But that night words came to him first.
Specifically four words, spoken by Alan King: plus whatever Karen wants. The coffee order. Two with cream and sugar, plus whatever Karen wants. Which attacked Reacher's impression of them as a team. Team members knew each other's coffee orders by heart. They had stood on line together a hundred times, in rest areas, in airports, at Starbucks, at shabby no-name shacks. They had ordered together in diners and in restaurants. They had fetched and carried for each other.
But King had not known how Karen liked her coffee.
Therefore Karen was not a team member, or not a regular team member, or perhaps she was a new team member. A recent addition to the roster. Which might explain why she wasn't talking. Perhaps she felt unsure of her place. Perhaps she simply didn't like her new associates. Perhaps they didn't like her. Certainly Alan King had spoken impatiently and even contemptuously about her, right in her presence. Like she wasn't there. He had said, Karen doesn't drive. After she hadn't ordered coffee, he had said, Nothing for Karen, then.
They were not a trio. King and McQueen were a duo, barely tolerating an interloper.
Sorenson met Goodman back on Karen Delfuenso's empty oil-stained driveway, and she told him about Delfuenso's kid.
'Jesus,' Goodman said. He glanced at the other neighbour's house. 'And the kid is in there now?'
'Unless she sleepwalks. And she's expecting to see her mommy in the morning.'
'We shouldn't tell her. Not yet. Not until we're sure.'
'We're not going to tell her. Not now. But we have to talk to the neighbour. It's still possible this whole thing is nothing. Something innocent might have come up, and Karen might have left a message.'
'You think?'
'No, not really. But we have to check.'
So they cut across the other lawn together and Sorenson tried to weight her knock so that a sleeping adult might hear it, but sleeping children wouldn't. Hard to do. Her first attempt woke nobody. Her second might have woken everybody. Certainly it brought a tired woman of about thirty to the door.
There had been no message from Karen Delfuenso.
SEVENTEEN
THE NEXT WORDS into Reacher's empty mind had been spoken by the grizzled old State Police sergeant: Not you. Eventually they led to numbers, first six, then three, then one. Six because they contained six letters, and three because each word had three letters, and taken together they had three vowels and three consonants. Reacher had no patience for people who claimed that y was a vowel.
Three, and six.
Good numbers.
A circle could be drawn through any three points not on a straight line.
Take any three consecutive numbers, the largest divisible by three, and add them up, and then add the digits of the result, again and again if necessary, until just a single number is left.
That number will be six.
But eventually the words Not you led past the number six, and then past the number three, and then all the way down to the number one, simply because of their content. Reacher had asked: Who are you looking for, sergeant? The sergeant had answered: Not you. Not: Not you guys or Not you people.
Not you.
They were looking for a lone individual.
Which was consistent with what had happened at the earlier roadblock. Reacher had gotten a better view back there, and he had seen men driving alone getting extra scrutiny.
But: Not you.
Which meant that the cops had at least a rough description of the guy they were looking for, and that Reacher categorically wasn't that guy. Why not? There could be a million reasons. Right off the bat Reacher was tall, white, old, and heavy. And so on, and so forth. Therefore the target might be short, black, young, and skinny. And so on, and so forth.
But the sergeant had paused first, and thought, and smiled. The Not you had been emphatic, and a little wry. Maybe even a little rueful. As if the difference between Reacher and the description had been a total contrast. Or completely drastic. But it wasn't possible to be drastically tall, unless they were looking for a dwarf or a midget, in which case the merest glance into the car would have sufficed. It wasn't possible to be drastically white. White or black was an everyday difference. No one thought of degrees of blackness or whiteness. Not any more. Reacher wasn't drastically old either, unless their target was a fetus. And Reacher wasn't outstandingly heavy, unless their target was practically skeletal.
Not you. Said right after Reacher's deliberate mistake about the guy's rank, which would have been understood as a pro-forma compliment, just one regular guy to another, probably one veteran to another. Common ground.
Not you. Emphatic, wry, rueful, and good-natured. Just one regular guy to another, one vet to another, right back, equally. Still surfing on the earlier stuff about the busted nose. Referring back to it, in a way. A continuation of the banter. Common ground, established and repeated.
Therefore the guy they were looking for didn't have a busted nose.
But then, most people didn't have a busted nose.
Which meant the sergeant had been generalizing. As if to say: I'm pretty sure our description would have included that nose of yours, for instance.
Which meant they had been told their target didn't have anything especially noticeable about him. No first-glance singularities. Nothing obvious. No scars, no tattoos, no missing ears, no glass eyes, no yard-long beard, no weird haircut.
Reacher had been a cop for thirteen years, and he remembered the rote expression very well: no distinguishing marks.
Sorenson and Goodman stepped over the muddy gutter again and climbed back into Goodman's car and Sorenson said, 'You should check in with your dispatcher. You should see if anyone reported a lone woman wandering about, maybe confused or disoriented. From now on our working hypothesis is that the two guys stole Delfuenso's car. And they might have hit her over the head to get it.'
'They might have killed her.'
'We have to hope for the best. So you should get your deputies to check the area behind the lounge, too. Very carefully. She could be unconscious in the shadows somewhere.'
'By now she'd be halfway frozen to death.'
'So you should do it quickly.'
So Goodman got on the radio, and Sorenson got on her cell, to check in with the distant troopers in two separate states. They were both negative on a pair of men travelling together, with average appearance and no distinguishing marks, and they were negative on bloodstained clothing, and they were negative on bladed weapons. Sorenson did the math in her head. The two guys were almost certainly already through. Time and space said so. But she asked the troopers to stay in place for another hour. The two guys could have had a flat tyre. Or some other kind of unexpected delay. She didn't want to have the roadblocks dismantled only for the guys to roll through the vacated space five minutes later.
Then she clicked off her call and Goodman told her his dispatcher hadn't heard a thing, and that all his deputies were searching hard, behind the Sin City lounge and all over town.
EIGHTEEN
REACHER DROVE ON, with Alan King fast asleep next to him and Don McQueen fast asleep behind him. Karen Delfuenso was still awake, still upright and tense. Reacher could feel her gaze on his face in the mirror. He glanced up and made eye contact. She was staring at him. Staring hard, as if mutely willing him to understand something.
Understand what? Then numbers came back to him, this time specifically thirteen, and two, and three, and one, and nine. Delfuenso had blinked out those numbers, in five separate sequences, between emphatic shakes of her head.
Why?
Communication of some kind?
A simple alphabetical code? The thirteenth letter of the alphabet was M. The second was B. The third was C. The first was A. The ninth was I.