Angelo Mancini was saying, 'This is a waste of time. He ain't in there. He can't be. Not unless he's hanging out with three of their football players.'
Roberto Cassano nodded. He glanced over his shoulder at the pick-up truck and the SUV on the shoulder, and then he glanced ahead at the gold GMC Yukon on the driveway. It was parked in front of an older truck. He said, 'That's the old woman's ride, from the farm.'
Mancini said, 'Sleepover time.'
'I guess Mahmeini's boy was right about something. They know the doctor is the weak link. They've got him staked out.'
'Not much of a trap, all things considered. Not with their cars parked out front. No one is going to walk into that.'
'Which is good for us, in a way. They're wasting their resources. Which gives us a better chance somewhere else.'
'Do you want to check here? Just in case?'
'What's the point? If he's in there, he's already their prisoner.'
'That's what I was thinking. But then I thought, not necessarily. They could be his prisoner.'
'One against three?'
'You saw what he did to the guy in the Cadillac's trunk.'
'I don't know. I kind of want to check, I guess. And maybe we should. But you heard the man. This is a competition now. We can't waste time.'
'Wouldn't take much time.'
'I know. But we'll look like idiots if he's not in there. The football players will be straight on the phone to the Duncans, all yukking it up about how we came looking in a place he couldn't possibly be.'
'No one said there are style points involved.'
'But there are. There are always style points involved. This is a long game. There's a lot of money involved. If we lose face we'll never get it back.'
'So where?'
Cassano looked again at the old woman's truck. 'If she's here, then her house is empty tonight. And people looking for places to hide love empty houses.'
Reacher saw them back out and drive away again. At first he didn't understand why. Then he concluded they were looking for Seth Duncan. They had pulled up, they had eyeballed the parked cars, they had seen that the Mazda wasn't among them, and they had gone away again. Logical. He put the Remington back on the floor, and planted his feet, and straightened his back, and stared out into the darkness.
Nothing else happened for ninety long minutes. No one came, no one stirred. Then pale streaks of dawn started showing in the sky to Reacher's right. They came in low and silver and purple, and the land slowly lightened from black to grey, and the world once again took solid shape, all the way to the far horizon. Rags of tattered cloud lit up bright overhead, and a knee-high mist rose up off the dirt. A new day. But not a good one, Reacher thought. It was going to be a day full of pain, both for those who deserved it, and for those who didn't.
He waited.
He couldn't get his Yukon out, because he had no key for Dorothy Coe's pick-up truck. It was possibly in her coat, but he wasn't inclined to go look for it. He was in no hurry. It was wintertime. Full daylight was still an hour away.
Five hundred miles due north, up in Canada, just above the 49th Parallel, because of the latitude, dawn came a little later. The first of the morning light filtered down through the needles of the towering pine and touched the white van in its summer picnic spot at the end of the rough grassy track. The driver woke in his seat, and blinked, and stretched. He had heard nothing all night long. He had seen nothing. No bears, no coyotes, no red foxes, no moose, no elk, no wolves. No people. He had been warm, because he had a sleeping bag filled with down, but he had been very uncomfortable, because panel vans had small cabs, and he had spent the night folded into a seat that didn't recline very far. It was always on his mind that the cargo in the back was treated better than he was. It rode more comfortably. But then, it was expensive and hard to get, and he wasn't. He was a realistic man. He knew how things worked.
He climbed out and took a leak against the pine's ancient trunk. Then he ate and drank from his meagre supplies, and he pushed his palms against his aching back, and he stretched again to work out the kinks. The sky was brightening. It was his favourite time for a run to the border. Light enough to see, too early for company. Ideal. He had just twenty miles to go, most of them on an unmapped forest track, to a point a little less than four thousand yards north of the line. The transfer zone, he called it. The end of the road for him, but not for his cargo.
He climbed back in the cab and started the engine. He let it warm and settle for a minute while he checked the dials and the gauges. Then he selected first gear, and released the parking brake, and turned the wheel, and moved away slowly, at walking speed, lurching and bouncing down the rough grassy track.
Reacher heard sounds at the end of the hallway. A toilet flushing, a faucet running, a door opening, a door closing. Then the doctor came limping past the dining room, stiff with sleep, mute with morning. He nodded as he passed, and he skirted the football players, and he headed for the kitchen. A minute later Reacher heard the gulp and hiss of the coffee machine. The sun was up enough to show a reflection in the window of the SUV parked beyond the fence. Webs of frost were glinting and glittering in the fields.
The doctor came in with two mugs of coffee. He was dressed in a sweater over pyjamas. His hair was uncombed. The damage on his face was lost in general redness. He put one mug in front of Reacher and threaded his way around and sat in a chair on the opposite side of the table.
He said, 'Good morning.'
Reacher said nothing.
The doctor asked, 'How's your nose?'
Reacher said, 'Terrific.'
The doctor said, 'There's something you never told me.'
Reacher said, 'There are many things I never told you.'
'You said twenty-five years ago the detective neglected to search somewhere. You said because of ignorance or confusion.'
Reacher nodded, and took a sip of his coffee.
The doctor asked, 'Is that where you're going this morning?'
'Yes, it is.'
'Will you find anything there after twenty-five years?'
'Probably not.'
'Then why are you going?'
'Because I don't believe in ghosts.'
'I don't follow.'
'I hope you never have to. I hope I'm wrong.'
'Where is this place we're talking about?'
'Mrs Coe told me that fifty years ago two farms were sold for a development that never happened. The outbuildings from one of them are still there. Way out in a field. A barn, and a smaller shed.'
The doctor nodded. 'I know where they are.'
'People plough right up to them.'
'I know,' the doctor said. 'I guess they shouldn't, but why let good land go to waste? The subdivisions were never built, and they're never going to be. So it's something for nothing, and God knows these people need it. It's yield that doesn't show up on their mortgages.'
'So when Detective Carson came up here twenty-five years ago, what did he see? In the early summer? He saw about a million acres of waist-high corn, and he saw some houses dotted around here and there, and he saw some outbuildings dotted around here and there. He stopped in at every house, and every occupant said they'd searched their outbuildings. So Carson went away again, and that old barn and that old shed fell right between the cracks. Because Carson's question was, did you search your outbuildings? Everyone said yes, probably quite truthfully. And Carson saw the old barn and the old shed and quite naturally assumed they must belong to someone, and that therefore they had indeed been looked at, as promised. But they didn't belong to anyone, and they hadn't been looked at.'
'You think that was the scene of the crime?'
'I think Carson should have asked that question twenty-five years ago.'
'There won't be anything there. There can't be. Those buildings are ruins now, and they must have been ruins then. They've been sitting there empty for fifty years, in the middle of nowhere, just mouldering away.'