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“No. Not yet. A junior officer, an off-duty death. It’s a line item. The rest is a hunch. Nothing more than a feeling. I can tell you about it, but I can’t tell him. Not without more substance. Which is your job. Find something. Or nothing. Obviously I would prefer nothing. Just tell me either way.”

—

Turner dropped Reacher at a motel with a lit-up vacancy sign and told him she would be back late afternoon to pick up the file. It couldn’t stay out overnight. Reacher headed for the motel office. He got a fifty-dollar room for thirty, by claiming thirty was all he had, and then by standing there, part charming gentleman, part silent barbarian, six feet five, two-fifty, dressed for the heat, all glistening bone and muscle, slick with grime, until the clerk with the lit-up vacancy sign slapped down a key and the deal was done.

His room was standard in every way. It had a bed, which was all he needed. He sat on the end and used the rest of the slick queen-size expanse as a giant desk. He opened the file Turner had given him. He started to read.

CID Special Agent Bisley’s first name was John and his middle name was James. John James Bisley, thirty-two years old, five-eight, one-forty, a straight-up white guy born in Rochester, New York. His file photo matched Turner’s description. Neat, well dressed, urban, sophisticated. To which Reacher would have added compact, slender, wiry like a runner, tan, and probably funny. At thirty-two he had laugh lines both sides of his face. His hair was dark and nicely cut, and gelled with product.

He had been married just short of two years, and a father just short of one. A baby girl, eleven months old, named Amanda. His wife was named Julia. His home address was an apartment in Crystal City, Arlington. His duty billet was an office building not far from the old 110th.

Bisley had enlisted in the army at age eighteen in order to get a college education. Uncle Sam had paid for four years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer science, with an emphasis on digital forensics. Flawless attendance, excellent grades. After graduating he had been trained up at the military police school at Fort Leonard Wood, promoted to W-1 warrant officer, and given a desk. He was promoted again after a year, to CW-2 chief warrant officer, and again two years later to CW-3. A solid progression. Clearly a quality guy.

But now a dead guy. He had flown from D.C. to Denver and rented a hybrid Toyota. He had driven seventy miles north and west, into the Denver–Boulder–Fort Collins university triangle. He had arrived in a small municipality named Summertown, which was known for an immense solar array, five massive data centers, and a small but decent motel. He had checked in for a week. Then at some later point the same afternoon he had driven forty more miles to the west, to a biker bar in the V where two county highways merged. There he had met his end.

The next part of Turner’s file was about the crime Bisley was chasing. There were pages of complicated computer terminology Reacher couldn’t make out in detail. The gist seemed to be something about the potential for a phantom data center to copy stuff from legitimate data centers nearby. Like an eavesdropper or a pickpocket. Not exactly ax murder, but a crime all the same, Reacher was happy to acknowledge. The military angle was that all kinds of digital secrets were stored in all kinds of places, some of which would inevitably turn out to be ordinary commercial data centers, given the kind of deals the government was doing, and therefore all kinds of digital secrets might turn out be stored right next to all kinds of phantom eavesdroppers and pickpockets. The military was paid to worry about stuff like that.

Reacher butted the technical pages together and laid them aside on the bed.

Next up was the police report. Technically the county sheriff’s report. The V between the highways wasn’t a town or attached to one. So the county sheriff’s department got the call, at four minutes past eight o’clock in the evening, from a bartender hauling trash out back, who had found Bisley’s body in the summer dusk. Two units responded, followed by detectives and the coroner. Their reports showed a well run crime scene, a diligent investigation, but zero conclusions.

The main problem was a lack of witnesses and suspects. Which was paradoxical, because the bar staff said the place had been packed all day long, but almost all their customers had been transient out-of-staters, heading north in a dense and noisy all-day stream to a big motorcycle rally in South Dakota. Local regulars had been thin on the ground. The transients had quickly become impossible to trace. They were lost to time and distance. One bartender said he might have seen Bisley in the crowd. Another wasn’t certain. One regular customer said he maybe remembered him, and another was sure he didn’t.

