Worth Dying For (Jack Reacher #15)

Worth Dying For (Jack Reacher #15) Page 25

FIFTY-FOUR

DOROTHY COE USED THE GUEST BATHROOM AND SHOWERED fast, ready for work at the motel. She stopped in the kitchen to drink coffee and eat toast with the doctor and his wife, and then she changed her mind about her destination. She asked, 'Where did Reacher go?'

The doctor said, 'I'm not sure.'

'He must have told you.'

'He's working on a theory.'

'He knows something now. I can feel it.'

The doctor said nothing.

Dorothy Coe asked, 'Where did he go?'

The doctor said, 'The old barn.'

Dorothy Coe said, 'Then that's where I'm going too.'

The doctor said, 'Don't.'

Reacher drove south on the two-lane road and coasted to a stop a thousand yards beyond the barn. It stood on the dirt a mile away to the west, close to its smaller companion, crisp in the light, canted down at one corner like it was kneeling. Reacher got out and grasped the roof bar and stood on the seat and hauled himself up and stood straight, like he had before on the doctor's Subaru, but higher this time, because the Tahoe was taller. He turned a slow circle, the sun in his eyes one way, his shadow immense the other. He saw the motel in the distance to the north, and the three Duncan houses in the distance to the south. Nothing else. No people, no vehicles. Nothing was stirring.

He stepped down on the hood and jumped down to the ground. He ignored the tractor ruts and walked straight across the dirt, a direct line, homing in, aiming for the gap between the barn and the smaller shelter.

Eldridge Tyler heard the truck. Just the whisper of faraway tyres on coarse blacktop, the hiss of exhaust through a catalytic converter, the muted thrash of turning components, all barely audible in the absolute rural silence. He heard it stop. He heard it stay where it was. It was a mile away, he thought. It was not one of the Duncans with a message. They would come all the way, or call on the phone. It was not the shipment, either. Not yet. The shipment was still hours away.

He rolled on his side and looked back at the tripwire. He rehearsed the necessary moves in his head, should someone come: snatch back the rifle, roll on his hip, sit up, swivel around, and fire point blank. No problem.

He faced front again and put his eye on the scope and his finger on the trigger.

Ten minutes later Reacher was halfway to the barn, assessing, evaluating, counting in his head. He was alone. He was the last man standing. All ten football players were down, the Italians were down, the Arabs in the Ford were down, the remaining Iranian was accounted for, and all four Duncans were holed up in one of their houses. Reacher felt he could trust that last piece of information. The local phone tree seemed to be an impeccable source of human intelligence. Humint, the army called it, and the army Reacher had known would have been crazy with jealousy at such vigilance.

He walked on, bending his line a little to centre himself in the gap between the buildings. The barn was on his right, and the smaller shelter was on his left. The brambles at their bases looked like hasty freehand shading on a pencil drawing. Dry sticks in the winter, possibly a riot of colour and petals in the summer. Possibly an attraction. Kids' bikes could handle the tractor ruts. Balloon tyres, sturdy frames.

He walked on.

Eldridge Tyler stilled his breathing and concentrated hard and strained to hear whatever sounds there were to be heard. He knew the land. The earth was always moving, heating, cooling, vibrating, suffering tiny tremors and microscopic upheavals, forcing small stones upward through its many layers to the broken surfaces above, where they lay in the ruts and the furrows, waiting to be stepped on, to be kicked, to be crunched together, to be sent clicking one against the other. It was not possible to walk silently across open land. Tyler knew that. He kept his eye to the scope, his finger on the trigger, and his ears wide open.

Reacher stopped fifty yards out and stood absolutely still, looking at the buildings in front of him and juggling circular thoughts in his head. His theory was either all the way right or all the way wrong. The eight-year-old Margaret Coe had come for the flowers, but she hadn't gotten trapped by accident. The bike proved the proposition. A child impulsive enough to drop a bike on a path might have dashed inside a derelict structure and injured herself badly. But a child earnest and serious enough to wheel her bike in with her would have taken care and not gotten hurt at all. Human nature. Logic. If there had been an accident, the bike would have been found outside. The bike had not been found outside, therefore there had been no accident.

