Or both.
A minute later Peterson stopped talking and hung up. He looked worried. Expert in a casual way with all the local stuff, a little out of his depth with anything else. He said, 'We've got a guy shot to death in a car.'
Reacher said, 'Who?'
'The plates come back to a lawyer from the next county. He's had five client conferences up at the jail. All of them since we busted the biker. Like you said. He's their parallel track. And now their plan is made. So they're cleaning house and breaking the chain.'
'Worse than that,' Reacher said.
Peterson nodded. 'I know. Their guy isn't on his way. We missed him. He's already here.'
Chapter Thirteen
TWICE PETERSON TRIED TO GET OUT OF THE SQUAD ROOM AND twice he had to duck back to answer a phone. Eventually he made it to the corridor. He looked back at Reacher and said, 'You want to ride along with me?'
Reacher asked, 'You want me there?'
'If you like.'
'I really need to be somewhere else.'
'Where?'
'I should go introduce myself to Mrs Salter.'
'What for?'
'I want to know the lie of the land. Just in case.'
Peterson said, 'Mrs Salter is covered. I made sure of that. Don't worry about it.' Then he paused and said, 'What? You think they're going to move on her today? You think this dead lawyer is a diversion?'
'No, I think they're breaking the chain. But it looks like I'm going to be here a couple of days. Because of the snow. If that escape siren goes off any time soon, then I'm all you've got. But I should introduce myself to the lady first.'
Peterson said nothing.
Reacher said, 'I'm trying to be helpful, that's all. To repay your hospitality.'
Peterson said nothing.
Reacher said, 'I'm not your guy.'
'I know that.'
'But?'
'You could be helpful at the crime scene.'
'You'll be OK. You know what to do, right? Take plenty of photographs and pay attention to tyre tracks and footprints. Look for shell cases.'
'OK.'
'But first call your officers in Mrs Salter's house. I don't want a big panic when I walk up the driveway.'
'You don't know where she lives.'
'I'll find it.'
In summer it might have taken ten minutes to find Mrs Salter's house. In the snow it took closer to thirty, because lines of sight were limited and walking was slow. Reacher retraced the turns that the prison bus had made, struggling through drifts, slogging through unploughed areas, slipping and sliding along vehicle ruts. It was still snowing hard. The big white flakes came down on him, came up at him, whipped all around him. He found the main drag south. He knew that ahead of him was the restaurant. Beyond that was the parked cop car. He kept on going. He was very cold, but he was still functioning. The new clothes were doing their job, but nothing more.
There were cars heading north and south, lights on, wipers thrashing. Not many of them, but enough to keep him on the shoulder and out of the tyre tracks, which would have been easier going. He guessed the roadway under the snow was wide, but right then traffic was confining itself to two narrow lanes near the centre, made of four separate parallel ruts. Each passing car confirmed the collective decision not to wander. With each passing tyre the ruts grew a little deeper and their side walls grew a little higher. The snow was dry and firm. The ruts were lined on the bottom with broken lattices of tread prints, smooth and greasy and stained brown in places.
Reacher passed the restaurant. The lunch hour was in full swing. The windows were fogged with steam. Reacher struggled on. Four hundred yards later he saw the parked cop car. It had pulled out of the southbound ruts and broken through the little walls and made smaller ruts of its own, like a railroad switch. It had parked parallel with the traffic and was completely blocking the side street. Its motor was turned off but its roof lights were turning. The cop in the driver's seat was not moving his head. He was just staring through the windshield, looking neither alert nor enthusiastic. Reacher slogged through a wide turn and approached him from his front left side. He didn't want to surprise the guy.
The cop buzzed the window down. Called out, 'Are you Reacher?'
Reacher nodded. His face felt too cold for coherent speech. The cop's name plate said Montgomery. He was unshaven and overweight. Somewhere in his late twenties. In the army his ass would have been kicked to hell and back a hundred times. He said, 'The Salter house is ahead on the left. You can't miss it.'
Reacher struggled on. There were no big ruts in the side street. Just two lone tracks, one car coming, one car going. The tracks were already mostly refilled with snow. The change of watch, some hours earlier. The night guy going home, the day guy coming in. The day guy had gunned it a little after the turn. His tracks slalomed through a minor fishtail before straightening.
The street curved gently and was lined on both sides by big old houses in big flat lots. The houses looked Victorian. They could have been a hundred years old. They had all been prosperous once and most of them still were. Clearly they had been built during an earlier boom. They predated the federal prison dollars by a century. Their details were obscured by snow, but they had heft and solidity and gingerbread trim. Peterson had called Janet Salter a storybook grandma, and Reacher had expected a storybook grandma's house to be a small cottage with gingham curtains. Especially considering this storybook grandma had been a teacher and a librarian. Maybe Janet Salter had a different kind of story. Reacher was looking forward to meeting her. He had never known either one of his own grandmothers. He had seen a black and white photograph of himself as a baby on a stern woman's knee. His father's mother, he had been told. His mother's mother had died when he was four, before ever having visited.
The second cop car was parked up ahead. No lights. It was facing him. The cop inside was watching him closely. Reacher floundered onward and stopped ten feet short. The cop opened his door and climbed out and tracked around. His boots set powder flying and small snowballs skittering. He said, 'Are you Reacher?'
Reacher nodded.
'I have to search you.'
'Says who?'
'The deputy chief.'
'Search me for what?'
'Weapons.'
'She's more than seventy years old. I wouldn't need weapons.'
'True. But you'd need weapons to get past the officers in the house.'
This cop was a sharp-looking guy the right side of middle age. Compact, muscled, competent. A department of two halves, one better, one worse. A new hire at the end of the street, an old hand outside the house. Reacher planted his feet and unzipped his coat and stood with his arms held wide. Cold air rushed in under his coat. The cop patted him down and squeezed his coat pockets from both sides at once.
'Go ahead,' he said. 'They're expecting you.'
The driveway was long and the house was ornate. It could have been airlifted straight from Charleston or San Francisco. It had all the bells and whistles. A wraparound rocking-chair porch, dozens of windows, fish scale siding. It had turrets, and more stained glass than a church. Reacher made it up the steps on to the porch and clumped across the boards and stamped the snow off his boots. The front door was a carved multi-panelled thing. It had a bell pull next to it, a cast weight on the end of a wire that looped over pulleys and entered the house through a small bronze eye. Probably ordered by mail from Sears Roebuck a century ago, and delivered by wagon in a wooden box packed with straw, and fitted by a man more used to cart wheels and horseshoes.
Reacher pulled on it. He heard a chime deep inside the house, delayed by a second, low and polite and sonorous. Another second later a policewoman opened the door. She was small and dark and young and was in full uniform. Her gun was in its holster. But the holster was unsnapped, and she looked to be fully on the ball. Women officers in the house, Peterson had said, the best we've got, minimum of four at all times, two awake, two asleep.