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.”

Chapter 30

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.

The traffic was slowing up, in the right-hand lane at least. The middle lane and the left lane were passing them by. But the driver didn’t move over.

Chang scrolled on down the list. Next up after the gerbils was a five-month-old piece about climate change. The headline said the oceans were rising, and the capsule summary said fractal geometry meant an East Coast seawall would need more concrete than humans had mixed in all their history so far.

Chang said, “Everyone writes about climate change. No need for McCann to pick on Westwood in particular, right?”

Reacher said, “Agreed.”

Next up was something called the Deep Web. Which had to do with search engines and the internet. Apparently the Surface Web was easier to navigate. After that came bees. Apparently they were dying out the world over. Without them crops would not get fertilized and everyone would starve. Which was a lot more than two hundred people. Reacher could see about two hundred people right then, out the window, because the traffic was slowing even more. They were still in the right-hand lane. The middle lane and the left-hand lane were still a little faster. A black Town Car came level on Chang’s side and kept pace for a second. A gap opened up ahead of it. Its rear window came down, and Reacher caught a partial glimpse of a guy inside, his head turning toward them. For an absurd split second it looked like the guy wanted to tell them something. But then the inevitable happened. The Town Car was in the middle lane, but it was going at the right-hand lane’s speed, and behind it a small red coupe didn’t slow, inattentive, and it kissed the Town Car’s rear bumper. The speed differential was modest, not more than five or ten miles an hour, but even so the Town Car was punted solidly forward, and the passenger’s head was slammed back against the seat cushion, and then hurled forward again, all of Newton’s Laws of Motion in play, inertia and action and reaction. Reacher was surprised by the force of it all. Maybe whiplash really was a thing. The Town Car motored on into the gap ahead, and the red coupe followed, neither one of them slowing, both of them apparently undamaged. Clearly federal bumpers worked like they should.