“Don’t worry. I called around, after you called me, naturally. Friend of a friend said I should push the boat out. Word is you were a solid guy, for a major.”
Reacher smiled, briefly.
“Well, I always tried to be,” he said. “For a major. Who was the friend of the friend?”
“Some guy worked for you when you worked for old Leon Garber. He said you were a stand-up guy and old Garber always swore by you, which makes you pretty much OK as long as this generation is still in harness.”
“People still remember Garber?”
“Do Yankees fans still remember Joe DiMaggio?”
“I’m seeing Garber’s daughter,” Reacher said.
“I know,” Leighton said. “Word gets around. You’re a lucky guy. Jodie Garber’s a nice lady, from what I recall.”
“You know her?”
Leighton nodded. “I met her on the bases, when I was coming up.”
“I’ll remember you to her.”
Then he lapsed into silence, thinking about Jodie, arid Leon. He was going to sell the house Leon had left him, and Jodie was worrying about it.
“Sit down,” Leighton said. “Please.”
There were two upright chairs in front of the desk, tubular metal and canvas, like the things storefront churches threw away a generation ago.
“So how can I help you?” Leighton said, aiming the question at Reacher, looking at Harper.
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“She’ll explain,” Readier said.
She ran through it all from the beginning, summarizing. It took seven or eight minutes. Leighton listened attentively, interrupting her here and there.
“I know about the women,” he said. “We heard.”
She finished with Reacher’s smoke screen theory, the possible Army thefts; and the trail which led from Petrosian’s boys in New York to Bob in New Jersey.
“His name is Bob McGuire,” Leighton said. “Quartermaster sergeant. But he’s not your guy. We’ve had him two months, and he’s too dumb, anyway.”
I I
“We figured that,” Harper said. “Feeling was he could name names, maybe lead us to somebody more likely.”
“A bigger fish?”
Harper nodded. “Somebody doing enough business to make it worth killing witnesses.”
Leighton nodded back.
“Theoretically, there might be such a person,” he said, cautiously.
“You got a name?”
Leighton looked at her and shook his head. Leaned back in his chair and rubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes. Suddenly looked very tired.
“Problem?” Reacher asked.
“How long have you been out?” Leighton asked back, eyes closed.
“About three years, I guess,” Reacher said.
I • Leighton yawned and stretched and returned to an upright position.
‘” “Things have changed,” he said. “Time marches on, right?”
“What’s changed?”
“Everything,” Leighton said. “Well, this, mainly.” He leaned over and tapped his computer monitor with his nail. It made a glassy ringing thunk, like a bottle. “Smaller Army, easier to organize, more time on our hands. So they computerized us, completely. Makes communication a whole lot easier. Makes it so we all know each other’s business. Makes inventories easier to manage. You want to know how many Willys Jeep tires we got in store, even though we don’t use Willys Jeeps anymore? Give me ten minutes, I can tell you.”
“C }”
So?
“So we keep track of everything, much better than we used to. For instance, we know how many M9 Berettas have ever been delivered, we know how many have ever been legitimately issued, and we know how many we got in store. And if those numbers didn’t add up, we’d be worrying about it, believe me.”
“So do the numbers add up?”
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Leighton grinned, briefly. “They do now. That’s for damn sure. Nobody’s stolen an M9 Beretta from the U.S. Army in the last year and a half.”
“So what was Bob McGuire doing two months ago?” Reacher asked.
“Selling out the last of his stockpile. He’d been thieving ten years, at least. A little computer analysis made it obvious. Him, and a couple dozen others in a couple dozen different locations. We put procedures in place to dry up the stealing and we rounded up all the bad guys selling whatever they still had left.”
“All of them?”
“Computer says so. We were leaking weapons like crazy, all kinds of descriptions, couple of dozen locations, so we arrest a couple dozen guys, and the leakage has stopped. McGuire was about the last, maybe second-to-last, I’m not sure.”