The Midnight Line (13 page)

“The last time they spoke she got the impression Sanderson had a friend called Cyrus. She heard her say that name.”

“Cyrus?”

“Well, Cy, at least. As if he was in the room with her. Like, shut up, Cy, I'm on the phone. Said in a friendly way. Like she was comfortable with him. The sister says for a second she sounded happy.”

“Was that rare?”

“Very.”

“When was this?”

“A couple of years ago, she thinks. Maybe a bit less.”

“Is that all she got?”

“She said their conversations were usually very stiff. Are you OK, yes I'm OK. That kind of thing.”

“Maybe it wasn't Cy for Cyrus,” Reacher said. “Maybe it was Sy for Seymour. Which was Porterfield's first name. Scorpio told me he went by Sy. Let's go find where he lived. That would be my first move. There might still be something there. Or neighbors we can talk to.”

The old guy in the old post office had said Porterfield had lived in a log house up in the hills, maybe twenty miles down the dirt road, on one of the old ranches Reacher had seen on the university's map, behind fence lines as fine as the engraving on a hundred dollar bill. Bramall's Land Cruiser had a navigation screen that showed the dirt road, but not much else. So they watched the trip meter and drove west and counted the miles as they clicked by. The truck was as neat and competent as Bramall himself. It floated over the rough surface and felt like it could run forever.

Reacher asked, “What was the last time the sisters met face to face?”

Bramall said, “Seven years ago. After Sanderson's third deployment. The visit didn't go so well. I guess they decided not to repeat it. After that it was all on the phone.”

“Sanderson was wounded at some point.”

“I didn't know that. Mrs. Mackenzie never mentioned it.”

“She might not have known about it. Sanderson might not have told her.”

“Why wouldn't she?”

“It happens a lot. It's a complex dynamic. Maybe she didn't want to upset her family. Or appear diminished in any way. Or weak. Or to appear to be asking for sympathy. Or help. Or to avoid a told-you-so moment. Sounds like her sister didn't like the army.”

“Wounded how bad?”

“I don't know,” Reacher said. “All I know is she got a Purple Heart. Which can be anything from a scratch to losing a limb. Or all of them. Some of those people came home in a hell of a mess.”

The mileage counter showed eight miles gone. Bramall was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “You sure you want to do this? I don't see how the outcome can be good. She's either all messed up or a junkie or both. She might not want to be found.”

“In which case I'll leave her alone. I'm not trying to save the world. I just want to know.”

Ten miles gone. Either side of the road the high plains were getting higher. The mountain foothills rippled and folded, and tongues of conifer forest came and went. The sky was huge and high and impossibly blue, like a sapphire on the horizon, shading to deep navy way overhead. Like a Kodak photograph. Like the edge of outer space. The wind was getting up. The dust plume behind them was pulling south off the road.

“PTSD too,” Bramall said. “I guess they all have that.”

“I guess they do,” Reacher said.

Fourteen miles. Aspen groves blazed like flares on the slopes. Whole copses of hundreds of separate trees, but all joined together underground by a single root. An aspen wood was all one organism. The largest living thing on earth.

Bramall said, “Did the guy mean twenty miles to the house itself, or twenty miles to the end of the driveway?”

“The driveway,” Reacher said. “I guess. That's how it worked with Billy's place. Except the guy underestimated. He called it about twenty percent short.”

“So his twenty miles could be twenty-five.”

“Unless sometimes he overestimates also. Maybe he's an all-around inaccurate guy, on a number of levels and a random basis. Which could make his twenty miles sixteen. Which would give us a nine-mile window.”

“Then logically we should take the next track we see. Unlikely to be two in a nine-mile distance. This is Wyoming. Therefore the first track is our track, however sooner or later it comes.”

“Not bad for the FBI,” Reacher said.

The track came bang in the middle of the nine-mile stretch, at twenty miles from the post office exactly. Score one for the old guy. It was a right turn off the dirt road, under a high ranch gate, which had a name on it, spelled out in letters so weathered Reacher couldn't read them. Then the track ran straight north for close to a mile, before rising and curving west through the trees, out of sight, toward an unseen destination.

