by Lee Child
‘Want me to drive the rest of the way?’
‘No, I don’t. I can’t arrive with you at the wheel. It’s bad enough having you in the front.’
‘I’m not going to ride in the back.’
Sorenson didn’t reply to that. They climbed aboard, into their accustomed positions. Sorenson backed out of the motel lot and threaded her way back to the highway. She took the ramp and accelerated. There were rain clouds in the east. The weather was chasing them all the way. Sorenson fumbled her phone up into its cradle, where it beeped once to acknowledge it was charging, and then immediately it started to ring again, no longer thin and reedy, but loud and powerful through the sound system. Sorenson accepted the call and Reacher heard a man’s voice say he was en route for the location south and east of Des Moines, Iowa, as instructed.
Sorenson clicked off and said, ‘My forensics team, heading for Delfuenso.’
Reacher said, ‘Who is what we should be talking about here. How can the Bureau shut down a case where an innocent bystander died?’
‘Such a thing has happened before.’
‘But facts don’t just go away.’
‘We don’t dispute Delfuenso died. Lots of people die every day.’
‘How did she die?’
‘No one knows. She drove her own car to a neighbouring state. It set on fire. Suicide, maybe. Maybe she took some pills and smoked a last cigarette. And dropped the cigarette. We’ll never know for sure, because the evidence was lost in the fire. The pill bottle, and so on.’
‘That’s your boss’s script?’
‘It’s a local matter now. Sheriff Goodman will deal with it. Except he won’t, because someone will sit on him too, for sure.’
‘What about the missing eyewitness? Is he erased too?’
Sorenson shrugged at the wheel. ‘A no-account local farm worker, with a history of drinking and a rented house and no stable relationships? People like that wander off all the time. Some of them come back, and some of them don’t.’
‘That’s all in the script too?’
‘Everything will have a plausible explanation. Not too precise, not too vague.’
Reacher said, ‘If the case was closed twenty minutes ago, why are you still getting calls? Like just now, from Mother Sill, and your forensics guy?’
Sorenson paused a beat. She said, ‘Because they both had my cell number. They called me direct. They didn’t go through the field office. They haven’t gotten the memo yet.’
‘When will they?’
‘Not soon, I hope. Especially my forensics guys. I need to know how King and McQueen kept Delfuenso in the back seat. I mean, would you just sit still for that? They set the car on fire, and you just sit there and take it? Why would you? Why wouldn’t you fight?’
‘They shot her first. It’s obvious. She was already dead.’
‘That’s what I’m hoping.’
‘They may never be able to prove it.’
‘All I need is an indication. A balance of probabilities. Which I might get. My people are pretty good.’
‘Your boss will recall them, surely.’
‘He doesn’t know they’re out and about. And I’m not going to make it a point to tell him.’
‘Won’t they check in?’
‘Only with me,’ Sorenson said. ‘I’m their primary point of contact.’
She drove on, another fast mile, with Reacher quiet beside her. The sun was still out behind them. It was casting shadows. The rain clouds were still low in the sky. But they were coming. The far horizon was bright. Reacher said, ‘If there’s no case any more, then the Omaha field office doesn’t need to show anything for its night’s work. Because there was no night’s work. Because nothing happened in Nebraska.’
Sorenson didn’t answer.
Reacher said, ‘And if there’s no case any more, who needs a suspect or a material witness? No one did anything and no one saw anything. I mean, how could anyone, if nothing even happened?’
No response.
Reacher said, ‘And if there’s no active investigation any more, then there won’t be any new information for you to pass on to me.’
Sorenson said nothing.
Reacher asked, ‘So why am I still in this car?’
No answer.
Reacher asked, ‘Am I in the script too? A no-account unemployed and homeless veteran? With no stable relationships? Not even a rented house? People like me wander off all the time, right? Which would be very convenient for all concerned. Because I’m the last man alive who can call bullshit on this whole thing. I know what happened. I saw King and McQueen. I saw Delfuenso with them. I know she didn’t drive her own car to a neighbouring state. I know she didn’t take any pills. So are they going to erase me too?’