And: she had gone to the barn voluntarily, but she had not gone inside the barn voluntarily. Why would a child looking for flowers have gone inside a barn? Barns held no secrets for farm children. No mysteries. A kid interested in colours and nature and freshness would have felt no attraction for a dark and gloomy space full of decaying smells. Had the slider even worked twenty-five years ago? Could a kid have moved it? The building was a century old, and it had been rotting since the day it was finished. The slider was jammed now, and it might have been jammed then, and in any case it was heavy. Alternatively, could an eight-year-old kid have lifted a bike through the judas hole? A bike with big tyres and a sturdy frame and awkward pedals and handlebars?

No, someone had done it for her.

A fifth man.

Because the theory didn't work without the existence of a fifth man. The barn was irrelevant without a fifth man. The flowers were meaningless without a fifth man. The Duncans were alibied, but Margaret Coe had disappeared even so. Therefore someone else had been there, either by chance or on purpose.

Or not.

Circular logic.

All the way right, or all the way wrong.

To be all the way wrong would be frustrating, but no big deal. To be all the way right meant the fifth man existed, and had to be considered. He would be bound to the Duncans, by a common purpose, by a terrible shared secret, always and for ever. His cooperation could be assumed. His loyalty and service were guaranteed, either by mutual interest or by coercion. In an emergency, he would help out.

Reacher looked at the barn, and the smaller shelter.

If the theory was right, the fifth man would be there.

If the fifth man was there, the theory was right.

Circular logic.

Reacher had seen the buildings twice before, once by night, and once by day. He was an observant man. He had made his living by noticing details. He was living because he noticed details. But there was nothing much to be seen from fifty yards. Just a side view of two old structures. Best move would be for the guy to be inside the barn, off centre, maybe six feet from the door, sitting easy in a lawn chair with a shotgun across his knees, just waiting for his target to step through in a bar of bright light. Second-best move would put the guy in the smaller shelter a hundred and twenty yards away, prone with a rifle on the mezzanine half-loft, his eye to a scope, watching through the ventilation louvres Reacher had noticed on both his previous visits. A harder shot, but maybe the guy thought of himself more as a rifleman than a close-quarters brawler. And maybe the inside of the barn was sacrosanct, never to be seen by an outsider, even one about to die. But in either case, the smaller shelter would have to be checked first, as a matter of simple logic.

Reacher headed left, straight for the long east wall of the smaller shelter, not fast, not slow, using an easy cadence halfway between a march and a stroll, which overall was quieter than either rushing or creeping. He stopped six feet out, where the dry brambles started, and thought about percentages. Chances were good the fifth man had served, or at least had been exposed to military culture through friends and relatives. A heartland state, big families, brothers and cousins. Probably not a specialist sniper, maybe not even an infantryman, but he might know the basics, foremost among which was that when a guy lay down and aimed forward, he got increasingly paranoid about what was happening behind him. Human nature. Irresistible. Which was why snipers operated in two-man teams, with spotters. Spotters were supposed to acquire targets and calculate range and windage, but their real value was as a second pair of eyes, and as a security blanket. All things being equal, a sniper's performance depended on his breathing and his heart rate, and anything that helped quiet either one was invaluable.

So would the fifth man have brought a spotter of his own? A sixth man? Probably not, because there was already a sixth man away driving the grey van, so a spotter would be a seventh man, and seven was a large and unwieldy number for a local conspiracy. So the fifth man was most likely on his own, and therefore at the minimum he would have set up a physical early-warning system, either fresh gravel or broken glass scattered along the approaches, or possibly a tripwire at the shelter's entrance, something noisy, something definitive, something to help him relax.

