by Lee Child
“They’re scattered here and there. One of them has her arm in a sling and one of them has a cast on her wrist. But generally they’re not bitching too much. I don’t think any of them has called a lawyer yet. Actually some of them are looking on the bright side, like this whole thing is a magical mystery tour.”
“Not so bad,” Reacher said again.
Knox didn’t answer. Just got up suddenly and took stuff off a nearby hook and jammed a hat on his head, and wound a muffler around his neck, and struggled into a heavy coat, all borrowed, judging by the sizes and the colors. He nodded once at Reacher, a slightly bad-tempered farewell, and then he walked to the door and stepped out into the snow.
A waitress came by and Reacher ordered the biggest breakfast on the menu.
Plus coffee.
Five to eleven in the morning.
Forty-one hours to go.
The lawyer left his briefcase in his office but carried his overshoes in their grocery bag. He put them on in his building’s lobby and retraced his steps through the lot to his car. He buckled up, started the engine, heated the seat, turned on the wipers. He knew that the highway was still closed. But there were alternative routes. Long, straight South Dakota roads, stretching all the way to the horizon.
He fumbled his overshoes off and put a leather sole on the brake pedal and moved the shifter to Drive.
Reacher was halfway through a heaping plate of breakfast when Peterson came in. He was dressed in his full-on outdoors gear. It was clear that Reacher was supposed to be impressed by how easily Peterson had found him. Which Reacher might or might not have been, depending on how many other places Peterson had tried first.
Peterson put his hand on the chair that Knox had used, and Reacher invited him to sit with a gesture from his loaded fork. Peterson sat down and said, “I’m sorry you didn’t get breakfast at the house.”
Reacher chewed and swallowed and said, “No problem. You’re being more than generous as it is.”
“Kim suffers from loneliness, that’s all. It isn’t her favorite time of day, when the boys and I leave the house. She usually hides out in her room.”
Reacher said nothing.
Peterson asked, “Have you ever been lonely?”
Reacher said, “Sometimes.”
“Kim would say you haven’t. Not unless you had sat on a back porch day after day in South Dakota and looked all around and seen nothing for a hundred miles in any direction.”
“Isn’t she local?”
“She is. But being used to something doesn’t mean you have to like it.”
“I guess not.”
“We checked the bars. We found one with a very clean floor.”
“Where?”
“North. Where the prison guards drink.”
“Any cooperative witnesses?”
“No, but the bartender is missing. Lit out in his truck yesterday.”
“OK,” Reacher said.
“Thank you,” Peterson said.
“You’re welcome.” Reacher speared half a slice of bacon and a half-circle of set egg yolk and ate it.
“Any other thoughts?” Peterson asked.
“I know how the guy you put in jail is communicating.”
“How?”
“He made a friend on the inside. Or coerced somebody. Your guy is briefing the second guy, and the second guy is briefing his own lawyer. Like a parallel track. You’re bugging the wrong room.”
“There are dozens of lawyer visits every day.”
“Then you better start sifting through them.”
Peterson was quiet for a beat. “Anything else?”
Reacher nodded. “I need to find a clothing store. I more or less promised your wife. Cheap, and nothing fancy. You know somewhere like that?”
The clothing store that Peterson recommended was a long block west of the public square. It carried sturdy garments for sturdy farmers. There were summer and winter sections, without many obvious differences between the two. Some of the items were off-brand makes, and others had recognizable labels but visible defects. There was a limited choice of dull colors. Prices were low, even for footwear. Reacher started from the ground up with a pair of black waterproof boots. Then he started in on the garments. His rule when confronted with a choice was to take either olive green or blue. Olive green, because he had been in the army. Blue, because a girl had once told him it picked out his eyes. He went with olive green, because it almost matched his borrowed coat, which was tan. He chose pants with a flannel lining, a T-shirt, a flannel shirt, and a sweater made of thick cotton. He added white underwear and a pair of black gloves and a khaki watch cap. Total damage was a hundred and thirty bucks. The store owner took a hundred and twenty for cash. Four days of wear, probably, at the rate of thirty dollars a day. Which added up to more than ten grand a year, just for clothes. Insane, some would say. But Reacher liked the deal. He knew that most folks spent much less than ten grand a year on clothes. They had a small number of good items that they kept in closets and laundered in basements. But the closets and basements were surrounded by houses, and houses cost a whole lot more than ten grand a year, to buy or to rent, and to maintain and repair and insure.
So who was really nuts?
He dressed in a changing cubicle and dumped his old stuff in a trash barrel behind the counter. He jammed the hat on his head and tugged it down over his ears. He covered it with the borrowed parka’s hood. He zipped up. He put on the gloves. He stepped out to the sidewalk.
And was still cold.
The air was meat-locker chilled. He felt it in his gut, his ribs, his legs, his ass, his eyes, his face, his lungs. Like the worst of Korea, but in Korea he had been younger, and he had been there under orders, and he had been getting paid. This was different. The snow danced and swirled all around him. A freshening wind pushed at him. His nose started running. His vision blurred. He took breaks in doorways. He turned a ten-minute walk to the police station into a twenty-minute winter odyssey.
