by Lee Child
“Did Keever send you?”
“Ma’am, now we really need to talk. But we can’t pull you away from all of this.”
“Is Peter in trouble?”
Chang did the same thing again. She said, “Ma’am, we’re here to be briefed. Our job is to hear about Peter from you.”
McCann’s sister said, “Come with me.”
They walked through the house to a dark-paneled study, shuttered tight against the sun, with club chairs and a river stone fireplace. They sat down, the women perched almost knee to knee, Reacher leaning back. McCann’s sister asked, “Where should I begin?”
Reacher said, “Tell us what you know about Keever.”
“I never met him, obviously. But Peter likes to talk things through, so during the selection process I felt I got to know all the candidates to some extent.”
“How many candidates were there?”
“Eight to start with.”
“Did the process take long?”
“Almost six weeks.”
“That’s thorough.”
“That’s Peter.”
“How often do you talk?”
“Most days.”
“How long are the calls?”
“Some days an hour.”
“That’s a lot.”
“He’s my brother. He’s lonely.”
“Why did he need a private detective?”
“Because of Michael, his son. My nephew.”
“People say there are issues.”
“That’s the wrong word. That’s a polite way of saying difficult. Which is already a polite way of saying something worse. Michael is the opposite of difficult.”
“What would be the right word?”
“Michael didn’t make it all the way to the end of the assembly line. A couple of things didn’t get bolted on. I try not to blame the mother. But she wasn’t well. She died less than ten years later.”
“Which things got missed?”
“Are you a happy man, Mr. Reacher?”
“Can’t complain. Generally speaking. Right now I feel pretty good. Not in relation to the current part of our conversation, you understand.”
“On a scale of one to ten, what’s the worst you’ve ever felt?”
“About a four.”
“And the happiest?”
“Compared to the theoretical best ever?”
“I suppose.”
“About a nine.”
“OK, four at the bottom and nine at the top. What about you, Ms. Chang?”
She didn’t answer right away. Then she said, “The worst I’ve ever felt would be a three. And I was going to say eight for the best. But now maybe nine. I think.”
She looked at Reacher as she said it, in a certain way, and McCann’s sister caught the glance. She said, “Are you two sleeping together?”
No response.
“Honey, if you’re sleeping together, make it a nine for sure. Always safer. But no higher. Ten gives them performance anxiety. But right now between the two of you we have a swing from either three or four at the low end to a pair of nines at the high end, even though one of the nines is really an eight, but we’re too polite to say so. But you get my drift. You’re normal people. If you swung from two to seven you’d still be normal, but you’d be seen as a little dour and reserved. Understand?”
Chang nodded.
“Now suppose your needle is jammed on zero. Doesn’t move at all. Zero at the bottom and zero at the top. That’s Michael. He was born unhappy. Born without the capacity to be happy. Born without any concept even of what happiness is. He doesn’t know it’s there.”
Chang said, “Is there a name for that?”
“They have names for everything now. Peter and I discuss them endlessly. None of them really fits. I like an old-fashioned vocabulary. I think of it as melancholy. But that sounds too weak and passive. Michael has depth of emotion. Just not range. You feel joy or passion, and he feels the same intensity, but it’s all hammering away down at the zero level. And he’s intelligent. He knows exactly what’s happening to him. The result is endless torment.”
“How old is he now?”
“He’s thirty-five.”
“What are the outward signs? Is he hard to get along with?”
“The opposite. You hardly know he’s there. He’s very quiet. He does what you tell him. He hardly speaks. He sits for days staring into space, chewing his lip, his eyes darting around. Or else he’s on his computer, or fiddling with his phone. There’s no aggression. He never gets upset. Upset would imply an emotional range.”
“Can he work?”
“That’s been part of the problem. He has to work, to qualify for housing. It’s part of the deal. And he can work. There are things he’s good at. But people find him draining. They don’t like to be with him. Productivity goes down. Usually he’s asked to leave. So he’s in and out of the programs.”
“Where does he live now?”
“Right now, nowhere. He went missing.”
At that point the bride-to-be came in, looking for her mother. A thin shirt over her bikini. Peter McCann’s niece. Michael McCann’s cousin. Up close she was still luminous. She glowed. She was close to perfect. Pre-natal care, perinatal care, post-natal care, pediatrics, nutrition, education, orthodontics, vacations, college, postgrad, a fiancé, the whole nine yards. Her assembly line had worked just fine. The American dream. A spectacular result. And she looked happy. Not silly, not giggly, not hyped up, and not an airhead. Just deeply and serenely content. With room at the top for ecstasy. Her needle ran from maybe six to ten. She had gotten everything her cousin hadn’t.
McCann’s sister went back out to the pool with her. She promised to return as soon as she could. Reacher and Chang sat quiet in the darkened den. They heard the sounds of the party, muted by walls and distance. Splashes and yelps and the clink of glasses, and the rolling murmur of conversation. Chang said, “We should call Westwood in LA. We should update him. A deal’s a deal. Plus we’re going to need another hotel.”
