by Lee Child
Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini were driving north in a rented Impala. They were based in a Courtyard Marriott, which was the only hotel in the county seat, which was nothing more than a token grid of streets set in the middle of what felt like a billion square miles of absolutely nothing at all. They had learned to watch their fuel gauge. Nebraska was that kind of place. It paid to fill up at every gas station you saw. The next one could be a million miles away.
They were from Vegas, which as always meant they were really from somewhere else. New York, in Cassano’s case, and Philadelphia, in Mancini’s. They had paid their dues in their hometowns, and then they had gotten hired together in Miami, like playing triple-A ball, and then they had moved up to the big show out in the Nevada desert. Tourists were told that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but that wasn’t true as far as Cassano and Mancini were concerned. They were traveling men, always on the move, tasked to roam around and deal with the first faint pre-echoes of trouble long before it rolled in and hit their boss where he lived.
Hence the trip to the vast agricultural wastelands, nearly eight hundred miles north and east of the glitter and the glamour. There was a snafu in the supply chain, and it was a day or two away from getting extremely embarrassing. Their boss had promised certain specific things to certain specific people, and it would do him no good at all if he couldn’t deliver. So Cassano and Mancini had so far been on the scene for seventy-two hours straight, and they had smacked some beanpole yokel’s wife around, just to make their point. Then some other related yokel had called with a claim that the snafu was being caused by a stranger poking his nose in where it didn’t belong. Bullshit, possibly. Quite probably entirely unconnected. Just an excuse. But Cassano and Mancini were only sixty miles away, so their boss was sending them north to help, because if the yokel’s statement was indeed a lie, then it indicated vulnerability, and therefore minor assistance rendered now would leverage a better deal later. An obvious move. This was American business, after all. Forcing down the wholesale price was the name of the game.
They came up the crappy two-lane and rolled through the crappy crossroads and pulled in at the motel. They had seen it before. It looked OK at night. Not so good in the daylight. In the daylight it looked sad and botched and halfhearted. They saw a damaged Subaru standing near one of the cabins. It was all smashed up. There was nothing else to see. They parked in the lot outside the lounge and got out of the rental car and stood and stretched. Two city boys, yawning, scoured by the endless wind. Cassano was medium height, dark, muscled, blank-eyed. Mancini was pretty much the same. They both wore good shoes and dark suits and colored shirts and no ties and wool overcoats. They were often mistaken for each other.
They went inside, to find the motel owner. Which they did, immediately. They found him behind the bar, using a rag, wiping a bunch of sticky overlapping rings off the wood. Some kind of a sad-sack loser, with dyed red hair.
Cassano said, “We represent the Duncan family,” which he had been promised would produce results. And it did. The guy with the hair dropped the rag and stepped back and almost came to attention and saluted, like he was in the army, like a superior officer had just yelled at him.
Cassano said, “You sheltered a guy here last night.”
The guy with the hair said, “No, sir, I did not. I tossed him out.”
Mancini said, “It’s cold.”
The guy behind the bar said nothing, not following.
Cassano said, “If he didn’t sleep here, where the hell did he sleep? You got no local competition. And he didn’t sleep out under a hedge. For one thing, there don’t seem to be any hedges in Nebraska. For another, he’d have frozen his ass off.”
“I don’t know where he went.”
“You sure?”
“He wouldn’t tell me.”
“Any kindly souls here, who would take a stranger in?”
“Not if the Duncans told them not to.”
“Then he must have stayed here.”
“Sir, I told you, he didn’t.”
“You checked his room?”
“He returned the key before he left.”
“More than one way into a room, asshole. Did you check it?”
“The housekeeper already made it up.”
“She say anything?”
“No.”
“Where is she?”
“She finished. She left. She went home.”
“What’s her name?”
“Dorothy.”
Mancini said, “Tell us where Dorothy lives.”
Chapter 16
Dorothy’s idea of a fifteen-dollar breakfast turned out to be a regular feast. Coffee first, while the rest of it was cooking, which was oatmeal, and bacon, and eggs, and toast, big heaping portions, lots of everything, all the food groups, all piping hot, served on thick china plates that must have been fifty years old, and eaten with ancient silverware that had heavy square Georgian handles.
“Fabulous,” Reacher said. “Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome. Thank you for mine.”
“It isn’t right, you know. People not eating because of the Duncans.”
“People do all kinds of things because of the Duncans.”
“I know what I’d do.”
She smiled. “We all talked like that, once upon a time, long ago. But they kept us poor and tired, and then we got old.”
“What do the young people do here?”
“They leave, just as soon as they can. The adventurous ones go all over the place. It’s a big country. The others stay closer to home, in Lincoln or Omaha.”
“Doing what?”
“There are jobs there. Some boys join the State Police. That’s always popular.”
“Someone should call those boys.”
She didn’t answer.
He asked, “What happened twenty-five years ago?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“You can, to me. No one will know. If I ever meet the Duncans, we’ll be discussing the present day, not ancient history.”