Sorenson said nothing.
Reacher asked, ‘Julia, did you discuss me with your boss while I was in the shower?’
Sorenson said, ‘Yes, I did.’
‘And what are your orders?’
‘I still have to bring you in.’
‘Why? What’s the plan?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sorenson said. ‘I have to bring you to the parking lot. That’s all I was told.’
FORTY-FOUR
REACHER SPENT A long minute revisiting a variation on an earlier problem: it was technically challenging to take out a driver from the front passenger seat, while that driver was busy doing eighty miles an hour on a public highway. More than challenging. Impossible, almost certainly, even with seat belts and air bags. Too much risk. Too many innocent parties around. People driving to work, old folks dropping in on family.
Sorenson said, ‘I’m sorry.’
Reacher said, ‘My mom always told me I shouldn’t put myself first. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to this time. How much trouble will you be in if you don’t deliver me?’
‘A lot,’ she said.
Which was not the answer he wanted to hear. He said, ‘Then I need you to swear something for me. Raise your right hand.’
She did. She took it off the wheel and brought it up near her shoulder, palm out, halfway between slow and snappy, a familiar move for a public official. Reacher swivelled in his seat and caught her wrist with his left hand, one, and then he leaned over and snaked his right hand under her jacket and took her Glock out of the holster on her hip, two. Then he sat back in his seat with the gun in the gap between his leg and the door.
Three.
Sorenson said, ‘That was sneaky.’
‘I apologize,’ Reacher said. ‘To you and my mom.’
‘It was also a crime.’
‘Probably.’
‘Are you going to shoot me?’
‘Probably not.’
‘So how are we going to play this out?’
‘You’re going to let me out a block from your building. But you’re going to tell them you lost me twenty miles back. So they start looking in the wrong place. Maybe we stopped at a gas station. Maybe I went to use the bathroom, and ran.’
‘Do I get my gun back?’
‘Yes,’ Reacher said. ‘A block from your building.’
Sorenson drove on and said nothing. Reacher sat quiet beside her, thinking about the feel of the skin on her wrist, and the warmth of her stomach and hip. He had brushed them with the heel of his hand, on his way to her holster. A cotton shirt, and her body under it, somewhere between hard and soft.
They stayed on the Interstate through the southern part of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and they crossed the Missouri River on a bridge, and then they were back in the state of Nebraska, right in the city of Omaha itself. The highway speared through its heart, past a sign for a zoo, past a sign for a park, with residential quarters to the north and a ragged tightly packed strip of industrial enterprises to the south. Then eventually the highway curved away to the left and Sorenson came off on a street that continued straight onward east to west through the centre of the commercial zone. But by that point the zone had changed. It had become more like a retail park.
Or an office park. There were broad lawns and trees and landscaping. Buildings were low and white, hundreds of yards apart. There were huge flat parking lots in between. Reacher had been expecting something more central and more urban. He had pictured narrow streets and brick walls and corners and alleys and doorways. He had been anticipating a regular downtown maze.
He asked, ‘Where exactly is your place?’
Sorenson pointed beyond the next light, diagonally, west and a little north.
‘Right there,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’
Two hundred yards away Reacher saw the back of a sprawling white building, pretty new, four or five storeys high. Behind it and to the right and left of it were wide grassy areas. Beyond it was a gigantic parking lot for the next enterprise in line. Everything was flat and empty. There was nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.
‘Keep going,’ he said. ‘This is no good.’
Sorenson had already slowed the car. She said, ‘You told me a block away.’
‘These aren’t blocks. These are football fields.’
She rolled through the light. Directly behind the white building Reacher saw a small parking lot with staff vehicles and unmarked cars in neat lines. But there was a navy blue Crown Vic all alone some yards from them, waiting at an angle, and a black panel van next to it. There were four men stumping around in the space between the two, hunched in coats, sipping coffee, shooting the shit, just waiting.