When he arrived, he found full-on mayhem.
Five minutes before noon.
Forty hours to go.
It sounded like half the phones in the place were ringing. The old guy behind the reception counter had one in each hand and was talking into both of them. Peterson was alone in the squad room, on his feet behind a desk, a phone trapped between his ear and his shoulder, the cord bucking and swaying as he moved. He was gesticulating with both hands, short, sharp, decisive motions, like a general moving troops, as if the town of Bolton was laid out in front of him on the desk top, like a map.
Reacher watched and listened. The situation made itself clear. No rocket science was involved. A major crime against a person had been committed and Peterson was moving people out to deal with it while making sure his existing obligations were adequately covered. The crime scene seemed to be on the right hand edge of the desk, which was presumably Bolton’s eastern limit. The existing obligations seemed to be slightly south and west of downtown, which was presumably where Janet Salter lived. The vulnerable witness. Peterson was putting more resources around her than at the scene, which indicated either proper caution or that the victim at the scene was already beyond help.
Or both.
A minute later Peterson stopped talking and hung up. He looked worried. Expert in a casual way with all the local stuff, a little out of his depth with anything else. He said, “We’ve got a guy shot to death in a car.”
Reacher said, “Who?”
“The plates come back to a lawyer from the next county. He’s had five client conferences up at the jail. All of them since we busted the biker. Like you said. He’s their parallel track. And now their plan is made. So they’re cleaning house and breaking the chain.”
“Worse than that,” Reacher said.
Peterson nodded. “I know. Their guy isn’t on his way. We missed him. He’s already here.”
Chapter 13
Twice Peterson tried to get out of the squad room and twice he had to duck back to answer a
phone. Eventually he made it to the corridor. He looked back at Reacher and said, “You want to ride along with me?”
Reacher asked, “You want me there?”
“If you like.”
“I really need to be somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“I should go introduce myself to Mrs. Salter.”
“What for?”
“I want to know the lay of the land. Just in case.”
Peterson said, “Mrs. Salter is covered. I made sure of that. Don’t worry about it.” Then he paused and said, “What? You think they’re going to move on her today? You think this dead lawyer is a diversion?”
“No, I think they’re breaking the chain. But it looks like I’m going to be here a couple of days. Because of the snow. If that escape siren goes off anytime soon, then I’m all you’ve got. But I should introduce myself to the lady first.”
Peterson said nothing.
Reacher said, “I’m trying to be helpful, that’s all. To repay your hospitality.”
Peterson said nothing.
Reacher said, “I’m not your guy.”
“I know that.”
“But?”
“You could be helpful at the crime scene.”
“You’ll be OK. You know what to do, right? Take plenty of photographs and pay attention to tire tracks and footprints. Look for shell cases.”
“OK.”
“But first call your officers in Mrs. Salter’s house. I don’t want a big panic when I walk up the driveway.”
“You don’t know where she lives.”
“I’ll find it.”
In summer it might have taken ten minutes to find Mrs. Salter’s house. In the snow it took closer to thirty, because lines of sight were limited and walking was slow. Reacher retraced the turns that the prison bus had made, struggling through drifts, slogging through unplowed areas, slipping and sliding along vehicle ruts. It was still snowing hard. The big white flakes came down on him, came up at him, whipped all around him. He found the main drag south. He knew that ahead of him was the restaurant. Beyond that was the parked cop car. He kept on going. He was very cold, but he was still functioning. The new clothes were doing their job, but nothing more.
There were cars heading north and south, lights on, wipers thrashing. Not many of them, but enough to keep him on the shoulder and out of the tire tracks, which would have been easier going. He guessed the roadway under the snow was wide, but right then traffic was confining itself to two narrow lanes near the center, made of four separate parallel ruts. Each passing car confirmed the collective decision not to wander. With each passing tire the ruts grew a little deeper and their side walls grew a little higher. The snow was dry and firm. The ruts were lined on the bottom with broken lattices of tread prints, smooth and greasy and stained brown in places.
Reacher passed the restaurant. The lunch hour was in full swing. The windows were fogged with steam. Reacher struggled on. Four hundred yards later he saw the parked cop car. It had pulled out of the southbound ruts and broken through the little walls and made smaller ruts of its own, like a railroad switch. It had parked parallel with the traffic and was completely blocking the side street. Its motor was turned off but its roof lights were turning. The cop in the driver’s seat was not moving his head. He was just staring through the windshield, looking neither alert nor enthusiastic. Reacher slogged through a wide turn and approached him from his front left side. He didn’t want to surprise the guy.
The cop buzzed the window down. Called out, “You Reacher?”
Reacher nodded. His face felt too cold for coherent speech. The cop’s nameplate said Montgomery. He was unshaven and overweight. Somewhere in his late twenties. In the army his ass would have been kicked to hell and back a hundred times. He said, “The Salter house is ahead on the left. You can’t miss it.”
Reacher struggled on. There were no big ruts in the side street. Just two lone tracks, one car coming, one car going. The tracks were already mostly refilled with snow. The change of watch, some hours earlier. The night guy going home, the day guy coming in. The day guy had gunned it a little after the turn. That was clear. His tracks slalomed through a minor fishtail before straightening.