“I was wrong anyway.”
“About what?”
She wouldn’t answer.
He asked, “Were you the neighbor with the dispute?”
She wouldn’t answer.
He asked, “You want help cleaning up?”
She shook her head. “You don’t wash the dishes in a restaurant, do you?”
“Not so far.”
“Where were you, twenty-five years ago?”
“I don’t remember,” he said. “Somewhere in the world.”
“Were you in the army then?”
“Probably.”
“People say you beat up three Cornhuskers yesterday.”
“Not all at once,” he said.
“You want more coffee?”
“Sure,” he said, and she recharged the percolator and set it going again. He asked, “How many farms contracted with the Duncans?”
“All of us,” she said. “This whole corner of the county. Forty farms.”
“That’s a lot of corn.”
“And soybeans and alfalfa. We rotate the crops.”
“Did you buy part of the old Duncan place?”
“A hundred acres. A nice little parcel. It squared off a corner. It made sense.”
“How long ago was that?”
“It must be thirty years.”
“So things were good for the first five years?”
“I’m not going to tell you what happened.”
“I think you should,” he said. “I think you want to.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Like you said, I had three football players sent after me. I’d like to understand why, at least.”
“It was because you busted Seth Duncan’s nose.”
“I’ve busted lots of noses. Nobody ever retaliated with retired athletes before.”
She poured the coffee. She placed his mug in front of him. The kitchen was warm from the
stove. It felt like it would stay warm all day long. She said, “Twenty-five years ago Seth Duncan was eight years old.”
“And?”
“This corner of the county was like a little community. We were all spread out and isolated, of course, but the school bus kind of defined it. Everybody knew everybody else. Children would play together, big groups of them, at one house, then another.”
“And?”
“No one liked going to Seth Duncan’s place. Girls especially. And Seth played with girls a lot. More so than with boys.”
“Why didn’t they like it?”
“No one spelled it out. A place like this, a time like that, such things were not discussed. But something unpleasant was going on. Or nearly going on. Or in the air. My daughter was eight years old at the time. Same age as Seth. Almost the same birthday, as a matter of fact. She didn’t want to play there. She made that clear.”
“What was going on?”
“I told you, no one said.”
“But you knew,” Reacher said. “Didn’t you? You had a daughter. Maybe you couldn’t prove anything, but you knew.”
“Have you got kids?”
“None that I know about. But I was a cop of sorts for thirteen years. And I’ve been human all my life. Sometimes people just know things.”
The woman nodded. Sixty years old, blunt and square, her face flushed from the heat and the food. She said, “I suppose today they would call it inappropriate touching.”
“On Seth’s part?”
She nodded again. “And his father’s, and both his uncles’.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yes, it was.”
“What did you do?”
“My daughter never went there again.”
“Did you talk to people?”
“Not at first,” she said. “Then it all came out in a rush. Everyone was talking to everyone else. Nobody’s girl wanted to go there.”
“Did anyone talk to Seth’s mother?”
“Seth didn’t have a mother.”
Reacher said, “Why not? Had she left?”
“No.”
“Had she died?”
“She never existed.”
“She must have.”
“Biologically, I suppose. But Jacob Duncan was never married. He was never seen with a woman. No woman was ever seen with any of them. Their own mother had passed on years before. It was just old man Duncan and the three of them. Then the three of them on their own. Then all of a sudden Jacob was bringing a little boy to kindergarten.”
“Didn’t anyone ask where the kid came from?”
“People talked a little, but they didn’t ask. Too polite. Too inhibited. I suppose we all thought Seth was a relative. You know, maybe orphaned or something.”
“So what happened next? You all stopped your kids from going there to play, and that’s what caused the trouble?”
“That’s how it started. There was a lot of talk and whispers. The Duncans were all alone in their little compound. They were shunned. They resented it.”
“So they retaliated?”
“Not at first.”
“So when?”
“After a little girl went missing.”
Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini got back in their rented Impala and fired up the engine. The car had a bolt-on navigation system, a couple of extra dollars a day, but it was useless. The screen came up with nothing more than a few thin red lines, like doodles on a pad. None of the roads had names. Just numbers, or else nothing at all. Most of the map was blank. And it was either inaccurate or incomplete, anyway. The crossroads wasn’t even marked. Just like Vegas, to be honest. Vegas was growing so fast no GPS company could keep up with it. So Cassano and Mancini were used to navigating the old-fashioned way, which was to scribble down turn-by-turn directions freely given by a source who was anxious to be accurate, in order to avoid a worse beating than he was getting along with the initial questions. And the motel guy had been more anxious than most, right after the first two smacks. He was no kind of hero. That was for sure.
“Left out of the lot,” Mancini read out loud.
Cassano turned left out of the lot.
