‘Sheriff Connelly will claim Rose’s place is a potential crime scene. He’ll keep us out. Better not tell him. He still wants to know where Porterfield died. He’ll chase any connection.’
‘Rose’s place is a crime scene,’ Mackenzie said. ‘No potential about it. Trespass, at least. Or illegal occupation of someone else’s land. Wyoming has laws about that. Plus a stolen car, it seems. Plus narcotics, we assume. Plus however she’s paying for them. I don’t want the sheriff to be the one to find her. I can’t let him put her in the system. I might never get her out again. We have to get to her first.’
‘OK,’ Bramall said.
They drove south to Mule Crossing, and turned at the bottle rocket billboard, and headed west on the dirt road. The first three miles were solitary. Then not long after they passed Billy’s place they saw a tiny worm of dust on the far horizon. A vehicle on the road, coming towards them. Two miles away, maybe.
It’s rare to see another car.
Like the neighbour told them.
‘Pull over,’ Reacher said. ‘Park on the shoulder. If it’s her, we’ll want to follow. Or her friends. If it isn’t, no harm, no foul.’
Bramall made the same manoeuvre he had made the day before, which was to stop dead in the traffic lane, and then back up carefully, like he was in a city garage. He ended up at ninety degrees exactly, which put the westward view through Mackenzie’s window. She buzzed it down and buzzed it up, to wipe the dust away.
The cloud got closer. It was still early in the day. The air was still cool. No thermals yet. No haze, no shimmer. They could see the oncoming vehicle clearly. It was tiny in the distance. Dark in colour. Too far away to say more. Bramall kept the engine running. Transmission in gear, foot on the brake. Ready to go, either left or right.
The cloud got closer. The vehicle got clearer. It was old or dull or both. No flash of chrome against the morning sun. No gleam of paint.
‘It’s not the friends,’ Mackenzie said. ‘It’s too small. Their truck was a huge thing.’
The cloud got closer. The vehicle was brown. Rust or dust or sunbaked paint. Hard to say. It was hugging the road. It looked wider than it was tall.
‘It’s not her,’ Mackenzie said. ‘It’s too low. Hers was way more square.’
A minute later it blew on by, juddering and bouncing. No one they had seen before. Just a beat-up old pick-up truck, with Wyoming plates and a vinyl camper shell on the back. A guy at the wheel, late thirties maybe, looking straight ahead, paying no attention.
Nothing.
‘Onward,’ Reacher said.
They drove on west, past Porterfield’s driveway. Then eleven miles later past his neighbour’s, as inconspicuous as ever. They had six more places ahead, three on the left, three on the right. The plan was to look at them all, one by one. Simple in principle. Maybe not in practice. The big book of maps had shown neat brown rectangles for houses and barns, but Mackenzie said over the years such places could have built way more than that. Maybe with the proper permissions, maybe not. There could be garages, and smaller barns, and tractor barns, and wood stores, and generator huts, and hobby huts, and staff cottages, and guest cottages, and in-law cottages. Maybe even summer houses deep in the woods. A hundred places for Rose to hide, Reacher thought. But she would have chosen somewhere civilized. Not a cellar or an attic. Reasonably big. Not up a tree. Porterfield had come by from time to time.
Hope for the best.
The first driveway opening was on the left. They took it. It led to a track like the others they had seen, uneven, full of roots and rocks and gravel. The Toyota clawed onward, but slowly, like an overweight goat. There were more conifer trees than before, and aspen, because the elevation was greater, and the terrain more mountainous. The track stayed in the woods all the way, except one bare spot on the shoulder of a hairpin turn, looking east. The pie lady’s place was too far away to see. The nearest neighbour. The curvature of the earth was in the way. Then the track swung back into the woods, and wound ever onward and upward.
Six miles later they came out on a scruffy five-acre compound full of the kind of buildings Mackenzie had mentioned.
There was a main house, all log, old, modest in size, nearly matched in its dimensions by a separate log cottage, newer, some distance away. In between were log barns and wood stores and storage structures, some of them big enough for a decent truck, some of them as small as garden sheds or dog houses.
First thing they did was knock on the door. No one was home. Not a surprise. Reacher figured no one had been home for a couple of years. Maybe more. Every step on the porch raised a puff of dust, from the red sand, blown as fine as talcum.
Second thing they did was check the surrounding terrain. It was crusted smooth by wind and snowmelt. Undisturbed. Certainly there were no new tyre tracks. The Toyota’s own stood out crisp and fresh and vivid. A total contrast. Mackenzie felt that was game over right there. She felt it was impossible to live in Wyoming without a vehicle. Therefore no sign of a vehicle meant no sign of life. Rose wasn’t there. Not camped out in any of the various buildings. Reacher agreed. Bramall agreed.
They moved on.
They drove the six miles back down the track, and turned on the dirt road, and headed west again. One down, five to go. The next driveway would most likely be on the right.
‘Look,’ Bramall said.
He pointed.
Up ahead, still far away, another worm of dust. At its head, another vehicle coming towards them. It was rare to see another car? Not really. It was getting like Times Square.
They drove on, closing the gap.
It was a big vehicle coming.
‘That could be her friends,’ Mackenzie said. ‘Same size of truck.’
‘Block the road,’ Reacher said. ‘Make them stop.’
Bramall took his foot off the gas, and steered left, and straddled the crown of the road. He put his hazard flashers on, and blinked his high beams, and coasted on slowly to a hundred-yard stretch that had a knee-high rock ledge on one side, and a drainage ditch on the other. He came to a stop halfway between them. No way around. The engine idled. The hazard flashers clicked urgently. He pulsed the headlights, fast, slow, randomly, like Morse code.
Up ahead the big truck slowed. Behind it the dust cloud caught up momentarily, and then thinned out and fell away. The truck stopped three hundred yards west, in the middle of the road itself, like a long-distance showdown.
‘More than one person,’ Reacher said. ‘They can’t agree what to do. They stopped to talk it out.’
They waited.
Up ahead the truck moved forward. Slowly. Like cruising a parking lot. It rolled on. Two hundred yards away. One hundred. Fifty yards away.
It was the same crew-cab they had seen the night before. Huge size, a rumbling exhaust. Three people in it. The same guys. Reacher was sure of it. They came to a stop fifty feet away. Bramall turned off his hazard lights. For a second the tableau was frozen, two trucks facing off, close together, engines idling, on a narrow red ribbon in the middle of a vast version of nowhere.