Next to it on both sides were plenty of empty spaces. Behind it was fifty yards of weedy gravel, and then basically nothing all the way to the Denver suburbs seven hundred miles to the west. In front of it was the lounge’s rear door, which was a plain steel rectangle set in a mud-coloured stucco wall.
A good spot. Not overlooked. No witnesses. Goodman pictured the two guys climbing out of the Mazda, shucking their suit coats, stepping across to their new ride, getting in, taking off.
What new ride?
No idea.
Taking off to where?
Not east or west, because they couldn’t get out of the county east or west without first driving south, back to the crossroads, and no one drives a getaway vehicle back towards the scene of the crime. So they had carried on north, obviously. Because the Interstate was up in that direction, just waiting there for them beyond the dark horizon, like a big anonymous magnet.
Therefore they were long gone. Either they had gotten out of the county minutes before the local northern roadblock had been set up, or they had gotten through it undetected minutes afterwards because at that point the deputies were still looking for a bright red car.
Goodman’s own fault, and he knew it.
He got on his radio and told his guys to close down their local roadblocks. He told them exactly why. He told two of them to secure the area behind the cocktail lounge, and he told the rest of them to resume their general duties. He called the highway patrol’s dispatcher, and got no good news. He checked his watch and calculated time and speed and distance, and he breathed in and breathed out, and he put his car in gear, and he set off back to the crime scene again, ready for his appointment with Special Agent Julia Sorenson.
His fault.
The two men were out of the state already.
It was the FBI’s problem now.
SEVEN
JULIA SORENSON FOUND the crossroads easily enough, which was not surprising, because her GPS showed it to be the only cartographical singularity for miles around. She made the right turn, as instructed, and she drove west a hundred yards towards a pool of light, and she saw a concrete bunker with a sheriff’s car and a deputy’s cruiser parked right next to it.
The crime scene, exactly as described.
She understood the cars better than the bunker. The cars were Crown Vics like her own, but painted up in county colours and fitted with push bars front and rear and light bars on their roofs. The bunker was harder to explain. It was rectangular, maybe twenty feet long and fifteen feet deep and ten feet tall. It had a flat concrete roof and no windows. Its door was metal, bowed and scuffed and dented. The whole structure looked old and tired and settled. The concrete itself was worn by wind and weather, spalled and pitted, hollowed out here and there into fist-sized holes. Brown flinty stones had been exposed, some of them smooth, some of them split and shattered.
She parked behind the deputy’s car and climbed out. She was a tall woman, clearly Scandinavian, handsome rather than pretty, with long ash blonde hair, most of which colour was natural. She was wearing black pants and a black jacket with a blue shirt under it. She had solid black shoes on her feet, and she had a black pear-shaped shoulder bag which carried all her stuff except her gun, which was in a holster on her left hip, and her ID wallet, which was in her pocket.
She took out the wallet and flipped it open and walked towards the sheriff. She judged him to be about twenty years older than she was. He was very solid but not tall, like three-quarters of a football player. Not bad for an old guy. He was wearing a winter jacket over his uniform shirt. No gloves, even though the night was cold. They shook hands and stood quiet for a second, facing the concrete bunker, as if wondering where to start.
‘First question,’ Sorenson said. ‘What is this place?’
Goodman said, ‘It’s an old pumping station. It brought water up from the aquifer.’
‘Abandoned now?’
Goodman nodded. ‘The water table fell. We had to dig a deeper hole. The new pump is about a mile from here.’
‘Is the dead guy still in there?’
Goodman nodded again. ‘We waited for you.’
‘Who has been in there so far?’
‘Just me and the doctor.’
‘There’s a lot of blood.’
‘Yes,’ Goodman said. ‘There is.’
‘Did you step in it?’
‘We had to. We had to make sure the guy was dead.’
‘What did you touch?’
‘Just his wrist and his neck, looking for a pulse.’
Sorenson squatted down and opened up her pear-shaped shoulder bag. She took out plastic booties, to cover her shoes, and latex gloves, to cover her hands, and a camera. She put one foot in the sticky puddle and opened the bunker’s door. One hinge squealed, and one hinge moaned. The two sounds together made a kind of banshee wail. She put the other foot in the puddle.
‘There’s a light inside,’ Goodman said.
She found the switch. It operated a caged bulb on the ceiling. Old cage, old bulb. Maybe two hundred watts. Clear glass. It gave a bright, harsh, shadowless light. She saw the stumps of two fat old pipes coming up through the floor, maybe ten feet apart. Both pipes were about a foot wide, and both of them had once been painted smooth institutional green, but they were now chipped and scaly with rust. Both of them were open at the top, and both of them terminated with wide flanges, where bolted joints had once been made. A municipal system, long disassembled. Sorenson guessed for many years ground water had come up through one pipe and had been boosted onward through the other, horizontal and underground, to a water tower somewhere close by. But then one day the pumps had started sucking on dry rock honeycombs, and it had been time for a new hole. Irrigation, population, and indoor plumbing. Sorenson had read her briefing papers. Two and a half trillion gallons of ground water a year, more than anywhere except Texas and California.
