17
Reacher turned a careful one-eighty and stared back at the road to make sure he hadn’t drifted too far either west or east. He hadn’t. He was right on target. He walked five paces south, turned east, walked five more paces, turned around, walked ten steps west.
Saw nothing.
“Well?” Vaughan called.
“It’s gone,” he said.
“You were just yanking my chain.”
“I wasn’t. Why would I?”
“How accurate could you have been, with the stones? In the dark?”
“That’s what I’m wondering.”
Vaughan walked a small quiet circle, all around. Shook her head.
“It isn’t here,” she said. “If it ever was.”
Reacher stood still in the emptiness. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear, except Vaughan’s truck idling patiently twenty yards away. He walked ten more yards east and started to trace a wide circle. A quarter of the way through it, he stopped.
“Look here,” he said.
He pointed at the ground. At a long line of shallow crumbled oval pits in the sand, each one a yard apart.
Vaughan said, “Footprints.”
“My footprints,” Reacher said. “From last night. Heading home.”
They turned west and backtracked. Followed the trail of his old footprints back toward Despair. Ten yards later they came to the head of a small diamond-shaped clearing. The clearing was empty.
“Wait,” Reacher said.
“It’s not here,” Vaughan said.
“But it was here. This is the spot.”
The crusted sand was all churned up by multiple disturbances. There were dozens of footprints, facing in all directions. There were scrapes and slides and drag marks. There were small depressions in the scrub, some fairly precise, but most not, because of the way the dry sand had crumbled and trickled down into the holes.
Reacher said, “Tell me what you see.”
“Activity,” Vaughan said. “A mess.”
“A story,” Reacher said. “It’s telling us what happened.”
“Whatever happened, we can’t stay here. This was supposed to be in and out, real fast.”
Reacher stood up straight and scanned the road, west and east.
Nothing there.
“Nobody coming,” he said.
“I should have brought a picnic,” Vaughan said.
Reacher stepped into the clearing. Crouched down and pointed two-fingered at a pair of neat parallel depressions in the center of the space. Like two coconut shells had been pressed down into the sand, hard, on a north-south axis.
“The boy’s knees,” he said. “This is where he gave it up. He staggered to a stop and half-turned and fell over.” Then he pointed to a broad messed-up stony area four feet to the east. “This is where I landed after I tripped over him. On these stones. I could show you the bruises, if you like.”
“Maybe later,” Vaughan said. “We need to get going.”
Reacher pointed to four sharp impressions in the sand. Each one was a rectangle about two inches by three, at the corners of a larger rectangle about two feet by five.
“Gurney feet,” he said. “Folks came by and collected him. Maybe four or five of them, judging by all the footprints. Official folks, because who else carries gurneys?” He stood up and checked and pointed north and west, along a broad ragged line of footprints and crushed vegetation. “They came in that way, and carried him back out in the same direction, back to the road. Maybe to a coroner’s wagon, parked a little ways west of my cairn.”
“So we’re OK,” Vaughan said. “The proper authorities have got him. Problem solved. We should get going.”
Reacher nodded vaguely and gazed due west. “What should we see over there?”
“Two sets of incoming footprints,” Vaughan said. “The boy’s and yours, both heading east out of town. Separated by time, but not much separated by direction.”
“But it looks like there’s more than that.”
They skirted the clearing and formed up again west of it. They saw four separate lines of footprints, fairly close together.
“Two incoming, two outgoing,” Reacher said.
“How do you know?” Vaughan asked.
“The angles. Most people walk with their toes out.”
The newer of the incoming tracks showed big dents in the sand a yard or more apart, and deep. The older showed smaller dents, closer together, less regular, and shallower.
“The kid and me,” Reacher said. “Heading east. Separated in time. I was walking, he was stumbling and staggering.”
The two outgoing tracks were both brand new. The sand was less crumbled and therefore the indentations were more distinct, and fairly deep, fairly well spaced, and similar.
“Reasonably big guys,” Reacher said. “Heading back west. Recently. Not separated in time.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means they’re tracking the kid. Or me. Or both of us. Finding out where we’d been, where we’d come from.”
