Vaughan nodded vaguely and got up. Said, “We should get out of here before the day guy gets in. And the watch commander.”

“Embarrassed to be seen with me?”

“A little. And I’m a little embarrassed that I don’t know what to do.”

The breakfast rush at the diner was over. A degree of calm had been restored. Reacher ordered coffee. Vaughan said she was happy with tap water. She sipped her way through half a glass and drummed her fingers on the table.

“Start over,” she said. “Who was this guy?”

“Caucasian male,” Reacher said.

“Not Hispanic? Not foreign?”

“I think Hispanics are Caucasians, technically. Plus Arabs and some Asians. All I’m going on is his hair. He wasn’t black. That’s all I know for sure. He could have been from anywhere in the world.”

“Dark-skinned or pale?”

“I couldn’t see anything.”

“You should have taken a flashlight.”

“I’m still glad I didn’t.”

“How did his skin feel?”

“Feel? It felt like skin.”

“You should have been able to tell something. Olive skin feels different from pale skin. A little smoother and thicker.”

“Really?”

“I think so. Don’t you?”

Reacher touched the inside of his left wrist with his right forefinger. Then he tried his cheek, under his eye.

“Hard to tell,” he said.

Vaughan stretched her arm across the table. “Now compare.”

He touched the inside of her wrist, gently.

She said, “Now try my face.”

“Really?”

“Purely for research purposes.”

He paused a beat, then touched her cheek with the ball of his thumb. He took his hand away and said, “Texture was thicker than either one of us. Smoothness was somewhere between the two of us.”

“OK.” She touched her own wrist where he had touched it, and then her face. Then she said, “Give me your wrist.”

He slid his hand across the table. She touched his wrist, with two fingers, like she was taking his pulse. She rubbed an inch north and an inch south and then leaned over and touched his cheek with her other hand. Her fingertips were cold from her water glass and the touch startled him. He felt a tiny jolt of voltage in it.

She said, “So he wasn’t necessarily white, but he was younger than you. Less lined and wrinkled and weather-beaten. Less of a mess.”

“Thank you.”

“You should use a good moisturizer.”

“I’ll bear that advice in mind.”

“And sunscreen.”

“Likewise.”

“Do you smoke?”

“I used to.”

“That’s not good for your skin either.”

Reacher said, “He might have been Asian, with the skimpy beard.”

“Cheekbones?”

“Pronounced, but he was thin anyway.”

“Wasted, in fact.”

“Noticeably. But he was probably wiry to begin with.”

“How long does it take for a wiry person to get wasted?”

“I don’t know for sure. Maybe five or six days in a hospital bed or a cell, if you’re sick or on a hunger strike. Less if you’re moving about out-of-doors, keeping warm, burning energy. Maybe only two or three days.”

Vaughan was quiet for a moment.

“That’s a lot of wandering,” she said. “We need to know why the good folks of Despair put in two or three days sustained effort to keep him out of there.”

Reacher shook his head. “Might be more useful to know why he was trying so hard to stay. He must have had a damn good reason.”

Vaughan finished her water and Reacher finished his coffee and asked, “Can I borrow your truck?”

“When?”

“Now. While you sleep.”

Vaughan said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll use it to go back to Despair, you’ll get arrested, and I’ll be implicated.”

“Suppose I don’t go back to Despair?”

“Where else would you want to go?”

“I want to see what lies to the west. The dead guy must have come in that way. I’m guessing he didn’t come through Hope. You would have seen him and remembered him. Likewise with the girl’s missing husband.”

“Good point. But there’s not much west of Despair. A lot of not much, in fact.”

“Got to be something.”

Vaughan was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “It’s a long loop around. You have to go back practically all the way to Kansas.”

Reacher said, “I’ll pay for the gas.”

“Promise me you’ll stay out of Despair.”

“Where’s the line?”

“Five miles west of the metal plant.”

“Deal.”

Vaughan sighed and slid her keys across the table.

“Go,” she said. “I’ll walk home. I don’t want you to see where I live.”

The old Chevy’s seat didn’t go very far back. The runners were short. Reacher ended up driving with his back straight and his knees splayed, like he was at the wheel of a farm tractor. The steering was vague and the brakes were soft. But it was better than walking. Much better, in fact. Reacher was done with walking, for a day or two at least.

His first stop was his motel in Hope. His room was at the end of the row, which put Lucy Anderson in a room closer to the office. She couldn’t be anywhere else. He hadn’t seen any other overnight accommodation in town. And she wasn’t staying with friends, because they would have been with her in the diner the night before, in her hour of need.

The motel had its main windows all in back. The front of the row had a repeating sequence of doors and lawn chairs and head-high pebbled-glass slits that put daylight into the bathrooms. Reacher started with the room next to his own and walked down the row, looking for the white blur of underwear drying over a tub. In his experience women of Lucy Anderson’s station and generation were very particular about personal hygiene.

The twelve rooms yielded two possibilities. One had a larger blur than the other. Not necessarily more underwear. Just bigger underwear. An older or a larger woman. Reacher knocked at the other door and stepped back and waited. A long moment later Lucy Anderson opened up and stood in the inside shadows, warily, with one hand on the handle.

Reacher said, “Hello, Lucky.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know why your husband went to Despair, and how he got there.”

She was wearing the same sneakers, and the same kind of abbreviated socks. Above them was a long expanse of leg, smooth and toned and tanned to perfection. Maybe she played soccer for UCLA. Maybe she was a varsity star. Above the expanse of leg was a pair of cut-off denims, frayed higher on the outside of her thighs than the inside, which was to say frayed very high indeed, because the effective remaining inseam had to have been less than three-quarters of an inch.

Above the shorts was another sweatshirt, mid-blue, with nothing written on it.

She said, “I don’t want you looking for my husband.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want you to find him.”

“Why not?”

“It’s obvious.”

“Not to me,” Reacher said.

She said, “I’d like you to leave me alone now.”

“You were worried about him yesterday. Today you’re not?”

She stepped forward into the light, just a pace, and glanced left and right beyond Reacher’s shoulders. The motel’s lot was empty. Nothing there, except Vaughan’s old truck parked at Reacher’s door. Lucy Anderson’s sweatshirt was the same color as her eyes, and her eyes were full of panic.

“Just leave us alone,” she said, and stepped back into her room and closed the door.

Reacher sat a spell in Vaughan’s truck, with a map from her door pocket. The sun was out again and the cab was warm. In Reacher’s experience cars were always either warm or cold. Like a primitive calendar. Either it was summer or winter. Either the sun came through the glass and the metal, or it didn’t.

The map confirmed what Vaughan had told him. He was going to have to drive a huge three-and-a-half-sided rectangle, first east almost all the way back to the Kansas line, then north to I-70, then west again, then south on the same highway spur the metal trucks used. Total distance, close to two hundred miles. Total time, close to four hours. Plus four hours and two hundred miles back, if he obeyed Vaughan’s injunction to keep her truck off Despair’s roads.