The coroner said Bisley was stabbed eight times, including an upward thrust under the rib cage that most likely would have proved fatal all on its own. No wallet, watch or phone were found on the body. No local pawnbroker had seen the watch, the phone had been turned off and never turned on again, and none of Bisley’s credit cards had been used in the subsequent days.

The crime scene photographs were stark and bleached by the camera’s flash. There was a general scene-setting shot, from a drone, like a map, showing the bar’s parking lot on the left, with the bar itself on the right, with a yard behind it full of trash containers and general junk. Bisley’s body was small in the distance, a couple of feet into the yard, near a blue recycling container.

The close-ups were brutal. Bisley was on his side in a pool of blood, unmistakably dead, limp, deflated, the spark of life gone. His shirt was slashed and soaked with blood. His eyes were open. Beyond him in the distance was his car. The only one left in the emptied-out lot. It was yellow. It was low and sculpted and aerodynamic. Reacher knew little about cars. He would have marked it down as something exotic. Maybe from Europe. Maybe a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. But it was listed as a Toyota Prius. From Japan. A current model. A rental from Avis. It was shaped like an arrow, so swept back that the driver’s headrest showed through the rear door window.

The accompanying inventories showed nothing remained in Bisley’s pockets except a fob-style remote clicker for the Toyota, and a metal key on a ring with a plastic tag for the motel room in Summertown. The sheriff’s department liaised with their opposite numbers forty miles east, and got permission to search the room. There they found nothing but everyday items, pajamas on the pillow, sunglasses stowed on a shelf, a paperback book on the nightstand, washing kit laid out on the vanity, an array of all kinds of things, including skin creams, moisturizers and hair gel.

Reacher butted the photographs and the inventories together and laid them on the bed, next to the sheriff’s report, which was next to the tech stuff, which was next to the army personnel jacket. John James Bisley, thirty-two, married just shy of two years, a father just shy of one. Reacher went to take a shower.

—

Afterward he went to sit out front, in the shade of the eave, in the plastic lawn chair the motel supplied, at the rate of one per guest. Turner didn’t know which room he had taken. He figured he should make himself plainly visible, to save her a lot of time knocking on doors. He watched for the blue Dodge Charger.

It rolled in just before five o’clock in the afternoon. Reacher waved, and it nosed down the row toward him. It turned in to the parking space at his door. He felt the heat of its engine. Turner got out. Still in the blue jeans and the black T-shirt. Still looking good. She had a slim briefcase in her hand. Fine black leather. Living the dream.

“Too hot out here,” she said. “Can we go inside?”

Reacher showed her in. She saw the file pages on the bed. Four neat stacks. She said, “What do you think?”

“I think I should go to Colorado.”

“Which parts didn’t you like?”

“He was stabbed up under the ribs. Almost certainly the mortal wound. It usually is. Not easy to do. Instinct makes you want to jab the blade horizontally, not vertically. You have to learn it somewhere. And maybe you learn to disguise the fact that you learned it, with a bunch more random slashes. Bisley’s shirt looks like he was attacked by a bear.”

“So you think it wasn’t a real mugging?”

“Inconclusive in itself. But it also bothers me that the watch and the phone and the credit cards haven’t shown up anywhere. If it was a real mugging, they would have been sold on a street corner within a couple of hours. Someone would have used them, surely. At least some part of one of them.”

Turner nodded, and said, “Those things bother me too. But if it was a professional hit disguised as a mugging, they were kind of second-rate professionals, don’t you think? They shouldn’t have used the fancy knife work. They should have kept it strictly amateur hour, for the sake of appearances. They were smart enough to take the wallet and the watch and the phone, but they weren’t smart enough to use them.”

“Which puzzles you, because the profile of your unit suggests Bisley should have attracted only first-rate professionals.”

“Depends whether he was hitting a nerve or not. If not, I would expect nothing to happen yet, except I’ve got a guy out of the office all week on a wasted excursion. But if he was hitting a nerve, then yes, I would expect the cream of the crop. Some crew from right here, probably.”