“Why?”
“They found the body, they were curious.”
“How did they find the body in the first place?”
“Buzzards,” Reacher said. “It’s the obvious way, on open ground.”
Vaughan stood still for a moment. Then she said, “Back to the truck, right now.”
Reacher didn’t argue. She had beaten him to the obvious conclusion, but only by a heartbeat.
18
The old Chevy was still idling patiently. The road was still empty. But they ran. They ran and they flung the truck’s doors open and dumped themselves inside. Vaughan slammed the transmission into gear and hit the gas. They didn’t say a word until they thumped back over the Hope town line, eight long minutes later.
“Now you’re really a citizen with a problem,” Vaughan said. “Aren’t you? The Despair cops might be dumb, but they’re still cops. Buzzards show them a dead guy, they find the dead guy’s tracks, they find a second set of tracks that show some other guy caught up with the dead guy along the way, they find signs of a whole lot of falling down and rolling around, they’re going to want a serious talk with the other guy. You can bet on that.”
Reacher said, “So why didn’t they follow my tracks forward?”
“Because they know where you were going. There’s only Hope, or Kansas. They want to know where you started. And what are they going to find?”
“A massive loop. Buried PowerBar wrappers and empty water bottles, if they look hard enough.”
Vaughan nodded at the wheel. “Clear physical evidence of a big guy with big feet and long legs who paid a planned clandestine visit the night after they threw a big guy with big feet and long legs out of town.”
“Plus one of the deputies saw me.”
“You sure?”
“We talked.”
“Terrific.”
“The dead guy died of natural causes.”
“You sure? You felt around in the dark. They’re going to put that boy on a slab.”
“I’m not in Despair anymore. You can’t go there, they can’t come here.”
“Small departments don’t work homicides, you idiot. We call in the State Police. And the State Police can go anywhere in Colorado. And the State Police get cooperation anywhere in Colorado. And you’re in my logbook from yesterday. I couldn’t deny it even if I wanted to.”
“You wouldn’t want to?”
“I don’t know anything about you. Except that I’m pretty sure you beat on a deputy in Despair. You practically admitted that to me. Who knows what else you did?”
“I didn’t do anything else.”
Vaughan said nothing.
Reacher asked, “What happens next?”
“Always better to get out in front of a thing like this. You should call in and volunteer information.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I was a soldier. I never volunteer for anything.”
“Well, I can’t help you. It’s out of my hands. It was never
in
my hands.”
“You could call,” Reacher said. “You could call the State Police and find out what their thinking is.”
“They’ll be calling us soon enough.”
“So let’s get out in front, like you said. Early information is always good.”
Vaughan didn’t reply to that. Just lifted off the gas and slowed as they hit the edge of town. The hardware guy had his door open and was piling his stuff on the sidewalk. He had some kind of a trick stepladder that could be put in about eight different positions. He had set it up like a painter’s platform good for reaching second-story walls. Vaughan made a right on the next block and then a left, past the back of the diner. The streets were broad and pleasant and the sidewalks had trees. She pulled in to a marked-off parking space outside a low brick building. The building could have been a suburban post office. But it wasn’t. It was the Hope Police Department. It said so, in aluminum letters neatly fixed to the brick. Vaughan shut off the engine and Reacher followed her down a neat brick path to the police station’s door. The door was locked. The station was closed. Vaughan used a key from her bunch and said, “The desk guy gets in at nine.”
Inside, the place still looked like a post office. Dull, worn, institutional, bureaucratic, but somewhat friendly. Accessible. Oriented toward service. There was a public inquiry counter and a space behind it with two desks. A watch commander’s office behind a solid door, in the same corner a postmaster’s would be. Vaughan stepped past the counter and headed for a desk that was clearly hers. Efficient and organized, but not intimidating. There was an old-model computer front and center, and a console telephone next to it. She opened a drawer and found a number in a book. Clearly contact between the Hope PD and the State Police was rare. She didn’t know the number by heart. She dialed the phone and asked for the duty desk and identified herself and said, “We have a missing person inquiry. Male, Caucasian, approximately twenty years of age, five-eight, one-forty. Can you help us with that?” Then she listened briefly and her eyes flicked left and then right and she said, “We don’t have a name.” She was asked another question and she glanced right and said, “Can’t tell if he’s dark or fair. We’re working from a black-and-white photograph. It’s all we have.”
