Its area code was 816.
Its population was counted several different ways. Local boosters liked to bump it up by ranging far and wide.
But most agreed its metro area was home to about a million and a half people.
FIFTY-FIVE
THE INTERSTATE’S ARCHITECTURE and its appearance and its grammar were the same as its parallel twin a hundred and fifty miles to the north. It was equally straight and wide and level. Its exits were equally infrequent. They were preceded by the same blue boards, part information, part temptation. Some exits were for real, and some were deceptive. The blue Crown Vic hummed along. Dawson and Mitchell stayed resolutely silent. Reacher sat straight and comfortable, held in place by his belt. He watched the shoulder, and he watched the road ahead. It was getting dark in the east. The day was nearly over. The sun had come up over the burned-out Impala, and now it was disappearing somewhere far behind him.
Then he felt the car slow fractionally ahead of an exit sign to a place with a name he didn’t recognize. The blue boards showed gas and food but no accommodation. But that deficiency was recent. The accommodations board was blank, but newly blank. There was a neat rectangle of new blue paint on it, not quite the same shade as the old blue paint. A bankruptcy, possibly, or a corporate realignment, or the death of a mom or a pop or of both.
Or something more complicated, maybe.
Up ahead the exit itself looked somewhere halfway between for real and deceptive. Plausible, but not wildly attractive. There was no gas station sign immediately visible. No lurid colours announcing fast food. But the way the land lay in the gathering gloom suggested there might be something worthwhile over the next ridge or around the next bend.
Mitchell checked his mirror and put on his turn signal and slowed some more. Best practices for driver and passenger safety. He eased off the gas and hugged the white line and took the exit gently and smoothly. He kept his turn signal going and paused and yielded at the end of the ramp and turned right on a two-lane local road. South again, maybe a hundred miles short of the Paris of the Plains, out into open country.
They passed a gas station a mile later, and a no-name diner a mile after that. Then a last blue board stood all alone on the shoulder, completely blank except for one horizontal patch of new blue paint and one vertical patch of new blue paint. A short motel name and an arrow pointing straight ahead, both of them recently concealed.
Left and right of the road was nothing but dormant agriculture. Just like Iowa. Wheat, sorghum, and sunflowers. Nothing doing right then, but in six months it would all be as high as an elephant’s eye, on some of the best prairie topsoil in the world. For long miles there was no habitation to be seen. Whatever farm buildings were left were all more distant than the darkening horizons.
Mitchell drove more than twenty miles through the lonely country, and then he slowed again. Reacher peered ahead into the gloom, looking for lights. He saw none at all. Then the road jinked right and left around a stand of bare trees and fell away into a broad shallow valley and the last gloomy glow from the west showed a motel about a mile away, laid out like a model on a table.
It was a fair-sized place. It had a central block, maybe for the office and the dining room, and a bunch of satellite blocks, with maybe five or six rooms in each. The blocks were all low-built but long, and they were all roofed with what looked like Spanish tiles, and they were all faced with what looked like pale stucco. There was an empty swimming pool, and there were cement paths, and parking areas, and bare flowerbeds. The whole compound was ringed by a low decorative wall done up in the same pale stucco as the buildings. From a distance the overall effect was like a seaside place. Not exactly Miami, not exactly California, not exactly Long Island, but a kind of landlocked fever-dream interpretation of all three mixed together.
And despite the blanked-out signs, the place looked open for business.
There were lights on in the main office block, and four of the windows in the satellite blocks were lit up too. There was steam drifting from what might have been a kitchen vent. There were two cars parked far apart in two different lots. Both were sedans, both were long and low, both were dark in colour. Fords, Reacher thought. Crown Victorias, probably.
Exactly like the car he was riding in.
He said, ‘Is that place where we’re going?’
Mitchell drove on in silence, and Dawson didn’t answer either.
As they got closer Reacher expected to see more of the place. More details. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. The details never resolved. Something was obscuring his view. Not just the evening gloom. From half a mile out there seemed to be some kind of a low haze all around the edges of the compound. Like a force field, walling it in.
From a quarter-mile out, he saw what it was.
It was a security fence, maybe eight or ten feet high, made of dense metal mesh painted flat black, with rolls of razor wire canted inward at the top at an angle of forty-five degrees. It followed every twist and turn of the low stucco wall, all the way around the compound, but set ten feet farther out, like that innocent architectural frivolity’s sinister cousin.
Canted inward at the top.
It was for keeping people in, not keeping them out.
