by Lee Child
But those were grown-ups, and Delfuenso’s kid was a kid.
He drove out to the short row of ranch houses slowly and reluctantly. Four times in his career he had been required to tell a parent a child had died. He had never had to tell a child its parent had died. Not a ten-year-old, anyway. He didn’t really know how. Just the facts, Sorenson had said, in an earlier conversation. Don’t say anything more until we know for sure. Not very helpful. The facts were tough. Hey kid, guess what? Your mom burned to death in a car. There was no easy way to say it. Because there was no easy way for the kid to face it. She goes to bed one night all hunky dory, and she wakes up the next morning with a different life.
Although: Just the facts. Don’t say anything more until we know for sure.
What were the facts? What did they actually know for sure? He had seen burned bodies. House fires, barn fires. You had to get dental records. Or DNA. For the death certificate, and the insurance. A couple of days, at least. Medical opinions, which had to be signed off and notarized. So as far as Delfuenso was concerned, nobody really knew anything for sure. Not yet. Except that she was missing, apparently carjacked.
And maybe a two-stage process would be better, with a ten-year-old. First, I’m sorry, but your mom is missing. Then, a couple of days later, when they were really sure, I’m sorry, but your mom died. Drip, drip. Maybe better than one massive blow. Or was that just cowardice on his own part?
He parked in front of the neighbour’s house and concluded, yes, it was cowardice on his own part, no question, but it was also the best approach, probably, with a ten-year-old kid. Kids were different.
Just the facts. Don’t say anything more until we know for sure.
He got out of his car, slow and reluctant. He closed the door and stood for a second, and then he tracked around the hood and stepped over the muddy gutter and walked up the neighbour’s short driveway.
FORTY
SORENSON GOT THROUGH the chequerboard and back to the Interstate without further incident. The car stayed on the road. The rain kept on falling. It was a gloomy day. The sky was low and the colour of iron. Traffic was heavier than Reacher had seen it the night before. Each vehicle was trailing a long grey Zeppelin of spray. Sorenson had her wipers on fast. She was sticking to seventy miles an hour. She asked, ‘What’s the fastest way of finding Alan King’s brother from the army?’
‘King claimed he was a red leg,’ Reacher said. ‘Probably just a dagby. The Gulf, the first time around. Mother Sill will know.’
‘I didn’t understand a word of that.’
‘A red leg is an artilleryman. Because way back they had red stripes on their dress pants. And their branch colour is still red. A dagby is a 13B MOS. Which is a cannon crewmember’s military occupational specialty. In other words, a dagby. A dumb-ass gun bunny. Mother Sill is Fort Sill, which is artillery HQ. Someone there will have a record. The Gulf the first time around was the thing with Saddam Hussein, back in 1991.’
‘I knew that part.’
‘Good.’
‘The brother’s first name was Peter, right?’
‘Correct.’
‘And you still think King was his real last name?’
‘More likely than not. Worth a try, anyway.’
‘Dumb-ass gun bunny isn’t very polite.’
‘But very necessary,’ Reacher said. ‘Unfortunately Frederick the Great once said that field artillery lends dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl. It went to their heads. They started calling themselves the kings of battle. They started to think they’re the most important part of the army. Which obviously isn’t true.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the military police is the most important part of the army.’
‘What did they call you?’
‘Sir, usually.’
‘And?’
‘Meatheads. Monkey patrol. And chimps, but that was an acronym.’
‘For what?’
‘Completely hopeless in most policing situations.’
‘Where is Fort Sill?’
‘Lawton, Oklahoma.’
She speed-dialled her phone in its cradle. Reacher heard the ring tone loud and clear through the stereo. A voice answered, male, low and fast and without preamble. A duty officer, probably, with Sorenson’s number front and centre on his caller ID, and therefore instantly on the ball and ready for business. The night guy, most likely, still there at the end of his watch. He didn’t sound like a guy who had just gotten out of bed. Sorenson said to him, ‘I need you to call the army at Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, and get what they have on an artilleryman named Peter King, who was on active service in 1991. Present whereabouts and details of family would be especially appreciated. Give them my cell number and ask them to call me back direct, OK?’
‘Understood,’ the guy said.
‘Is Stony in his office yet?’
‘Just arrived.’
‘What’s the word?’
‘Nothing is happening yet. It’s weird.’
‘No three-ring circus?’
‘Phones are quiet. No one has even asked for the night log yet.’
‘Weird.’
‘Like I said.’
The eyewitness was not kept waiting at the reception desk. There was no line. He had been given a cup of coffee and he had eaten a breakfast muffin. The woman at the desk took his name and asked what kind of bed he preferred. She was a plump, motherly type, seemingly very patient and capable. The eyewitness didn’t really understand her question.
He said, ‘Bed?’
The woman said, ‘We have rooms with kings, queens, and twins.’
‘I guess anything will do.’
‘Don’t you have a preference?’
‘What would you suggest?’
‘Honestly, I think the rooms with the queens are ideal. Overall they feel a little more spacious. With the armchairs and all? Most people like those rooms the best.’
‘OK, I’ll take one of those.’