Reacher said, “Tell him we need everything he has on the Deep Web. All his notes. Or maybe tell him to come out here to explain it all in person. We might not understand his notes. He can get on a plane. He’s getting the book deal.”
Chang put her phone on speaker and dialed, and she gave the guy the play-by-play, everything that had happened since she last called, from the West Hollywood motel. She mentioned Chicago, the library, the mom-and-pop pharmacy, McCann’s street, McCann’s house, Hackett, the neighbor, the Lincoln Park homicide, the flight to Phoenix, and finally the sister. And then the son, in the long term trapped between zero and zero, and in the short term missing.
Westwood said, “They call it anhedonia. The inability to experience pleasure.”
“The sister makes it sound worse than that.”
“And Keever’s job was to find him and bring him home?”
“We assume so. We didn’t get that far in the story. We were interrupted.”
“I don’t see how the Deep Web or two hundred deaths are involved. This feels like the crime desk, not the science desk. Or one of those human tragedy stories.”
“It could be all three. We don’t know yet.”
“Where are you staying?”
“We haven’t figured that out.”
“OK, I’ll call you when I land.”
The line went dead.
Reacher said, “Apparently Michael spends time on his computer, or fiddling with his phone. Maybe that’s the Deep Web connection. Maybe he’s in some weird kind of chat room all the time. Maybe he has a whole life no one else knows about.”
“He’s depressed, not weird.”
“Depressed means what it says, which is pushed down below the normal position. Which implies a range. Which Michael doesn’t have. Which is weird. Or unusual, to be polite. But he’s intelligent, she said. Maybe there are support groups on-line. Maybe he started one.”
“Why would it need to be secret?
”
“Because of search engines, I guess. Employers check on-line. I read about it in the newspaper. And not just employers, probably. Probably all kinds of people. Relatives, possibly, or doctors. There’s no privacy anymore. Things can come back to bite you. If Michael posted something that showed he wasn’t making progress, he could lose his housing. Or someone might decide he needed supervision.”
Then the door opened and Lydia Lair came back in. Peter McCann’s sister, Michael McCann’s aunt, and the mother of the bride. She sat down in the same chair and Reacher asked her, “How did Michael go missing?”
She said, “That’s a long story.”
Twenty miles south of Mother’s Rest, the man with the ironed jeans and the blow-dried hair took the call on his land line. His contact said, “This is your screw-up now.”
“In what way?”
“There were things you didn’t know.”
“What things?”
“I promised you they wouldn’t talk to McCann. And I delivered. Can’t talk to a dead man. But it came at a cost. I lost Hackett.”
“How?”
“Reacher took him out. Or both of them together. Either way, it shouldn’t have happened. Not theoretically possible.”
“Is he dead?”
“He’s in the hospital.”
“Are you going to let them get away with this?”
“No, I’m not. I’m going to make an example. This is an image business. Very competitive. Brand strength is everything. So I’ll split it with you fifty-fifty.”
“Split what?”
“The cost of not letting them get away with it.”
The man with the jeans and the hair paused a beat, and then he said, “You didn’t let them talk to McCann. For which you have my grateful thanks. It was a job well done. But with respect, that concluded our business. Any feelings you retain for Reacher or Chang are now personal to you, surely.”
“Hackett is handcuffed to the hospital bed. He’s in police custody.”
“How much does he know?”
“Bits and pieces. But they won’t prove anything. Hackett has no evidence with him. No data. Reacher stole his phone, and he left his computers in the car. Which was provided by our friends in Chicago, complete with a driver. So we still have his hardware. We fired up the phone sniffer again. Chang is back on the air. She just called the guy at the LA Times. From a suburban location right here in Phoenix.”
“Why there? Because of you? Are they coming for you?”
“Reacher called me on Hackett’s phone and told me so. Plus it would be an easy prediction anyway. But not if you listened to Chang’s call to the LA Times. They’re here for a completely different reason altogether.”
“Which is what?”
“There were things you didn’t know.”
“What things?”
“The kind of things that will make you happy to split with me fifty-fifty.”
“Tell me.”
“Peter McCann had a sister. Lydia McCann, as was. Now Lydia Lair, married to a doctor. She lives here in Phoenix. In a suburban location. The brother and the sister talked all the time. He told her everything. According to what Chang just said to Westwood, it could be that talking to the sister is the same thing as talking to McCann himself.”
“We can’t let that happen.”
“We?”
“OK, fifty-fifty. Of course.”
“I’m glad we see eye to eye.”
“But with one extra thing.”
“Which would be what?”
“Tell me how McCann died.”
“Hackett shot him.”
“In greater detail.”
“Hackett went to visit him very early in the morning and walked him out the building at gunpoint. To the local park. There was no one around. He shot him in the back of the skull with a silenced nine.”
“Was there a lot of mess?”
“I wasn’t there.”
“Probably exited through the face. But the brain was dead by then. No further heartbeat. No blood pressure. Effective, but not visual. Are you going to do the same thing with Reacher and Chang?”