Dawson made a call on his cell and by the time Mitchell got close to the fence a motorized gate was already opening. He drove on through and Reacher turned in his seat and saw the gate closing again behind them. Mitchell kept on going, along a worn concrete roadway, tight around a circle, and stopped next to the office. He didn’t sit back and sigh and stretch like his journey was over. He didn’t switch off the motor. He kept the car in gear and his foot on the brake. Reacher unclipped his belt and tried his door. He had been right. It wouldn’t open from the inside.
Dawson got out and opened it for him from the outside. He didn’t say anything. He just pointed with his chin, towards the office door. Reacher slid out and stood up straight in the evening chill. Dawson got back in and closed his door and the car drove off. It moved quietly away from next to Reacher’s hip and completed its trip around the circle and headed back along the worn concrete roadway to the gate. The gate was already opening before the car got there and it drove on through without stopping. It paused for a second and then turned right on the two-lane and headed back north, the way it had come.
The gate closed behind it, not fast, not slow, but silent.
Reacher stepped into the motel office. It looked like a hundred others he had seen. It was very similar to the fat man’s place from early that morning. There was a reception counter, and lobby furniture, and a table with space for coffee and breakfast muffins. There was vinyl on the floor, and pictures on the walls, and lighting chosen more for a small electric bill than adequate illumination.
There was a plump, motherly woman behind the counter. She was smiling, in a kind, welcoming fashion.
She said, ‘Mr Reacher?’
Reacher said, ‘Yes.’
‘We’ve been expecting you.’
‘Have you?’
She nodded. She said, ‘We have rooms with kings, queens, and twins, but I’ve gone right ahead and put you in a room with a queen.’
‘Have you?’ Reacher said again.
The woman nodded again. She said, ‘I think the rooms with the queens are the nicest. They feel more spacious, with the armchairs and all. Most people like those rooms the best.’
‘Most people? How many guests do you get?’
‘Oh, we have quite the procession.’
He said, ‘I guess I’m happy with a queen. I’m on my own.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know.’
She wrote in a book and took a key off a hook. She said, ‘Room twenty. It’s easy to find. Just follow the signs. They’re all lit up at night. Dinner starts in an hour.’
Reacher put the key in his pocket and went back outside. It was nearly full dark. As promised he saw knee-high fingerposts lit up by nearby spotlights set on spikes in the ground. He followed the si
gn for rooms sixteen through twenty. The path was brushed concrete and it wound its curving way around empty flowerbeds and it came out at a long low block of five rooms together. Room twenty was the last room in line. The empty swimming pool was not far from it, and beyond the pool was the decorative wall faced with stucco, and beyond that was the security fence. Up close it looked tall and black and angular. The mesh was a matrix of flat steel blades welded into rectangles smaller than postage stamps. Too small to put a finger in. Way too small for a foothold. Plus loops of razor wire overhanging the whole thing. It was a very efficient fence.
Reacher unlocked his door and let himself in. As promised he saw a queen bed, and armchairs. There were clothes on the bed, in two neat piles. Two outfits, both the same. Blue jeans, blue button-down shirts, blue cotton sweaters, white undershirts, white underwear, blue socks. Every garment looked to be exactly the right size. Not easy to find, at short notice.
We’ve been expecting you.
There were pyjamas on the pillow. There were toiletries in the bathroom. Soap, shampoo, conditioner, shaving cream. Some kind of skin lotion. Deodorant. There were disposable razors. There was toothpaste, and a new full-size toothbrush sealed in cellophane. There was a hairbrush and a comb, like the toothbrush brand new and still sealed. There was a bathrobe on a hook. There were little hotel slippers in a packet. There were all kinds of towels on the rails, and a bath mat.
Just like the Four Seasons.
But there was no television in the room, and no telephone.
He locked up again, and went out exploring.
Overall the whole compound was roughly rectangular, indented here and there for the sake of interest and variety. A complicated network of brushed concrete paths wound in and out and visited everywhere of significance, including five separate accommodation blocks, and the main building, and the pool, and a mini golf installation way in one far corner. There were raised flowerbeds everywhere, edged with lower versions of the low stucco wall. In the gaps and the angles between the buildings and the walls and the flowerbeds there was crushed stone. A simpler network of concrete roadways connected the gate to the turning circle near the office, and then onward to five separate five-space parking lots near each of the accommodation blocks, and to a delivery bay behind the main building.
Four rooms were lit up inside. Two of them were near the two parked cars, and two of them weren’t. The parked cars were Ford Crown Victorias, police spec, with needle antennas on their trunk lids. Reacher checked their dark interiors through their windows, and saw empty cell phone cradles on their dashboards, just like Sorenson’s.