For him, presumably.
He asked, ‘Do you know them?’
‘Two of them,’ Sorenson said. ‘They’re the counterterrorism guys that came up from Kansas City last night. Their names are Dawson and Mitchell.’
‘And the other two?’
‘Never saw them before.’
‘Keep going.’
‘Couldn’t you at least talk to them?’
‘Not a good idea.’
‘They can’t really do anything to you.’
‘Have you read the Patriot Act?’
‘No,’ Sorenson said.
‘Has your boss?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Therefore they can do whatever the hell they want to me. Because who’s going to tell them otherwise?’
Sorenson slowed some more.
Reacher said, ‘Don’t turn in, Julia. Keep on going.’
‘I gave them an ETA. Pretty soon they’re going to come out and start looking for me.’
‘Call them and tell them you’re broken down on the shoulder somewhere. Tell them you got a flat tyre. Tell them we’re still in Iowa. Or tell them we took a wrong turn and went to Wisconsin by mistake.’
‘They’ll track my cell. Maybe they already are.’
‘Keep on going,’ Reacher said.
Sorenson accelerated gently. They passed the side of the white building. It was about a hundred yards away. It had a wide looping driveway in front of it. Its facade was modern and impressive. There was a lot of plate glass. There was no obvious activity going on. All was quiet. Reacher turned his head and watched as the building fell away behind them.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘Where do you want to go now?’ Sorenson asked.
‘A mile away will do it.’
‘And then what?’
‘Then we say goodbye.’
But they didn’t get a mile away, and they didn’t say goodbye. Because Sorenson’s phone rang in its cradle and she answered and Reacher heard a man’s voice, urgent and loud and panicked. It said, ‘Ms Sorenson? This is Sheriff Victor Goodman. Karen Delfuenso’s daughter is gone. She was taken away by some men.’
FORTY-FIVE
SORENSON HIT THE brakes and hauled on the wheel and U-turned immediately and headed back towards the highway, fast, past the FBI building again, past its front, past its side, past its rear lot, and onward, the same way they had come minutes before. The voice on the phone told the whole long story. County Sheriff Victor Goodman, Reacher gathered, about eighty miles away. The local guy. The first responder, the night before. He sounded like a competent man, but tired and stressed and way out of his depth. He said, ‘I told the kid her mom was missing first thing this morning. I figured it was best to break it gently. You know, the first step, and then the second step. I told the neighbour she should keep both kids home from school today. I asked her to stay home with them. But she didn’t. She was worried about her job. She left them there alone. Which she thought would be OK. But it wasn’t OK. I dropped by again to touch base and only the neighbour’s kid was there. All by herself. She said some men came and took Delfuenso’s kid away.’
Sorenson asked, ‘When?’
Goodman said, ‘This is a ten-year-old girl we’re talking about here. She’s pretty vague. Best guess is about an hour ago.’
‘How many men?’
‘She doesn’t really know.’
‘One? Two? A dozen?’
‘More than one. She said men, not a man.’
‘Descriptions?’
‘Just men.’
‘Black? White? Young? Old?’
‘White, I’m sure, or she’d have said. This is Nebraska, after all. No idea about age. All adults look old to a ten-year-old.’
‘Clothing?’
‘She doesn’t remember.’
‘Vehicle?’
‘She can’t describe it. I’m not certain she even saw a vehicle. She claims she did, and she’s calling it a car, but it could have been anything. A pick-up, or an SUV.’
‘Colour?’
‘She can’t recall. If she saw it at all, that is. She might have just assumed it. She’s probably never seen a pedestrian in her life. Not out there.’
‘Does she remember what was said?’
