Lee Child - A Wanted Man

Nothing in the distance. No sign of Dawson and Mitchell. Not yet. They were still out of sight, more than a mile to the north. He counted out time and space in his head. Right then they would be slowing, stopping, turning around, hassling with Puller, showing ID, arguing, yelling, getting frustrated.

Getting delayed.

Then they would be coming back south, as fast as they could. They would have seen his tight turn on the dirt, and they would be planning on chasing him all the way back to town.

Three minutes, he figured.

Maybe three minutes and ten seconds.

He waited.

And then he saw them, right on time, far away on the main drag, hustling left to right, north to south, doing about a hundred again. An impressive sight. The big stately sedan was really picking up its skirts. Its paint was winking in the watery sun. It was planted firmly on the blacktop, squatting at the rear, straddling the centre line. Reacher ran back past Goodman’s car and peered out from the barn’s other corner. He got a rear view of the blue Crown Vic blasting south. After ten seconds it was a tiny dot. After twenty seconds it was gone altogether.

He breathed out and walked back to the car. He got back in and closed the door. He sat slumped in the seat with his hands on his knees.

Silence. Nothing but the faithful idle of the engine, and clicks and ticks as stressed components cooled back down.

Sorenson said, ‘You’re not such a terrible driver.’

He said, ‘Thank you.’

‘What now?’

‘We wait.’

‘Where?’

‘I guess this place is as good as any.’

She unzipped her black leather bag and took out Goodman’s phone. She clipped it in its dashboard cradle. It chimed once to tell them it was charging.

Then it started to ring.

She leaned over and checked the window.

‘My tech team,’ she said.

SORENSON TOUCHED THE green button and Reacher heard telephone sounds over the speakers again, weirdly clear and detailed, like before. Sorenson said, ‘You have something for me?’

A man’s voice said, ‘Yeah, we have some preliminary results.’

The voice was tired, and a little breathless. Reacher thought the guy was walking and talking at the same time. Probably stumbling out to the fresh air and the bright sunlight, after long and unpleasant hours in a white-tiled basement room. Breathing deep, blinking, yawning and stretching. Reacher could picture the scene. A pair of institutional doors, a short flight of concrete steps, a parking lot. Maybe planters and benches. Back in the day the guy would have been pausing at that point, to light a welcome cigarette.

Sorenson said, ‘Go ahead.’

The guy said, ‘You want me to be honest?’

‘You usually are.’

‘Then I can’t promise you the incineration was post mortem. It might have been. Or it might not have been. There’s something that might have been damage to what might have been a rib. If I squint a bit I could see it as a gunshot wound to the chest. Which might have been enough. It’s in what would have been the general area of the heart. But I wouldn’t say so in court. The other side would laugh me out of the room. There’s far too much heat damage for conclusions about external injuries.’

‘Gut feeling?’

‘Right now my gut feeling is I want to retrain as a hairdresser. This thing was about the worst I’ve ever seen.’

Sorenson was quiet for a long moment.

Then she said, ‘Anything else?’

‘I started from the beginning, with the pelvic girdle. That’s the only way to confirm gender with a case like this. And it was totally clear. The pelvic bones had been reasonably well protected by a thick layer of fat.’

Reacher looked up. Delfuenso wasn’t fat. She was thin .

Sorenson said, ‘And?’

‘It’s beyond a reasonable doubt the corpse was male.’

Sorenson ran through the details with her guy. Like a crash course in forensic anthropology. Reacher remembered some of the words and some of the principles from the classroom. He had studied such things once, partly as a professional requirement, and partly out of interest. There were four things to look for with pelvises. First was the iliac spread. The ilia were the big bones shaped like butterfly wings, and female ilia were flared wider, and shaped more like a cradle, like cupped hands, with the anterior spines farther apart, whereas male ilia were narrower and tighter and much more straight up and down, more like a guy on a riverbank describing a foot-long trout.

Then second, the hole in the ischium was small and triangular in females, and large and round in males. And third, the angle across the pubic arch was always greater than ninety degrees in females, and rounded, and always less than ninety degrees in males, and sharp.

And the fourth was the clincher, of course: the space between the ischia was big enough in females for a baby’s head to fit through. Not so with males. Not even close.

Pelvises didn’t lie. They couldn’t be confused one for the other. Even a million-year-old pelvis dug out of the ground in pieces was quite clearly either male or female. Short of being ground to powder, a pelvis determined gender, no question, no doubt at all, end of story, thank you and goodnight. That was what Reacher had learned in the classroom, and that was what the voice on the phone confirmed.

Sorenson said, ‘So it wasn’t Delfuenso.’

The voice on the phone said, ‘Correct. And I’m happy for you. But that’s all I can reliably tell you. It was a male human being. Anything more than that would be pure guesswork.’

Sorenson clicked off the call and turned to Reacher and said, ‘You knew, didn’t you?’

Reacher said, ‘I suspected.’

‘Why?’

‘Nothing else made sense after Lucy was taken. I figured Delfuenso might still be a captive somewhere, maybe freaking out, maybe refusing to cooperate, and the only way to shut her up was go get her kid.’

‘To calm her down?’

‘Or to threaten her with.’

‘So now we have two of them in danger.’

‘Or maybe we don’t,’ Reacher said. ‘Maybe we have two of them as safe as houses. Because there are other potential conclusions, too. But they could be wrong conclusions. They could be embarrassingly grand pronouncements.’

‘Which one died? King or McQueen? Or was it someone we never heard of yet?’

‘It was King, I think. He was a little fat, especially around the middle. And he would fit the theory.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Something McQueen said when we pulled off the Interstate for gas.’

‘You told me this already. He said you should have trusted him.’

‘Before that. I was dubious about coming off there and he got a little impatient and said he was in charge.’

‘Maybe he was. One or the other had to be. I doubt it was a democracy.’

‘But there’s a sound in those specific words, don’t you think? In charge? You have special agents in charge. We had officers in charge of this and that. A charge is something you’re given. You’re entrusted with it. It’s authority that devolves down an official hierarchy.’

‘That’s very subjective.’

‘I think a regular bad guy would have said I’m the boss here . Something like that.’

‘So what are you saying? You think McQueen is ex-military? Or ex-law enforcement?’

Reacher didn’t answer that. He said, ‘And then he said the thing about trusting him. As if he was worthy of trust, somehow as of right. And then he shot at me and missed.’

‘Probably not either military or law enforcement, then. Lousy marksman.’

‘Maybe he was a great marksman.’

‘But he was in the room with you. It was what, about eight feet? How can he be a great marksman and miss from eight feet?’