He stood for a minute in the dark and listened hard. He heard nothing. Total silence. No traffic. No airplanes. Just vast night-time emptiness all around. Common sense and dead reckoning told him he was in Kansas, somewhere on the axis between Topeka and Wichita, probably halfway between the two, or maybe slightly nearer Topeka, possibly someplace near the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. But as far as physical evidence was concerned he could have been on the dark side of the moon. The sky felt heavy and cloud-covered and there was no world beyond the dense mesh fence.
He turned and strolled back the way he had come, past one of the lit-up windows, and then he more or less bumped into a guy coming out of a room marked 14. The guy was a lean, hardscrabble type, of medium height, not young but not yet ancient, with a lined and seamed face like he spent all his time outside in the weather.
A farm worker, about fifty.
The guy smiled like he had a shared secret and said, ‘Hi.’
Reacher said, ‘You’re the eyewitness.’
The guy said, ‘The what?’
Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Reacher said, ‘You saw the red car.’
‘Maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t. But we’re not allowed to talk about any of that. Not even to each other. Didn’t they tell you?’
The guy was wearing new blue jeans, and a new blue button-down shirt under a new blue cotton sweater. Exactly like the clothes on Reacher’s bed, but smaller. His hair was clean and brushed. He had a fresh shave. He looked like a guy on vacation.
Reacher asked him, ‘When did you get here?’
The guy said, ‘Early this morning.’
‘With Dawson and Mitchell, or with someone else?’
‘I didn’t get their names. And we’re not allowed to talk about it, anyway. Didn’t they tell you?’
‘Who’s supposed to tell me?’
‘Didn’t you get a visit?’
‘Not yet.’
‘When did you get here?’
‘Just now. A few minutes ago.’
‘They’ll come pretty soon, then. They’ll come to your room and they’ll tell you the rules.’ The guy shuffled in place on the path. Like he was impatient about something. Like he had somewhere else to be.
Reacher asked him, ‘Where are you going now?’
The guy said, ‘To the dining room, man. Where else? They got beer there. A whole bunch of different brands. Long neck bottles, good and cold. I mean, no work all day and free food and free beer? Does it get any better than that?’
Reacher said nothing.
The guy said, ‘You coming?’
‘Later, maybe.’
‘No rush,’ the guy said. ‘I’m planning to snag a few, but they got plenty. They ain’t going to run out any time soon. You can trust me on that.’ And then he hustled onward along the winding path, at first all lit up from the waist down by the fingerpost spotlights, and then eventually out of sight.
Reacher stayed where he was. Room fourteen. One of the two lit-up rooms without a Bureau car parked nearby. The other was room five. He turned around and backtracked, all the way past the six-through-ten block, around a flowerbed, across the gap to the next block, to the first door in line. Room five. He was planning to knock, but he didn’t need to. When he was still six feet away the door burst open and a girl ran out, all arms and legs and energy. A thin kid, dark-haired and pale, maybe ten years old, all jacked up on excitement, and smiling wide. Then she saw Reacher’s giant bulk in the gloom on the walkway and she froze in place and her smile changed to puzzlement and her hands came up over her mouth, so that Reacher could see nothing of her face except two huge eyes.
He said, ‘Hello, Lucy.’
FIFTY-SIX
DELFUENSO HERSELF CAME out straight after that. She must have heard his voice. She stopped on the walkway all backlit by warm light from the room behind her. She looked in great shape. She looked rested, and happy, and relieved, and relaxed. She was wearing a woman’s version of the place’s standard-issue clothing. New blue jeans, and a new blue blouse under a new blue sweater of a different style, lighter and tighter and shorter than the men’s. Her hair was clean and styled, and her face was bright and fresh. Clearly she had found piles of clothes on her bed, and toiletries in her bathroom.
We’ve been expecting you.
She said, ‘Lucy, this is Mr Reacher. He was with me part of the time.’
The kid said, ‘Hello, Mr Reacher.’
‘Hello, Lucy,’ Reacher said again.
The kid said, ‘You broke your nose.’
‘Technically someone broke it for me.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Not much any more.’
Delfuenso said, ‘Lucy was on her way to try the mini golf.’
‘It’s too dark,’ Reacher said. ‘I was just there.’
The kid pondered that new information. Her face went serious and contemplative. She said, ‘Then can I go look for something else? I don’t think I’ve seen everything yet.’
‘Sure,’ her mother said. ‘Go see what you can find.’ So the kid scuttled away along the path and Delfuenso looked at Reacher and said, ‘I guess the fence makes it safe for her to run around on her own. And there’s no water in the pool.’
Reacher said, ‘Can we talk?’
‘About what?’
‘Last night. And today.’
‘We