A Wanted Man

FIFTY-EIGHT

EVIDENTLY JULIA SORENSON had not gotten her phone back. Or her car. Or her reputation. She had not become a hero. Reacher saw a shiny black Crown Vic pull in off the two-lane and drive through the still-moving gate. Its headlight beams turned in a wide arc and it hissed over the concrete roadway and came to a stop on the circle near the main office door. A guy Reacher hadn’t seen before got out of the front passenger seat and opened the rear passenger door. He didn’t seem to say anything. He just pointed with his chin. Like Dawson had.

Julia Sorenson slid out of the back and stood up and stood still. She looked tired in the low light, and a little defeated. A little round-shouldered. The night breeze caught her coat and flapped it open. She was still wearing the new shirt. But her holster was empty. She had surrendered her weapon.

The guy from the front closed her door behind her and slid back in his seat. The car drove off and left her standing there alone. The gate started to open again. The car drove through it, and paused a beat, and turned right, and drove back the way it had come.

The gate closed again behind it. Reacher watched the car until its lights were gone and its whisper had died away to silence. Then he turned around and watched Sorenson.

She stood still for a moment more, and then she went inside. Reacher counted out time in his head, for the greeting from the motherly type at the reception desk, and the smile and the welcome, and the kings and the queens and the twins, and the armchairs, and the floor space, and the majority preferences. All that kind of stuff. We’ve been expecting you. Four minutes, he figured. Maybe less, if the conversation went faster, which he figured it might, because it would be one agent to another. Or maybe more than four minutes, if Sorenson was up on her high horse and asking all kinds of outraged and resentful questions.

It took four minutes exactly. Sorenson came out with a key in her hand. She looked resigned. She checked the numbers on the low fingerposts and set off in Reacher’s direction. Then she checked again at the next fork and headed off at a shallow angle down a different path.

‘Julia,’ Reacher called, softly.

She stopped walking.

She called, ‘Reacher?’

‘Over here.’

She stepped off the path and walked over the crushed stone to him. He asked, ‘What happened with you?’

She said, ‘We’re not supposed to communicate.’

‘Or what? They’re going to lock us up?’

‘Well, we can’t talk out here. Where can we go?’

They went to Reacher’s room. Sorenson took a good look around it and said, ‘This is completely bizarre. It’s just like a regular motel.’

Reacher said, ‘It is a regular motel. Or it was. The Kansas City field office bought it three years ago. They told me. You never heard about it?’

‘Not a word. Are the others here too?’

Reacher nodded. ‘Delfuenso and her kid, and the eyewitness. Safe and sound. They’re all having a good time, actually.’

‘Even though they’re locked up?’

‘They’ve been told they’re sequestered. Like a jury. For their own good. Not the same thing as being locked up. They’re all treating it like a vacation. Mini golf and free beer.’

‘Is it legal?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. But it probably is. Except that it probably shouldn’t be. You know how these things are.’

‘Who brought them here?’ she said. ‘Who burned in the car?’

‘Alan King burned in the car,’ Reacher said. ‘But he was shot in the heart first. By McQueen. McQueen is one of you, undercover. Out of Kansas City. Which is why Dawson and Mitchell came straight up to babysit you at the pumping station. They were doing damage control. McQueen burned the car and he and Delfuenso were picked up by part of his Bureau support team. In a Bureau sedan, like the tyre marks showed, again out of Kansas City. McQueen came here with them but left again immediately. Apparently he said he had to get back in position.’

‘Poor guy. He’s going to be under a hell of a lot of pressure. With King dead? How is he going to explain that?’

‘With great difficulty, I would think.’

‘But you were right. He missed you deliberately. He fired over your head.’

‘But there was nothing he could fake when it came time to punch Delfuenso’s ticket. So he offed King instead.’

‘Good man. I hope he’s OK.’

‘What happened with you?’ Reacher asked again.

Sorenson sat down on the bed. She said, ‘Me? It started out OK. In fact it started out just fine. I drove back to Delfuenso’s place and got my phone and got back in my own car and called my SAC. I told him I had managed to overpower you and hand you over to the Kansas City boys. My SAC was very impressed. And he was very pleased. But I couldn’t quite let it go. I asked a few too many questions. He didn’t like that so much. I could tell. Then at one point he changed completely. He wasn’t pleased any more. Not pleased at all. I could hear it in his voice.’

‘At what point?’

‘I checked the glove box when I locked up Goodman’s car. Purely out of habit. I didn’t want any unsecured weapons left in it, and who knows what a country sheriff keeps in his glove box? But as it happened there was nothing in there except a notebook and a pen. So I looked through the notebook, naturally. Turns out Sheriff Goodman was a very thorough guy. He’d been doing his research overnight, and he’d been making notes about Karen Delfuenso. I guess he figured the more the merrier, when it came to information. I guess he thought it would help, if we didn’t get her back fast, although I can’t see how it would.’

‘And?’

‘There was something in there that struck me as odd, so I asked my SAC about it. Except I didn’t actually ask about it. I just mentioned it, really. But whichever, that was when he went all weird on me.’

‘What something was odd?’

‘I took Delfuenso to be a long-term resident. Maybe not necessarily a fourth generation farm girl or anything, but I got the impression she’d been there a good long time. Certainly I figured Lucy would have been born and raised there.’

‘But she wasn’t?’

‘They’ve only been there seven months. The neighbour on the other side said they moved there after a divorce. So it seems to have been a much more recent divorce than I thought.’

‘Are we even sure she was married in the first place?’ Reacher said.

‘There’s a kid.’

‘That doesn’t confirm marriage.’

‘Why wouldn’t she have been married?’

‘She copes on her own,’ Reacher said. ‘She copes really well. Like she’s always been obliged to. And she’s smart. Looking after some guy would drive her crazy.’

‘Smart women shouldn’t get married?’

‘Are you married?’

She didn’t answer that. She said, ‘I don’t care if it was a wedding with a thousand guests on a beach in Hawaii or a one-night stand in a motel in New Jersey. The point wasn’t that she was a single mom. The point is she’s a single mom who moved to town just seven months ago.’

Reacher said, ‘The Kansas City boys told me this operation is seven months old.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Why would they lie?’

‘No, I mean Delfuenso can’t be connected. How could she be? It has to be a coincidence. It has to be. Because we’ve already got one coincidence.’

Reacher said, ‘So now we have two coincidences?’

‘Which is one too many.’

‘What’s the first coincidence?’

Sorenson said, ‘You remember Alan King’s brother?’

‘Peter King? The fister?’

‘Apparently my night guy put a search on him. Just to be helpful. Right after he got off the phone with Mother Sill, the first time. DMVs, the postal service, the banks, the credit card companies. The cell phone companies, if we can get away with it, which is usually always. And the results came back this evening.’

‘And what were they?’

‘It looks like Peter King left Denver and moved to Kansas City.’

‘When?’

‘Seven months ago.’