A Wanted Man (26 page)

“OK, but why didn’t they come back to the crossroads and turn east from there?”

“Two reasons,” Reacher said. “They’re not local, so they didn’t know for sure where that road goes. I assume Delfuenso didn’t have GPS or maps in her glove box. But more importantly they’ll have assumed the crossroads would be roadblocked from the start. Four birds with one stone, right there. North, south, east, west, no one can go anywhere except through that crossroads. Didn’t the sheriff block it?”

“No,” Sorenson said. “I don’t think he did.”

“He should have. That was a mistake. But no big deal, because they ran away from it anyway. They went north, and they saw no obvious way east until they hit the highway. At night, in the dark, those
side roads must have looked hopeless. So that’s why they took the Interstate. No choice.”

“OK,” Sorenson said. “I’ll buy that.”

“The bigger question is how they got here in the first place. If they didn’t drive in from Denver with the dead guy, and if they didn’t have a car of their own, then they must have gotten a ride in with someone else. In other words they were dropped off here. Just like they were picked up again later. Possibly by the same people. In which case, why didn’t whoever it was just wait around for them? Why abandon them to a long and dangerous interlude? The only answer is, whatever happened in the pumping station wasn’t supposed to happen. Maybe King and McQueen were supposed to get a ride with the dead guy. But they killed him instead. For some unexplained reason. Which left them improvising like crazy.”

Sorenson’s phone rang. Loud and dramatic through the speakers. She checked the caller ID. “Omaha,” she said. “The field office.”

“Don’t answer it,” Reacher said.

She didn’t. She let it go. It rang for a long time, and then it cut off. Reacher said, “We should go see Delfuenso’s house. Or her neighbor’s, anyway. We should check it out. And we should talk to the neighbor’s kid. Maybe she remembered something about the men. They’re likely the same crew who vanished the eyewitness. Maybe the same crew who dropped King and McQueen here in the first place.”

Sorenson said, “I can’t remember where Delfuenso’s house is. It was the middle of the night.”

Her phone trilled once. A voice mail message.

“Don’t listen to it,” Reacher said.

She didn’t. Instead she scrolled through her list of contacts until she found Sheriff Goodman’s cell number. She hit
Call
and the phone dialed. Reacher heard the purr of the ring tone through the speakers, slow and sonorous, patient, no kind of urgency.

It rang for a long time, on and on.

There was no answer.

“Weird,” Sorenson said.

*  *  *

She backed away
from the old pumping station and turned around and headed back toward the crossroads. Before she got there she turned off into a side street. Reacher knew what she was doing. The sheriff’s department wouldn’t be on a main drag. It would be in back somewhere, where land was cheaper, where a big lot wouldn’t be a drain on the public purse. She nosed around corners and passed all kinds of places, but none of them was a police station. She came out again south of the crossroads and tried again in another quadrant.

“There,” Reacher said. He had seen a shortwave antenna on the roof of a low tan building. The building had a fenced lot big enough for a small handful of cruisers. The lot was empty, except for puddles, where the blacktop was holed by age. The whole place was old and worn, but it looked like it was maintained to a reasonable paramilitary standard. Nothing like the army, but nothing like a regular civilian establishment either.

Sorenson parked in the lot and they hustled through the downpour and found a woman behind a counter in the lobby doing double duty as receptionist and dispatcher. Sorenson showed her ID and asked where Sheriff Goodman was. The woman tried his car on the radio and got no result. She tried his cell from her landline console and got no result on that, either. She said, “Maybe he went home to take a nap. He’s an old man and he’s been awake for a long time.”

“We need Karen Delfuenso’s address,” Sorenson said. “And directions.”

The woman behind the counter provided both. North and east of the crossroads, out in the empty farmland, maybe eight miles distant. Basically left and right and left and right at every opportunity. Another checkerboard. They drove out there slowly. The eastern horizon was bright. The rain was rolling out, but slower than it had rolled in. Reacher was tired. He felt hollowed out. Every cell in his body was thrilling and buzzing with exhaustion. He had been awake most of two days. Not the longest he had ever endured, but up there. He guessed Sorenson was feeling just as bad. She was pale to begin with, and she was going blue around the eyes.