The street curved gently and was lined on both sides by big old houses in big flat lots. The houses looked Victorian. They could have been a hundred years old. They had all been prosperous once and most of them still were. Clearly they had been built during an earlier boom. They predated the federal prison dollars by a century. Their details were obscured by snow, but they had heft and solidity and gingerbread trim. Peterson had called Janet Salter a storybook grandma, and Reacher had expected a storybook grandma’s house to be a small cottage with gingham curtains. Especially considering this storybook grandma had been a teacher and a librarian. Maybe Janet Salter had a different kind of story. Reacher was looking forward to meeting her. He had never known either one of his own grandmothers. He had seen a black and white photograph of himself as a baby on a stern woman’s knee. His father’s mother, he had been told. His mother’s mother had died when he was four, before ever having visited.
The second cop car was parked up ahead. No lights. It was facing him. The cop inside was watching him closely. Reacher floundered onward and stopped ten feet short. The cop opened his door and climbed out and tracked around. His boots set powder flying and small snowballs skittering. He said, “You Reacher?”
Reacher nodded.
“I have to search you.”
“Says who?”
“The deputy chief.”
“Search me for what?”
“Weapons.”
“She’s more than seventy years old. I wouldn’t need weapons.”
“True. But you’d need weapons to get past the officers in the house.”
This cop was a sharp-looking guy the right side of middle age. Compact, muscled, competent. A department of two halves, one better, one worse. A new hire at the end of the street, an old hand outside the house. Reacher planted his feet and unzipped his coat and stood with his arms held wide. Cold air rushed in under his coat. The cop patted him down and squeezed his coat pockets from both sides at once.
“Go ahead,” he said. “They’re expecting you.”
The driveway was long and the house was ornate. It could have been airlifted straight from Charleston or San Francisco. It had all the bells and whistles. A wraparound rocking-chair porch, dozens of windows, fish scale siding. It had turrets, and more stained glass than a church. Reacher made it up the steps onto the porch and clumped across the boards and stamped the snow off his boots. The front door was a carved multi-paneled thing. It had a bell pull next to it, a cast weight on the end of a wire that looped over pulleys and entered the house through a small bronze eye. Probably ordered by mail from Sears Roebuck a century ago, and delivered by wagon in a wooden box packed with straw, and fitted by a man more used to cart wheels and horseshoes.
Reacher pulled on it. He heard a chime deep inside the house, delayed by a second, low and polite and sonorous. Another second later a policewoman opened the door. She was small and dark and young and was in full uniform. Her gun was in its holster. But the holster was unsnapped, and she looked to be fully on the ball. Women officers in the house, Peterson had said, the best we’ve got, minimum of four at all times, two awake, two asleep.
The woman asked, “Are you Reacher?”
Reacher nodded.
“Come on in.”
The hallway was dark and paneled and fairly magnificent. There were oil paintings on the walls. Ahead was a substantial staircase that rose out of sight. All around were closed doors, maybe chestnut, each of them polished to a shine by a century of labor. There was a large Persian carpet. There were antiquated steam radiators connected with fat pipes. The radiators were working. The room was warm. There was a bentwood hat stand, loaded down with four new police-issue winter parkas. Reacher shrugged off his unzipped coat and hung it on a spare peg. It looked like he felt, a
n old battered item surrounded by current models.
The woman cop said, “Mrs. Salter is in the library. She’s expecting you.”
Reacher said, “Which one is the library?”
“Follow me.” The cop stepped ahead like a butler. Reacher followed her to a door on the left. She knocked and entered. The library was a large square room with a high ceiling. It had a fireplace and a pair of glass doors to the garden. Everything else was books on shelves, thousands of them. There was a second woman cop in front of the glass doors. She was standing easy with her hands folded behind her back, looking outward. She didn’t move. Just glanced back, got a nod from her partner, and glanced away again.
There was an older woman in an armchair. Mrs. Salter, presumably. The retired teacher. The librarian. The witness. She looked at Reacher and smiled politely.
She said, “I was just about to take some lunch. Would you care to join me?”
Five to one in the afternoon.
Thirty-nine hours to go.
Chapter 14
Janet Salter prepared the lunch herself. Reacher watched her do it. He sat in a spacious kitchen while she moved from refrigerator to counter to stove to sink. The impression he had formed from Peterson’s casual description did not match the reality. She was more than seventy years old, for sure, gray-haired, not tall, not short, not fat, not thin, and she certainly looked kind and not in the least forbidding, but as well as all of that she was ramrod straight and her bearing was vaguely aristocratic. She looked like a person used to respect and obedience, possibly from a large and important staff. And Reacher doubted that she was a real grandmother. She wore no wedding band and the house looked like no children had set foot in it for at least fifty years.
She said, “You were one of the unfortunates on the bus.”
Reacher said, “I think the others were more unfortunate than me.”
“I volunteered this house, of course. I have plenty of space here. But Chief Holland wouldn’t hear of it. Not under the circumstances.”