Bramall stopped the truck.

He said, “From my point of view this kind of thing is perfectly normal. I drive up to hundreds of houses. Sometimes there's yelling and sometimes there are dogs, but no one has ever discharged a weapon in my direction. We should talk about how you think those odds might change, with you in the car right next to me.”

“You want me to get out and walk?” Reacher said. “Feel safer that way?”

“It's a tactical discussion. Worst case, Billy took over Porterfield's house as well as his business, and he's in there now. He wasn't in his other place, after all.”

“Why would he want two places?”

“Some people do.”

“Not twenty miles apart. They have a house on the lake.”

“There were no heirs or relatives. Why wouldn't Billy take it?”

“Doesn't matter if he did. Doesn't matter if he's in there now. He never got the phone message. He doesn't know me from Adam. He'll think we're Mormons.”

“You're not dressed like a Mormon.”

“So you go knock on the door. Just in case. If he's there, tell him you're a Mormon who is coincidentally also in the snowplow business, and you want to talk to him about insurance against global warming.”

The truck moved on. The track ran through the wooded slopes five more miles, always rough, with deep baked ruts in places, and worn gravel, and flat rocks the size of tables. The Land Cruiser nodded from side to side, and soldiered on. All the way through a final curve, and up a sudden sharp rise, to a stadium-sized plateau, full of trees, except for a home site set about a third of the way in. It had a long low log house, with wide porches all around, all in the center of a slightly tended acre, behind an informal fence made up of posts and rails twisted and grayed by the wind and the weather. Bramall drove in, and parked a respectful distance from the house. There were tatters of crime scene tape on the porch rails either side of the entrance. As if at one time the house was roped off.

“This wasn't the crime scene,” Bramall said. “The guy died in the woods.”

“He was found in the woods,” Reacher said. “Maybe the sheriff thought that was a whole different thing entirely. We know he searched here. He found a car with a lot of miles, and ten grand in the closet.”

“Where is Billy right now?”

“Why worry about him?”

“I'm not. But you should. Scorpio was ordering a homicide.”

“Billy's not here. What are the odds? Plus he didn't get the message. He doesn't know Scorpio gave me Porterfield's name. So why would he come here to Porterfield's house? What were the odds we would ever find it anyway? Who knew the old post office guy was so good at guessing distances? Billy is somewhere else and this place is empty.”

“OK,” Bramall said.

He got out of the car and went to knock on the door.

A purposeful stride.

Reacher saw him knock, and he heard the sound, loud and clear, a fraction delayed by the distance, like a mismatched movie soundtrack.

He saw Bramall step back politely.

No one came to the door.

No movement anywhere.

Bramall knocked again.

The same no reaction.

He walked back and got in the truck, and said, “This place is empty.”

Reacher said, “How do you feel about going in?”

“It's all closed up.”

“We could break a window.”

“Legally we have to ask ourselves if the county owns it now. Which it might, officially. Because of the unpaid taxes. Breaking into county property is a big step. You can't fight city hall.”

“Maybe you smelled a suspicious smell, or thought you heard something. Like a despairing cry. The kind of thing that would justify a warrantless search. Did you?”

“No,” Bramall said.

“You're retired,” Reacher said. “You don't have to stick to FBI bullshit anymore.”

“What would be the army approach? Set the place on fire?”

“No, that would be the Marine Corps approach. The army would conduct a careful survey of the exterior, and by great good fortune would discover a pane of glass previously broken by persons unknown, at a previous time, maybe long ago, or even just recently, which if true would reasonably suggest an ongoing emergency inside, which in turn would justify a good look around. I don't think the Supreme Court could argue with that.”

“Previously broken either recently or a long time ago?”

“Obviously any sounds you hear in real time will be me, accidentally stepping on previously broken glass left lying on the porch ever since the unknown previous incident. That can sound very like a freshly breaking window. It's a common illusion.”

“That's a standard FBI trick too. We weren't all bullshit.”

“Some of you came to us for training.”

“And some of you came to us.”

“I'm going to conduct a careful survey,” Reacher said.

He got out of the car.