“I’m going to do whatever the hell works. Split fifty-fifty. Which could be expensive. Because apart from anything else, we also have to do it fast. They could be talking right this minute.”
Chapter 39
The long story about Michael McCann’s disappearance began with a desire to visit Oklahoma. Michael announced it one day, in his slow, halting, disappointed way, and his father didn’t let himself fall in the trap of worrying about it, not then, not immediately, because he knew it was unlikely to happen. These things rarely did. But then Michael further announced he had researched housing policy in Oklahoma, which was different than Illinois, in that part-time work could qualify. Which might be more sustainable.
Peter McCann’s reaction had been mixed. Obviously at the top of the pole was the sheer terror of imagining Michael alone and adrift in an unfamiliar environment. But underneath that was a tiny green shoot of optimism. Finally Michael had spent some computer time productively. He had researched housing policy in another state. He had even drawn a conclusion. Which might be more sustainable. Which was almost like making a plan. Certainly it showed a solid flicker of initiative. It was evidence of self-motivation, which some long-ago shrink had said would be the first sign of improvement.
So all in all Peter McCann had been holding it together.
His sister said, “Then Michael announced he had a friend in Oklahoma. Which was a big deal. He had never had a friend before. He had never even used the word. We figured it happened through an internet forum. Which was worrying, I guess. But Michael is thirty-five years old. He’s not retarded. His IQ is way up there. He knows what he’s doing. He’s sad, that’s all. So Peter asked what questions he could and then bit his lip.”
Reacher said, “And what happened?”
“Michael went to Oklahoma. A little place not far from Tulsa. He texted at first. Then less frequently. But he was OK, as far as we knew. Then one day he texted to say he was coming home soon. He didn’t say exactly when, and he didn’t say why. We haven’t heard from him since.”
“When did Peter call the police?”
“Pretty soon afterward. Then he called everybody.”
“Including the White House?”
“I advised him not to. But of course no one anywhere was listening to him. There are half a million mentally-challenged homeless men in America. No one would consider searching for an individual among them. How could they? Why would they? Michael is not aggressive and he isn’t on medication. He isn’t dangerous.”
“Didn’t they at least check with the friend?”
“I’m sure you know how it is. In your own jobs. Suddenly all you have is a name that doesn’t mean much, and a hazy half-remembered address no one can find.”
“So the friend has not been identified?”
“No one even knows whether it was a man or a woman.”
“What about the social housing?”
“There wasn’t any. Clearly Michael had been staying with the unknown friend. Probably not working at all, even part-time.”
“And then what happened?”
“Obviously Peter wouldn’t give up. He went to work on his own. First he got help from the phone company. He can be very persistent. They tracked Michael’s phone. The last day they can see it move southwest, from one cell tower to the next, from around Tulsa to Oklahoma City, at what looks like an average speed of about fifty miles an hour. Which was a bus, Peter thinks. He thinks Michael took the bus from Tulsa to Oklahoma City.”
“Why?”
“To get the train to Chicago.”
Reacher nodded. The train.
Inevitably.
Chang said, “There are other trains out of OC.”
McCann’s sister said, “Peter thinks Michael was coming home. Peter’s certain of it. And sure enough, at first the phone moves north in the right direction
at the right speed. But then it switches off.”
“Because it got too far away. We had the same thing. The last cell tower is about ninety minutes north of Oklahoma City. Then you’re in dead air forever.”
“It never came back on again.”
“Did Peter tell the cops?”
“Of course.”
“What did they say?”
“They say the phone hunted for a signal so hard it ran down the battery. Then Michael didn’t get a chance to charge it before it got stolen in Chicago. Just because he hasn’t visited his dad doesn’t mean he isn’t back in town. And so on and so forth. Or alternatively the phone was stolen in Tulsa or OC and some other guy took it on the bus and the train, but he didn’t have the code to unlock the screen, so he quit trying and trashed it. Meanwhile Michael is still in Oklahoma, or perhaps he went somewhere else entirely, possibly San Francisco.”
Reacher said, “Why San Francisco?”
McCann’s sister said, “There are a lot of homeless men in San Francisco. Cops think it’s a magnet. They think people go there automatically, like it’s still 1967.”
“How does Peter rate that possibility?”
“As a possibility, but nothing more.”
“So then he hired Keever?”
“He started the process.”
“Searching on-line?”
“At first.”
Reacher said, “Tell us about his interest in the internet.”
But then the daughter came back in the room, to tell her mom people were leaving. The two of them went out together to say goodbye, and Reacher heard the outside hubbub change in frequency to a long slow goodbye tone, and then he heard car doors slamming and engines starting, and vehicles pulling away.
Five minutes later the house was absolutely silent.
No one came back to the shuttered study. Reacher and Chang waited alone in the gloom. Five more minutes. Nothing doing. They opened the door and looked out. An interior hallway, empty. Silver-framed photographs on the wall. A family story, in chronological order. A couple, a couple with a baby, a couple with an infant, a couple with a kid, a couple with a teenager. All three of them growing older, frame by frame.
