Wounded Earth Read Online Free PDF

came with my research grant, but,” she shrugged, “it's not always easy to prove you're being stonewalled.”
    “So what did you do?”
    “Perhaps you've noticed that I'm slightly obstinate.”
    “Perhaps.”
    Larabeth hit the page-down key and let a few hundred more names scroll by.
    “Sometimes I called the same office back until I got somebody more willing to talk. Sometimes I went to their supervisors. Sometimes I bypassed official channels and contacted veterans' organizations or people who served on draft boards. Even I don't remember where I got all this data. I'd have to check my dissertation for the references.” She moved the cursor back to the top of the file. “I believe this to be the most exhaustive compilation of data on Vietnam-era veterans in existence. It beats the hell out of the VA's official database. Babykiller's name is very probably somewhere in this mountain of data. But I call this a wild goose chase, because I don't know how to look for it. And even if I knew how to look, he might not be here. He might be part of the small percentage that the VA lost and that I couldn't find.”
    J.D. pulled up a chair. “Shall I light a candle to the patron saint of lost causes?”
    “And who might that be?”
    “I don't know,” he said. “I'm not Catholic.”
    “Then lighting a candle would do us precious little good. I'm not Catholic, either.”
    “Then why don't we forget about candles and saints? Just fire this thing up and show me how it works.”
    Larabeth closed the file and opened another. “I'm approaching this by the process of elimination. Here's the list of assumptions I made.” She handed him a short printout. “First, I sorted by sex. I'm virtually certain Babykiller is male, so that was a high-probability assumption. Unfortunately, not many women served in Vietnam, so that step only cut the original list by a percent or so.”
    “It beats making the list a couple percent longer," J.D. said.”
    “Yeah. Now we've got a population roughly the size of Mississippi. I kept going, but the farther I get into this, the more doubtful my assumptions get.”
    “An assumption is only bad when you stick to it too long.” J.D. grinned. “Detective's proverb.”
    Larabeth was successful in ignoring J.D.'s disarming smile, because she was immersed in something she loved, the work that had kickstarted her career. She was ridiculously pleased by the magic that the simple power of modern computers worked with her database, her baby, the product of four years of labor.
    “I think he's a white guy,” she said. “I know, voices can be deceiving, but I'm trying long shots. And his accent says 'Midwest' to me, so I eliminated men from New England and the Deep South. I left the Westerners, though. Their accents are too iffy.”
    “Sounds like a fair guess.” J.D.'s eyes said that this exercise had started his detective's juices flowing. “What did that do for us?”
    “It cut the list by more than half.”
    “Go ahead. Give me a town with that population, just for perspective.”
    “I don't know. New Orleans, maybe, minus a suburb or two. And that's where I've stopped for the moment.”
    J.D. rocked back in his chair to think. “That's nearly a million people. I don't believe I'd get on the phone or go door-to-door looking for somebody in a town that size, but it's not a bad start and you did it without the expert assistance of the Czar of Missing Persons.”
    “And where might I find this Czar?”
    The disarming smile flashed again. “You're looking at him, Czarina.”
    * * *
    It was hot unloading postal trucks in Atlanta, but it was a good job. Jessup was glad to have it. Good insurance, solid retirement plan, paid vacations and holidays and sick leave. Of course, a man could always use a little extra money. Speaking of which, this truck spelled a nice wad of extra money. Tomorrow was Friday. Maybe he'd take his kids to Six Flags this weekend.
    He spotted one of the packages right away.