It was a big house, but an easy survey, because the porch ran all the way around the structure, flat and level and true, and it served up all the first-floor doors and windows at a convenient height for inspection. Reacher started at the front, with the door Bramall had knocked on, which was a solid wooden affair, locked tight, and way too much effort to break down. So he moved on, to a hallway window, which would have taken no effort at all to get through, except it was on the front of the house, and even in the uninhabited middle of nowhere some ancient part of his brain sounded a warning. The front was never good. Not during, and not even afterward. Why leave after-action evidence in plain view? Not that there would be much. A discreet punched-out hole in the glass, about the size of a big man's elbow, and a slit insect screen rippling in the breeze. That would be all. Not much. But maybe enough to catch a passerby's eye. Always safer if that kind of thing happened later, not sooner, for all kinds of reasons.

The back was better.

Reacher walked down the side of the house, past five more windows all the same as the front. Which made it likely the windows in back would be all the same, too. Some kind of a unifying design theme. Or some kind of a big discount for a bulk purchase. But either way was good news. Windows like that were easy.

He turned the corner, and the first window he came to was broken.

It had a hole punched through it, about the size of a big man's elbow.

The insect screen was slit.

The broken glass was dirty, and the screen was mildewed. A year, maybe more. At least four seasons of wind and weather. Inside was a kitchen. Countertops that should have been shiny were dull with dust. Beyond the kitchen was a dining area, all gloom and shadows.

He walked the long way around the porches, and back to the car. Bramall had gotten out again. He was standing in a no-man's-land patch of dirt about thirty feet from the house.

Reacher said, “I found a busted window.”

“Nicely done,” Bramall said. “I didn't hear a thing.”

“For real. An actual busted window. Previously broken by persons unknown. A year or more ago, by the look of it. Exactly how we would have done it.”

“Show me,” Bramall said.

Reacher led him along the front porch, and the side porch, and around the corner to the back. Bramall took a good long look. He seemed impressed by the mildew. He said, “A year at least. Let's say a year and a half. Why not? Let's say this happened right after Porterfield died. Was it the sheriff? You told me he searched the place.”

“The sheriff had the keys,” Reacher said. “He found them in Porterfield's pocket. That's how they identified him, along with his teeth. So the sheriff didn't need to break in. This was someone else, who didn't have the keys.”

“Squatters, maybe.”

“They wouldn't bust the kitchen window. The kitchen is a room they would want to use. They would have bust a window somewhere else.”

“Ordinary burglars, then.”

“Possible. We'll know by how much mess they made.”

“We're still going inside?”

“We were before,” Reacher said. “I don't see why we shouldn't now. This is practically an open invitation. We have a duty as citizens.”

“To call the sheriff, technically.”

“It's a gray area. The owner is dead. There are no heirs. It's a different situation. People read whole books about this kind of thing in law school. I'm sure the sheriff doesn't want to get in a big long discussion. Plus this could be where she called her sister. Right here. When she said, shut up, Sy, I'm on the phone. Had to be his place or hers. Either way she spent time here. So you know we're going in.”

“I know I am,” Bramall said. “But you're under no obligation.”

“You looking out for me now?”

“I feel I ought to point out the legal downside.”

“I get it. You want me to go first. So you can say to yourself the worst thing you ever did was get all swept up. You want me to be the bad guy. Because you have scruples.”

“Not as such. What I have is a license from the state of Illinois. Which I would like to keep. Doesn't matter who goes first. What matters is, it would count against me if I didn't explicitly caution a junior partner against potential legal jeopardy.”

“Are we partners?”

“Effectively.”

“Junior and senior?”

“By age and experience.”

“Do you have to explicitly caution me every step of the way?”

“Technically, yes.”

“Let's not do that part, OK? Let's take it as read. More fun that way.”

“OK,” Bramall said. “You want fun, you go first.”

Bramall's contribution was to stick his arm in through the hole in the glass and wind the window open with the inside handle. Reacher's jacket was new, and his shirt was new. He didn't want to smear either one of them with mildew, which he would if he pushed through the slit in the screen, like the original intruder or intruders must have, a year or more ago, back when the screen was clean. So he tore it out of its frame, all the way around, and folded it in a ragged square, and dropped it on the porch.

