"Let's go," he said.
The clerk was in the motel office, sitting on a high stool behind the counter, doing something with a ledger and a calculator. But she had no useful information. Maria had left her room before seven o'clock that morning, dressed as before, on foot, carrying only her purse.
"She ate breakfast before seven," Reacher said. "The waitress in the diner told me."
The clerk said she hadn't come back. That was all she knew. Vaughan asked her to open Maria's room. The clerk handed over her passkey immediately. No hesitation, no fuss about warrants or legalities or due process.Small towns, Reacher thought. Police work was easy. About as easy as it had been in the army.
Maria's room was identical to Reacher's, with only very slightly more stuff in it. A spare pair of jeans hung in the closet. They were neatly folded over the bar of a hanger. Above them on the shelf were one spare pair of cotton underpants, one bra, and one clean cotton T-shirt, all folded together in a low pile. On the floor of the closet was an empty suitcase. It was a small, sad, battered item. Blue in color, made from fiberboard, with a crushed lid, as if it had been stored for years with something heavy on top of it.
On the shelf next to the bathroom sink was a vinyl wash bag, white, with improbable pink daisies on it. It was empty, but it had clearly been overstuffed during transit. Its contents were laid out next to it, in a long line. Soaps, shampoos, lotions and ointments and unguents of every possible kind.
No personal items. They would have been in her purse.
"Day trip," Vaughan said. "She's expecting to return."
"Obviously," Reacher said. "She paid for three nights."
"She went to Despair. To look for Ramirez."
"That would be my guess."
"But how? Did she walk?"
Reacher shook his head. "I would have seen her. It's seventeen miles. Six hours, for her. If she left at seven she wouldn't have arrived before one in the afternoon. I was on the road between eight-thirty and nine. I didn't pass her along the way."
"There's no bus or anything. There's never any traffic."
"Maybe there was," Reacher said. "I came in with an old guy in a car. He was visiting family, and then he was moving on to Denver. He'd head straight west. No reason to loop around. And if he was dumb enough to give me a ride, he'd have given Maria a ride for sure."
"If he happened to leave this morning."
"Let's find out."
They returned the passkey and got into Vaughan's cruiser. She fired it up and they headed west to the hardware store. The sidewalk was piled high with an elaborate display. Ladders, buckets, barrows, gasoline-driven machines of various types. The owner was inside, wearing a brown coat. He confirmed that he had been building the display early that morning. He thought hard and memory dawned in his eyes and he confirmed that he had seen a small dark girl in a blue warm-up jacket. She had been standing on the far sidewalk, right at the edge of town, half-turned, looking east but clearly aiming to head west, gazing at the empty traffic lane with a mixture of optimism and hopelessness. A classic hitchhiker's pose. Then later the store owner had seen a large bottle-green car heading west, a little before eight o'clock. He described the car as looking basically similar to Vaughan's cruiser, but without all the police equipment.
"A Grand Marquis," Reacher said. "Same platform. Same car. Same guy."
The store owner had not seen the car stop or the girl get in. But the inference was clear. Vaughan and Reacher drove the five miles to the town line. No real reason. They saw nothing. Just the smooth blacktop behind and the ragged gritty ribbon ahead.
"Is she in danger?" Vaughan asked.
"I don't know," Reacher said. "But she's probably not having the best day of her life."
"How will she get back?"
"I suspect she decided to worry about that later."
"We can't go there in this car."
"So what else have you got?"
"Just the truck."
"Got sunglasses? It's breezy, without the windshield."
"Too late. I already had it towed. It's being fixed."
"And then you went to the library? Don't you ever sleep?"
"Not so much anymore."
"Since when? Since what?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Your husband?"
"I said I don't want to talk about it."
Reacher said, "We need to find Maria."
"I know."
"We could walk."
"It's twelve miles."
"And twelve miles back."
"Can't do it. I'm on duty in two hours."
Reacher said, "She's domiciled in Hope. At least temporarily. Now she's missing. The HPD should be entitled to head over there in a car and make inquiries."
"She's from San Diego."
"Only technically."
"Technicalities matter, Reacher."
"She took up residency."
"With one change of underwear?"
"What's the worst thing that can happen?"
"Despair could ask us for reciprocity."
"They already grabbed it. Their deputies came by last night."
"Two wrongs don't make a right."
"Says who?"
"Are you bullying me?"
"You're the one with the gun."
Vaughan started to say something, then shook her head and sighed and said, "Shit." Then she jammed her foot on the gas and the Crown Vic shot forward. The tires had traction on Hope's blacktop but lost it on Despair's loose gravel. The rear wheels spun and howled and the car stumbled for a second and then accelerated west in a cloud of blue smoke.
They drove eleven miles into the setting sun with nothing to show for it except eyestrain. The twelfth mile was different. Way ahead in the glare Reacher saw the familiar distant sights, all in sharp silhouette and shortened perspective. Vague smudges, on the horizon. The vacant lot, on the left. The abandoned motor court, low and forlorn. The gas station, on the right. Farther on, the dry goods store in the first brick building.
Plus something else.
From a mile away it looked like a shadow. Like a lone cloud was blocking the sun and casting a random shape on the ground. He craned his neck and looked up at the sky. Nothing there. The sky was clear. Just the gray-blue of approaching evening.
Vaughan drove on.
Three-quarters of a mile out the shape grew width, and depth, and height. The sun blazed behind it and winked around its edges. It looked like a low wide pile of something dark. Like a gigantic truck had strewn earth or asphalt right across the road, shoulder to shoulder, and beyond.
The pile looked to be fifty feet wide, maybe twenty deep, maybe six high.
From a half-mile out, it looked to be moving.
From a quarter-mile out, it was identifiable.
It was a crowd of people.
Vaughan slowed, instinctively. The crowd was two or three hundred strong. Men, women, and children. They were formed up in a rough triangle, facing east. Maybe six people at the front. Behind the six, twenty more. Behind the twenty, sixty more. Behind the sixty, a vast milling pool of people. The whole width of the road was blocked. The shoulders were blocked. The rearguard spilled thirty feet out into the scrub on both sides.
Vaughan stopped, fifty yards out.
The crowd compressed. People pushed inward from the sides. They made a human wedge. A solid mass. Two or three hundred people. They held together, but they didn't link arms.