Lee Child - Make Me

“We don’t know what we’re looking for.”

“Loose papers, legal pads, notebooks, scratch pads, anywhere he could have scribbled a note. Grab it all and we’ll go through it when we’re out of here.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “We’ll have to break a window.”

“Which one?”

“I like the door. The little Georgian pane nearest the knob. That way we can walk in.”

“Go for it,” Chang said.

The pane was the bottom left of the nine, a little low for Reacher’s elbow, but feasible, if he squatted and jabbed. Then it would be a case of knocking out the surviving shards of glass, and threading his arm in up to the shoulder, and then bending his elbow and bringing his hand back toward the inside knob. He jiggled the outside knob, to test the weight of the mechanism, to figure out how much grip he would need.

The door was open.

It swung neatly inward, over a welcome mat in the mud room. There was an alarm contact on the jamb. A little white pellet, with a painted-over wire. Reacher listened, for a warning signal. Thirty seconds of beeping, usually, to let the homeowner get to the panel and disarm the system.

There was no sound.

No beeping.

Chang said, “This can’t be right.”

Reacher put his hand in his pocket and closed it around the Smith and Wesson. Self-cocking, and no manual safety. Good to go. Point and shoot. He stepped through the mud room to the kitchen. Which was empty. Nothing out of place. No signs of violence. He moved on to a hallway. The front door was dead ahead. The sun had dropped lower. The house was full of golden light.

And still air, and silence.

Behind him he felt Chang move left, so he moved right, into a corridor with four doors, which were a master suite, and a hall bath, and a guest bedroom with beds in it, and a guest bedroom with an office in it, all of them empty, with nothing out of place, and no signs of violence.

He met Chang in the hallway, near the front door. She shook her head. She said, “It’s like he stepped out to pick up a pizza. He didn’t even lock the door.”

The alarm panel was on the wall. It was a recent installation. It was showing the time of day and a steady green light.

It was disarmed.

Reacher said, “Let’s get what we came for.”

He led the way back to the smallest bedroom, which was all kitted out with matching units, shelves above, cabinets below, and chests of drawers, and a desk, all in blond maple veneer, and a computer and a telephone and a fax machine and a printer. Investments, Reacher supposed, for a new career. We have offices everywhere . The Scandinavian look was calming. The room was tidy. There was no clutter.

There was no paper.

No legal pads, no notebooks, no scratch pads, no memo blocks, no loose leaves.

Reacher stood still.

He said, “This guy was a cop and a federal agent. He spent hours on the phone. On hold, and waiting, and talking. Did anyone ever do that without a pen and a pad of paper? For notes and doodling and passing the time? That’s an unbreakable habit, surely.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this is bullshit.” He ducked away, to the cabinets below the shelves. He opened one after the other. The first held spare toner cartridges for the printer. The second held spare toner cartridges for the fax machine.

The third held spare legal pads.

And right next to them were spare spiral-bound notebooks, still shrink-wrapped in packs of five, and right behind them were spare memo blocks, solid cubes of crisp virgin paper, three and a half inches on a side.

“I’m sorry,” Reacher said.

“For what?”

“This doesn’t look too good anymore. This is a guy who uses a lot of paper. So much so he buys it in the economy size. I bet that desk was covered with paper. We could have pieced this whole thing together. But someone got here ahead of us. On the same mission. So now it’s all gone.”

“Who?”

“The how tells us who, I’m afraid. Keever is a prisoner. That’s the only way this thing can work. They found notes in his jacket pocket, maybe torn out from a legal pad, and in one pants pocket they found his wallet, with his driver’s license, which told them his address, which they assumed was where the rest of the legal pad was, maybe with more notes on it, and in the other pants pocket they found his house keys, which meant they could walk right in, even to the extent of these new alarms maybe having a thing you wave near the panel, to turn it off. A remote fob, on the keychain. A transponder. Which would be a mercy, I guess. It would mean they didn’t have to beat the code out of him.”

Chang said, “That’s very blunt.”

“I can’t explain it any other way.”

“It doesn’t tell me who.”

“Mother’s Rest,” Reacher said. “That’s his last known location.”

They went through Keever’s house room by room, in case something had been missed. The mud room held nothing of interest. The kitchen was a plain space, not much used. There was mismatched silverware, and odds and ends of canned food, presumably bought with temporary enthusiasm, but never eaten. There was nothing hidden, unless it had been walled up and artfully painted over with a finish exactly resembling twenty-year-old latex base coat, complete with grease and grime.

The living room and the dining nook were the same. Searching was easy. The guy wasn’t exactly camping out, but it was clear he had started over without much stuff, and hadn’t added a great deal along the way. The guest room with beds looked like it had been set up for his children. Visitation rights. Every other weekend, maybe. Whatever the lawyers had agreed. But Reacher felt the room had never been used.

The master suite smelled slightly sour. There was a bed with a single night table. There was a chest of drawers and a wooden apparatus that had a hanger for a jacket, and trays for watches and coins and wallets. Like in a fancy hotel. The bathroom smelled humid, and the towels were a mess.

The night table had a short stack of magazines, weighted down by a hardcover book. As he passed by, Reacher glanced down to see what it was. Purely out of interest.

He saw three things.

First, the magazine on the top of the pile was the Sunday supplement from the LA Times .

Second, it was only part consumed. There was a quarter-inch of bookmark visible.

Third, the hardcover book was also only part consumed. It had a bookmark, too.

The bookmarks were old slips of memo paper, folded once, lengthwise. They were the first paper Reacher had seen, anywhere in the house.

The slip of paper in the hardcover book was blank, except for a single scribbled number 4 . Which was a number of moderate technical interest, and most famous for being the only number in the entire universe that matched the number of letters in its own word in English: four . But other than that, it didn’t seem to mean much. Not in context.

Chang said, “I’m with the defense attorneys on that one.”

Reacher nodded. But the next one was better. Much better. Purely in terms of function, at first. The LA Times Sunday magazine came open at the start of a long article by science editor Ashley Westwood. It was about how modern advances in treating traumatic brain injuries were giving us a better understanding of the brain itself.

The magazine was less than two weeks old.

Chang said, “The defense attorneys would start by quoting the LA Times ’s Sunday circulation.”

Reacher said, “Which is what?”

“Nearly a million, I think.”

“As in, it’s a million-to-one chance this is not a coincidence?”

“That’s what the defense attorneys would say.”