Ли Чайлд - No Middle Name

Then the soft sergeant trailed in behind her, with a torn-off telex in his hand.

The Georgia State Police had made an arrest.

Not a soldier.

Not a military veteran.

Reacher called Fort Smith direct for the skinny. The suspect was a black man who lived alone in a cabin on the muddy shore of a lake forty miles north and west of the post. He was six feet seven inches tall, and wore size fifteen shoes. He drove a Ford Ranger pick-up truck with Firestone tyres, and he owned a nine-millimetre handgun.

He denied everything.

Reacher looked up at the soft sergeant standing in front of him and said, ‘You’re in charge now, soldier. Sergeant Neagley and I are going to Smith.’

Neagley drove, in her pool car from Bragg. It was a green Chevrolet, with Firestone tyres. The trip was about a hundred and ten miles, more or less due east from Benning. Most of the scenery was woods. New spring-green leaves flashed by in the sun. Reacher said, ‘So we’ll call this the casting-the-net theory. Like fishing on a lazy afternoon. Once in a while the guy comes down from the lake and sets up on a back road and catches something. Like Robin Hood. Or an ogre from under a bridge. When the moon is full. Or whenever he needs to eat. Or something. Like a fairy tale.’

‘Or maybe he comes down every day. But catches something only once in a while. Either way is possible. These are the Georgia woods. Think about carjacking in LA. Or getting mugged in New York City. Routine. Maybe this is the local version. Adapted to the environment.’

‘Then why did the carjacker not jack her car? Why did he execute her very clinically instead?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why did she stop in the first place?’

‘He was blocking the road.’

‘She didn’t need to come close and talk to the guy. Being in War Plans doesn’t make her a total idiot. She went to West Point. She’s a woman driving alone. She should have stood back a hundred yards and made a threat assessment.’

‘Maybe she did.’

‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes. She did. She was a woman driving alone.’

‘In which case we conclude the guy was no threat. She drove right up to him, with her window open. Would she do that, for a weird six-seven stranger she had never seen before? With a broken-down pick-up truck? I’m sure she saw all the movies. With the chainsaws and the banjo music.’

‘OK, she felt safe with the guy. Maybe she knew him. Or thought she knew him. Or knew his type.’

‘Exactly,’ Reacher said. ‘Which would make him active-duty military. Probably in uniform. Possibly even with a military vehicle. Not too far below in rank. Or maybe equal or even higher. For her to feel truly comfortable. This was a whole complicated performance. I want to get the right guy. Otherwise what’s the point? And I’ve always found a big part of getting the right guy is not getting the wrong guy.’

‘They’re going to say this guy has the right tyres.’

‘So do a million other people.’

‘He has the right bullets.’

‘So do a million other people.’

‘He has the right feet.’

Neagley had read a lot of research into first impressions, those merciless subliminal split seconds where one human judges another, on a million different things, all at once like a computer, all leading to an instant and inevitable yes-no answer: should I stay or should I go? Sadly the State Police’s suspect scored very low on that test. Neagley knew her own sense of threat assessment was likely to be more robust than Crawford’s, by an order of magnitude, but even so she would have kept her distance and approached warily, and only after locking her doors and getting her gun out.

They saw the guy in a holding cell at the county police station, which was ten minutes from Smith. He had some kind of growth disorder. Pituitary, maybe. A hormone imbalance. He should have been average size, but the long bones in his arms and legs had been racked out way longer than nature could have intended, and his hands and feet were equally huge, and his face was very long, with a chisel of a chin below it, and a narrow-domed forehead above.

Reacher asked, ‘Has he lawyered up?’

The county sheriff said, ‘He waived. He believes innocent men don’t need lawyers.’

‘That’s groundwork for an insanity plea.’

‘No, I think he means it.’

‘Then it might be true. It sometimes is.’

‘He’s got the feet and the gun and the tyres. That’s a rare combination.’

‘A guy with hands that big prefers a shotgun.’

‘He told us he owns a nine.’

‘He might. But does he use it?’

‘Think I should ask him? What else is he going to say?’

‘Did you match the footwear?’

‘It was raining again almost immediately. Photographs were all we got. No casts. Not that we could have gotten casts anyway. Wrong kind of mud. More like liquid peat. Too spongy. I apologize on behalf of the state of Georgia for the poor quality of our mud. Not what you expect, I know. But spongy or not, we measured the prints with a ruler. They were size fifteen. Just like the boots he was wearing when they brought him in.’

‘So you can’t match the tyres either. Not exactly. For nicks or wear.’

‘The photograph is clear as to brand.’

‘Has he said where he was at the time?’

‘Home alone. No witnesses.’

‘So it’s a closed case?’

‘The State Police is expressing considerable satisfaction in the outcome. But no case is closed until the grand jury says so.’

‘Are they still looking?’

‘Not as hard. What’s your problem, major?’

‘This guy lives alone in a cabin. You know why that is? People are scared to look at him. He’s repellent. That’s all he’s ever heard, ever since he was a little kid. These growth things start early. So when it came time to earn some coin, why would he choose the role of smooth-talking conman, lulling passing drivers into a false sense of security? Why would he expect to succeed at that, given the way he’s been looked at all his life? I think he’s ugly, but I think he’s innocent. In fact I think he’s innocent because he’s ugly.’

‘Lots of people look a little funny. Doesn’t stop them working.’

‘Does this happen often? Is it a big thing here? Sticking people up by faking breakdowns?’

‘I never heard of it before.’

‘So this guy invented it too?’

‘He’s got the feet and the gun and the tyres,’ the county guy said. ‘That’s a rare combination.’

They gave Reacher Caroline Crawford’s room, in the Fort Smith visiting officers’ quarters. The MPs had taken all her possessions out, as part of the investigation, and the stewards had cleaned the place up. Some of the surfaces were still damp. Neagley was in NCO accommodation. They met first thing the next morning in her mess for coffee and breakfast, and then they headed to the MP office to look at maps. The local commander was a captain named Ellsbury. He was a squared-away individual running a tight ship, and rightly proud of it. He produced every kind of map there was, including the government surveys they had seen before, plus large-scale topographical sheets bound into an atlas, and even an AAA giveaway of the southern part of the state.

Reacher started at the far end of a random potential journey, at what the government survey labelled a bar, and what the much older topographical sheets called a Negro Night Club. It was about thirty miles out. An hour by car, probably, given the prevailing conditions. There was no really direct way to get there. An intending patron departing Fort Smith would have to leave the county road at the first fork, and then thread through the woods on any one of ten potential routes, all looping and curving, none obviously better than another. The road Crawford had used had nothing to recommend it. Not in terms of efficiency. It might even have added unnecessary distance. A mile or two.