Reacher stepped back from the brambles and walked towards the entrance. He stopped a foot short of level, and listened hard, but he heard nothing at all. He breathed the air, hoping to detect the kind of faint chemical tang that would betray the presence of a parked vehicle, benzenes and cold hydrocarbons riding the earthier organic odours of dirt and old wood, but his broken nose was blocked with clots of blood and he had no sense of smell. None at all. So he just drew the sawn-off with his right hand and the Glock with his left and inched forward and peered right.

And saw a tripwire.

It was a length of thin electrical cable, low voltage, like something a hobbyist would buy at Radio Shack, insulated with black plastic, tied tight and shin-high across the open end of the structure. It was filmy with the part-dried remains of the morning dew, which meant it had been in place for at least two hours, since before dawn, which in turn meant the fifth man was a serious, cautious person, and patient, and committed, and fully invested. And it meant he had been contacted the day before, by the Duncans, maybe in the late afternoon, as a belt-and-suspenders back-up plan, which confirmed, finally, that the barn was indeed important.

Reacher smiled.

All the way right.

He stayed clear of the tangled vine and walked a silent exaggerated curve. He worked on the assumption that most people were right-handed, so he wanted to be on the guy's left before he announced himself, because that would give the guy's rifle a longer and more awkward traverse before it came to bear on target. He watched the ground and saw nothing noisy there. He saw a truck deep inside the shelter, parked halfway under the mezzanine floor. Its tailgate was open, the dirty white paint on its edge pale in the gloom. He approached within six inches of the wire and stood absolutely still, letting his eyes adjust. The inside of the shelter was dark, except for thin random bars of sunlight coming through gaps between warped boards. The truck was still and inert. It was a Chevy Silverado. Above it, a long step up from its crew-cab roof, was the loft, and there was a humped shape up there, butt and legs and back and elbows, all preceded by the soles of a pair of boots, all brightly backlit by daylight coming in through the ventilation louvres. The fifth man, prone with a rifle.

Reacher stepped over the tripwire, left foot, then right, high and careful, and eased into the shadows. He inched along the left-hand tyre track, where the earth was beaten smooth, like walking a tightrope, slow and cautious, holding his breath. He made it to the back of the truck. From there he could see the fifth man's feet, but nothing more. He needed a better angle. He needed to be up in the truck's load bed, which meant that a silent approach was no longer an option. The sheet metal would clang and the suspension would creak and from that point onward the morning would get very noisy very fast.

He took a deep breath, through his mouth, in and out.

FIFTY-FIVE

ELDRIDGE TYLER HEARD NOTHING AT ALL UNTIL A SUDDEN shattering cacophony erupted ten feet behind him and eight feet below. There was some kind of heavy metal implement beating on the side of his truck and then footsteps were thumping into the load bed and a loud nasal voice was screaming STAY STILL STAY STILL and then a shotgun fired into the roof above his back with a pulverizing blast in the closed space and the voice yelled STAY STILL STAY STILL again and the shotgun crunch-crunched ready for the next round and hot spent buckshot pattered down on him and wormy sawdust drifted off the damaged boards above him and settled all around him like fine khaki snow.

Then the shelter went quiet again.

The voice said, 'Take your hands off your gun, or I'll shoot you in the ass.'

Tyler took his right forefinger off the trigger and eased his left hand out from under the barrel. The voice was behind him, to the left. He jacked up on his palms and turned a little, arching his back, craning his neck. He saw a big guy, six-five at least, probably two-fifty, wearing a big brown parka and a wool cap. He was holding himself awkwardly, like he was stiff. Like he was hurting, exactly as advertised, except for a length of duct tape stuck to his face. Nobody had mentioned that. He was holding a sawn-off shotgun and a big metal wrench. He was right-handed. His shoulders were broad. The centre of his skull was about seventy-three inches off the floor of the Silverado's load bed. Exactly as calculated.

Tyler closed his eyes.

Reacher saw a man somewhere between sixty and seventy years old, broad and not tall, with thin grey hair and a seamed, weather-beaten face. He was dressed in multiple layers topped by an old flannel shirt and wool pants. Beyond him and beneath him was the gleam of fine walnut and smooth gunmetal. An expensive hunting rifle, resting on what looked like stacked bags of rice. There was a bottle of water next to the rice, and what looked like a sandwich.

