"Find anything?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Let's go."
We crunched back down the driveway together and turned north on the county road. Headed back to town. I could see the church steeple and the bronze statue in the distance, waiting for us.
Chapter Thirteen
"SOMETHING I NEED TO CHECK WITH YOU," I SAID.
Finlay's patience was running thin. He looked at his watch.
"You better not be wasting my time, Reacher," he said.
We walked on north. The sun was dropping away from overhead, but the heat was still fierce. I didn't know how Finlay could wear a tweed jacket. And a moleskin vest. I led him over to the village green. We crossed the grass and leaned up on the statue of old Caspar Teale, side by side.
"They cut his balls off, right?" I said.
He nodded. Looked at me, waiting.
"OK," I said. "So the question is this: did you find his balls?"
He shook his head.
"No," he said. "We went over the whole place. Ourselves and the medical examiner. They weren't there. His testicles are missing."
He smiled as he said it. He was recovering his cop's sense of humor.
"OK," I said. "That's what I needed to know."
His smile widened. Reached his eyes.
"Why?" he said. "Do you know where they are?"
"When's the autopsy?" I asked him.
He was still smiling.
"His autopsy won't help," he said. "They were cut off. They're not connected to him anymore. They weren't there. They're missing. So how can they find them at his autopsy?"
"Not his autopsy," I said. "Her autopsy. His wife's. When they check what she ate."
Finlay stopped smiling. Went quiet. Just looked at me.
"Talk, Reacher," he said.
"OK," I said. "That's why we came out here, remember? So answer another question for me. How many homicides have they had in Margrave?"
He thought about it. Shrugged.
"None," he said. "At least, not for maybe thirty years or so. Not since voter registration days, I guess."
"And now you've had four in four days," I said. "And pretty soon you'll find the fifth."
"Fifth?" he said. "Who's the fifth?"
"Hubble," I said. "My brother, this Sherman Stoller guy, the two Morrisons and Hubble makes five. No homicides in thirty years and now you've got five all at once. That can't be any kind of a coincidence, right?"
"No way," he said. "Of course not. They're linked."
"Right," I said. "Now I'll tell you some more links. But first of all, you got to understand something, right? I was just passing through here. On Friday and Saturday and Sunday right up to the time those prints came through on my brother, I wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention to anything at all. I was just figuring I'd wait around and get the hell out of here as soon as possible."
"So?" he said.
"So I was told stuff," I said. "Hubble told me things in Warburton, but I didn't pay a lot of attention. I wasn't interested in him, OK? He told me things, and I didn't follow them up with him and I probably don't recall some of them."
"Like what things?" Finlay said.
So I told him the things I remembered. I started the same way Hubble had started. Trapped inside some kind of a racket, terrorized by a threat against himself and his wife. A threat consisting of the same things, word for word, that Finlay had just seen for himself that morning.
"You sure about that?" he said. "Exactly the same?"
"Word for word," I said. "Totally identical. Nailed to the wall, balls cut off, the wife forced to eat the balls, then they get their throats cut. Word-for-word identical, Finlay. So unless we got two threateners at the same time in the same place making the exact same threat, that's another link."
"So Morrison was inside the same scam as Hubble?" he said.
"Owned and operated by the same people," I said.
Then I told him Hubble had been talking to an investigator. And I told him the investigator had been talking to Sherman Stoller, whoever he had been.
"Who was the investigator?" he asked. "And where does Joe fit in?"
"Joe was the investigator," I said. "Hubble told me the tall guy with the shaved head was an investigator, trying to get him free."
"What sort of an investigator was your brother?" Finlay said. "Who the hell was he working for?"
"Don't know," I said. "Last I heard he was working for the Treasury Department."
Finlay pushed off the statue and started walking back north.
"I got to make some calls," he said. "Time to go to work on this thing."
"Walk slow," I said. "I haven't finished yet."
FINLAY WAS ON THE SIDEWALK. I WAS IN THE ROAD, STAYING clear of the low awnings in front of every store. There was no traffic on the street to worry about. Monday, two o'clock in the afternoon, and the town was deserted.
"How do you know Hubble's dead?" Finlay asked me.
So I told him how I knew. He thought about it. He agreed with me.
"Because he was talking to an investigator?" he said.
I shook my head. Stopped outside the barbershop.
"No," I said. "They didn't know about that. If they had, they'd have got to him much earlier. Thursday at the latest. I figure they made the decision to waste him Friday, about five o'clock. Because you pulled him in with the phone number in Joe's shoe. They figured he couldn't be allowed to talk to cops or prison guards. So they set it up with Spivey. But Spivey's boys blew it, so they tried over again. His wife said he got a call to wait at home today. They were setting him up for a second attempt. Looks like it worked."