Ли Чайлд - The Midnight Line

‘She got nothing at all?’

‘The last time they spoke she got the impression Sanderson had a friend called Cyrus. She heard her say that name.’

‘Cyrus?’

‘Well, Cy, at least. As if he was in the room with her. Like, shut up, Cy, I’m on the phone. Said in a friendly way. Like she was comfortable with him. The sister says for a second she sounded happy.’

‘Was that rare?’

‘Very.’

‘When was this?’

‘A couple of years ago, she thinks. Maybe a bit less.’

‘Is that all she got?’

‘She said their conversations were usually very stiff. Are you OK, yes I’m OK. That kind of thing.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t Cy for Cyrus,’ Reacher said. ‘Maybe it was Sy for Seymour. Which was Porterfield’s first name. Scorpio told me he went by Sy. Let’s go find where he lived. That would be my first move. There might still be something there. Or neighbours we can talk to.’

THE OLD GUY in the old post office had said Porterfield had lived in a log house up in the hills, maybe twenty miles down the dirt road, on one of the old ranches Reacher had seen on the university’s map, behind fence lines as fine as the engraving on a hundred-dollar bill. Bramall’s Land Cruiser had a navigation screen that showed the dirt road, but not much else. So they watched the trip meter and drove west and counted the miles as they clicked by. The truck was as neat and competent as Bramall himself. It floated over the rough surface and felt like it could run for ever.

Reacher asked, ‘What was the last time the sisters met face to face?’

Bramall said, ‘Seven years ago. After Sanderson’s third deployment. The visit didn’t go so well. I guess they decided not to repeat it. After that it was all on the phone.’

‘Sanderson was wounded at some point.’

‘I didn’t know that. Mrs Mackenzie never mentioned it.’

‘She might not have known about it. Sanderson might not have told her.’

‘Why wouldn’t she?’

‘It happens a lot. It’s a complex dynamic. Maybe she didn’t want to upset her family. Or appear diminished in any way. Or weak. Or to appear to be asking for sympathy. Or help. Or to avoid a told-you-so moment. Sounds like her sister didn’t like the army.’

‘Wounded how bad?’

‘I don’t know,’ Reacher said. ‘All I know is she got a Purple Heart. Which can be anything from a scratch to losing a limb. Or all of them. Some of those people came home in a hell of a mess.’

The mileage counter showed eight miles gone. Bramall was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, ‘You sure you want to do this? I don’t see how the outcome can be good. She’s either all messed up or a junkie or both. She might not want to be found.’

‘In which case I’ll leave her alone. I’m not trying to save the world. I just want to know.’

Ten miles gone. Either side of the road the high plains were getting higher. The mountain foothills rippled and folded, and tongues of conifer forest came and went. The sky was huge and high and impossibly blue, like a sapphire on the horizon, shading to deep navy way overhead. Like a Kodak photograph. Like the edge of outer space. The wind was getting up. The dust plume behind them was pulling south off the road.

‘PTSD too,’ Bramall said. ‘I guess they all have that.’

‘I guess they do,’ Reacher said.

Fourteen miles. Aspen groves blazed like flares on the slopes. Whole copses of hundreds of separate trees, but all joined together underground by a single root. An aspen wood was all one organism. The largest living thing on earth.

Bramall said, ‘Did the guy mean twenty miles to the house itself, or twenty miles to the end of the driveway?’

‘The driveway,’ Reacher said. ‘I guess. That’s how it worked with Billy’s place. Except the guy underestimated. He called it about twenty per cent short.’

‘So his twenty miles could be twenty-five.’

‘Unless sometimes he overestimates also. Maybe he’s an all-around inaccurate guy, on a number of levels and a random basis. Which could make his twenty miles sixteen. Which would give us a nine-mile window.’

‘Then logically we should take the next track we see. Unlikely to be two in a nine-mile distance. This is Wyoming. Therefore the first track is our track, however sooner or later it comes.’

‘Not bad for the FBI,’ Reacher said.

The track came bang in the middle of the nine-mile stretch, at twenty miles from the post office exactly. Score one for the old guy. It was a right turn off the dirt road, under a high ranch gate, which had a name on it, spelled out in letters so weathered Reacher couldn’t read them. Then the track ran straight north for close to a mile, before rising and curving west through the trees, out of sight, towards an unseen destination.

Bramall stopped the truck.

He said, ‘From my point of view this kind of thing is perfectly normal. I drive up to hundreds of houses. Sometimes there’s yelling and sometimes there are dogs, but no one has ever discharged a weapon in my direction. We should talk about how you think those odds might change, with you in the car right next to me.’

‘You want me to get out and walk?’ Reacher said. ‘Feel safer that way?’

‘It’s a tactical discussion. Worst case, Billy took over Porterfield’s house as well as his business, and he’s in there now. He wasn’t in his other place, after all.’

‘Why would he want two places?’

‘Some people do.’

‘Not twenty miles apart. They have a house on the lake.’

‘There were no heirs or relatives. Why wouldn’t Billy take it?’

‘Doesn’t matter if he did. Doesn’t matter if he’s in there now. He never got the phone message. He doesn’t know me from Adam. He’ll think we’re Mormons.’

‘You’re not dressed like a Mormon.’

‘So you go knock on the door. Just in case. If he’s there, tell him you’re a Mormon who is coincidentally also in the snow-plough business, and you want to talk to him about insurance against global warming.’

The truck moved on. The track ran through the wooded slopes five more miles, always rough, with deep baked ruts in places, and worn gravel, and flat rocks the size of tables. The Land Cruiser nodded from side to side, and soldiered on. All the way through a final curve, and up a sudden sharp rise, to a stadium-sized plateau, full of trees, except for a home site set about a third of the way in. It had a long low log house, with wide porches all around, all in the centre of a slightly tended acre, behind an informal fence made up of posts and rails twisted and greyed by the wind and the weather. Bramall drove in, and parked a respectful distance from the house. There were tatters of crime scene tape on the porch rails either side of the entrance. As if at one time the house was roped off.

‘This wasn’t the crime scene,’ Bramall said. ‘The guy died in the woods.’

‘He was found in the woods,’ Reacher said. ‘Maybe the sheriff thought that was a whole different thing entirely. We know he searched here. He found a car with a lot of miles, and ten grand in the closet.’

‘Where is Billy right now?’

‘Why worry about him?’

‘I’m not. But you should. Scorpio was ordering a homicide.’

‘Billy’s not here. What are the odds? Plus he didn’t get the message. He doesn’t know Scorpio gave me Porterfield’s name. So why would he come here to Porterfield’s house? What were the odds we would ever find it anyway? Who knew the old post office guy was so good at guessing distances? Billy is somewhere else and this place is empty.’

‘OK,’ Bramall said.

He got out of the car and went to knock on the door.