Reacher said, 'Your tripwire worked real well, didn't it?'

The guy didn't answer.

Reacher asked, 'What's your name?'

The guy didn't answer.

Reacher said, 'Come down from there. Leave your rifle where it is.'

The guy didn't move. His eyes were closed. He was thinking. Reacher saw him running through the same basic calculation any busted man makes: How much do they know?

Reacher told him, 'I know most of it. I just need the last few details.'

The guy said nothing.

Reacher said, 'Twenty-five years ago a little girl came here to see flowers. Probably she came every Sunday. One particular Sunday you were here too. I want to know if you were here by chance or on purpose.'

The guy opened his eyes. Said nothing.

Reacher said, 'I'm going to assume you were here on purpose.'

The guy didn't answer.

Reacher said, 'It was early summer. I don't know much about flowers. Maybe they hadn't been open long. I want to know how fast the Duncans picked up on the pattern. Three weeks? Two?'

The guy moved a little. His head stayed where it was, but his hands crept back towards the gun. Reacher said, 'Fair warning. I'll shoot you if that muzzle starts turning towards me.'

The guy stopped moving, but he didn't bring his hands back.

Reacher said, 'I'm going to assume two weeks. They noticed her the first Sunday, they watched for her the second Sunday, they had you in place for the third go-round.'

No response.

Reacher said, 'I want you to confirm it for me. I want to know when the Duncans called you. I want to know when they called those boys to build the fence. I want to hear about the plan.'

No response.

Reacher said, 'You want to tell me you don't know what I'm talking about?'

No reply.

'OK,' Reacher said. 'I'm going to assume you do know what I'm talking about.'

No comment.

Reacher said, 'I want to know how you knew the Duncans in the first place. Was it a matter of shared enthusiasms? Were you all members of the same disgusting little club?'

The guy didn't answer.

Reacher asked, 'Had you done it before somewhere?'

No reply.

Reacher asked, 'Or was it your first time?'

No reply.

Reacher said, 'You need to talk to me. It's your only way of staying alive.'

The guy said nothing. He closed his eyes again, and his hands started creeping back under his body again, blindly, all twisted and awkward. He was up on one hip and one elbow, curled around, the bottom of his ribcage facing Reacher like the open mouth of a bucket. The muzzle of the rifle jerked left a little. The guy had his hand on the forestock. He didn't want to stay alive. He was going to commit suicide. Not with the rifle, but by moving the rifle. Reacher knew the signs. Suicide by cop, it was called. Not uncommon, after arrests for certain kinds of crimes.

Reacher said, 'It had to come to an end sometime, right?'

The guy nodded. Just a tiny movement of his head, almost not there at all. The rifle kept on moving, sudden inch after sudden inch, pulling and snagging, trapped between the wooden boards and the guy's awkward clothing.

Reacher said, 'Open your eyes. I want you to see it coming.'

The guy opened his eyes. Reacher let him fumble the rifle through ninety degrees, and then he shot him with the sawn-off, in the gut, another tremendous twelve-gauge blast in the stillness, at an angle that drove the small steel buckshot balls upward through the guy's stomach and deep into his chest cavity. He died more or less instantly, which was a privilege Reacher figured had not been offered to young Margaret Coe.

Reacher waited a long moment and then he stepped up on the roof of the Silverado's cab and climbed on to the half-loft shelf and squatted next to the dead man. He rolled him off the rifle and climbed down with it. It was a fancy toy, custom built around a standard Winchester bolt action. Very expensive, probably, but as good a way of wasting money as any other. There was a.338 Magnum in the breech and five more in the magazine. Reacher thought the.338 was overkill at a hundred and twenty yards against a human target, but he figured the firepower was about to be useful.

He carried the rifle to the mouth of the shelter and stepped over the tripwire again and stood with the cold sun on his face. Then he looped around and headed for the barn.