‘Good,’ the woman said, brightly. She marked it up in a book and took a key off a hook. She said, ‘Room fourteen. It’s easy to find.’
The eyewitness carried the key in his hand and left the lobby. He stood for a moment in the chill air and looked up at the sky. It was going to rain. It was probably already raining in the north. He set off down the path and saw a knee-high fingerpost for rooms eleven through fifteen. He followed the sign. The path wound its way through sad winter flowerbeds and came out at a long low block of five rooms together. Room fourteen was the last but one. There was an empty leaf-strewn swimming pool not far from it. The eyewitness thought it would make a nice facility in the summer, with blue water in it, and the flowers all around it in bloom. He had never been in a swimming pool. Lakes and rivers, yes, but never a pool.
Beyond the pool was the perimeter wall, a waist-high decorative feature made of stucco over concrete blocks. Ten feet beyond that was the security fence, all tall and black and angular and topped with canted-in rolls of razor wire. The eyewitness figured it must have been very expensive. He knew all about the price of fencing, being a farmer. Labour and materials could kill you.
He unlocked room fourteen. He stepped inside. The bed was a little wider than the one he shared at home. There were clothes on it, in neat piles. Two outfits, both the same. Blue jeans, blue shirts, blue sweaters, white undershirts, white underwear, blue socks. There were pyjamas on the pillow. There were toiletries in the bathroom. Soap, shampoo, shaving cream. Some kind of lotion. Deodorant. There were razors. There was toothpaste, and a toothbrush sealed in cellophane. There was a comb. There was a bathrobe. There were lots of towels.
He looked at the bed but sat down in an armchair. He had been told lunch was available from twelve o’clock onward. Nothing to do until then. So he figured he might start his day with a nap. Just a short doze. It had been a long night.
Reacher waited until Sorenson was safely past a howling semi truck, and then he said, ‘Tell me about
how the fingerprint thing worked with the dead guy.’
‘Standard procedure,’ Sorenson said. ‘It’s the first thing they do, before decomposition starts to make it difficult. They take the prints and upload them to the database.’
‘By satellite?’
‘No, over the regular cell phone networks.’
‘That’s convenient.’
‘You bet it is. We love cell phones. We love them to death. For all kinds of reasons. I mean, can you imagine? Suppose twenty years ago Congress had proposed a law saying every citizen had to wear a radio transponder around his neck, all day and all night, so the government could track him wherever he went. Can you imagine the outrage? But instead the citizens went right ahead and did it to themselves. In their pockets and purses, not around their necks, but the outcome is the same.’
‘Were there prints in the bright red car?’
‘Plenty. Those guys took no care at all.’
‘Did you upload them?’
‘Of course.’
‘Any results?’
‘Not yet,’ Sorenson said. ‘Which almost certainly means those guys aren’t in the database. The software will hunt for hours, until it’s sure, but it never takes this long. They must be virgins.’
‘Therefore not foreign,’ Reacher said. ‘There are no foreign fingerprint virgins, right? Everyone gets fingerprinted at the port of entry. Or for their visas. Unless they’re illegals. They could have come over the Canadian border, I guess. People say it’s full of holes.’
‘Except how did they get into Canada? We have access to their databases too. And Canada has no other borders. Unless they hiked across the North Pole or swam the Bering Strait.’
‘There’s Alaska.’
‘But to get into Alaska from overseas you have to be fingerprinted.’
‘No chance of errors or glitches?’
‘Not for the last ten years.’
‘OK, they’re not foreign.’
Sorenson drove on. She had driven the opposite way just hours before, but she didn’t really recognize the terrain. The highway looked different. It was lit up a dull grey and there was no view to the sides and no horizon ahead or behind. It was like passing through an endless cloud. The rain was easing but the road was still streaming. There was spray everywhere.
By her side Reacher said, ‘Where did the State Department guy come from?’
She said, ‘I don’t know. He just showed up in a car. But he was for real. I saw his ID.’
‘Does the State Department have field offices, like you guys?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
‘So where did he come from? Obviously not D.C., because he got there too quick.’
‘Good question. I’ll ask my SAC. He got a message that the guy was coming. And I know he spoke to State during the night. That’s how we found out the dead guy was a trade attaché.’
‘Or not. It feels to me like State was keeping its eye on something. Like standing by, in the vicinity. If the guy really was from State, that is. He could have been CIA too.’
Sorenson said nothing. Nothing about the checked shirt from Pakistan or the Middle East, nothing about the night-time calls from the CIA, nothing about their insistent requests for constant updates. She didn’t know why, beyond a kind of basic superstition. Some things just shouldn’t be mentioned out loud, and in her opinion the idea of the CIA roaming America’s heartland by night was one of them.
FORTY-ONE
DELFUENSO’S DAUGHTER WAS called Lucy. Sheriff Goodman met her on the neighbour’s stoop. She was a thin child, dark-haired and sallow, still in pyjamas. She smelled faintly of sleep and a busy household. Goodman sat her down on the concrete step and sat next to her with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging loose in front of him. Just two regular folks, chatting. Except they weren’t. He started out by asking how she was, and he didn’t get much of an answer. The kid was mute with incomprehension. But she was listening. He said her mom hadn’t come home from work. He said no one knew where she was. He said lots of people were out looking for her.