Dorothy the housekeeper made a third pot of coffee. She rinsed the percolator and filled it again and set it going. She said, “Seth Duncan had a hard time in school. He got bullied. Eight-year-old boys can be very tribal. I guess they felt they had permission to go after him, because of the whispers at home. And none of the girls stuck with him. They wouldn’t go to his house, and they wouldn’t even talk to him. That’s how children are. That’s how it was. All except one girl. Her parents had raised her to be decent and compassionate. She wouldn’t go to his house, but she still talked to him. Then one day that little girl just disappeared.”
Reacher said, “And?”
“It’s a horrible thing, when that happens. You have no idea. There’s a kind of crazy period at first, when everyone is mad and worried but can’t bring themselves to believe the worst. You know, a couple of hours, maybe three or four, you think she’s playing somewhere, maybe out picking flowers, she’s lost track of the time, she’ll be home soon, right as rain. No one had cell phones back then, of course. Some people didn’t even have regular phones. Then you think the girl has gotten lost, and everyone starts driving around, looking for her. Then it goes dark, and then you call the cops.”
Reacher asked, “What did the cops do?”
“Everything they could. They did a fine job. They went house to house, they used flashlights, they used loud-hailers to tell everyone to search their barns and outbuildings, they drove around all night, then at first light they got dogs and called in the State Police and the State Police called in the National Guard and they got a helicopter.”
“Nothing?”
The woman nodded.
“Nothing,” she said. “Then I told them about the Duncans.”
“You did?”
“Someone had to. As soon as I spoke up, others joined in. We were all pointing our fingers. The State Police took us very seriously. I guess they couldn’t afford not to. They took the Duncans to a barracks over near Lincoln and questioned them for days. They searched their houses. They got help from the FBI. All kinds of laboratory people were there.”
“Did they find anything?”
“Not a trace.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Every test was negative. They said the child hadn’t been there.”
“So what happened next?”
“Nothing. It all fizzled out. The Duncans came home. The little girl was never seen again. The case was never solved. The Duncans were very bitter. They asked me to apologize, for naming names, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t give it up. My husband, neither. Some folks were on our side, like the doctor’s wife. But most weren’t, really. They saw which way the wind was blowing. The Duncans withdrew into themselves. Then they started punishing us. Like revenge. We didn’t get our crop hauled that year. We lost it all. My husband killed himself. He sat right in that chair where you’re sitting and he put his shotgun under his chin.”
“I’m sorry.”
The woman said nothing.
Reacher asked, “Who was the girl?”
No reply.
“Yours, right?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “It was my daughter. She was eight years old. She’ll always be eight years old.”
She started to cry, and then her phone started to ring.
Chapter 17
The phone was a clunky old Nokia. It was on the kitchen counter. It hopped and buzzed and trilled the old Nokia tune that Reacher had heard a thousand times before, in bars, on buses, on the street. Dorothy snatched it up and answered. She said hello and then she listened, to what sounded like a fast slurred message of some kind, maybe a warning, and then she clicked off and dropped the phone like it was scalding hot.
“That was Mr. Vincent,” she said. “Over at the motel.”
Reacher said, “And?”<
br />
“Two men were there. They’re coming here. Right now.”
“Who?”
“We don’t know. Men we’ve never seen before.” She opened the kitchen door and glanced down a hallway toward the front of the house. There was silence for a second and then Reacher heard the distant hiss of tires on blacktop, the moan of a slowing engine, the sound of brakes, and then the crunch of a wheel on gravel, then another, then two more together, as a car turned in and bumped onto the track.
The woman said, “Get out of here. Please. They can’t know you’re here.”
“We don’t know who they are.”
“They’re Duncan people. Who else would they be? I can’t let them find you here. It’s more than my life is worth.”
Reacher said, “I can’t get out of here. They’re already on the track.”
“Hide out back. Please. I’m begging you. They can’t find you here. I mean it.” She stepped out to the hallway, ready to meet them head-on at the front door. They were close, and moving fast. The gravel was loud. She said, “They might search. If they find you, tell them you snuck in the yard. Over the fields. Please. Tell them I didn’t know. Make them believe you. Tell them you’re nothing to do with me.” Then she closed the door on him and was gone.
Angelo Mancini folded the sheet of handwritten directions and put it in his pocket. They were on some lumpy, bumpy, piece-of-shit farm track, heading for some broken-down old woebegone piece-of-shit farmhouse that belonged in a museum or a history book. The navigation screen showed nothing at all. Just white space. Roberto Cassano was at the wheel, hitting every pothole. What did he care? They were Hertz’s tires, not his. Up ahead the front door opened and an old woman appeared on the step, clutching the jamb, like she would fall over if she let go.
Mancini said, “That’s a woman with a guilty secret, right there. Count on it.”
“Looks that way,” Cassano said.
Reacher checked the view across the yard at the back. Maybe sixty feet to the parked pick-up, maybe sixty more to the line of barns and sheds and coops and sties. He eased the door open. He turned back and checked the door to the front hallway. It was closed, but he could hear the car. It was crunching to a stop. Its doors were opening. He sensed the woman out there, staring at it, fearful and panicking. He shrugged and turned again to leave. His gaze passed over the kitchen table.
