Make Me

Chapter 11

After breakfast they found the motel maid had indeed started work, but she was nowhere near Keever’s room. She was fully occupied on the other side of the horseshoe, making 203 ready-to-rent again after the man in the suit’s departure. She had a big stacked cart on the walkway, and the room door was standing open. She was visible inside, stripping the bed.

She would have a pass key on her belt, or in her pocket, or chained to her cart handle.

Reacher said, “I guess I’ll walk over there and say hello.”

He turned left at 211, and left again at 206, and he stopped level with the cart and looked in 203’s door.

The maid was crying.

And working, both at the same time. She was a white woman, thin as a rail, no longer young, hauling a sack of towels from the bathroom. She was bawling and sniveling and tears were streaming down her face.

From outside the room Reacher said, “Ma’am, are you OK?”

The woman stopped, and let go of the sack, and straightened up. She huffed and puffed and took a breath and stared blankly at Reacher, and then she turned and stared blankly in the mirror, and then she turned back again without a reaction, as if her appearance was already too far gone to worry about.

She smiled.

She said, “I’m very happy.”

“OK.”

“No, really. I’m sorry. But the gentleman who just checked out left me a tip.”

“What, your first ever?”

She said, “My best ever.”

She had a smock with a wide catch-all pocket on the bottom hem. She used both hands carefully and came out with an envelope. Smaller than a regular letter. Like a reply to a fancy invitation. On it the words Thank You were handwritten with a fountain pen.

She flipped up the flap with her thumb, and took out a fifty-dollar bill. Ulysses S. Grant, right there on the front.

“Fifty bucks,” she said. “The most I ever got before was two dollars.”

“Outstanding,” Reacher said.

“This is going to make such a big difference to me. You can’t imagine.”

“I’m happy for you,” Reacher said.

“Thank you. I guess sometimes miracles happen.”

“Do you know why this town is called Mother’s Rest?”

The woman paused a beat.

She said, “Are you asking me or are you going to tell me?”

“I’m asking you.”

“I don’t know.”

“You never heard any stories?”

“About what?”

“About mothers,” Reacher said. “Resting, either literally or figuratively.”

“No,” she said. “I never heard anything about that.”

“Can you let me into 215?”

The woman paused a beat. She said, “Are you the gentleman from 113? And 106, the night before?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t open a room except for the registered occupant. I’m sorry.”

“It was a corporate booking. We all work together. We need to be in and out. It’s a teamwork thing.”

“I could go check with the manager.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Reacher said. “I’ll go check with him myself.”

But the one-eyed guy wasn’t in his office. An impromptu absence, clearly, because the desk looked like work had been interrupted recently and temporarily. Files and ledgers were open, and pens were dropped on notebooks, and there was a go-cup of coffee that looked pretty warm.

But the guy wasn’t there.

Behind the desk was a door in the wall. Private space, Reacher guessed. The sleeping couch for sure, and maybe a kitchenette, and certainly at least a half-size bathroom. Which was maybe where the guy was right then. Some things can’t wait.

Reacher listened hard, and heard nothing.

He stepped around the desk to the private side.

He glanced at the ledgers. And the files. And the notebooks. Routine motel stuff. Accounts, orders, to-do lists, percentages.

He listened again. Heard nothing.

He opened a drawer. Where the guy kept the room keys. He put 113 in, and took 215 out.

He closed the drawer.

He stepped back to the public side.

He breathed out.

The one-eyed guy didn’t come back. Maybe he had a digestive disorder. Reacher turned around, and strolled out of the office. He crossed the horseshoe and went up Chang’s stairs. He showed her the key, and she asked, “How long have we got it?”

He said, “As long as Keever paid for. All week, probably. I’m taking over his room. The motel guy can’t complain. He’s had his money. And Keever isn’t here to express an opinion.”

“Will that work?”

“It might. Unless they get up a posse.”

“In which case we call 911. Like Keever should have.”

“The guy in the suit left a fifty-dollar tip for the maid.”

“That’s a lot of money. You give that for a week on a cruise ship.”

“She was very happy.”

“She would be. It’s like a free week’s wages.”

“Makes me feel bad. I never leave more than five.”

“He was a rich man. You said so yourself.”

Reacher said nothing, and stepped up to Keever’s door. He put the key in the lock. He opened the door and stepped back and said, “After you.”

Chang went inside, and Reacher followed. Evidence of Keever was all over the room. The shirt on the door knob, a neat travel kit in the bathroom, a linen jacket in the closet, a battered valise open against a wall, full of clothes. Everything had been lined up with great precision by the maid. The room was clean and tidy.