The judas hole was hinged to open outward and was secured with the kind of lock normally seen on a suburban front door. There was a corroded brass keyhole plate the diameter of an espresso cup, and there would be a steel tongue behind it, which would be snicked into a pressed steel receptacle, which would be rabbeted into the jamb and held by two screws. The jamb was the main slider itself, which was a sturdy item. Reacher aimed the fancy rifle from a foot away and fired twice, at where he thought the screws might be, and then twice more, at a different angle. The Magnums did a pretty good job. The door sagged open half an inch before catching on splinters. Reacher jammed his fingertips in the crack and pulled hard. A jagged piece of wood the length of his arm split off and fell to the floor and the door came free. Reacher folded the door all the way back, and then he stood in the sun for a second, and then he stepped inside the barn.

FIFTY-SIX

REACHER STEPPED OUT OF THE BARN AGAIN ELEVEN MINUTES later, and saw Dorothy Coe's truck driving up the track towards him. There were three people in the cab. Dorothy herself was at the wheel, and the doctor was in the passenger seat, and the doctor's wife was jammed in the space between them. Reacher stood absolutely still, completely numb, blinking in the sun, the captured rifle in one hand, the other hand hanging free. Dorothy Coe slowed and stopped and waited thirty feet away, a cautious distance, as if she already knew.

A long minute later the truck doors opened and the doctor climbed out. His wife slid across the vinyl and joined him. Then Dorothy Coe got out on her side. She stood still, shielded by the open door, one hand on its frame. Reacher blinked one last time and ran his free hand over his taped face and walked down to meet her. She was quiet for a moment, and then she started the same question twice, and stopped twice, before getting it all the way out on the third attempt.

She asked, 'Is she in there?'

Reacher said, 'Yes.'

'Are you sure?'

'Her bike is in there.'

'Still? After all these years? Are you sure it's hers?'

'It's as described in the police report.'

'It must be all rusted.'

'A little. It's dry in there.'

Dorothy Coe went quiet. She was staring at the western horizon, a degree or two south of the barn, as if she couldn't look directly at it. She was completely still, but her hand was clenched hard on the truck's door frame. Her knuckles were white.

She asked, 'Can you tell what happened to her?'

Reacher said, 'No,' which was technically true. He was no pathologist. But he had been a cop for a long time, and he knew a thing or two, and he could guess.

She said, 'I should go look.'

He said, 'Don't.'

'I have to.'

'Not really.'

'I want to.'

'Better if you don't.'

'You can't stop me.'

'I know.'

'You have no right to stop me.'

'I'm asking you, that's all. Please don't look.'

'I have to.'

'Better not.'

'I don't have to listen to you.'

'Then listen to her instead. Listen to Margaret. Pretend she grew up. Imagine what she would have become. She wouldn't have been a lawyer or a scientist. She loved flowers. She loved colours and forms. She would have been a painter or a poet. An artist. A smart, creative person. In love with life, and full of common sense, and full of concern for you, and full of wisdom. She'd look at you and she'd shake her head and smile and she'd say, come on, mom, do what the man says.'

'You think?'

'She'd say, mom, trust me on this.'

'But I have to see. After all these years of not knowing.'

'Better if you don't.'

'It's just her bones.'

'It's not just her bones.'

'What else can be left?'

'No,' Reacher said. 'I mean, it's not just her bones.'

Up on the 49th Parallel, the transfer was going exactly to plan. The white van had driven slowly south, through the last of Canada, and it had parked for the final time in a rough forest clearing a little more than two miles north of the border. The driver had gotten out and stretched and then taken a long coil of rope from the passenger foot well and walked around to the rear doors. He had opened them up and gestured urgently and the women and the girls had come on out immediately, with no reluctance, with no hesitation at all, because passage to America was what they wanted, what they had dreamed about, and what they had paid for.