Best way into a kitchen was face down and feet first. Because of the countertop. You stood a chance of ending the maneuver standing on your feet, not your hands. But it was hard to set up. It required a contortion. Worse if there was a sink under the window, with a tap. Which could get to the wrong place at the wrong time. But Porterfield's sink was on a different wall. Which helped. A little.

Reacher felt his legs swim free, and he jack-knifed at the waist, and planted his feet, and pushed himself upright. Inside, looking out. The kitchen was a little weather-beaten, because of the hole in the glass, but it had started out expensive. That was clear. The wood was thick, and the granite was thicker. There were appliances made out of stainless steel. They all had clock screens, dark and blank. There was absolute silence. No subliminal hum, no rustle in the pipes. No power, no water. No one paying the bills. All closed up.

He moved on through the gloom, out of the kitchen, into the dining area. From where he saw the living room, all open plan, with a complicated cathedral ceiling, and a full-height rock fireplace, made out of stones the size of tractor tires.

A trophy cabin. Authentic designs didn't have fireplaces built with forklift trucks and hydraulic cranes. They used smaller rocks. And why make a weird ceiling, where a flat one would fit?

But it was a lived-in trophy cabin. Reacher didn't hate it. The log walls were stained a light honey shade. The furniture looked comfortable but unobtrusive. There were weird collections on shelves. Animal skulls, interesting stones, interesting pine cones. Almost a family feel. A rich-family feel.

He walked back to the kitchen. To the broken window. Bramall was looking in at him.

Reacher said, “Nothing to worry about. It's like a time capsule. Which rules out a burglary. Because nothing is out of place. The dust is a uniform thickness everywhere. There's no mess at all. Which I guess rules out squatters too.”

“I'm coming in,” Bramall said.

He was stiffer in the joints than Reacher, but those joints started out much closer together, because he was smaller, so overall his maneuver was easier. He pushed himself upright, and looked around the same way Reacher had. Kitchen, dining area, living room.

Undisturbed.

Bramall said, “Not what I expected.”

“In what way?” Reacher said.

“If I had a cabin it might look like this.”

“Dope dealers don't have taste?”

“Not usually.”

Reacher checked the hallway.

He said, “There are bedrooms at both ends.”

Bramall said, “If it wasn't burglars or squatters, who broke the window?”

“Not the sheriff,” Reacher said. “But like the sheriff. A pro with a reason to search.”

“But where's the mess? Pro searchers tear a place apart.”

“Maybe they found what they wanted the first place they looked. Maybe that's what it means to be a pro. Or maybe they knew where it was all along. Maybe they came to get something back.”

“Get what back?”

“I don't care,” Reacher said. “All I want to do is find Sanderson.”

“You think she was here. Back when she was dating a dope dealer worth getting gut shot or stabbed in the stomach.”

“You're her older brother now?”

“I doubt the relationship would have happened. She would have done better for herself.”

“She said, shut up, Sy, I'm on the phone. Even the uptight twin called it friendly and comfortable and happy. Best case, they were real good friends.”

“Even worse,” Bramall said. “You choose your friends.”

“Either way, they spent time together. Here, and her place. Wherever that is.”

“A year and a half ago.”

“Better than nothing.”

“If your Sy is the right Sy.”

“Fifty-fifty right or wrong. Not bad odds.”

Bramall took out his phone.

“Two bars,” he said. “She could have called from here.”

“What did the cell records say?”

“You need three masts to triangulate. There's only one here. Omnidirectional. She was calling from somewhere inside a giant circular area about the size of New Jersey. That's all we know.”

“Could have been here. No reason why not.”

Bramall moved to the center of the living room. He said, “It was a year and a half ago and this place has been searched twice since then. And if you're right about someone getting something back, then the most important thing we could have found is already gone. So this is about looking for what two other parties missed. Which is slow work. How long have we got?”

“Out here, about a hundred years, I would think,” Reacher said. “Pull your car around the back, and we could move in and live here forever. No one would ever know.”

“OK, we'll search together. No look-out. Two heads are better than one.”

They found the first missed item in less than a minute.