No briefcase. No computer bag, no fat notebooks, no handwritten pages.

Not on open view, anyway.

Reacher turned back and closed the door. He had searched maybe a hundred motel rooms in his long and unglamorous career, and he was good at it. He had found all kinds of things in all kinds of places.

He said, “What was Keever, before he joined the Bureau?”

Chang said, “He was a police detective, with a night-school law degree.”

Which meant he had searched motel rooms too. Which meant he wouldn’t have used anywhere obvious. He knew the tricks. Not that the room offered many opportunities. It was not architecturally complex.

Chang said, “We’re fooling ourselves, surely. The motel clerk could have been in here half a dozen times already. Or let someone else in. We have to assume this room was searched long ago.”

Reacher nodded. “But how well? That’s the question. Because we know one thing for sure. Keever was in this room at one point, and then he left. He had three possible ways of leaving. First, he left on an innocent errand that turned bad later. Second, he was dragged out of here kicking and screaming by persons unknown. Or third, he was sitting here on the bed, running things through his mind, and he made a sudden random connection, like a real oh-shit moment, and he stood up and hustled over to the pay phone in the general store to call 911 without further ado. Except he didn’t make it.”

“Didn’t make it? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying the guy is missing. Tell me where and why, and I’ll close down the other theories.”

“None of those three ways of leaving means we should expect to find something in this room. Something that everyone else missed.”

“No, I think the third one does. Just possibly. Imagine the moment. Oh shit. You’re stunned. And as of that split second you’re in grave danger. The danger is so bad you need to run straight for the phone. But you’ll be exposed. This is not the same as using a cell behind a locked door. This is a walk in the open air. Which carries a risk now. So maybe you’re tempted to leave a marker behind. You scribble a note and you hide it. Then you go for the phone.”

“And don’t make it.”

“That’s what the math says. Sometimes.”

“But this note is hidden so well no one has found it. But not so well we won’t find it. If there is a note at all. If it was the third of the three possibilities. If it wasn’t something completely different.”

“It was a sequence,” Reacher said. “Had to be, right? It was two oh-shit moments. A small one, maybe the day before, after which he calls you for back-up, and then the big one, after which he goes to call the cops.”

“After leaving a note.”

“I think it’s worth considering.”

When Reacher searched a room, he started with the room, not the contents. Hiders and therefore seekers tended to ignore the physical structure, which was often rich with possibility. Especially for a sheet of paper. An under-window HVAC unit could be opened up, and nine times out of ten there was a plastic pocket expressly designed to hold paperwork, often an instruction manual or a warranty card, among which an enterprising person could conceal dozens of pages.

Or if there was forced-air heating and cooling, there would be grills, easily unscrewed. Pocket doors were good for hiding papers. Ceilings had removable panels for maintenance purposes. A folding door on a closet had an inside face no one ever saw. And so on.

Only then came the furniture. In this case a bed, two night tables, an upholstered chair, a dining chair at the desk, the desk itself, and a small chest of drawers.

They looked everywhere, but they found nothing.

Afterward Chang said, “Worth a try, I guess. In a way I’m glad we didn’t find anything. Makes it less final. I want him to be OK.”

Reacher said, “I want him to be in Vegas with a nineteen-year-old. But until we get a postcard, we have to assume he isn’t. Just so we stay sharp.”

“He was a cop and a special agent. How far is it from here to the general store? What could have happened?”

“It’s about two hundred feet. Past the diner. Lots of things could have happened.”

Chang didn’t answer. Reacher’s hands felt dirty. From moving furniture, and touching surfaces not regularly cleaned. He stepped into the bathroom and flipped up the tap to wet his hands. The soap was a new cake, still wrapped in tissue paper. Light blue, all pleated and stuck down with a gold label. Not the worst place Reacher had ever seen. He pulled off the paper and balled it up. The trash can was under the vanity. The vanity was deep. A kind of underhand through-the-slot change-up was required. Left-handed, too. Which he executed. And then he washed his hands, the new soap hard at first, and then better later. He dried his hands on a fresh towel, and then his conscience got the better of him, and he bent down to check his tissue-paper spitball had in fact hit the target.

It hadn’t.

The trash can was round, like a short cylinder, but it was jammed up in a left-hand corner, which meant there was a shallow space behind. The kind of space that got ignored, especially by maids with mops. Not for two-dollar tips. It was the kind of space that ended up the graveyard of errant throws.

Three of them.

One was his own spitball. He could tell by the dampness. One was an older version of the same thing. Bone dry. A previous cake of soap.

And one was a piece of furred paper, like junk from a pocket.