There were sixteen of them, all from rural Thailand, six women and ten female children, average weight close to eighty pounds each, for a total payload of 1,260 pounds. The women were slim and attractive, and the girls were all eight years old or younger. They all stood and blinked in the morning light and looked up and around at the tall trees, and shuffled their feet a little, stiff and weary but excited and full of wonderment.

The driver herded them into a rough semicircle. He couldn't speak Thai and they couldn't understand English, so he started the same dumb show he had performed many times before. It was probably faster than talking anyway. First he patted the air to calm them down and get their attention. Then he raised a finger to his lips and twisted left, twisted right, tracking the whole length of the semicircle, a big exaggerated pantomime, so that they all saw, so that they all understood they had to be silent. He pointed at a spot on the ground and then cupped a hand behind his ear. There are sensors. The earth listens. The women nodded, deferential, keen to let him know they understood. He pointed to himself, and then to all of them, and then pointed south, and wiggled his fingers. Now we all have to walk. The women nodded again. They knew. They had been told at the outset. He used both hands, one and then the other, palms down, stepping on the air gently and delicately. He kept the gesture going and looked along the semicircle, making eye contact with each of his charges. We have to walk softly and keep very quiet. The women nodded eagerly, and the girls looked back at him shyly from behind their hair.

The driver uncoiled his rope and measured off six feet from the end and wrapped that point around the first woman's hand. He measured another six feet and wrapped the rope around the first girl's hand, and then the next, and then the second woman, and so on, until he had all sixteen joined together safely. The rope was a guide, that was all, not a restraint. Like a mobile hand-rail. It kept them all moving at the same pace in the same direction and it prevented any of them from wandering off and getting lost. The forest transfer was dangerous enough without having to double back and crash around, hunting for stragglers.

The driver picked up the free end of the rope and wrapped it around his own hand. Then he led them off, like a train, snaking south between bushes and trees. He walked slowly and softly and listened out for commotion behind him. There was none, as usual. Asian people knew how to keep quiet, especially illegals, especially women and girls.

But as quiet as they were, twenty minutes later they were clearly heard, in two separate locations, both more than six hundred miles away, first in Fargo, North Dakota, and then in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Or more accurately they were seen in both places, in that remote seismograph needles flickered a little as they passed over a buried sensor. But the deflection was minor, barely above the level of background noise. In Fargo, an employee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security checked back on his graph and thought: Deer. Maybe whitetails. Maybe a whole family. His counterpart in Canada checked his own graph and thought: A breeze, bringing clumps of snow down off the trees.

They walked on, slowly and carefully, treading lightly, patiently enduring the third of the four parts of their adventure. First had come the shipping container, and then had come the white van. Now came the hike, and then there would be another van. Everything had been explained beforehand, in great detail, in a small shipping office above a store in a town near their home. There were many such offices, and many such operations, but the one they had used was widely considered the best. The price was high, but the facilities were excellent. Their contact had assured them his only concern was that they arrive in America in the best of condition, as fresh as daisies. To that end, the shipping container, which would be their home for the longest of the four phases, was equipped with everything necessary. There were lamps inside with bulbs that simulated daylight, wired to automobile batteries. There were mattresses and blankets. There was plenty of food and water and there were chemical toilets. There was medicine. There were ventilation slots disguised as rust holes, and in case they weren't enough there was a fan that ran off the same batteries as the lights, and there were oxygen cylinders that could be bled slowly if the air got stuffy. There was an exercise machine, so they could keep in shape for the four-mile hike across the border itself. There were washing facilities, and lotions and moisturizers for their skin. They were told that the vans were equipped with the same kind of stuff, but less of it, because the road trips would be shorter than the sea voyage.

An excellent organization, that thought of everything.

And the best thing was that there was no bias shown against families with girl children. Some organizations would smuggle adults only, because adults could work immediately, and some allowed children, but older boys only, because they could work too, but this organization welcomed girls, and wasn't even upset if they were young, which was considered a very humane attitude. The only downside was that the sexes always had to travel separately, for the sake of decorum, so fathers were separated from mothers, and brothers from sisters, and then on this particular occasion they were told at the very last minute that the ship the men and the boys were due to sail on was delayed for some reason, so the women and the girls had been obliged to go on ahead. Which would be OK, they were told, because they would be well looked after at their destination, for as long as it took for the second ship to arrive.