She moved on.
Apart from the water pipes there was old grit on the floor, and a heavy-duty electrical panel on one wall, several generations old, and a faded diagram on another wall, showing the nature and purpose of the hydraulic equipment that had once connected one green stump to the other. And that was it, in terms of permanent infrastructure.
The non-permanent infrastructure was the dead guy, and his blood. He was on his back, with his elbows and knees bent like a cartoon sketch of a man dancing an old-fashioned number. His face was covered in blood, and his midsection was covered in blood, and he was lying in a lake of blood. He was maybe forty years old, although it was hard to judge. He was wearing a green winter coat, cotton canvas padded and insulated with something, not old, but not new either. The coat was not zipped or buttoned. It was open, over a grey sweater and a cream checked shirt. Both sweater and shirt looked worn and dirty. Both sweater and shirt had been tugged out of the guy’s waistband, and then they had been pulled up past his ribcage.
He had two knife wounds. The first was a lateral slash across his forehead an inch above his eyes. The second was a ragged stab wound in the right side of his midsection, about level with his navel. Most of the blood had come from the second wound. It had welled out. The guy’s navel looked like a thimble full of drying paint.
Sorenson said, ‘How do you see it, sheriff?’
From outside the door Goodman said, ‘They nicked him in the forehead to blind him. A sheet of blood came down in his eyes. That’s an old knife-fighting trick. Which is why I thought of them as professionals. And from that point on it was easy. They pulled up his shirt and stuck the knife up under his ribs. And jerked it around. But not quite enough. It took him a few minutes to die.’
Sorenson nodded to herself. Hence all the blood. The guy’s heart had kept on pumping, valiantly but fruitlessly.
She asked, ‘Do you know who he is?’
‘Never saw him before.’
‘Why did they pull up his shirt?’
‘Because they’re professionals. They didn’t want the blade to snag.’
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‘I agree,’ Sorenson said. ‘It must have been a long knife, don’t you think? To get up into his thorax from there?’
‘Eight or nine inches, maybe.’
‘Did the eyewitness see a knife?’
‘He didn’t say so. But you can ask him yourself. He’s waiting in the deputy’s car. Keeping warm.’
Sorenson asked, ‘Why didn’t they use a gun? A silenced .22 would be more typical, if this is a professional hit.’
‘Still loud, in an enclosed space.’
‘Pretty far from anywhere.’
‘Then I don’t know why they didn’t,’ Goodman said.
Sorenson used her camera and took photographs, zooming out wide for context, zooming in tight for details. She asked, ‘Do you mind if I disturb the body? I want to check for ID.’
Goodman said, ‘It’s your case.’
‘Is it?’
‘The perps are out of the state by now.’
‘They are if they went east.’
‘And if they went west, it’s only a matter of time. They got through the roadblocks, apparently.’
Sorenson said nothing.
‘They switched to another car,’ Goodman said.
‘Or cars,’ Sorenson said. ‘They might have split up and travelled separately.’
Goodman thought about the empty spaces either side of the parked Mazda. Thought about his final APB: any two men in any kind of vehicle. He said, ‘I didn’t consider that possibility. I guess I screwed up.’
Sorenson didn’t reassure him. She just picked her way around the blood and squatted down in the driest patch she could find. She put her left hand out behind her for balance and used her right hand on the corpse. She pressed and patted and searched. There was nothing in the shirt pocket. Nothing in the coat, inside or out. Her gloved fingers turned red with rubbery smears. She tried the pants pockets. Nothing there.
She called, ‘Sheriff? You’re going to have to help me here.’
Goodman picked his way inside, on tiptoe, using long sideways steps, like he was on a ledge a thousand feet up. Sorenson said, ‘Put your finger in his belt loop. Roll him over. I need to check his back pockets.’
Goodman squatted opposite her, arm’s length from the body, and hooked a finger in a belt loop. He turned his face away and hauled. The dead guy came up on his hip. Blood squelched and dripped, but slowly, because it was drying and mixing with the grit on the floor to make a paste. Sorenson’s gloved hand darted in like a pickpocket, and she poked and prodded and patted.
Nothing there.
‘No ID,’ she said. ‘So as of right now, we have ourselves an unidentified victim. Ain’t life grand?’
Goodman let the guy roll back, flat on the floor.
EIGHT
JACK REACHER WAS no kind of a legal scholar, but like all working cops he had learned something about the law, mostly its practical, real-world applications, and its tricks and its dodges.
