Second Son

CHAPTER TWENTY

It was a reasonably short wait, as Reacher had privately predicted. The smelly kid had demonstrated a degree of animal cunning, but he was no kind of a criminal mastermind. That was for damn sure. The three men came back less than ten minutes later with a metal object that had been burned in a fire. It was ashy gray as a result. It was a once-bright alloy fillet eleven inches long and one inch wide, slightly curved across its shorter dimension, with three round appendages spaced along its length.

It was what is left when you burn a regular three-ring binder.

No stiff covers, no pages, no contents, just scorched metal.

Reacher asked, “Where did you find it?”

One of the MPs said, “Under a bed in the second bedroom. The boys’ room.”

No kind of a criminal mastermind.

The major from Intelligence asked, “Is it the code book?”

Reacher shook his head.

“No,” he said. “It’s the test answers from the school.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“So why call us?”

“This has to be handled by the Corps. Not by the school. You need to go up to the hospital and talk to the kid and his father together. You need to get a confession. Then you need to tell the school. What you do to the kid after that is your business. A warning will do it, probably. He won’t trouble us again anyway.”

“What exactly happened here?”

“It was my brother’s fault,” Reacher said. “In a way, anyway. The kid from down the street started hazing us, and Joe stepped up and did really well. Smart mouth, fast answers, the whole nine yards. It was a great performance. Plus, Joe is huge. Gentle as a lamb, but the kid didn’t know that, obviously. So he decided to duck the physical route, in terms of revenge. He decided to go another way. He figured out that Joe was uptight about the test. Maybe he had heard us talking. But anyway, he followed Joe up to the school yesterday and stole the answers. To discredit him.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Circumstantially,” Reacher said. “The kid didn’t go to the ballgame. He wasn’t on the bus. So he was in town all day. And Joe washed his hands and took a shower when he got back. Which is unusual for Joe, in the afternoon. He must have felt dirty. And my guess is he felt dirty because he had been smelling that kid’s stink all day, from behind him and around corners.”

“Very circumstantial,” the major said.

“Ask the kid,” Reacher said. “Lean on him, in front of his dad.”

“Then what happened?”

“The kid made up a scenario where Joe memorized the answers and then burned the book. Which would be plausible, for a guy who wanted to cheat on a test. And it was trash night, which was convenient. The plan was the kid would burn the book in his own back yard, and then sneak into ours during the night and dump the metal part in our incinerator, among our ashes, so the evidence would be right there. But we had no ashes. We missed trash night. We had to be up at the airport instead. So the kid had to abort the plan. He just snuck away again. And I heard him. Early hours of the morning. I thought it was a cat or a rat.”

“Any trace evidence?”

“You might find footprints out there,” Reacher said. “The yard was swept at some point, but there’s always dust. Especially after trash night.”

The MPs went away and took a look at the yard, and then they came back with quizzical expressions on their faces, as if to say, the kid could be right.

The Intelligence major got a look on his own face, like I can’t believe I’m about to say this to a thirteen-year-old, and then he asked, “Do you know where the code book is too?”

“No,” Reacher said. “Not for sure. But I could make a pretty good guess.”

“Where?”

“Help my brother out with the school, and then we’ll talk.”