The stump itself was shrivelled. There was some muscle left, but with no work to do it had wasted to nothing. The bones were filed smooth on the cut ends, and the skin had been sewn tight down over them. The skin was white, and the stitches were red. They looked like Chinese writing. There was black hair growing on the bottom of the stump, because the skin there had been stretched down from the outside of his forearm. He stood up again and walked to the bathroom. A previous owner had installed a wall of mirror above the sink. He looked at himself in it, and hated what he
saw. His arm didn’t bother him. It was just missing. It was his face he hated. The burns. The arm was a wound, but the face was a disfigurement. He turned half sideways so he didn’t have to look at it. He cleaned his teeth and carried a bottle of lotion back to the bed. Squeezed a drop on to the skin of the stump and worked it in with his fingers. Then he placed the lotion next to the baby’s sock on the nightstand and rolled under the covers and clicked the light off.
‘Left or right?’ Jodie asked. ‘Which did he lose?’
Reacher was standing over Bamford’s bright casket, sorting through bones.
‘His right,’ he said. ‘The extra hand is a right hand.’
Newman moved across to Reacher’s shoulder and leaned in and separated two splintered shards of bone, each one about five inches in length.
‘He lost more than his hand,’ he said. ‘These are the radius and the ulna from his right arm. It was severed below the elbow, probably by a fragment of the rotor blade. There would have been enough left to make a decent stump.’
Reacher picked up the bones and ran his fingers across the splintered ends.
‘I don’t understand, Nash,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you search the area?’
‘Why should we?’ Newman said back, neutrally.
‘Because why just assume he survived? He was grievously injured. The impact, the severed arm? Maybe other injuries, maybe internal? Massive blood loss at least? Maybe he was burned, too. There was burning fuel everywhere. Think about it, Nash. Probability is he crawled out from the wreck, bleeding from his arteries, maybe on fire, he dragged himself
twenty yards away and collapsed in the undergrowth and died. Why the hell didn’t you look for him?’
‘Ask yourself the question,’ Newman said. ‘Why didn’t we look for him?’
Reacher stared at him. Nash Newman, one of the smartest guys he had ever known. A man so picky and precise he could take a fragment of skull an inch wide and tell you who it had belonged to, how he had lived, how he had died. A man so professional and meticulous he had run the longest-lasting and most complicated forensic investigation ever known in history and had received nothing but praise and plaudits all the way. How could Nash Newman have made such an elementary mistake? Reacher stared at him, and then he breathed out and closed his eyes.
‘Christ, Nash,’ he said slowly. ‘You know he survived, don’t you? You actually know it. You didn’t look for him because you know it for sure.’ Newman nodded. ‘Correct.’ ‘But how do you know?’
Newman glanced around the lab. Lowered his voice. ‘Because he turned up afterward,’ he said. ‘He crawled into a field hospital fifty miles away and three weeks later. It’s all in their medical files. He was racked with fever, serious malnutrition, terrible burns to one side of his face, no arm, maggots in the stump. He was incoherent most of the time, but they identified him by his dog tags. Then he came around after treatment and told the story, no other survivors but himself. That’s why I said we knew exactly what we were going to find up there. That’s why it was such a low priority, until Leon got all agitated about it.’
‘So what happened?’ Jodie asked. ‘Why all the secrecy?’
‘The hospital was way north,’ Newman said. ‘Charlie was pushing south and we were retreating. The hospital was getting ready for evacuation.’