Then there was a pause. Reacher saw her yawn. She was tired. She had been working all night. She moved the phone a little ways from her ear and Reacher heard the faint tap of a keyboard in the distant state office. Denver, maybe, or Colorado Springs. Then a voice came back on and Vaughan clamped the phone tight and Reacher didn’t hear what it had to say.
Vaughan listened and said, “Thank you.”
Then she hung up.
“Nothing to report,” she said. “Apparently Despair didn’t call it in.”
“Natural causes,” Reacher said. “They agreed with me.”
Vaughan shook her head. “They should have called it in anyway. An unexplained death out in open country, that’s at least a county matter. Which means it would show up on the State Police system about a minute later.”
“So why didn’t they call it in?”
“I don’t know. But that’s not our problem.”
Reacher sat down at the other desk. It was a plain government-issue piece of furniture, with steel legs and a thin six-by-three fiberboard top laminated with a printed plastic approximation of rosewood or koa. There was a modesty panel and a three-drawer pedestal bolted to the right-hand legs. The chair had wheels and was covered with gray tweed fabric. Military Police furniture had been different. The chairs had been covered with vinyl. The desks had been steel. Reacher had sat behind dozens of them, all over the world. The views from his windows had been dramatically different, but the desks had been all the same. Their contents, too. Files full of dead people and missing people. Some mourned, some not.
He thought of Lucy Anderson, called Lucky by her friends. The night before, in the diner. He recalled the way she had wrung her hands. He looked across at Vaughan and said, “It is our problem, kind of. The kid might have people worried about him.”
Vaughan nodded. Went back to her book. Reacher saw her flip forward from
C
for
Colorado State Police
to
D
for
Despair Police Department.
She dialed and he heard a loud reply in her ear, as if physical proximity made for more powerful electrical current in the wires. She ran through the same faked inquiry, missing person, Caucasian male, about twenty, five-eight, one-forty, no name, coloring unclear because of a monochrome photograph. There was a short pause and then a short reply.
Vaughan hung up.
“Nothing to report,” she said. “They never saw such a guy.”
19
Reacher sat quiet and Vaughan moved stuff around on her desk. She put her keyboard in line with her monitor and put her mouse in line with her keyboard and squared her phone behind it and then adjusted everything until all the edges were either parallel or at perfect right angles to each other. Then she put pencils away in drawers and flicked at dust and crumbs with the edge of her palm.
“The gurney marks,” she said.
“I know,” Reacher said. “Apart from them, I could have invented this whole thing.”
“If they were gurney marks.”
“What else could they have been?”
“Nothing, I guess. They were from one of those old-fashioned stretchers, with the little skids, not the wheels.”
“Why would I invent anything anyway?”
“For attention.”
“I don’t like attention.”
“Everyone likes attention. Especially retired cops. It’s a recognized pathology. You try to insinuate yourselves back into the action.”
“Are you going to do that when you retire?”
“I hope not.”
“I don’t, either.”
“So what’s going on over there?”
“Maybe the kid was local,” Reacher said. “They knew who he was, so he wasn’t a candidate for your missing persons inquiry.”
Vaughan shook her head. “Still makes no sense. Any unexplained death out-of-doors has got to be reported to the county coroner. In which case it would have showed up on the state system. Purely as a statistic. The State Police would have said,
Well, hey, we heard there was a dead guy in Despair this morning, maybe you should check it out.
”
“But they didn’t.”
“Because nothing has been called in from Despair. Which just doesn’t add up. What the hell are they doing with the corpse? There’s no morgue over there. Not even any cold storage, as far as I know. Not even a meat locker.”
“So they’re doing something else with him,” Reacher said.
“Like what?”
“Burying him, probably.”
“He wasn’t road kill.”
“Maybe they’re covering something up.”
“You claim he died of natural causes.”
