‘When?’
‘After he was dead.’
‘So how can I help you?’
‘You can’t,’ Reacher said. ‘But I’m curious. Getting eaten by a bear seems a little extreme.’
‘Could have been a mountain lion.’
‘How likely is that?’
‘Not very,’ Connelly said. ‘Either thing would be rare.’
‘So what do you think happened?’
‘A practical man would say the guy was gut-shot or knifed in the stomach and then dumped in the woods. It was the end of winter. Bears or mountain lions might have been hungry enough to scavenge the corpse. Birds would have, for sure. Also raccoons and what-not. But there was zero evidence either way. We confirmed all the parts were Porterfield, but he was real torn up. We didn’t find a bullet. Didn’t find a knife. There were marks on the bones, but they were all animal teeth. I had folks at the university take a good long look. All inconclusive. We called it an accident, and maybe it was.’
Reacher said, ‘What do you know about the guy himself?’
‘Very little. This is Wyoming. We leave people alone. No one enquires into other people’s business. He lived by himself. He had a fairly new car with a lot of miles on it. So he got around some. He had cash in a shoebox in the back of his closet. That’s all we found out.’
‘How much cash?’
‘Nearly ten grand.’
‘Not bad.’
‘I agree. I wish I had ten grand in the back of my closet. But it wasn’t enough to get all excited about.’
‘Except you formed the impression he was the type of guy who could get gut-shot or knifed in the stomach.’
‘I try to keep an open mind, both ways around.’
‘No friends or relatives showing up asking questions?’
‘Not a peep.’
‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Connelly said. ‘I hope you find who you’re looking for.’
‘I plan to,’ Reacher said.
FOURTEEN
REACHER WALKED EAST the best part of a mile, to where the university buildings started. He stopped in at what looked like a general office and asked for the geography department. The kid at the desk looked like a student. He was half asleep. But eventually he understood the question. He said, ‘What do you need there?’
‘I want to look at a map,’ Reacher said.
‘Use your phone, man.’
‘I don’t have a phone.’
‘Really?’
‘And I want to see detail.’
‘Use satellite view.’
‘All I would see is trees. Plus like I told you, I don’t have a phone.’
‘Really?’
‘Where’s the geography department?’
The kid pointed and said further on down the road, so Reacher went back to walking. Five minutes later he was in the right place, in front of another kid at another desk. This one was a girl, and she was wider awake. Reacher told her what he needed, and she went away and then came back labouring under the weight of a hardbound Wyoming topographical atlas about the size of a sidewalk paving slab. Reacher took it from her and hefted it to a table under a window. He opened it up and found the southeast corner of the state. Found Laramie, and the two-lane south towards Colorado, and the dirt-road turnoff at Mule Crossing.
Reacher had been at West Point when reading paper maps was still taught as a serious lifesaving skill. Terrain was important to an army. Understanding it was the difference between winning and getting wiped out. What he saw west of the old post office was an unimproved road of reasonable width, never quite straight, following the gentle contours of the surrounding land, flanked on both sides by empty plains, which broke up after a mile or so into the faintest first foothills of the Snowy Range mountains fifty miles further on. There were fence lines here and there, engraved as fine as the detail on a hundred-dollar bill. There were thin streams coloured blue, and forests coloured green, and orange contour lines rising and falling. Left and right along a twenty-mile distance were occasional ranch roads, leading to faraway buildings drawn as tiny brown squares. The first such track on the left was almost exactly two and a half miles from the old post office. It ran south for a spell, through patchy conifer woods, and then it curved west, and then snaked east, and then west again, up a shallow rise on to a knoll cradled by a higher U-shaped ridge to the south. On the knoll were shown two tiny brown squares. A house and a barn, maybe.
Billy’s place.
The next track on the left was almost three miles further west. Same kind of situation. A meandering dirt track, squirming right and left through the early hills and the thickening forest, leading to some kind of an inhabited dwelling. Obviously Reacher could use that second track and loop back to Billy’s place through the trees on the blind side. Which would be an advantage. Except that to get there in the first place he would have to walk the unimproved road all the way from the old post office. He would be visible from Billy’s house for the best part of forty minutes. The knoll was at least a hundred feet higher than the road. He would be a speck in the far distance, for sure, but the guy had been warned. Maybe he had binoculars. Or a scope on his deer rifle.
A problem.
The girl at the desk said, ‘You OK, sir?’
‘Doing well,’ Reacher said.
He turned the page.
Much more interesting was what lay farther to the south. The next right off the two-lane after Mule Crossing came three miles later. It was a forest service track into a nature preserve labelled Roosevelt National something. It was right at the bottom of the map. Right on the state line. The third word would be on the first Colorado sheet. Forest, presumably. Teddy Roosevelt, Reacher supposed, not Franklin. The great naturalist, except for when he was shooting things like tigers and elephants. People were complicated. The service track fed a spider web of more service tracks, one of which curved around north and came out on the back slope of the U-shaped ridge right behind Billy’s house. The contour lines showed the ridge was more than a hundred feet higher than the knoll. A person could get within fifty yards completely unobserved, no matter how many binoculars or rifle scopes the guy was using.