‘She wasn’t really paying attention. The doorbell rang, and Lucy Delfuenso went to answer it. The neighbour’s kid says she saw men at the door, and she heard some talking, but basically she stayed in the back room. She was busy playing with something. She was really into it. About five minutes later she realized Lucy hadn’t come back from the door.’
‘Why would Delfuenso’s kid answer the door in someone else’s house?’
‘It doesn’t feel like that to them. It’s like both of them treat both places like home. They’re in and out all the time.’
‘Have you searched the area? Including Delfuenso’s own house?’
‘I’ve got everyone on it. No sign of Lucy anywhere.’
‘Did you canvass the other neighbour? That grey-haired guy?’
‘He wasn’t there. He leaves for work at six in the morning. The fourth house didn’t see anything either.’
‘Did you call the state troopers?’
‘Sure, but I have nothing to give them.’
‘Missing kids get an instant response, right?’
‘But what can they do? It’s a small department. And it’s a big state. They can’t stop everyone everywhere.’
‘OK, we’ll figure it out,’ Sorenson said. ‘I’m on my way. But in the meantime you should keep on looking.’
‘Of course I will. But they could be sixty miles away by now.’
Sorenson didn’t answer that. She just clicked off the call and howled around the on-ramp and headed west close to a hundred miles an hour.
Ten high-speed minutes later Reacher gave Sorenson her Glock back and asked, ‘Is your boss going to ignore a missing kid too?’
Sorenson put the gun back on her hip and said, ‘My boss is an ambitious guy. He dreams of bigger things. He wants to be an Assistant Director one day. Therefore he’ll do whatever the Hoover Building tells him to do, right or wrong. Some SACs are like that. And the Hoover Building will do whatever the CIA tells it to do. Or the State Department, or Homeland Security, or the West Wing, or whoever the hell is calling the shots here.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘That’s modern law enforcement. Get used to it.’
‘How much freedom of action are you going to get?’
‘None at all, as soon as they figure out where
I am.’
‘So don’t answer your phone.’
‘I’m not going to. Not the first couple of times, anyway.’
‘And after that?’
‘They’ll leave voice messages. They’ll send texts and e-mails. I can’t go rogue. I can’t disobey direct orders.’
Reacher said nothing.
Sorenson said, ‘Well, would you? Did you?’
‘Sometimes,’ Reacher said.
‘And now you’re a homeless unemployed veteran with no stable relationships.’
‘Exactly. These things are never easy. But you can make a start. You can get something done before they shut you down.’
‘How?’
‘Motive,’ Reacher said. ‘That’s what you need to think about. Who the hell snatches a dead woman’s kid? And why? Especially a kid who knows nothing at all about what happened to her mom?’
‘But this can’t be unrelated, surely. This can’t be a coincidence. This is not the father showing up after some custody battle. This is not some random paedophile on the prowl.’
‘Maybe it was the neighbour’s kid they were looking for. Maybe they got them confused. It was the neighbour’s house, after all. Is the neighbour divorced too?’
‘This is not a coincidence, Reacher.’
‘So what is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Neither do I,’ Reacher said. ‘It makes no sense at all.’
Sheriff Goodman was into his thirtieth hour without sleep. He was dazed and groggy and barely upright. But he kept on going. No reason to believe the abductors had stayed in the vicinity, but he had his guys out checking any and all vacant buildings, barns, huts, shelters, and empty houses. He himself was supplementing their efforts by covering the places they weren’t getting to. He had found nothing. They had found nothing. Radio traffic was full of tired and resigned negativity.
He ended up back in front of Delfuenso’s neighbour’s house. He parked and sat there and fought to stay awake. Fought to make himself think. He recalled how the kid had acted on the stoop, first thing that morning. Mute with incomprehension, nodding politely, fidgeting. She was a country girl. Ten years old. Not a prodigy. She would have believed any kind of halfway-legitimate adult. She would have been convinced by any kind of show of knowledge or authority. She would have bought into any kind of promise. Come with us, little girl. We found your mommy. We’ll take you to her.
