36

Manuel Orozco had gone through four years of college on army money and had assumed he would wind up a combat infantry officer. His baby sister had gone through a major irrational panic and had assumed he would wind up KIA with serious disfiguring facial wounds such that his body would not be identified on recovery. She would never know what had happened to him. He told her about dog tags. She said they might get blown off or lost. He told her about fingerprints. She said he might lose limbs. He told her about dental identification. She said his whole jaw might get exploded. Later he realized she was worrying on a deeper level but at the time he thought the answer to her fears was to get a big tattoo across his upper back that said Orozco, M. in large black letters, with his service number equally large below. He had gotten home and peeled off his shirt in triumph and had been mystified when the kid had cried even harder.

Ultimately he had avoided the infantry and ended up a key part of the 110th MP, where Reacher had immediately rechristened him Kit Bag because his broad olive back looked like a GI duffel with its name-and-number stencil. Now fifteen years later Reacher stood in the Chateau Marmont’s sunblasted parking lot and said, “You found another body.”

“I’m afraid we did,” Mauney said.

“Where?”

“Same general area. In a gully.”

“Helicopter?”

“Probably.”

“Orozco,” Reacher said.

“That’s the name on his back,” Mauney said.

“So why ask?”

“We have to be sure.”

“All corpses should be so convenient.”

“Who’s the next of kin?”

“He has a sister somewhere. Younger.”

“So you should make the formal ID. If you would. This really isn’t the kind of thing a younger sister should see.”

“How long was he in the gully?”

“A long time.”

They got back in the car and Dixon followed Mauney all the way to a county facility north of Glendale. Nobody spoke. Reacher sat in the back next to O’Donnell and did what he was pretty sure O’Donnell was doing too, which was to run through a long involuntary sequence of remembered Orozco moments. The guy had been a comedian, part on purpose, part unwittingly. He had been of Mexican descent, born in Texas and raised in New Mexico, but for many years had pretended to be a white Australian. He had called everyone mate. As an officer his command skills had been first rate, but he had never really issued orders. He would wait until a junior officer or a grunt had grasped the general consensus and then he would say, If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please. It had become a group catchphrase every bit as ubiquitous as You do not mess.

Coffee?

If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please.

Cigarette?

If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please.

Want me to shoot this mother?

If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please.

O’Donnell said, “We knew already. This is not a surprise.”

Nobody answered him.

The county facility turned out to be a brand-new medical center with a hospital on one side of a wide new street. On the other side was a state-of-the-art receiving station for townships without morgues of their own. It was a white concrete cube set on stilts a story high. Meat wagons could roll right under the bulk of the building to hidden elevator doors. Neat, clean, discreet. Californian. Mauney parked in a line of visitor slots near some trees. Dixon parked right next to him. Everyone got out and stood for a moment, stretching, looking around, wasting time.

Nobody’s favorite trip.

Mauney led the way. There was a personnel elevator opening off a cross-hatched walkway. Mauney hit the call button and the elevator door slid back and cold chemical air spilled out. Mauney stepped on, then Reacher, then O’Donnell, then Dixon, then Neagley.

Mauney pressed 4.

The fourth floor was as cold as a meat locker. There was a miserable public viewing area with a wide internal window backed by a venetian blind. Mauney passed it by and headed through a door to a storage area. Three walls showed the fronts of refrigerated drawers. Dozens of them. The air was bitter with cold and heavy with smells and noisy from reflections off stainless steel. Mauney pulled a drawer. It came out easily on ball bearing runners. Full length. It smacked all the way open against end stops made of rubber.

Inside was a refrigerated corpse. Male. Hispanic. The wrists and the ankles were tied with rough twine that had bitten deep. The arms were behind the back. The head and the shoulders were grievously damaged. Almost unrecognizable as human.

“He fell head first,” Reacher said, softly. “He would, I guess, tied up like that. If you’re right about the helicopter.”

“No tracks to or from,” Mauney said.

Further medical details were hard to discern. Decomposition was well advanced, but due to the desert heat and dryness it looked more like mummification. The body was shrunken, diminished, collapsed, leathery. It looked empty. There was some animal damage, but not much. Contact with the gully’s walls had prevented more.

Mauney asked, “Do you recognize him?”

“Not really,” Reacher said.

“Check the tattoo.”

Reacher just stood there.

Mauney said, “Want me to call an orderly?”

Reacher shook his head and put a hand under the corpse’s icy shoulder. Lifted. The body rolled awkwardly, all of a piece, stiff, like a log or a stump. It settled facedown, the arms flung upward, tied and contorted as if the desperate struggle for freedom had continued until the very last.

Which it undoubtedly had, Reacher thought.

The tattoo was a little folded and creased and wrinkled by the sloughing looseness of the skin and the unnatural inward pressure of the upper arms.

It was a little faded by time.

But it was unmistakable.

It said: Orozco, M.

Under it was a nine-digit service number.

“It’s him,” Reacher said. “It’s Manuel Orozco.”

Mauney said, “I’m very sorry.”

There was silence for a moment. Nothing to hear, except cooled air forcing its way through aluminum vents. Reacher asked, “Are you still searching the area?”

“For the others?” Mauney said. “Not actively. It’s not like we’ve got a missing child.”

“Is Franz in here, too? In one of these damn drawers?”

“You want to see him?” Mauney asked.

“No,” Reacher said. Then he looked back at Orozco and asked, “When is the autopsy?”

“Soon.”

“Is the string going to tell us anything?”

“It’s probably too common.”

“Do we have an estimate on when he died?”

Mauney half-smiled, cop to cop. “When he hit the ground.”

“Which was when?”

“Three, four weeks ago. Before Franz, we think. But we may never know for sure.”

“We will,” Reacher said.

“How?” Mauney asked.

“I’ll ask whoever did it. And he’ll tell me. By that point he’ll be begging to.”

“No independent action, remember?”

“In your dreams.”

Mauney stayed to process paperwork and Reacher and Neagley and Dixon and O’Donnell took the elevator back down to warmth and sunlight. They stood in the lot, saying nothing. Doing nothing. Just crackling and trembling and twitching with suppressed rage. It was a given that soldiers contemplate death. They live with it, they accept it. They expect it. Some of them even want it. But deep down they want it to be fair. Me against him, may the best man win. They want it to be noble. Win or lose, they want it to arrive with significance.

A soldier dead with his arms tied behind him was the worst kind of outrage. It was about helplessness and submission and abuse. It was about powerlessness.

It took away all the illusions.

“Let’s go,” Dixon said. “We’re wasting time.”