Then after the final right-hand turn Reacher saw a row of four
small ranch houses all alone in the emptiness. There was a cop car parked in the middle of the road. Sorenson said, “He’s here after all. That’s Sheriff Goodman’s car. And that’s Karen Delfuenso’s house, second from the right.”

She parked on the curb twenty feet back, and they got out.

Chapter 48

They found Goodman where he had fallen, on his back
, hard up against the front wheel of his car. His eyes were full of rainwater. New drops splashed into the tiny pools and overflowed down his cheeks like tears. His mouth was open and water was pooling in his throat. His clothes were soaked. He looked like a drowned man. His skin was already ice cold. He had no pulse. He looked slack and collapsed and empty, like only dead people can. All the invisible thousand muscular tensions of the living were gone.

He’s an old man and he’s been awake for a long time
.

Not anymore
, Reacher thought.

“How old was he?” he asked.

“Late sixties,” Sorenson said. “Maybe early seventies. Too young to die, anyway. He was a nice man. A good man, like his name. Was it a heart attack?”

“Probably,” Reacher said. “Stress, exhaustion, and worry. That kind of thing. Not good for a person. Cops should get paid more.”

“No argument from me on that point.”

“Did he tell us what we need to know?”

“I don’t think he knew what we need to know.”

“I guess we should call it in.”

So they got back in Sorenson’s car, and she dialed the department’s switchboard number on her cell. The woman behind the counter answered,
and Sorenson broke the news. The woman cried. Sorenson clicked off and they waited, wet, cold, and tired, staring ahead through the windshield, not seeing much, and not saying anything.

Next on scene
was a very large thirty-five-year-old man in a deputy’s car. He was fair-haired and bulky and red-faced, and he was wearing a padded nylon jacket open over a uniform. The jacket had a sergeant’s stripes on the sleeves. The guy came to Sorenson’s window and bent down. The jacket fell open and Reacher saw a black plate with the name
Puller
over one shirt pocket and a sheriff’s department star over the other. The star had the words
Chief Deputy
on it. The guy knocked on the window with fat red knuckles. Sorenson didn’t lower her glass. She just pointed. The guy walked toward his chief’s car with short nervous steps, like he was approaching a fortified position. Like he was expecting an armed enemy to open fire. He made it around to the passenger side and stopped. He looked down. Then he staggered away to the shoulder and bent double and threw up in the mud.

Reacher noticed the rain had stopped.

A long moment later the guy named Puller straightened up a little and stared out over the open land. He was green in the face. Not sentimental about the old man, but upset by the sight of a corpse. Reacher got out of the car. The road was still streaming, but the air felt suddenly fresh and dry. Sorenson got out on her side. The guy named Puller started back toward them and they all met as a threesome in the space between the cars.

Sorenson asked, “Are you the department’s second in command?”

Puller said, “I guess so.”

“Then you guess wrong. As of now you’re the chief. Acting chief, anyway. And you’ve got things to do. You need to bring us up to speed, for instance.”

“With what?”

“There’s a missing kid here.”

“I didn’t really keep up with that.”

“Why not?”

“I do traffic mostly. To and from the Interstate. Up beyond Sin City. You know, with the radar gun.”

“Were you briefed on what happened here last night?”

“We all were.”

“But you didn’t keep up with it?”

“I do traffic mostly.”

“Didn’t Sheriff Goodman take you off your normal duties?”

“He took us all off.”

“So why didn’t you pay attention?”

“He didn’t really tell me what to do.”

Reacher asked, “Were you dropped on your head as a baby?”

The guy named Puller didn’t answer.

Sorenson said, “Call your dispatcher and arrange for an ambulance to take the body away.”

“OK.”

“Then call Sheriff Goodman’s family.”

“OK.”

“Then call the funeral home.”

“From where?”

“From a telephone. Any telephone. Just make sure it’s nowhere near me.”

The guy named Puller walked back to his cruiser and Reacher and Sorenson walked up Delfuenso’s neighbor’s driveway.

