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“Anything in particular?” he asked again.
“Let’s try afternoon sunshine,” Reacher said. “Maybe some time ago. We should check your cloud service doesn’t compress your data. That could damage the definition. Let’s try mid- to late afternoon, a couple of weeks ago. The day your guest got stabbed at the bar.”
The kid said, “Is this still corporate security?”
“The dead guy worked for a large organization. His boss wants my opinion.”
“There was a glitch that day,” the kid said. “I’m sorry. Nothing recorded after about two o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Until when?”
“It seemed to reboot itself at midnight. The start of the next day.”
“That’s a big chunk of time.”
“It was a technical fault. Very rare, actually. It’s a good system.”
Reacher nodded.
“These things happen,” he said. “Or sometimes other things happen. Like maybe a couple of guys came in here straight after doing something bad in a room down the row, involving a small man and a yellow Toyota Prius. Maybe they demanded you erase the video all the way back to before the guy arrived, so it was like he was never here at all. And then maybe they demanded you disable the cameras for the rest of the day, so it looked like a serious fault, not just a convenient blip. You’re an upstanding citizen, so probably you objected. So they punched you in the face. You have a bruise about two weeks old.”
The kid said nothing.
Reacher said, “Go back to where I was checking in.”
The kid pattered at the keyboard. Reacher watched himself. The cash, the key. The hard sell on room ten’s virtues. No one in nine, no one in eleven, a quiet night guaranteed. Then came the solar or the servers question, and the back and forth about the dark, and the duty hours question, and the no good to me part, and then it was over. Reacher saw himself walk out of the office, his key swinging on his finger. Right away he was picked up on three more cameras outside, the same physical movements, but different sizes and angles.
“Stay on the office camera,” he said.
The kid hit a key. On the screen the old guy sat there. Nothing moving, except the pages in his paperback book. Maybe ten minutes. Then he rested the book upside down and picked up the phone. He made a call. He had a short conversation.
In the here and now Reacher said, “You keep glancing out the window. Want to tell me why?”
The kid said nothing.
Reacher asked, “When did that truck even get here?”
“What truck?”
“The truck you keep looking at. The dirty white pickup truck parked nose-out from the diner, with a guy in it. Why would he get here so long before the place even opens for business? I don’t think he’s waiting for breakfast. I think he’s watching the motel. Watching me, presumably. I think you’ve seen that truck before.”
“I don’t know when it got here.”
“Then let’s find out. Hit fast forward. Do the math with the time code. I think the punch in the face bought them more than just erasing the tape. I think it bought them an ongoing relationship. I think they told you to call them any time someone comes by who isn’t either an engineer or a software guy. I think you agreed to do so. I think you called them when the sheriff arrived, and then your dad called them when I arrived. You told him what you had agreed to do. You told him he had to do it too.”
“I’m sorry,” the kid said.
“Do you know them?”
“We never saw them before.”
“Are you sure?”
“I swear.”
“Can you describe them?”
“Two of them came in here. Tough guys, like you see in the movies. They were white. I don’t really remember their faces. They had hats and sunglasses. Dark stubble, maybe. One was tall and the other was wide. Like, huge. The tall guy did the talking. It was him who hit me.”
