Worth Dying For (Page 37)
The Lebanese arrived five minutes later. Safir’s men. Arabs, for sure, but they were big, and they looked plenty tough. Again, only one of them spoke, and he gave no names. Cassano indicated that they should sit on the bed, but they didn’t. They leaned on the wall instead. They were trying for menace, Cassano figured. And nearly succeeding. A little psychology of their own. Cassano let the room go quiet and he looked at them all for a minute, one after the other, four men he had only just met, and who would soon be trying to kill him.
He said, ‘It’s a fairly simple job. Sixty miles north of here there’s a corner of the county with forty farms. There’s a guy running around causing trouble. Truth is, it’s not really very important, but our supplier is taking it personally. Business is on hold until the guy goes down.’
Mahmeini’s man said, ‘We know all that. Next?’
‘OK,’ Cassano said. ‘Next is we all move up there and work together and take care of the problem.’
‘Starting when?’
‘Let’s say tomorrow morning, first light.’
‘Have you seen the guy?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Got a name?’
‘Reacher.’
‘What kind of name is that?’
‘It’s an American name. What’s yours?’
‘My name doesn’t matter. Got a description?’
‘Big guy, blue eyes, white, six-five, two-fifty, brown coat.’
Mahmeini’s man said, ‘That’s worthless. This is America. This is farm country. It’s full of settlers and peasants. They all look like that. I mean, we just saw a guy exactly like that.’
Safir’s guy said, ‘He’s right. We saw one too. We’re going to need a much better description.’
Cassano said, ‘We don’t have one. But it will be easier when we get up there. He stands out, apparently. And the local population is prepared to help us. They’ve been told to phone in with sightings. And there’s no cover up there.’
Mahmeini’s man said, ‘So where is he hiding out?’
‘We don’t know. There’s a motel, but he’s not in it. Maybe he’s sleeping rough.’
‘In this weather? Is that likely?’
‘There are sheds and barns. I’m sure we’ll find him.’
‘And then what?’
‘We put him down.’
‘Risky.’
‘I know. He’s tough. So far he’s taken out four of the local people.’
Mahmeini’s man said, ‘I don’t care how tough he thinks he is. And I don’t care how many local people he’s taken out either. Because I’m sure they’re all idiots up there. I mean it’s risky because this isn’t the Wild West any more. Do we have a safe exit strategy?’
Cassano said, ‘They tell me he’s a kind of hobo. So nobody is going to miss him. There’s not going to be an investigation. There aren’t even any cops up there.’
‘That helps.’
‘And it’s farm country. Like you said. There must be backhoes all over the place. We’ll bury him. Alive, preferably, the way our supplier is talking.’
THIRTY-ONE
THE PHYSICAL SEARCH OF THE AREA WAS DESCRIBED FOUR separate ways, in four separate files, the first from the county PD, the second from the State Police, the third from the National Guard’s helicopter unit, and the fourth from the FBI. The helicopter report was thin and useless. Margaret Coe had been wearing a green dress, which didn’t help in corn country in early summer. And the pilot had stayed above a thousand feet, to stop his downdraught damaging the young plants. Priorities had to be observed in a farm state, even when a kid was missing. Nothing significant had been seen from the air. No freshly turned earth, no flash of pink or chrome from the bike, no flattened stalks in any of the fields. Nothing at all, in fact, except an ocean of corn.
A waste of time and aviation fuel.
Both the county PD and the State Police had covered the forty farms at ground level. First had come the loudhailer appeals in the dark, and the next day every house had been visited and every occupant had been asked to verify that they hadn’t seen the kid and that they had searched their outbuildings thoroughly. There was near-universal cooperation. Only one old couple confessed they hadn’t checked properly, so the cops searched their place for themselves. Nothing was found. The motel had been visited, every cabin checked, the Dumpster emptied, the lot searched for evidence. Nothing was found.
The Duncan compound showed up in three files. Everyone except the helicopter unit had been there. First the county PD had gone in, then the county PD and the State Police together, then the State Police on its own, and then finally the FBI, which had been a lot of visits and a lot of people for such a small place. The searches had been intense, because the smallness of the place had struck people as somehow sinister in itself. Reacher could sense it between the lines, quite clearly, even a quarter-century later. Rural cops. They had been confused and disconcerted. It was almost like the Duncans hated the land. They had stripped away every inch of it they could. They had kept a single track driveway, plus token shoulders, plus a grudging five or ten yards beyond the foundations of their three houses. That was all. That was the whole extent of the place.
But the smallness had made it easy to search. The reports were meticulous. The piles of heavy lumber for the half-built fence had been taken apart and examined. Gravel had been raked up, and lines of men had walked slow and bent over, staring at the ground, and the dogs had covered literally every square inch ten times each.
Nothing was found.
The search moved indoors. As intense as it had been outside, it was twice as thorough inside. Absolutely painstaking. Reacher had searched a lot of places, a lot of times, and he knew how hard it was. But four times in quick succession not a single corner had been cut, and not a single effort had been spared. Stuff had been taken apart, and voids in walls had been opened up, and floors had been lifted. Reacher knew why. Nothing was stated on paper, and nothing was admitted, but again, he could read it right there between the lines. They were looking for a kid, certainly, but by that point they were also looking for parts of a kid.
Nothing was found.
The FBI contribution was a full-on forensics sweep, 1980s style. It was documented and described at meticulous length on sheets of Bureau paper that had been photocopied and collated and stapled and passed on as a courtesy. Hairs and fibres had been collected, every flat surface had been fingerprinted, all kinds of magic lights and devices and gadgets had been deployed. A corpse-sniffing dog had been flown in from Denver and then sent back again after producing a null result. Technicians with a dozen different specialist expertises had been in and out for twelve solid hours.
Nothing was found.
Reacher closed the file. He could hear it in his head right then, the same way they must have heard it all those years ago: the sound of a case going cold.
Sixty miles north Dorothy Coe was standing at her sink, washing her plate and her knife and her fork and her glass, and scrubbing the oven dish that her chop had cooked in. She dried it all with a thin linen towel and put it all away, the plate and the glass in a cupboard, the silverware in a drawer, the oven dish in another cupboard. She put her napkin in the trash and wiped her table with a rag and pushed her chair in neatly. Then she stepped out to her front parlour. She intended to sit a spell, and then go to bed, and then get up early and drive to the motel. Maybe she could help Mr Vincent fix the mirror behind his bar. Maybe she could even glue the handle back on his NASA mug.
Reacher sat a spell on the floor in his Marriott room, thinking. It was ten o’clock in the evening. His job was done, two hours ahead of his pretended midnight schedule. He got to his feet and packed up all eleven cartons and folded their flaps into place. He stacked them neatly in the centre of the floor, two piles of four and one of three. He dialled nine for a line, from the bedside table, and then he dialled the switchboard number he remembered from the transcript of Dorothy Coe’s original panic call, twenty-five years earlier. It was still an active number. It was answered. Reacher asked for Hoag, not really expecting to get him, but there was a click and a second of dead air and then the guy himself came on.