Delfuenso’s neighbor
was a woman not much more than thirty. Her daughter was a ten-year-old version of the same person, still straight and slender and unlined. The kid’s name was Paula. She was camped out in the back room. No view of the road. No view of anything, except mud. She had an electronic box hooked up to the TV. All kinds of things were happening on the screen. Explosions, mostly. Tiny cartoon figures were getting vaporized in sudden puffs of smoke smaller than golf balls.

The neighbor said, “I had to go to work. I’m sorry.”

Sorenson said, “I understand,” like she meant it. Reacher understood
too. He read the papers. He heard people talking. He knew jobs were easy to lose, and hard to get back.

The neighbor said, “I told them not to answer the door.”

Sorenson looked at the kid and asked, “Paula, why did you?”

The kid said, “I didn’t.”

“Why did Lucy?”

“Because the man called her name.”

“He called Lucy’s name?”

“Yes. He said, Lucy, Lucy.”

“What else did he say?”

“I didn’t hear.”

“Are you sure? You must have heard something.”

The kid didn’t answer.

Sorenson waited.

The kid asked, “Am I in trouble?”

Sorenson hesitated.

Reacher said, “Yes, kid, you are. Quite a lot of trouble, to be honest. But you can get out of all of it if you tell us everything you heard and everything you saw this morning. You do that, and you’ll be completely free and clear.”

A plea bargain. An incentive. A stick and a carrot. A time-honored system. Reacher had gone that route many times, back in the day. A ten-year stretch reduced to a three-to-five, probation instead of jail time, charges dropped in exchange for information. The system worked with twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds. It worked just fine. Reacher saw no reason why it wouldn’t work just as well with a ten-year-old.

The kid said nothing.

Reacher said, “And I’ll give you a dollar for candy, and my friend will give you a kiss on the head.”

Bribery worked, too.

The kid said, “The man said he knew where Lucy’s mom was.”

“Did he?”

The kid nodded, earnestly. “He said he would take Lucy to her mom.”

“What did the man look like?”

The kid was squeezing her fingers, like she could wring the answer out of her hands.

She said, “I don’t know.”

“But you peeked a little bit, right?”

The kid nodded again.

Reacher asked, “How many men did you see at the door?”

“Two.”

“What did they look like?”

“Like you see on the TV.”

“Did you see their car?”

“It was big and low.”

“A regular car? Not a pick-up truck or a four-wheel-drive?”

“Regular.”

“Was it muddy?”

“No, it was shiny.”

“What color was it?”

The kid was wringing her hands again.

She said, “I don’t know.”

Sorenson’s phone rang. She checked the window and mouthed,
Omaha
.

Reacher shook his head. Sorenson nodded, but she didn’t look happy. She let it ring. Eventually it stopped and Reacher looked back at the kid and said, “Thanks, Paula. You did great. You’re not in trouble anymore. You’re totally free and clear.” He dug in his pocket and peeled a buck off his roll of bills. He handed it over. Sorenson’s phone trilled once. Voice mail. Reacher said, “Now the pretty lady will give you a kiss on the forehead.”

The kid giggled. Sorenson looked a little shy about it, but she went ahead and bent down and did the deed. The kid went back to her onscreen explosions. Reacher looked at her mom and said, “We need to borrow the key to Karen’s house.”

The woman got it from a drawer in the hallway. It was a regular house key, on a fob with a crystal pendant. Just like the car key. Reacher wondered what kind of temperature would melt crystal glass. A lower temperature than regular glass, probably. Because of
whatever they put in it to make it sparkle. So the car key fob was gone forever. It was a smear of trace elements on the Impala’s burned-out floor, or a tiny cloud of vapor already halfway to Oregon on the wind.

He took the key and said, “Thanks,” and then he and Sorenson stepped out the door. Goodman’s car was still there, but the ambulance had been and gone with the body. Puller’s car was gone. And the clouds had gone too. The sky had brightened up. A watery winter sun was visible, high overhead.

Sorenson paused on the driveway and checked her voice mail list. Reacher said, “No need to listen to it. You already know what it says.”

“I’m going to have to call in,” she said. “The situation has changed. There’s still a missing kid here and now there’s no local law enforcement. Nothing competent, anyway. Not anymore.”