A Wanted Man

THIRTY-SEVEN

REACHER WAS THE first to get out. He closed his door and stood next to the Crown Vic’s hood, with cold on his back and heat on his face. He was five feet closer than he had been before, and therefore his angle was five feet better.

All the glass was gone. All the rubber was gone, all the plastics, all the vinyl, all the high-tech space age materials. All that was left was metal, the parts designed to be visible still curved and moulded, the parts designed to be hidden all sharp and knifelike and exposed. In particular the rear parcel shelf had lost its padding and its loudspeakers and its soundproof mat and its mouse-fur covering. What was left was a stamped steel cross-member, corrugated here and there for strength, drilled here and there with holes, but otherwise as plain and brutal as a blade. Its front edge was perfectly straight.

Except it wasn’t.

Reacher took three more steps. The heat was astonishing. The front of the parcel shelf looked different on the right than the left. On the right its straight edge was compromised by a humped shape completely unrelated to engineering necessity. It was an organic shape, odd and random, in no way similar to the stamped angularity all around it.

It was a human head, burned smooth and tiny by the fire.

Sorenson got out of her car.

Reacher said, ‘Stay there, OK?’

He turned away and took a breath from the cold side, and another, until his lungs were full. He turned back and started walking. He kept his distance, looping wide, until he was level with the side of the shell. Then he darted in, until he felt the blacktop hot and sticky under the soles of his boots.

The Chevy’s rear seat was burned away completely. But the person on it wasn’t. Not completely. On the right, directly behind the blackened frame of the front passenger seat, fallen down through the missing cushions to the zigzag springs below, was a shape, like a sea creature, like a seal or a porpoise or a dolphin, black in colour, oozing and smooth and smoking, cooked down to half its original size. It had tiny vestigial arms, clawed up like twigs. It had no expression, because it had no face.

But it had died screaming.

That was for damn sure.

They retreated fifty yards north and stood silently, breathing hard, staring blankly at a spot a thousand miles beyond the far horizon. They stood like that for a whole minute, and then another, as still as statues.

Then Sorenson said, ‘Where are they now?’

Reacher said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘And what are they driving?’

‘They’re not driving anything. They’re being driven. They were picked up.’

‘By who?’

Reacher didn’t answer. But he moved, finally. He glanced up at the sky and looked at the light. It was still very early. But it would do. He found the Chevy’s tyre tracks easily enough. They bumped down on to the shoulder through a thin skim of mud on the edge of the road about a yard wide. The mud was neither wet nor dry, and it had captured the tread prints perfectly. Like the finest plaster. The drift off the road on to the shoulder had been long and cautious. The Chevy had come in like a jumbo jet on approach. More like McQueen’s driving than King’s.

Reacher walked out into the dormant field. Sorenson followed him. They looped around the wreck together, as close as the heat would let them get. Once beyond it they looped back to the road, and they found more tyre tracks.

A second car had driven on to the shoulder. This one at a much tighter angle. Its tread prints were captured in the skim of mud. Road tyres, solid, reliable, nothing radical, nothing fancy, probably on a big sedan. But they had come steering in pretty hard. That was clear. And some little time later they had steered out again just as hard, and bumped their way south. Taken together the tracks looked like the same bite out of a big circle.

Sorenson said, ‘Nothing came through between you and me, right? So this guy must have gotten here hours ago.’

‘No, he came north,’ Reacher said. ‘Not south. He didn’t come past the motel. He U-turned right here, he picked them up, and he headed back where he came from. You can see all that from the tracks.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘What else can have happened? They didn’t jack another car. That’s for sure. There’s no traffic out here. You could wait for ever. And I doubt if they’re walking. So they were picked up. This was a rendezvous. They got here first. They were waiting. They know this place. Which is how they know that back road off the Interstate.’

‘Who picked them up?’

‘I don’t know,’ Reacher said again. ‘But this thing is starting to look like a big operation. Three coordinated crews, at least.’

‘Why three? There were only two here. King and McQueen, plus whoever picked them up.’

‘Plus whoever was simultaneously disappearing your eyewitness, all the way back in Nebraska. That’s what I mean by coordination. They’re cleaning house. They’re taking care of everyone who ever laid eyes on King and McQueen.’

The break of day brought with it a cold breeze out of the north. There was rain coming. And soon. Reacher hunched down in his coat. Sorenson’s pant legs flapped like sails. She walked twenty yards into a field. To get away from the smell on the wind, Reacher figured. He followed her, with stiff stalks crunching under his feet. Just to keep her company. He didn’t need to move. Right then he couldn’t smell anything at all. But he had smelled similar things before, from time to time in the past, back when his nose still worked. Oil, gas, plastic, charred meat. A chemical stink, plus rotting forgotten barbecue. Worse. Any sane person would want to get out of the way.

Sorenson called the Iowa troopers and claimed the scene for the FBI. She said it was not to be approached, and nothing was to be touched, and nothing was to be moved. Then she called her own tech team and told them to make the long trip over. She told them she wanted the best crime scene analysis ever attempted, and the best autopsy ever performed.

‘Waste of time,’ Reacher said, when she clicked off. ‘There’s virtually nothing to be found after a fire like that.’

‘I just need to know,’ she said.

‘Know what?’

‘That she was dead before the fire started. If I could know that, I might be able to carry on.’

They walked back to Sorenson’s car, a long curving route around the wreck, away from the heat and the smell, and when they got twenty feet from it she did what she had to do: she cleared her throat and took a breath and pulled her gun and arrested Jack-none-Reacher, on suspicion of conspiracy, and homicide in the first degree, and kidnapping.