Lee Child - Make Me

“Why do you need to know? Is he in trouble?”

“He was my firm’s client. But we lost touch. We’re trying to reconnect. To see if he still needs our help.”

“He’s an older man, very quiet, keeps himself to himself. But he does good work. We’d like to reconnect too.”

“Did he have any burning interests, or things on his mind?”

“I’m not sure. He was never exactly a chatterbox.”

“Is he local? Do you have an address for him?”

Dead air from Chicago. Then the woman said, “I’m sorry, but I’m really not permitted to give out that kind of information. We have to respect our volunteers’ privacy.”

“Do you have a phone number for him? At his home? Perhaps you could call him and ask him to call us.”

Silence from Chicago. Just tiny plastic clicks. A database, possibly. A long list, on a computer. Lots of scrolling required. M for McCann would be exactly halfway.

Then the woman came back on the line and said, “No, I’m afraid we don’t have a phone number for him.”

After that they checked Chang’s secret private-eye databases for guys named McCann in Chicago, in case he stood out some other way, but they got hundreds of random hits, as was to be expected, Reacher supposed, given ethnic names and historic patterns of migration. Maybe their McCann was one of them, but there was no way of knowing. He was hidden like a grain of sand on a beach.

After that they checked the airlines. There was plenty of choice. LAX to ORD was a big-deal route. There were multiple departures all through the afternoon hours. Which made sense. Folks could get home before their natural bedtimes, two time zones east. Anything later approached red-eye territory.

The major carriers were all charging the same price, to the penny, so Chang went with American, where she had a gold card, and she booked on the phone, through a gold card person. More reliable in urgent situations, she said, and better seats.

Reacher put his toothbrush in his pocket, and she packed her suitcase, with her comb, and her computer, and its charger, and her phone charger.

She zipped it up.

She said, “OK?”

Reacher nodded and said, “Let’s go find a cab.”

They stepped out the door and blinked in the bright sun, and stopped by the office to return the key. The clerk seemed perturbed by their early departure, at first worried there was something wrong with the room, and when they told him there wasn’t, he seemed to assume they saw the place as a hot-sheets by-the-hour convenience, and got upset all over again. Reacher told him it was an urgent change of plan, that was all, just business, nothing more, but he saw the guy’s point. Their hair was still wet from the shower, and the afterglow was coming off them in waves, like nuclear radiation.

There was a cab at the curb across the street. Reacher whistled and waved, the same as before, and this time it worked. The cab pulled a slow curb-to-curb U-turn and came to rest with the rear door handle exactly level with Reacher’s hip. The driver popped the trunk and climbed out to help with Chang’s suitcase. He was a big guy in a short-sleeved shirt, his forearms roped with muscle, his nose bent from an earlier break, his eyebrows thick with scar tissue. A boxer in his youth, Reacher thought, or just plain unlucky. The guy lifted the suitcase like it was weightless and placed it in the trunk. Chang slid in across the vinyl bench, behind the driver’s seat, and Reacher climbed in beside her. The driver got back behind the wheel and caught Reacher’s eye in the mirror.

“LAX,” Reacher said. “American, domestic.”

The cab took off, slow and steady through the winking sunlight, left and right on the side streets, to Santa Monica Boulevard, where it headed south and west toward the 405.

This time the guy with the jeans and the hair didn’t wait for his land line to ring. He wanted to get ahead of the news, so he dialed his contact preemptively. He said, “Is it done?”

His contact said, “Don’t worry, it will be.”

“So it isn’t done?”

“Not yet.”

“But Hackett was right there.”

“Let us do what we’re good at, OK? Two dead in a West Hollywood motel room would have been a disaster. They go to town over a thing like that. There would have been ten squad cars there in a thin minute. They’d have put four detectives on it. It would have been on the evening news. Hackett can’t afford that kind of exposure. Too much risk. He has to be able to work again.”

“So when?”

“Trust me. They won’t get on the plane.”

The 405 was busy, as always, but it was moving. Three lanes, keeping pace, all bright colors and clean paint and wax and chrome, and fierce flashing sun, and the tawny hills in the background. The ride was soft. Chang had her window all the way down, and the breeze was warm. It was blowing her hair around. Her T-shirt was damp on the shoulders, where it had rested. The driver was neat and precise in his movements. No slamming around. He was staying in the right-hand lane, going with the flow, as good a way as any, on LA’s freeways. They would get there when they got there.

Reacher was leaning back in his seat, still deeply content, still rubbery, and Chang looked the same beside him. She said, “A library volunteer is bound to be local, right? It’s a community thing, basically. It’s not like we’ll have to search the whole of Chicago.”

Reacher said, “You should check what Westwood wrote four months ago. We need to know what was on McCann’s mind. Before we meet him. We need to know what triggered his first call.”

Chang took out her phone, and used her thumbs to ask for the LA Times web site. The cell network was slower than wifi, but it got there in the end. She said, “Four months exactly? Or do we assume he researched an earlier piece?”

“Good point,” Reacher said. “I guess if McCann is an internet guy, he could have found anything. But listing everything Westwood ever wrote in his life won’t help us. Try a three-month window. Four, five, and six months back.”

Chang used the site’s own search box and typed Westwood . She got a bunch of stuff about the LA neighborhood of the same name. So she changed the search to Ashley Westwood, in quote marks, which worked much better. First up was a sidebar section on the right, with a photo and a bio of the man himself. The photo looked like it had been taken some years earlier, on a good day. Westwood looked a little younger, and his hair and his beard were a little neater, and less gray. The bio said he had postgraduate degrees in molecular biology and journalism. On the left was a list of his articles. Each one had a headline and a capsule summary. First up was a teaser for his piece on the history of wheat, which was due to be published on the upcoming Sunday. Below that was the piece on traumatic brain injuries they had already seen, in Keever’s Oklahoma City bedroom.

Chang swiped at her screen and the list spooled upward. She stopped it eight pieces back, which was four months. The guy was doing a new article every two weeks, approximately, each one fairly long and presumably researched fairly extensively. Which in terms of civilian employment was easier than being a coal miner or an ER doctor, no doubt, but not actually easy, in Reacher’s opinion. He had never written anything longer than an after-action report. Which was generally a discipline much shorter in form, and not necessarily researched, or even non-fiction.

First up at the four-month mark was a piece about organic farming. Fruits, vegetables, and staple crops. The headline was provocative, and the capsule summary hinted that big agribusinesses were subverting the definition in order to reap the premium prices without doing the hard work. Two weeks before that Westwood had written about gerbils. Ancient gerbils, to be precise, according to the headline. Apparently new research proved the bubonic plague in medieval Europe had been carried not by fleas on rats, as long supposed, but by fleas on giant gerbils from Asia.