They had been warned that the four-mile hike would be the hardest part of the whole trip, but it wasn't, really. It felt good to be out in the air, moving around. It was cold, but they were used to cold, because winter in Thailand was cold, and they had warm clothes to wear. The best part was when their guide stopped and raised his finger to his lips again and then traced an imaginary sideways line on the ground. He pointed beyond it and mouthed, 'America.' They walked on and passed the line one after the other and smiled happily and picked their way onward, across American soil at last, slowly and delicately, like ballet dancers.

The Duncan driver in the grey van on the Montana side of the border saw them coming about a hundred yards away. As always his Canadian counterpart was leading the procession, setting the pace, holding the rope. Behind him the shipment floated along, seemingly weightless, curving and snaking through the gaps between the trees. The Duncan driver opened his rear doors and stood ready to receive them. The Canadian handed over the free end of the rope, like he always did, like the baton in a relay race, and then he turned about and walked back into the forest and was lost to sight. The Duncan driver gestured into the truck, but before each of his passengers climbed aboard he looked at their faces and smiled and shook their hands, in a way his passengers took to be a formal welcome to their new country. In fact the Duncan driver was a gambling man, and he was trying to guess ahead of time which kid the Duncans would choose to keep. The women would go straight to the Vegas escort agencies, and nine of the girls would end up somewhere farther on down the line, but one of them would stay in the county, at least for a spell, or actually for ever, technically. Buy ten and sell nine, was the Duncan way, and the driver liked to look over the candidates and make a guess about which one was the lucky one. He saw four real possibilities, and then felt a little jolt of excitement about a fifth, not that she would be remotely recognizable by the time she was passed on to him.

Dorothy Coe stood behind her truck's open door for ten whole minutes. Reacher stood in front of her, watching her, hoping he was blocking her view of the barn, happy to keep on standing there as long as it took, ten hours or ten days or ten years, or for ever, anything to stop her going inside. Her gaze was a thousand miles away, and her lips were moving a little, as if she was rehearsing arguments with someone, look or don't look, know or don't know.

Eventually she asked, 'How many are in there?'

Reacher said, 'About sixty.'

'Oh my God.'

'Two or three a year, probably,' Reacher said. 'They got a taste for it. An addiction. There are no ghosts. Ghosts don't exist. What the stoner kid heard from time to time was real.'

'Who were they all?'

'Asian girls, I think.'

'You can tell that from their bones?'

'The last one isn't bones yet.'

'Where were they all from?'

'From immigrant families, probably. Illegals, almost certainly, smuggled in, for the sex trade. That's what the Duncans were doing. That's how they were making their money.'

'Were they all young?'

'About eight years old.'

'Are they buried?'

Reacher said, 'No.'

'They're just dumped in there?'

'Not dumped,' Reacher said. 'They're displayed. It's like a shrine.'

There was a long, long pause.

Dorothy Coe said, 'I should look.'

'Don't.'

'Why not?'

'There are photographs. Like a record. Like mementos. In silver frames.'

'I should look.'

'You'll regret it. All your life. You'll wish you hadn't.'

'You looked.'

'And I regret it. I wish I hadn't.'

Dorothy Coe went quiet again. She breathed in, and breathed out, and watched the horizon. Then she asked, 'What should we do now?'

Reacher said, 'I'm going to head over to the Duncan houses. They're all in there, sitting around, thinking everything is going just fine. It's time they found out it isn't.'

Dorothy Coe said, 'I want to come with you.'

Reacher said, 'Not a good idea.'

'I need to.'

'Could be dangerous.'

'I hope it is. Some things are worth dying for.'

The doctor's wife said, 'We're coming too. Both of us. Let's go, right now.'