“He did,” Reacher said. “From wandering through the scrub for days. Maybe because they ran him out of town. Which might embarrass them. Always assuming they’re capable of embarrassment.”
Vaughan shook her head again. “They didn’t run him out of town. We didn’t get a call. And they always call us. Always. Then they drive them to the line and dump them. This week there’s been you and the girl. That’s all.”
“They never dump them to the west?”
“There’s nothing there. It’s unincorporated land.”
“Maybe they’re just slow. Maybe they’ll call it in later.”
“Doesn’t compute,” Vaughan said. “You find a dead one, you put one hand on your gun and the other on your radio. You call for backup, you call for the ambulance, you call the coroner. One, two, three. It’s completely automatic. There and then.”
“Maybe they aren’t as professional as you.”
“It’s not about being unprofessional. It’s about making a spur-of-the-moment decision to break procedure and not to call the coroner. Which would require some kind of real reason.”
Reacher said nothing.
Vaughan said, “Maybe there were no cops involved. Maybe someone else found him.”
“Civilians don’t carry stretchers in their cars,” Reacher said.
Vaughan nodded vaguely and got up. Said, “We should get out of here before the day guy gets in. And the watch commander.”
“Embarrassed to be seen with me?”
“A little. And I’m a little embarrassed that I don’t know what to do.”
The breakfast rush at the diner was over. A degree of calm had been restored. Reacher ordered coffee. Vaughan said she was happy with tap water. She sipped her way through half a glass and drummed her fingers on the table.
“Start over,” she said. “Who was this guy?”
“Caucasian male,” Reacher said.
“Not Hispanic? Not foreign?”
“I think Hispanics are Caucasians, technically. Plus Arabs and some Asians. All I’m going on is his hair. He wasn’t black. That’s all I know for sure. He could have been from anywhere in the world.”
“Dark-skinned or pale?”
“I couldn’t see anything.”
“You should have taken a flashlight.”
“I’m still glad I didn’t.”
“How did his skin feel?”
“Feel? It felt like skin.”
“You should have been able to tell something. Olive skin feels different from pale skin. A little smoother and thicker.”
“Really?”
“I think so. Don’t you?”
Reacher touched the inside of his left wrist with his right forefinger. Then he tried his cheek, under his eye.
“Hard to tell,” he said.
Vaughan stretched her arm across the table. “Now compare.”
He touched the inside of her wrist, gently.
She said, “Now try my face.”
“Really?”
“Purely for research purposes.”
He paused a beat, then touched her cheek with the ball of his thumb. He took his hand away and said, “Texture was thicker than either one of us. Smoothness was somewhere between the two of us.”
“OK.” She touched her own wrist where he had touched it, and then her face. Then she said, “Give me your wrist.”
He slid his hand across the table. She touched his wrist, with two fingers, like she was taking his pulse. She rubbed an inch north and an inch south and then leaned over and touched his cheek with her other hand. Her fingertips were cold from her water glass and the touch startled him. He felt a tiny jolt of voltage in it.
She said, “So he wasn’t necessarily white, but he was younger than you. Less lined and wrinkled and weather-beaten. Less of a mess.”
“Thank you.”
“You should use a good moisturizer.”
“I’ll bear that advice in mind.”
“And sunscreen.”
“Likewise.”
“Do you smoke?”
“I used to.”
“That’s not good for your skin either.”
Reacher said, “He might have been Asian, with the skimpy beard.”
“Cheekbones?”
“Pronounced, but he was thin anyway.”
“Wasted, in fact.”
“Noticeably. But he was probably wiry to begin with.”
“How long does it take for a wiry person to get wasted?”
“I don’t know for sure. Maybe five or six days in a hospital bed or a cell, if you’re sick or on a hunger strike. Less if you’re moving about out-of-doors, keeping warm, burning energy. Maybe only two or three days.”
Vaughan was quiet for a moment.
“That’s a lot of wandering,” she said. “We need to know why the good folks of Despair put in two or three days sustained effort to keep him out of there.”
Reacher shook his head. “Might be more useful to know why he was trying so hard to stay. He must have had a damn good reason.”