“It could be all three. We don’t know yet.”

“Where are you staying?”

“We haven’t figured that out.”

“OK, I’ll call you when I land.”

The line went dead.

Reacher said, “Apparently Michael spends time on his computer, or fiddling with his phone. Maybe that’s the Deep Web connection. Maybe he’s in some weird kind of chat room all the time. Maybe he has a whole life no one else knows about.”

“He’s depressed, not weird.”

“Depressed means what it says, which is pushed down below the normal position. Which implies a range. Which Michael doesn’t have. Which is weird. Or unusual, to be polite. But he’s intelligent, she said. Maybe there are support groups on-line. Maybe he started one.”

“Why would it need to be secret?”

“Because of search engines, I guess. Employers check on-line. I read about it in the newspaper. And not just employers, probably. Probably all kinds of people. Relatives, possibly, or doctors. There’s no privacy anymore. Things can come back to bite you. If Michael posted something that showed he wasn’t making progress, he could lose his housing. Or someone might decide he needed supervision.”

Then the door opened and Lydia Lair came back in. Peter McCann’s sister, Michael McCann’s aunt, and the mother of the bride. She sat down in the same chair and Reacher asked her, “How did Michael go missing?”

She said, “That’s a long story.”

Twenty miles south of Mother’s Rest, the man with the ironed jeans and the blow-dried hair took the call on his land line. His contact said, “This is your screw-up now.”

“In what way?”

“There were things you didn’t know.”

“What things?”

“I promised you they wouldn’t talk to McCann. And I delivered. Can’t talk to a dead man. But it came at a cost. I lost Hackett.”

“How?”

“Reacher took him out. Or both of them together. Either way, it shouldn’t have happened. Not theoretically possible.”

“Is he dead?”

“He’s in the hospital.”

“Are you going to let them get away with this?”

“No, I’m not. I’m going to make an example. This is an image business. Very competitive. Brand strength is everything. So I’ll split it with you fifty-fifty.”

“Split what?”

“The cost of not letting them get away with it.”

The man with the jeans and the hair paused a beat, and then he said, “You didn’t let them talk to McCann. For which you have my grateful thanks. It was a job well done. But with respect, that concluded our business. Any feelings you retain for Reacher or Chang are now personal to you, surely.”

“Hackett is handcuffed to the hospital bed. He’s in police custody.”

“How much does he know?”

“Bits and pieces. But they won’t prove anything. Hackett has no evidence with him. No data. Reacher stole his phone, and he left his computers in the car. Which was provided by our friends in Chicago, complete with a driver. So we still have his hardware. We fired up the phone sniffer again. Chang is back on the air. She just called the guy at the LA Times. From a suburban location right here in Phoenix.”

“Why there? Because of you? Are they coming for you?”

“Reacher called me on Hackett’s phone and told me so. Plus it would be an easy prediction anyway. But not if you listened to Chang’s call to the LA Times. They’re here for a completely different reason altogether.”

“Which is what?”

“There were things you didn’t know.”

“What things?”

“The kind of things that will make you happy to split with me fifty-fifty.”

“Tell me.”

“Peter McCann had a sister. Lydia McCann, as was. Now Lydia Lair, married to a doctor. She lives here in Phoenix. In a suburban location. The brother and the sister talked all the time. He told her everything. According to what Chang just said to Westwood, it could be that talking to the sister is the same thing as talking to McCann himself.”

“We can’t let that happen.”

“We?”

“OK, fifty-fifty. Of course.”

“I’m glad we see eye to eye.”

“But with one extra thing.”

“Which would be what?”

“Tell me how McCann died.”

“Hackett shot him.”

“In greater detail.”

“Hackett went to visit him very early in the morning and walked him out the building at gunpoint. To the local park. There was no one around. He shot him in the back of the skull with a silenced nine.”

“Was there a lot of mess?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“Probably exited through the face. But the brain was dead by then. No further heartbeat. No blood pressure. Effective, but not visual. Are you going to do the same thing with Reacher and Chang?”

“I’m going to do whatever the hell works. Split fifty-fifty. Which could be expensive. Because apart from anything else, we also have to do it fast. They could be talking right this minute.”

Chapter 39

The long story about Michael McCann’s disappearance began with a desire to visit Oklahoma. Michael announced it one day, in his slow, halting, disappointed way, and his father didn’t let himself fall in the trap of worrying about it, not then, not immediately, because he knew it was unlikely to happen. These things rarely did. But then Michael further announced he had researched housing policy in Oklahoma, which was different than Illinois, in that part-time work could qualify. Which might be more sustainable.

Peter McCann’s reaction had been mixed. Obviously at the top of the pole was the sheer terror of imagining Michael alone and adrift in an unfamiliar environment. But underneath that was a tiny green shoot of optimism. Finally Michael had spent some computer time productively. He had researched housing policy in another state. He had even drawn a conclusion. Which might be more sustainable. Which was almost like making a plan. Certainly it showed a solid flicker of initiative. It was evidence of self-motivation, which some long-ago shrink had said would be the first sign of improvement.

So all in all Peter McCann had been holding it together.

His sister said, “Then Michael announced he had a friend in Oklahoma. Which was a big deal. He had never had a friend before. He had never even used the word. We figured it happened through an internet forum. Which was worrying, I guess. But Michael is thirty-five years old. He’s not retarded. His IQ is way up there. He knows what he’s doing. He’s sad, that’s all. So Peter asked what questions he could and then bit his lip.”

Reacher said, “And what happened?”

“Michael went to Oklahoma. A little place not far from Tulsa. He texted at first. Then less frequently. But he was OK, as far as we knew. Then one day he texted to say he was coming home soon. He didn’t say exactly when, and he didn’t say why. We haven’t heard from him since.”

“When did Peter call the police?”

“Pretty soon afterward. Then he called everybody.”

“Including the White House?”

“I advised him not to. But of course no one anywhere was listening to him. There are half a million mentally-challenged homeless men in America. No one would consider searching for an individual among them. How could they? Why would they? Michael is not aggressive and he isn’t on medication. He isn’t dangerous.”

“Didn’t they at least check with the friend?”

“I’m sure you know how it is. In your own jobs. Suddenly all you have is a name that doesn’t mean much, and a hazy half-remembered address no one can find.”

“So the friend has not been identified?”

“No one even knows whether it was a man or a woman.”

“What about the social housing?”

“There wasn’t any. Clearly Michael had been staying with the unknown friend. Probably not working at all, even part-time.”

“And then what happened?”

“Obviously Peter wouldn’t give up. He went to work on his own. First he got help from the phone company. He can be very persistent. They tracked Michael’s phone. The last day they can see it move southwest, from one cell tower to the next, from around Tulsa to Oklahoma City, at what looks like an average speed of about fifty miles an hour. Which was a bus, Peter thinks. He thinks Michael took the bus from Tulsa to Oklahoma City.”