Chenko squatted down next to her. Waited a moment for the body to settle and then felt the neck for a pulse. There wasn't one.
"You broke her neck," he said.
Vladimir nodded.
"It's about placement," he said. "The main vector is mostly sideways, obviously, but you try for a little rotation, too. So it's not so much a break. It's more like a wrenching action. Like a hangman's noose."
"Is your hand OK?"
"It will be tender tomorrow."
"Good work."
"I try my best."
They unlocked the car and raised the rear armrest and laid the body across the back seat. There was just enough space, side to side. She had been a small girl. Not tall. Then they got in the front together and drove off. They looped well to the east and came up on the Metropole Palace from behind. They avoided the bay where the garbage was piled and found a side alley. They stopped outside a fire exit. Vladimir slid out and opened the rear door. Pulled the body out by the shoulders and left it where it fell. Then he got back in. Chenko drove on and paused after five yards and turned in his seat. The body was lying in a heap against the alley's far wall. Directly opposite the fire door. It looked like a plausible scenario. She had fled the soldier's room in shame and panic, chosen not to wait for the elevator, and run down the fire stairs and out into the night. Maybe she had stumbled at that point and aggravated an injury already done to her. Maybe she had tripped and fallen against the wall, and the shock had dislodged an already-wrenched vertebra.
Chenko turned back and faced front and drove on, not fast, not slow, not drawing attention, not standing out, eight miles north and west, all the way back to the Zec's house.
Chapter 8
Reacher woke himself up at seven in the morning and went out to check for a tail and to look for a drugstore. He walked a zigzag half-mile and saw nobody behind him. He found a drugstore two blocks east of the motor court and bought black coffee in a cardboard cup, a pack of throwaway razors, a can of shaving foam, and a new tube of toothpaste. He carried his purchases back by a roundabout route and put his clothes back under the mattress and sat on the bed and drank the coffee. Then he showered and shaved, using his full twenty-two- minute routine. He washed his hair twice. Then he dressed again and went out for breakfast to the only place he could find, which was the drive-through he had seen the day before. It had a small counter inside. He had more coffee and an English muffin filled with a round piece of ham and something that might have once been egg, first dried and powdered and then reconstituted. His threshold of culinary acceptability was very low, but right then he felt he might be pushing at the bottom edge of his personal envelope.
He followed the muffin with a piece of lemon pie, for a sugar hit. It was better than the muffin, so he had a second piece, with a second cup of coffee. Then he walked south to the barbershop. He pulled the door and sat down in the chair at eight-thirty exactly.
By which time the homicide investigation outside the Metropole Palace was already three hours old. The body in the alley had been discovered at half-past five in the morning by a cleaner coming in to work. The cleaner was a middle-aged man from Honduras. He didn't touch the body. Didn't check for vital signs. The way it was lying there told him all he needed to know. The slack emptiness of death is recognizable anywhere. The guy just rushed inside and told the night porter. Then he went home again, because he had no green card and didn't want to be around a police investigation. The night porter dialed 911 from the desk phone and then went out through the fire door to take a look. Came back inside thirty seconds later, not having enjoyed it.
Two patrol cars and an ambulance showed up within eight minutes. Paramedics confirmed the DOA and the ambulance went away. The patrolmen blocked off the alley and the fire exit and then took a statement from the night porter. He said he had stepped out for some air and discovered the body himself, to protect the illegal from Honduras. It was close to true. Certainly the patrolmen had no reason to doubt his word. They just stood back and waited for Emerson.
Emerson got there by six twenty-five. He brought his number two, a woman called Donna Bianca, and the city ME, and Bellantonio himself to run the crime scene. Technical work occupied the first thirty minutes. Measurement, photography, the accumulation of trace evidence. Then Emerson got the OK and stepped close to the body and ran into his first major problem. The girl had no purse and no ID. Nobody had the slightest idea who she was.
Ann Yanni showed up behind the Metropole at seven-fifteen. She had an NBC crew with her, consisting of a cameraman and a sound guy with a microphone on a long boom. The microphone had a gray fur wind sock on it and the boom was ten feet long. The guy put his hips against the police tape and extended his arms as far as he could and heard Emerson's voice in his headphones. Emerson was talking to Bianca about prostitution.
The ME had checked the girl's arms and thighs and between her toes and found no needle tracks. So she hadn't been there to score. So maybe she was hooking. Who else would come out the side door of a downtown hotel in the middle of the night, dressed like that? She was young and she still had her looks. Therefore she wouldn't have been cheap. Therefore she would have been carrying a big purse full of twenties that had just come out of some businessman's ATM. She had run into somebody waiting for her. Either somebody waiting for her specifically, or somebody waiting on the off chance for someone like her. Whoever, he had snatched her purse and hit her in the head, a little harder than necessary.
A nineteen- or twenty-year-old who wasn't an addict wouldn't necessarily have been fingerprinted, unless she had a vice conviction somewhere. Emerson wasn't willing to count on that, therefore he didn't expect to discover her identity through the databases. He expected to discover it inside the hotel, either from the night porter who had pimped her in and out, or through the john who had called her.
"Nobody leaves," he said to Bianca. "We'll talk to all the guests and all the staff one by one. So find a room somewhere. And tell all units to be on the lookout for a guy with more new twenties than he should have."
"A big guy," Bianca said.
Emerson nodded. "A real big guy. That was some punch."
The ME took the body away to the morgue and Donna Bianca commandeered the hotel bar and the interviews were two-thirds through by eight-thirty in the morning.
The barber was a competent old guy who had probably been cutting the same style for close to fifty years. He went for what the military would have called a whitewall. He left an inch and a half on the top and used his clippers to shave the bottom and the sides up toward it. Then he flipped the clippers over and squared off the sideburns and cleaned the fuzz off the neck. It was a style Reacher was familiar with. He had worn it most of his life, except for periods when he had been too lazy to care, and a couple of six-month stretches when he had favored an all-over number-one buzz cut.
The barber did the thing with the hand mirror, to show Reacher the back.
"Happy?" he asked.
Reacher nodded. It looked OK, except that there was a half-inch margin all around where his skin was dead white. He had had longer hair in Miami and the tan hadn't penetrated. The barber brushed the clippings off his collar and removed the towel. Reacher gave him his seven bucks and tipped him a dollar. Then he walked around the block. Nobody followed him. He unlocked his room and washed his face and shaved under his sideburns again. There was a new half-inch of stubble there. The barber's clippers had been a little blunt.