Noble shook his head.
He said, ‘I can’t help with your sister. I’m sorry, ma’am. But what have you got? A lot of guesswork and hope for the best. A federal manhunt costs a million dollars a day. They need a very good reason. Which you can’t give them. You got a lot of probable and not much cause.’
Mackenzie didn’t answer.
Noble said, ‘But I wish you the best of luck.’
TWENTY-FOUR
THEY LEFT NOBLE in the house, and drove back to Laramie, with Reacher sprawled across the rear seat, and Mackenzie upright in the front, and Bramall at the wheel, one-handed. They agreed on the chain hotel Reacher and Bramall had used the night before. It had proved adequate, except for no coffee. Reacher said the diner he had found was a good substitute. Bramall agreed. He had found it too. He said breakfast there was excellent.
‘But then what?’ Mackenzie said. ‘What do we do after breakfast? What’s our next move? We have nothing now.’
‘Thanks to the DEA,’ Bramall said. ‘Trust them to start a stampede.’
‘We have more than some folks,’ Reacher said. ‘I agree, losing Billy is an inconvenience. But it’s worse for others. Like that lady up near the old homestead. Even all the way out there. She needed something bad today. She was getting scratchy. She was waiting for Billy. But he isn’t coming. So what next for her? Tomorrow she’ll be desperate. She’ll come looking, surely. She’ll come to town. They all will. If Rose is an addict, she’ll come to us.’
They met in the lobby at eight in the morning. Bramall was in a fresh shirt and Mackenzie was in a fresh blouse. Reacher’s clothes were a day old, but he felt OK in their company. He had used a whole bar of soap in the shower. They walked up to the diner and got a table. Mackenzie was OK with it.
She said, ‘Maybe six weeks ago the price of pills had gone especially high, and that’s why she had to sell her ring. To afford them.’
‘Maybe,’ Reacher said.
‘I want it to be pills,’ she said. ‘Not needles in a toilet stall.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m sure Special Agent Noble was speaking broadly when he said there are no pills on the black market any more. There must be some.’
Reacher said nothing.
Mackenzie said, ‘Before this is over, I’ll want to know why it happened.’
‘Probably our fault,’ Reacher said. ‘Depends on the wound she got. Could have been a scratch, but if it was something serious on the battlefield, with the medics under fire and so on, then she’ll have gotten a morphine jab ahead of a rough evacuation. Then maybe another morphine jab ahead of triage, and another while she was waiting for surgery. And then she got two weeks in a recovery room with a big tub of opioid pain medication by the bed. She was probably an addict before she left the hospital.’
‘Depending on the wound. Maybe it’s still painful. Maybe that’s why she needs the pills. Or the powder, now. With the needles in the toilet stall. If Agent Noble is right.’
‘Did your sister wear silver clothes?’
‘Why?’
‘Porterfield’s neighbour might have seen her in his car. She remembers a silvery colour.’
‘Was it winter?’
‘A month before the start of spring.’
‘You can get winter coats in silver. Almost like foil. Like a high-tech material.’
‘Would she wear that colour?’
‘I might,’ Mackenzie said.
Reacher thought about it. The hair, the eyes, the face, with a silver foil coat. She would look like the picture on the back of a shiny magazine.
An exact replica.
They drove to the university geography department and took another look at the giant book of maps. They traced the settlements westward, from the Mule Crossing turn. First came Billy’s place, south of the dirt road, and then Porterfield’s, north of it, and then his neighbour’s, south again. They had seen all of those. Beyond them lay twelve more places. Six each side of the road, altogether stretching forty long miles into the mountains. Then the dirt road ended. No way out, except to turn around. Not really a bowl, not really a valley. Just a chain of rising foothills, with a road that quit when the mountains came.
Mackenzie said, ‘You think she’s in there somewhere?’
Reacher said, ‘She was either living with Porterfield, or she was visiting with him on a regular basis, yet no one ever saw her, except maybe one occasion. If she lived anywhere else, she would have to drive in and out through Mule Crossing every single time. More people would have seen her, surely. Maybe even the old guy in the post office. But no one ever did. She must have been driving there and back the other way. Deeper into the hills. A buck gets ten she’s there right now. Where else would she go?’
‘She doesn’t own a car,’ Bramall said. ‘Not according to the Wyoming DMV. Or any other state.’
‘She camps out in abandoned ranch houses. Either she finds cars or steals them. She doesn’t care whose name is on the title. All a car has to do is start up when she needs it.’
‘I want to go there,’ Mackenzie said. ‘Back to Mule Crossing. It’s like the neck of a funnel. If she’s in there, she’s got to come out sooner or later. I want to be there when she does.’
‘If I’m right,’ Reacher said.
‘If you’re wrong, we’ll find her in town tonight. Or tomorrow.’
They pulled over and sat in the car, near the old post office, in a spot where they would get a good head-on view of anything coming down the dirt road. Just before the turn, where everyone would slow right down, and look first one way, and then the other, carefully, before making the left or the right on the pavement. Close enough for faces. At first it was awkward. Reacher figured they were all having the same trouble, picturing exactly what it was they expected to see. They knew the theory. The lack of Billy would draw the addicts out. But what would that look like? Reacher had seen his share of movie trailers. The walking dead. All kinds of zombies. He realized he was expecting some kind of apocalyptic vision.
The first candidate approached out of the west in an ancient pick-up truck that was lurching and bouncing and trailing a dust cloud a mile long. Not Rose Sanderson. The driver turned out to be a thin-faced man, with a turned-down mouth, as disapproving as an old-time preacher. Maybe an addict, maybe not. He looked left and right and turned towards Colorado.
The dust cloud settled.
They waited.
From the back seat, Reacher asked Mackenzie, ‘Where were you, when Rose was at West Point?’
She turned around.
‘University of Chicago,’ she said. ‘Then Princeton, for postgrad.’
‘Studying what?’
‘English literature. Different, I know.’
‘Not so different. Some of them can read at West Point now. If you take it slow and point to the letters.’
She smiled.
‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ she said. ‘I know Rose is as smart as I am. Obviously. It’s a scientific fact. I meant she was prepared to kill people, and I wasn’t.’