He stopped a couple of miles short of the crossroads. He didn’t want to be seen driving the dead sheriff’s car. Not by local people and especially not by Puller or any of the other deputies. He didn’t want controversy or radio chatter. Not at that point. At that point anonymity was his friend. He found a field entrance and backed up into the tractor ruts and left the motor running for the heat. He had about half a tank of gas. He stared straight ahead out the windshield at flat brown dirt that ran all the way to the horizon. Six months from then the car would have been hidden by green leaves, in the middle of thousands or tens of thousands of tons of produce, all made by plant DNA and rain and minerals from the earth.

Sorenson asked, ‘What are you thinking?’

‘Right now?’

‘No, about Delfuenso’s autopsy.’

‘It’ll be a yes or no answer,’ he said. ‘Either one thing or the other.’

‘Care to expand on that?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I might embarrass myself.’

‘Are you easily embarrassed?’

‘I can feel a little foolish if I make grand pronouncements that turn out wrong.’

‘Does that happen often?’

‘More often than I would like. Do you have kids?’

Sorenson shook her head. ‘Never happened for me.’

‘Did you want it to?’

‘I’m not sure. You?’

‘No and no. Are you easily embarrassed?’

‘Not easily,’ Sorenson said. ‘Not professionally, anyway. Sometimes personally, I suppose. Like right now I wish I could shower and change. I’ve been wearing this shirt since I got up yesterday.’

Reacher said, ‘I wear mine three days minimum. And right now my nose is busted. So I can’t smell anything anyway.’

She smiled.

He said, ‘You could go shopping. You could shower at Delfuenso’s house. This county is ours.’

‘Showering at Delfuenso’s house would be creepy. A dead woman’s bathroom?’

‘We’re driving a dead man’s car.’

‘Where could I go shopping, anyway?’

‘There must be a store in town. You could get bib overalls.’

‘You don’t want to go to town. Otherwise you wouldn’t have stopped here.’

‘We could go to Sin City. We know they have shirts there, at least. In the convenience store.’

‘Not very nice shirts.’

‘You’d look good in anything.’

‘I’ll choose to ignore that,’ she said. Then she said, ‘OK, let’s go to Sin City. I’ll do what you did. I’ll buy a shirt and you can get me an hour in a motel.’

‘Doesn’t work that way in the afternoon. The maids will have gone home. You’d have to pay for a whole night.’

‘No problem. It’s worth it to me.’

‘You’re very fastidious.’

‘Most people are.’

‘We could get lunch, too.’

But then Goodman’s phone rang again. The same urgent electronic squawk, loud and resonant through the speakers.

The area code was 816.

‘Kansas City,’ Reacher said.

‘Don’t answer it,’ Sorenson said.

The phone squawked on, six, seven, eight times, and then it stopped. The car went quiet again. Just the purr of the motor, and the whir of the heater.

Reacher said, ‘Your counterterrorism guys are from Kansas City, right?’

‘They’re not mine,’ Sorenson said.

‘Dawson and Mitchell, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who else would call Goodman from a Kansas City number?’

‘Could be anyone. Brother, sister, daughter, son. Old college roommate. Fishing buddy.’

‘During work hours?’

‘Why not?’

‘Did Goodman even go to college?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘I don’t think his chief deputy did.’

The phone trilled once. Voice mail. Sorenson leaned over and fiddled with the phone. Her hair touched Reacher’s arm. The car filled with a watery, distorted sound.

‘Cell phone,’ Sorenson said. ‘Weak signal. Probably indoors. Or in a moving vehicle.’

Then a voice broke through and said, ‘Sheriff Goodman, this is Agent Dawson with FBI counterterrorism out of Kansas City. We met last night. I need you to call me back as soon as possible. And until then I need to warn you about a man travelling with Agent Sorenson out of our Omaha office. He’s a dangerous fugitive and should be apprehended on sight. My partner and I are on our way to you. We’ll deal with the situation after we get there, but please take care until we do. We’ll be with you in about thirty minutes or less. We’ll check in at the department and hope to see you there.’

Then there was more watery distortion, and then there was silence.

Just the purr of the motor, and the whir of the heater.

Sorenson said, ‘Not our county after all.’

FIFTY-ONE

REACHER DIDN’T MOVE the car. It was in as good a place as any. He said, ‘Clearly Omaha isn’t talking to Kansas City. If your guy had known Dawson and Mitchell were on the way here he wouldn’t have asked Goodman to be his eyes and ears.’

‘More likely the other way around,’ Sorenson said. ‘Kansas City isn’t talking to Omaha. They’re operating independently. Which is typical, for a bunch of counterterrorism hotshots.’

‘Do they think I’m a terrorist?’

‘They know you were driving the car for King and McQueen. Who killed a guy you’re pretty sure was CIA. Which puts you all in the relevant category, wouldn’t you say?’

‘There was a black guy in a pick-up truck who almost stopped for me. Not long before King and McQueen showed up. I was kind of glad at the time. I was cold and it looked like his heater was busted. Now I wish he had stopped. I’d be in Virginia by now.’

‘With pneumonia, maybe.’

‘Let’s go get you a shirt and a shower.’

‘But we only have half an hour. Or less.’

‘Until what? No one’s got a beef with you. And no one will even see me.’

‘They think I’ve been kidnapped. They’ll rescue me. Same thing as taking me prisoner.’

‘Your boss hasn’t talked to them. They know nothing about the alleged kidnap. They said I was travelling with you, not holding you hostage. They’ll say hi, you’ll say hi, they’ll ask you about the guy with the nose, you’ll say you have no idea where he is. That’s if they find you at all. Which they won’t. They won’t want a room at the motel, and even if they do, the clerk won’t put them in the same room as you. That’s not how motels work, generally.’

‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘Let’s go.’

Goodman’s car had no GPS on the dash and no map in the glove box. No obvious need for either thing. Presumably Goodman had known his county like the back of his hand. Probably he had grown up there and lived there all his life. So Reacher navigated by memory and common sense and guesswork. He was about two miles north and east of the crossroads and he needed to get three miles due north of the crossroads. So he threaded basically west through the chequerboard and came out on the main drag opposite the sad line of for-sale farm junk. He paused there and checked both ways and saw nothing to worry about. No Bureau sedans, no SWAT teams, no armoured trucks. No local deputies, no roadblocks, no choppers in the air. So he turned north and cruised the last mile and looped in behind the convenience store.

Sorenson detached Goodman’s phone from its cradle and put it in her bag. She went in the store and five minutes later she came out again with the same kind and the same size of shirt that Delfuenso had been given, and a smaller softer packet Reacher guessed was dollar underwear and socks. The best-looking motel was on the other side of the road, so Reacher drove over there but parked some distance away. He figured it was better if Sorenson approached the place on foot. In his experience hotel keepers were habitual gossips, and he didn’t want a county-wide bulletin about a stranger driving the sheriff’s car. He watched Sorenson go into the office, and he saw her come out again five minutes later with a key. He watched her walk down the row of rooms, and he saw her go into one.