Nothing to Lose

Vaughan.

She was in uniform. Her HPD cruiser was parked neatly behind her. She was staring in at him, openly curious. Not an unusual reaction.Look at yourself. What do you see? He was a spectacular meso-morph, built of nothing except large quantities of bone and sinew and muscle. But with his shirt off most people saw only his scars. He had a dozen minor nicks and cuts, plus a dimpled.38 bullet hole in the left center of his chest, and a wicked spider web of white lacerations low down on the right side of his abdomen, all criss-crossed and puckered by seventy clumsy stitches done quick and dirty in a mobile army surgical hospital. Souvenirs, in the first instance of childhood mayhem, in the second of a psychopath with a small revolver, and in the third, shrapnel from a bomb blast. Survivable, because childhood mayhem was always survivable, and because the.38 that hit him had been packed with a weak load, and because the shrapnel had been someone else’s bone, not white-hot metal. He had been a lucky man, and his luck was written all over his body.

Ugly, but fascinating.

Vaughan’s gaze traveled upward to his face.

“Bad news,” she said. “I went to the library.”

“You get bad news at libraries?”

“I looked at some books and used their computer.”

“And?”

“Trichloroethylene is called TCE for short. It’s a metal degreaser.”

“I know that.”

“It’s very dangerous. It causes cancer. Breast cancer, prostate cancer, all kinds of cancers. Plus heart disease, problems with the nervous system, strokes, liver disease, kidney disease, even diabetes. The EPA says a concentration of five parts per billion is acceptable. Some places have been measured twenty or thirty times worse than that.”

“Like where?”

“There was a case in Te

“That’s a long way from here.”

“This is serious, Reacher.”

“People worry too much.”

“This isn’t a joke.”

He nodded.

“I know,” he said. “And Thurman uses five thousand gallons at a time.”

“And we drink the groundwater.”

“You drink bottled water.”

“Lots of people use tap.”

“The plant is twenty miles away. There’s a lot of sand. A lot of natural filtration.”

“It’s still a concern.”

Reacher nodded. “Tell me about it. I had two cups of coffee right there. One in the restaurant and one at the judge’s house.”

“You feel OK?”

“Fine. And people seem OK here.”

“So far.”

She went quiet.

He said, “What else?”

“Maria is missing. I can’t find her anywhere. The new girl.”

42

Vaughan hung around in the open doorway and Reacher grabbed his clothes and dressed in the bathroom. He called out, “Where did you look?”

“All over,” Vaughan called back. “She’s not here in the motel, she’s not in the diner, she’s not in the library, she’s not out shopping, and there isn’t anywhere else to go.”

“Did you speak to the motel clerk?”

“Not yet.”

“Then that’s where we’ll go first. She knows everything.” He came out of the bathroom, buttoning his shirt. The shirt was almost due for the trash, and the buttonholes were still difficult. He ran his fingers through his hair and checked his pockets.

“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.”