The Midnight Line

  Bramall said, “That was a year and a half ago?”

  Reacher nodded. “The start of spring last year.”

  “Which was when my client got worried.”

  “If you say so.”

  “And you’re here in his house because you think Billy replaced Porterfield in the ring-transportation business?”

  “I think it’s likely.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll show you,” Reacher said. He checked the view again, both ways, and saw no one coming. He led Bramall into the house, and up the stairs, and to Billy’s bedroom. To the closet. He showed him the shoeboxes, one crammed with cash, the other rattling and tinkling with cheap gold jewelry.

  “Drug dealers,” Bramall said. “Don’t you think? Small time. Home-cooked meth or cheap heroin up from Mexico. Twenty bucks sees you right, and if you can’t pay you trade your rings and your necklaces. Or you steal someone else’s.”

  “I thought it was all pain pills now,” Reacher said.

  “That boom is over,” Bramall said. “Now it’s back to how it used to be. Scorpio is the wholesaler, employing first Porterfield and now Billy as his local retailer, using the first guy as a decoy and secretly telling the second guy to get rid of you. He doesn’t like scrutiny.”

  “Possible,” Reacher said.

  “You got another coherent explanation?”

  “Who’s your client?”

  “A woman in Lake Forest named Tiffany Jane Mackenzie. Serena Rose Sanderson’s twin sister. Married, hence the different name. They were close as children, but pretty soon went their separate ways. Mackenzie’s living the dream. Big house, rich husband. She didn’t altogether approve of her sister’s career choice. But blood is thicker than water. There was occasional contact. Until the start of spring last year. How thorough was the investigation about the bear and the mountain lion?”

  “Very,” Reacher said. “By rural standards, anyway. The sheriff looks solid. There was only one body, and it was all Porterfield. They knew from his dental records and the keys in his pocket.”

  “So you think Sanderson is still alive?”

  “Probably. The ring showed up in Rapid City about six weeks ago, and in Wisconsin about two weeks later. I’m guessing they move stuff along pretty quickly. The sheriff said Porterfield’s car had a lot of miles. He was probably running back and forth pretty regularly. I imagine Billy is too. What we’ve got here in the shoebox is probably just a few weeks’ worth. The sheriff said Porterfield had cash in his closet too. A similar amount. Small time, maybe, but it seems to add up.”

  “So where is Billy now?”

  Reacher stepped to the window and checked the view. No one coming, either east or west. He said, “I have no idea where Billy is. There are dishes in the sink. Feels like he stepped out for a minute.”

  “Show me the phone.”

  Reacher led Bramall down the stairs, to the small parlor in back. To the phone on the desk. Bramall stabbed at buttons and played the message again. He’s like the Incredible Hulk. Don’t even let him see you. But get on it, OK? He’s got to go, because he’s a random loose end.

  Bramall said, “You took a risk coming here.”

  “Getting up in the morning is a risk. Anything could happen.”

  “Did you know Sanderson?”

  “No,” Reacher said. “I was already out eight years before 2005.”

  “Then what’s your interest?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “I felt sad when I saw the ring. Simple as that. It wasn’t right.”

  “You a West Pointer too?”

  “Long time ago.”

  “Where’s your ring?”

  “I didn’t buy one.”

  Bramall pressed more buttons. Checked the call log, looked for old voicemails. Didn’t find any. He went to another menu and chose a keep-as-new option. The screen went back to announcing one new message, the way it was when Reacher found it. Deniability. Score one for the Bureau.

  Bramall said, “Leaving dishes in his sink doesn’t mean much. Maybe he’s just a slob. Leaving the phone at home doesn’t necessarily mean much either. Probably doesn’t work in the hills. No signal. Right here he’s got a direct line of sight to the tower in Laramie. Maybe he never carries a phone with him.”

  Reacher said, “Scorpio seems to have expected some kind of an instant response.”

  “Do you believe the story about the bears and the mountain lions?”

  “The sheriff has his doubts. He thinks maybe Porterfield was stabbed or gut shot and dumped in the woods to let nature take its course.”

  “Maybe Billy did it. Maybe he took over from Porterfield by force. Like an armed coup. Now maybe someone else has done the same thing to Billy. Live by the sword, die by the sword. What goes around comes around.”

  “I don’t care,” Reacher said. “I’m here to find Sanderson. That’s all.”

  “Might not be a happy ending. Not if she traded her ring to a two-bit dope dealer. You might not like what you find.”

  “Someone else might have stolen it. You said so yourself.”

  “I sure hope so,” Bramall said. “Because sooner or later I’ll have to give the sister the news. And then give her my invoice. Sometimes that doesn’t go down so well.”

  “How big of an invoice?”

  “She has a house on the lake. She can afford it.”

  “You worth it?”

  “Usually.”

  “So what’s your next move?”

  “I think she’s close by. This feels like the end of the line. I think Billy is the final interface with the public. We’re down to one degree of separation. Either she gave the ring to him herself or a neighbor stole it and gave it to him.”

  “Not bad for the FBI,” Reacher said. “Plus Billy drives the snowplow. He knows all the local roads. Ideal cover for getting around and supplying his customers. Never held up by the weather, either. But his retail territory must be huge. Like you said, two blocks is seventy miles out here. All the way to Sanderson’s childhood home, as a matter of fact. I assume you’ve already looked there?”

  “The assumption is Sanderson won’t go back. Her sister was sure of it.”

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t explain. So knowing that, where would you start?”

  “I could tell you, but then I’d have to bill you.”

  Bramall said, “Did you park your car in the barn?”

  Reacher said, “I don’t have a car.”

  “Then how did you get all the way out here?”

  “Hitchhiked and walked.”

  “Suppose I let you ride in my truck?”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Suppose you shut up about a bill?”

  “Deal,” Reacher said.

  “So where?”

  “What other information did the sister give you? Any names or places?”

  “She says Sanderson was always very cagey. Maybe embarrassed, maybe upset. She never mentioned locations. She never said what she was doing. They could go three months without talking.”

  “Is that usual for twins?”

  “Twins are siblings, same as anyone else.”

  “She got nothing at all?”

  “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 k
ind 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.”

  Chapter 17

  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.”