He had two knife wounds. The first was a lateral slash across his forehead an inch above his eyes. The second was a ragged stab wound in the right side of his midsection, about level with his navel. Most of the blood had come from the second wound. It had welled out. The guy’s navel looked like a thimble full of drying paint.

Sorenson said, ‘How do you see it, sheriff?’

From outside the door Goodman said, ‘They nicked him in the forehead to blind him. A sheet of blood came down in his eyes. That’s an old knife-fighting trick. Which is why I thought of them as professionals. And from that point on it was easy. They pulled up his shirt and stuck the knife up under his ribs. And jerked it around. But not quite enough. It took him a few minutes to die.’

Sorenson nodded to herself. Hence all the blood. The guy’s heart had kept on pumping, valiantly but fruitlessly.

She asked, ‘Do you know who he is?’

‘Never saw him before.’

‘Why did they pull up his shirt?’

‘Because they’re professionals. They didn’t want the blade to snag.’

‘I agree,’ Sorenson said. ‘It must have been a long knife, don’t you think? To get up into his thorax from there?’

‘Eight or nine inches, maybe.’

‘Did the eyewitness see a knife?’

‘He didn’t say so. But you can ask him yourself. He’s waiting in the deputy’s car. Keeping warm.’

Sorenson asked, ‘Why didn’t they use a gun? A silenced .22 would be more typical, if this is a professional hit.’

‘Still loud, in an enclosed space.’

‘Pretty far from anywhere.’

‘Then I don’t know why they didn’t,’ Goodman said.

Sorenson used her camera and took photographs, zooming out wide for context, zooming in tight for details. She asked, ‘Do you mind if I disturb the body? I want to check for ID.’

Goodman said, ‘It’s your case.’

‘Is it?’

‘The perps are out of the state by now.’

‘They are if they went east.’

‘And if they went west, it’s only a matter of time. They got through the roadblocks, apparently.’

Sorenson said nothing.

‘They switched to another car,’ Goodman said.

‘Or cars,’ Sorenson said. ‘They might have split up and travelled separately.’

Goodman thought about the empty spaces either side of the parked Mazda. Thought about his final APB: any two men in any kind of vehicle. He said, ‘I didn’t consider that possibility. I guess I screwed up.’

Sorenson didn’t reassure him. She just picked her way around the blood and squatted down in the driest patch she could find. She put her left hand out behind her for balance and used her right hand on the corpse. She pressed and patted and searched. There was nothing in the shirt pocket. Nothing in the coat, inside or out. Her gloved fingers turned red with rubbery smears. She tried the pants pockets. Nothing there.

She called, ‘Sheriff? You’re going to have to help me here.’

Goodman picked his way inside, on tiptoe, using long sideways steps, like he was on a ledge a thousand feet up. Sorenson said, ‘Put your finger in his belt loop. Roll him over. I need to check his back pockets.’

Goodman squatted opposite her, arm’s length from the body, and hooked a finger in a belt loop. He turned his face away and hauled. The dead guy came up on his hip. Blood squelched and dripped, but slowly, because it was drying and mixing with the grit on the floor to make a paste. Sorenson’s gloved hand darted in like a pickpocket, and she poked and prodded and patted.

Nothing there.

‘No ID,’ she said. ‘So as of right now, we have ourselves an unidentified victim. Ain’t life grand?’

Goodman let the guy roll back, flat on the floor.

EIGHT

JACK REACHER WAS no kind of a legal scholar, but like all working cops he had learned something about the law, mostly its practical, real-world applications, and its tricks and its dodges.

And he had learned the areas where the law was silent.

As in: there was no law that said people who pick up hitchhikers have to tell the truth.

In fact Reacher had learned that harmless fantasy seemed to be irresistible. He figured it was a large part of the reason why drivers stopped at all. He had ridden with obvious cubicle drones who claimed to be managers, and managers who claimed to be entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs who claimed to be successful, and employees who said they owned the company, and nurses who said they were doctors, and doctors who said they were surgeons. People liked to spread their wings a little. They liked to inhabit a different life for an hour or two, testing it, tasting it, trying out their lines, basking in the glow.

No harm, no foul.

All part of the fun.

But Alan King’s lies were different.

There was no element of self-aggrandizement in what he was saying. The guy wasn’t making himself bigger or better or smarter or sexier. He was telling stupid, trivial, technical lies for no clear reason at all.

As in: the blue denim shirts. They were not a corporate brand. They were not crisp attractive items with embroidered logos above the pockets. They had never been worn before, or laundered. They were cheap junk from a dollar store, straight from the shelf, straight from the plastic packet. Reacher knew, because they were the kind of shirt he wore himself.

As in: King claimed they hadn’t stopped in three hours, but the gas gauge was showing three-quarters full. Which implied the Chevy could run twelve hours on a single tank. Which was close to a thousand miles, at highway speeds. Which was impossible.

And: the water King had given him with Karen Delfuenso’s aspirin was still cold from a refrigerator. Which would be impossible, after three hours in a car with the heater blasting.

Lies.

As in: King claimed somewhere in Nebraska as his residence, but then said there were a million and a half people living where he lived. Which was impossible. A million and a half was close to Nebraska’s entire population. Omaha had about four hundred thousand people, and Lincoln had two fifty. There were only nine U.S. cities with populations of more than a million, and eight of them were either emphatically bigger or smaller than a million and a half. Only Philadelphia was close to that number.

So were these guys really from Philly? Or did King mean a metro area? In which case Philadelphia was too big, but all kinds of other places would slide up the scale and become possibilities. Columbus would fit the bill, maybe, or Las Vegas, or Milwaukee, or San Antonio, or the Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News sprawl.

But not anyplace in Nebraska.

Not even close.

And why wasn’t Karen Delfuenso talking? She had said I’ve got one, about the aspirin, and she had said her name during the mutual introductions, and then she had said nothing more. Reacher himself was quite capable of silence for hours at a time, but even he had been making an effort in terms of polite conversation. Delfuenso looked like the kind of woman who would join in with such social proprieties. But she hadn’t.

Why not?

Not my problem, Reacher thought. His problem was to get himself on a bus to Virginia, and he was closing in on that target at close to eighty miles an hour, more than a hundred feet a second. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

Julia Sorenson hopped around outside the bunker and peeled her plastic booties off, and then she sealed them in a bag with her gloves. Evidence, possibly, and certainly a biohazard. Then she found her phone and called out full-boat teams of FBI medical examiners and crime scene investigators.