And he had learned the areas where the law was silent.
As in: there was no law that said people who pick up hitchhikers have to tell the truth.
In fact Reacher had learned that harmless fantasy seemed to be irresistible. He figured it was a large part of the reason why drivers stopped at all. He had ridden with obvious cubicle drones who claimed to be managers, and managers who claimed to be entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs who claimed to be successful, and employees who said they owned the company, and nurses who said they were doctors, and doctors who said they were surgeons. People liked to spread their wings a little. They liked to inhabit a different life for an hour or two, testing it, tasting it, trying out their lines, basking in the glow.
No harm, no foul.
All part of the fun.
But Alan King’s lies were different.
There was no element of self-aggrandizement in what he was saying. The guy wasn’t making himself bigger or better or smarter or sexier. He was telling stupid, trivial, technical lies for no clear reason at all.
As in: the blue denim shirts. They were not a corporate brand. They were not crisp attractive items with embroidered logos above the pockets. They had never been worn before, or laundered. They were cheap junk from a dollar store, straight from the shelf, straight from the plastic packet. Reacher knew, because they were the kind of shirt he wore himself.
As in: King claimed they hadn’t stopped in three hours, but the gas gauge was showing three-quarters full. Which implied the Chevy could run twelve hours on a single tank. Which was close to a thousand miles, at highway speeds. Which was impossible.
And: the water King had given him with Karen Delfuenso’s aspirin was still cold from a refrigerator. Which would be impossible, after three hours in a car with the heater blasting.
Lies.
As in: King claimed somewhere in Nebraska as his residence, but then said there were a million and a half people living where he lived. Which was impossible. A million and a half was close to Nebraska’s entire population. Omaha had about four hundred thousand people, and Lincoln had two fifty. There were only nine U.S. cities with populations of more than a million, and eight of them were either emphatically bigger or smaller than a million and a half. Only Philadelphia was close to that number.
So were these guys really from Philly? Or did King mean a metro area? In which case Philadelphia was too big, but all kinds of other places would slide up the scale and become possibilities. Columbus would fit the bill, maybe, or Las Vegas, or Milwaukee, or San Antonio, or the Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News sprawl.
But not anyplace in Nebraska.
Not even close.
And why wasn’t Karen Delfuenso talking? She had said I’ve got one, about the aspirin, and she had said her name during the mutual introductions, and then she had said nothing more. Reacher himself was quite capable of silence for hours at a time, but even he had been making an effort in terms of polite conversation. Delfuenso looked like the kind of woman who would join in with such social proprieties. But she hadn’t.
Why not?
Not my problem, Reacher thought. His problem was to get himself on a bus to Virginia, and he was closing in on that target at close to eighty miles an hour, more than a hundred feet a second. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
Julia Sorenson hopped around outside the bunker and peeled her plastic booties off, and then she sealed them in a bag with her gloves. Evidence, possibly, and certainly a biohazard. Then she found her phone and called out full-boat teams of FBI medical examiners and crime scene investigators.
Her case.
She got in the back of the deputy’s car with the eyewitness. No reason to haul the poor guy out into the cold. Goodman got in the front and the deputy twisted around behind the wheel. It was a regular little conference, two and two, separated by the bulletproof shield.
The eyewitness was a man of about fifty, whiskery, not well groomed, dressed in winter farm clothes. He ran through his story with the kind of imprecision Sorenson expected. She was well aware of the limitations of eyewitness testimony. As a Quantico trainee she had been sent to interview a doctor suspected of Medicare fraud. She had waited for her appointment in his crowded waiting room. A guy had burst in to rob the place for drugs, firing a handgun, rushing here, rushing there, rushing out. Afterwards, of course, she found out the whole thing was staged. The doctor was an actor, the robber was an actor, the handgun rounds were blanks, and everyone in the waiting room was a law enforcement trainee. There was no consensus on what the robber looked like. Absolutely none at all. Short, tall, fat, thin, black, white, no one really remembered. Since that morning Sorenson had taken eyewitness testimony with a pinch of salt.
She asked, ‘Did you see the man in the green coat arrive?’
The guy said, ‘No. I saw him on the sidewalk, that’s all, heading for the old pumping station, right there.’
‘Did you see the red car arrive?’
‘No. It was already there when I looked.’
‘Were th
e two men in the black suits in it?’
‘No, they were on the sidewalk too.’
‘Following the other man?’
The guy nodded. ‘About ten feet back. Maybe twenty.’
‘Can you describe them?’
‘They were just two guys. In suits.’
‘Old? Young?’
‘Neither. They were just guys.’
‘Short? Tall?’
‘Average.’
‘Black or white?’
‘White.’
‘Fat or thin?’