The kid didn’t really react. It was as if he had given her a piece of arcane and useless information from another world entirely, like the surface temperature of the planet Jupiter, or how AM was different from FM on the radio dial. She just nodded politely and fidgeted and shivered in the cold and wanted to go back inside.
Next Goodman spoke with the neighbour herself. He gave her the same incomplete information: Delfuenso was missing, her whereabouts were unknown, a search was continuing. He told the woman he had been advised that Lucy should stay home from school. He said maybe it would be a good idea if her own kid stayed home too. Then he asked the woman if she could stay home from work as well, to keep an eye on them both. He said familiar faces would probably be a good thing for Lucy, under the circumstances.
The neighbour hemmed and hawed and fussed a little, but in the end she said she would try to make it all work. She would do her best. She would make some calls. Goodman left her there at the door, the two kids energetic in the gloom behind her, the woman herself inert and distracted and looking worried about a dozen different things all at once.
The rain stopped and the clouds thinned and the Interstate went from streaming to damp to dry, all within a ten-mile stretch. Reacher started to recognize some of the road. It looked different by day. No longer a tunnel through the dark. Now it felt like an endless causeway, raised a little above the infinite flatness all around. He sat still and patient and watched the exits, most of them deceptive, some of them promising. Then he saw a really good one three or four miles ahead, vague in the distance, shapeless in the grey light, a cluster of buildings and a forest of bright signs, Exxon and Texaco and Sunoco, Subway and McDonald’s and Cracker Barrel, Marriott and Red Roof and the Comfort Inn. Plus a huge billboard for an outlet mall he hadn’t seen by night, because the sign was made of unlit paper, not neon.
He said, ‘Let’s get breakfast.’
Sorenson didn’t answer. He felt her stiffen in her seat. He felt her get a little wary. He said, ‘I’m hungry. You must be, too. And I’m sure we need gas, anyway.’
No response.
He said, ‘I’m not going to give you the slip. I wouldn’t be in this car in the first place unless I wanted to be. We have a deal. You remember that, right?’
She said, ‘The Omaha field office has to show something for a night’s work.’
‘I understand that. I’m coming with you, all the way.’
‘I have to be sure of that. So we’ll eat if there’s a drive-through.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll go inside and sit at a table, like civilized people who trust each other. And I need to take a shower. And I need to buy some clothes.’
‘Where?’
‘At the outlet mall.’
‘Why?’
‘So I can change.’
‘Why do you need to change?’
‘So I make a good impression.’
‘Were your bags still in the Impala?’
‘I don’t have bags.’
‘Why not?’
‘What would I put in them?’
‘Clean clothes, for instance.’
‘And then what, three days later?’
Sorenson nodded. ‘You make a good point.’ She was quiet for half a mile and then she slowed the car and put on her turn signal for the exit. She said, ‘OK, I’m trusting you, Reacher. Don’t embarrass me. I’m way out on a limb here.’
Reacher said nothing. They turned left off the end of the ramp and nosed into a Texaco station. Sorenson got out of the car. Reacher got out too. She didn’t like that much. He shrugged. He figured if she was going to trust him at all, she might as well trust him from the very beginning. She dipped a plain Amex and started pumping. He said, ‘I’m going in the store. You need anything?’
She shook her head. She was worried. With good reason. A live gas hose was like a ball and chain. He was free, and she was anchored.<
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‘I’ll be back,’ he said, and walked away. The store was like a shabby version of the Shell station’s, south and east of Des Moines. Same kind of aisles, same kind of stuff, but run down and dirty. Same kind of clerk at the register. The guy was staring at Reacher’s nose. Reacher prowled the aisles until he found the section with travel necessities. He took a tube of antiseptic cream and a small box of Band-Aids. And a small tube of toothpaste. And a bottle of aspirin. He paid in cash at the register. The clerk was still staring at his nose. Reacher said, ‘Mosquito bite. That’s all. Nothing to worry about.’
He found Sorenson waiting for him halfway between the store and the pump. Still worried. He said, ‘Where do you want to get breakfast?’
She said, ‘Is McDonald’s OK with you?’
He nodded. He needed protein and fats and sugars, and he didn’t really care where they came from. He had no prejudice against fast food. Better than slow food, for a travelling man. They got back in the car and drove a hundred yards and pulled off again and parked. They went inside to fluorescent light and cold air and hard plastic seats. He ordered two cheeseburgers and two apple pies and a twenty-ounce cup of coffee. Sorenson said, ‘That’s lunch, not breakfast.’
Reacher said, ‘I’m not sure what it is. Last time I woke up was yesterday morning.’
‘Me too,’ Sorenson said, but she ordered regular breakfast items. Some kind of a sausage patty, with egg, in a bun, also with a cup of coffee. They ate together across a wet laminate table. Sorenson asked, ‘Where are you going to get a shower?’
‘Motel,’ Reacher said.
