Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(19)
“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.
Amos said, “The old lady testified the smaller kid kept on hitting the bigger kid until the bigger kid fell down, whereupon the smaller kid kicked him repeatedly in the head and the ribs, and then the bigger kid struggled up and tried to run, but the smaller kid caught him and tripped him up, right in the next pool of light, which was apparently quite bright, which meant the old lady had no trouble seeing the smaller kid kicking the bigger kid a whole lot more. Then he quit just as suddenly as he had started, and he collected his timid pal, and they walked away together like nothing had happened. The old lady made contemporaneous notes on a piece of paper, plus a diagram, all of which she gave to the visiting officers the following day.”
“Good witness,” Reacher said. “I bet the DA loved her. What happened next?”
Amos scrolled and read.
“Nothing happened next,” she said. “The case went nowhere.”
“Why not?”
“Limited manpower. The draft for World War Two had started a couple of years before. The police department was operating with a skeleton staff.”
“Why hadn’t the twenty-year-old been drafted?”
“Rich daddy.”
“I don’t get it,” Reacher said. “How much manpower would they need? They had an eyewitness. Arresting a fifteen-year-old boy isn’t difficult. They wouldn’t need a SWAT team.”
“They had no ID on the assailant, and no manpower to go dig one up.”
“You said the old lady knew him from the birdwatching club.”
“The unknown friend was the fighter. Stan Reacher was the one who ran away.”
—
They gave Patty and Shorty a cup of coffee, and they sent them on their way, back to room ten. Mark watched them go, until they were halfway to the barn, until they looked like people who weren’t coming back. Whereupon he turned around and said, “OK, plug the phone back in.”
Steven did so, and Mark said, “Now show me the problem with the door.”
“The problem is not with the door,” Robert said. “It’s with our reaction time.”
They crossed an inner hallway and opened a back parlor door. The room beyond it was small by comparison, but still a decent size. It was painted flat black. The window was boarded over. All four walls were covered with flat screen televisions. There was a swivel chair in the center of the room, boxed in by four low benches pushed together, loaded with keyboards and joysticks. Like a command center. Patty and Shorty were on the screens, live pictures, past the barn now, walking away from one bunch of hidden cameras, toward another, some focused tight and head-on, others set wider, with the strolling couple tiny in the distance.
Robert stepped over a bench and sat down in the chair. He clicked a mouse and the screens changed to a dim night-vision shot.
He said, “This is a recording from three o’clock this morning.”
The picture was hyped up and misty because of the night-vision enhancements, but it was clearly of room ten’s queen-sized bed, which clearly had two sleeping people in it. It was the camera in the smoke detector, wide enough to be called a fisheye.
“Except she wasn’t asleep,” Robert said. “Afterward I figured she slept about four hours, and then she woke up. But she didn’t move at all. Not a muscle. She gave absolutely no sign. By that point I was kind of laying back, frankly, taking it easy, because the last four hours had been pretty boring. Plus at that point as far as I knew she was still asleep. But actually she was lying there thinking. About something that must have made her mad. Because, watch.”
On the screens the scene stayed the same, and then it changed, fast, with no warning at all, when Patty suddenly flipped the covers aside and slid out of bed, controlled, neat, decisive, exasperated.
Robert said, “By the time I sat up and got my finger near the unlock button, she had already tried the door once. I guess she wanted air. I had to make a decision. I decided to leave it locked, because it felt more consistent. I left it locked until Peter went up there to fix the car. I unlocked it then because I figured one of them would want to come out to talk to him.”
“OK,” Mark said.
Robert clicked the mouse again and the screens changed to a daylight shot from a different angle. Patty and Shorty were sitting side by side on room ten’s unmade bed.