There were clothes on it, in neat piles. Two outfits, both the same. Blue jeans, blue shirts, blue sweaters, white undershirts, white underwear, blue socks. There were pyjamas on the pillow. There were toiletries in the bathroom. Soap, shampoo, shaving cream. Some kind of lotion. Deodorant. There were razors. There was toothpaste, and a toothbrush sealed in cellophane. There was a comb. There was a bathrobe. There were lots of towels.
He looked at the bed but sat down in an armchair. He had been told lunch was available from twelve o’clock onward. Nothing to do until then. So he figured he might start his day with a nap. Just a short doze. It had been a long night.
Reacher waited until Sorenson was safely past a howling semi truck, and then he said, ‘Tell me about how the fingerprint thing worked with the dead guy.’
‘Standard procedure,’ Sorenson said. ‘It’s the first thing they do, before decomposition starts to make it difficult. They take the prints and upload them to the database.’
‘By satellite?’
‘No, over the regular cell phone networks.’
‘That’s convenient.’
‘You bet it is. We love cell phones. We love them to death. For all kinds of reasons. I mean, can you imagine? Suppose twenty years ago Congress had proposed a law saying every citizen had to wear a radio transponder around his neck, all day and all night, so the government could track him wherever he went. Can you imagine the outrage? But instead the citizens went right ahead and did it to themselves. In their pockets and purses, not around their necks, but the outcome is the same.’
‘Were there prints in the bright red car?’
‘Plenty. Those guys took no care at all.’
‘Did you upload them?’
‘Of course.’
‘Any results?’
‘Not yet,’ Sorenson said. ‘Which almost certainly means those guys aren’t in the database. The software will hunt for hours, until it’s sure, but it never takes this long. They must be virgins.’
‘Therefore not foreign,’ Reacher said. ‘There are no foreign fingerprint virgins, right? Everyone gets fingerprinted at the port of entry. Or for their visas. Unless they’re illegals. They could have come over the Canadian border, I guess. People say it’s full of holes.’
‘Except how did they get into Canada? We have access to their databases too. And Canada has no other borders. Unless they hiked across the North Pole or swam the Bering Strait.’
‘There’s Alaska.’
‘But to get into Alaska from overseas you have to be fingerprinted.’
‘No chance of errors or glitches?’
‘Not for the last ten years.’
‘OK, they’re not foreign.’
Sorenson drove on. She had driven the opposite way just hours before, but she didn’t really recognize the terrain. The highway looked different. It was lit up a dull grey and there was no view to the sides and no horizon ahead or behind. It was like passing through an endless cloud. The rain was easing but the road was still streaming. There was spray everywhere.
By her side Reacher said, ‘Where did the State Department guy come from?’
She said, ‘I don’t know. He just showed up in a car. But he was for real. I saw his ID.’
‘Does the State Department have field offices, like you guys?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
‘So where did he come from? Obviously not D.C., because he got there too quick.’
‘Good question. I’ll ask my SAC. He got a message that the guy was coming. And I know he spoke to State during the night. That’s how we found out the dead guy was a trade attache.’
‘Or not. It feels to me like State was keeping its eye on something. Like standing by, in the vicinity. If the guy really was from State, that is. He could have been CIA too.’
Sorenson said nothing. Nothing about the checked shirt from Pakistan or the Middle East, nothing about the night-time calls from the CIA, nothing about their insistent requests for constant updates. She didn’t know why, beyond a kind of basic superstition. Some things just shouldn’t be mentioned out loud, and in her opinion the idea of the CIA roaming America’s heartland by night was one of them.
FORTY-ONE
DELFUENSO’S DAUGHTER WAS called Lucy. Sheriff Goodman met her on the neighbour’s stoop. She was a thin child, dark-haired and sallow, still in pyjamas. She smelled faintly of sleep and a busy household. Goodman sat her down on the concrete step and sat next to her with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging loose in front of him. Just two regular folks, chatting. Except they weren’t. He started out by asking how she was, and he didn’t get much of an answer. The kid was mute with incomprehension. But she was listening. He said her mom hadn’t come home from work. He said no one knew where she was. He said lots of people were out looking for her.
The kid didn’t really react. It was as if he had given her a piece of arcane and useless information from another world entirely, like the surface temperature of the planet Jupiter, or how AM was different from FM on the radio dial. She just nodded politely and fidgeted and shivered in the cold and wanted to go back inside.
Next Goodman spoke with the neighbour herself. He gave her the same incomplete information: Delfuenso was missing, her whereabouts were unknown, a search was continuing. He told the woman he had been advised that Lucy should stay home from school. He said maybe it would be a good idea if her own kid stayed home too. Then he asked the woman if she could stay home from work as well, to keep an eye on them both. He said familiar faces would probably be a good thing for Lucy, under the circumstances.
The neighbour hemmed and hawed and fussed a little, but in the end she said she would try to make it all work. She would do her best. She would make some calls. Goodman left her there at the door, the two kids energetic in the gloom behind her, the woman herself inert and distracted and looking worried about a dozen different things all at once.
The rain stopped and the clouds thinned and the Interstate went from streaming to damp to dry, all within a ten-mile stretch. Reacher started to recognize some of the road. It looked different by day. No longer a tunnel through the dark. Now it felt like an endless causeway, raised a little above the infinite flatness all around. He sat still and patient and watched the exits, most of them deceptive, some of them promising. Then he saw a really good one three or four miles ahead, vague in the distance, shapeless in the grey light, a cluster of buildings and a forest of bright signs, Exxon and Texaco and Sunoco, Subway and McDonald’s and Cracker Barrel, Marriott and Red Roof and the Comfort Inn. Plus a huge billboard for an outlet mall he hadn’t seen by night, because the sign was made of unlit paper, not neon.
He said, ‘Let’s get breakfast.’
Sorenson didn’t answer. He felt her stiffen in her seat. He felt her get a little wary. He said, ‘I’m hungry. You must be, too. And I’m sure we need gas, anyway.’
No response.
He said, ‘I’m not going to give you the slip. I wouldn’t be in this car in the first place unless I wanted to be. We have a deal. You remember that, right?’
She said, ‘The Omaha field office has to show something for a night’s work.’
‘I understand that. I’m coming with you, all the way.’
‘I have to be sure of that. So we’ll eat if there’s a drive-through.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll go inside and sit at a table, like civilized people who trust each other. And I need to take a shower. And I need to buy some clothes.’
‘Where?’
‘At the outlet mall.’
‘Why?’
‘So I can change.’
