reacher, then just sixteen years old.”
“Was she sure? I think he was only fifteen in September of 1943.”
“She seems to be sure about the name. I guess she could have been wrong about the age. She was watching from an apartment window above a grocery store, looking directly down the street toward a good-sized patch of night sky in the east. She saw Stan Reacher with an unidentified friend about the same age. They were walking toward her, away from the center of downtown. They passed through a pool of light from a street lamp, which allowed her to be confident in her identification. Then walking toward them in the other direction she saw the twenty-year-old. He also passed through a pool of light. The three youths all met face to face in the gloom between two lamps, which was unfortunate, but there was enough spill and scatter for her to see what was going on. She said it was like watching shadow puppets. It made their physical gestures more emphatic. The two smaller boys were still facing her. The bigger boy had his back to her. He seemed to be demanding something. Then threatening. One of the smaller boys ran away, possibly timid or scared. The other smaller boy stayed where he was, and then suddenly he punched the bigger boy in the face.”
Reacher nodded. Personally he called it getting your retaliation in first. Surprise was always a good thing. A wise man never counted all the way to three.