‘To Rose,’ Mackenzie said. ‘Those were her friends.’
‘Except they weren’t,’ Reacher said. ‘They were nothing to do with Rose. We know for sure they never even met her. We know that because they didn’t recognize you. How could they be friends with your twin without knowing who you were? That’s why I wanted you close enough to see their faces. So they could see yours. They would have been staring at you, full of confusion. But they weren’t.’
‘So who were they?’
‘I don’t know,’ Reacher said.
They drove back to the hotel. Bramall went straight upstairs. Reacher stayed out in the parking lot. He looked up at the night sky. It was black and huge and dusted with stars. They were very bright, and there were millions of them.
The American West.
Mackenzie came out and stood beside him.
She said, ‘We could be in the wrong place entirely.’
Reacher was still looking at the sky.
‘In the universe?’ he said.
‘In this state. No one recognizes me, which means no one has seen her. All we know is six weeks ago she was in some part of Billy’s very large territory. When she traded her ring. Why conclude it was this part?’
‘Porterfield’s house. She wasn’t there full-time. The roofer said so. Yet no one ever saw her heading for the turn. Which means she came and went from the other direction.’
‘Two years ago.’
‘Why would she move?’
‘Her boyfriend died. People move, after a thing like that. It’s a shock.’
‘She did five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. She’s had worse shocks. She would have assessed the situation tactically. No one had ever seen her. There was no realistic threat vector against her current billet. Presumably it was a decent place. It had been good enough for Porterfield to come over. Why give it up? Replacing it would be tough.’
‘I would move.’
‘She would stay.’
‘You know her better?’
‘I know how a person lives through five tours.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘We’ll find out tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We know roughly where she is. She can’t hide for ever.’
‘I wanted to buy you a drink,’ she said. ‘To thank you. Since you won’t let me pay you. But there’s no bar in this hotel.’
‘No need to thank me either,’ Reacher said.
‘I would have enjoyed it.’
‘Me too, I guess.’
She moved away a couple of steps, and sat down on a concrete bench.
He sat down beside her.
She said, ‘Are you married?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘But you are.’
She laughed, short but soft.
She said, ‘It was an unconnected question. Just purely out of interest. It wasn’t a Freudian slip.’
‘Tell me about Mr Mackenzie.’
‘He’s a nice man. We’re a good match.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Can I ask an unconnected question of my own? Just purely out of interest?’
She said, ‘I suppose.’
‘It’s kind of weird, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘How does it feel to be so good-looking?’
‘Yes, that’s weird.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘How did it feel when those guys wouldn’t fight you?’
‘Useful.’
‘For us it felt like a minimum requirement. Our father had grandiose ideas.’
‘The judge.’
‘He thought he was living in a storybook. Everything had to be picturesque. On sunny days we ran around the woods in white cotton dresses. At first it was mostly about the hair. All sticking out. We looked like nymphs or fairies. We got the faces later. Then he started dreaming about who we would marry. We thought it was all pretty stupid. It was almost the twenty-first century, and we lived in Wyoming. We ignored it, mostly. But if I’m truly honest, deep down it made an impression. I was aware of it. It came to be part of who I am. Deep down I guess I believe being pretty is better than being ugly. Deep down I know I would choose to look like this again. I worry all that deep down stuff makes me shallow. To answer your question, that’s how it feels.’
‘Did Rose feel the same way?’
Mackenzie nodded.
She said, ‘Rose liked things to be perfect. She was smart, and she worked hard, and mostly she made it happen that way. How she looked was the one thing she couldn’t control. But happily she turned out OK in that department. I think deep down she took a lot of satisfaction from it. She wanted to be the absolute best, from any angle. She wanted to be the total package. And she was.’
‘Why did she join the army?’
‘I told you.’
‘You told me she would shoot a guy even before he set a foot on her porch, whereas you would wait a moment longer. She could have stayed home and done that.’
‘I feel like I’m on a psychiatrist’s couch.’
‘Lay back and pretend you’re an actress in a movie. Suppose the hotel had a bar. By now you’d have bought me a cup of coffee. Black, no sugar. Or a beer, if they didn’t have coffee. Domestic, in a bottle. You would have gotten some weird kind of white wine. Because of Lake Forest, Illinois. Right now we’d be at a table, talking. I would be asking why Rose joined the army, and you would be telling me.’
‘She was looking for something worth it. It turned out the storybook was a lie. He wasn’t the wise man of the county. At first we told ourselves certain practices were almost traditional. He was a lawyer, after all, and lawyers always get paid something. For an opinion, perhaps, prior to the filing. But there were whispers. If they were true, it was something worse. We never found out. Rose and I went to college. They sold the place and moved out of state. We were happy about it. It was a weird place for us. We always knew we were acting in someone else’s play. And then the playwright himself turned out to be made up too. We reacted in slightly different ways. It left Rose needing something real, and me needing a real storybook. And we got both of them, I guess.’
Reacher said nothing.
‘I’m going to bed now,’ she said. ‘Thanks for talking.’
She left him there, alone in the dark, leaning back on the concrete bench, looking at the stars.
At that moment, three hundred miles away at an I-90 truck stop not far from Rapid City, South Dakota, a guy in a beat-up old pick-up truck with Wyoming plates and a vinyl camper shell on the back turned into a service road he had been told led to a covered garage. His name was Stackley, and he was thirty-eight years old, a hard worker, maybe not where he should be in life, but always willing to try his best. He had been told the covered garage was half full with idle snowploughs and other winter equipment. He had been told the other half was empty. Plenty of space. He had been told they had it all to themselves.
He had been told there would be a guard at the door.
There was.
He slowed to a stop and wound down his window.
He said, ‘I’m Stackley. You should have gotten a call from Mr Scorpio. I’m taking over from Billy.’
The guard said, ‘You’re the new Billy?’
‘As of tonight.’