She came down the same way he had, backward, butt high like a monkey, then more or less vertically after the turn, ending up standing on the drum between his outstretched arms, which were still on the ladder. He left them there for a minute and then he moved and said, “Now it’s easy. Like stairs.”
They clambered down the pyramid. The empty drums boomed softly. They stepped off onto the sticky dirt and crunched out into the open.
“This way,” Reacher said.
They covered the quarter-mile to the vehicle gate in less than five minutes. The white Tahoes were parked close together near one end of it and there was a line of five flat-bed semis near the other. No tractor units attached. Just the trailers, jacked up at their fronts on their skinny parking legs. Four were facing outward, toward the gate. They were loaded with steel bars. Product, ready to go. The fifth was facing inward, toward the plant itself. It was loaded with a closed shipping container, dark in color, maybe blue, with the wordsCHINA LINES stenciled on it. Scrap, incoming. Reacher glanced at it and passed it by and headed toward the line of offices. Vaughan walked with him. They ignored the security hut, and Thurman’s own office, and Operations, and Purchasing, and Invoicing, and the first white-painted infirmary unit. They stopped outside the second. Vaughan said, “Visiting the sick again?”
Reacher nodded. “He might talk, without Thurman here.”
“The door might be locked.”
Reacher raised the wrecking bar.
“I have a key,” he said.
But the door wasn’t locked. And the sick deputy wasn’t talking. The sick deputy was dead.
The guy was still tucked tight under the sheet, but he had taken his last breath some hours previously. That was clear. And maybe he had taken it alone. He looked untended. His skin was cold and set and waxy. His eyes were clouded and open. His hair was thin and messy, like he had been tossing on the pillow, listlessly, looking for companionship or comfort. His chart had not been added to or amended since the last time Reacher had seen it. The long list of symptoms and complaints was still there, unresolved and apparently undiagnosed.
“TCE?” Vaughan said.
“Possible,” Reacher said.
We’re doing the best we can,Thurman had said.We’re hoping he’ll get better. I’ll have him taken to the hospital in Halfway tomorrow.
Bastard,Reacher thought.
“This could happen in Hope,” Vaughan said. “We need the data for Colorado Springs. For the lab.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Reacher said.
They stood by the bedside for a moment longer and then they backed out. They closed the door gently, as if it would make a difference to the guy, and headed down the steps and then up the line to the office marked Purchasing. Its door was secured with a padlock through a hasp. The padlock was strong and the hasp was strong but the screws securing the hasp to the jamb were weak. They yielded to little more than the weight of the wrecking bar alone. They pulled out of the wood frame and fell to the ground and the door sagged open an inch. Vaughan turned the flashlight on and hid its beam in her palm. She led the way inside. Reacher followed and closed the door and propped a chair against it.
There were three desks inside and three phones and a whole wall of file cabinets, three drawers high, maybe forty inches tall. A hundred and forty cubic feet of purchase orders, according to Reacher’s automatic calculation.
“Where do we start?” Vaughan whispered.
“TryT for TCE.”
The T drawers were about four-fifths of the way along the array, as common sense and the alphabet dictated they should be. They were crammed with papers. But none of the papers referred to trichloroethylene. Everything was filed according to supplier name. The T drawers were all about corporations called Tri-State and Thomas and Tomkins and Tribune. Tri-State had renewed a fire insurance policy eight months previously, Thomas was a telecommunications company that had supplied four new cell phones three months previously, Tomkins had put tires on two front-loaders six months ago, and Tribune delivered binding wire on a two-week schedule. All essential activity for the metal plant’s operation, no doubt, but none of it chemical in nature.
“I’ll start atA, ” Vaughan said.
“And I’ll start atZ, ” Reacher said. “I’ll see you atM orN, if not before.”
Vaughan was faster than Reacher. She had the flashlight. He had to rely on stray beams spilling from the other end of the array. Some things were obviously irrelevant. Anything potentially questionable, he had to haul it out and peer at it closely. It was slow work. The clock in his head ticked around, relentlessly. He started to worry about the dawn. It wasn’t far away. At one point he found something ordered in the thousands of gallons, but on close inspection it was only gasoline and diesel fuel. The supplier was Western Energy of Wyoming and the purchaser was Thurman Metals of Despair, Colorado. He crammed the paper back in place and moved left to theV drawers. The first file he pulled was for medical supplies. Saline solution, IV bags, IV stands, miscellaneous requisites. Small quantities, enough for a small facility.
The supplier was Vernon Medical of Houston, Texas.
The purchaser was Olympic Medical of Despair, Colorado.
Reacher held the paper out to Vaughan. An official purchase order, on an official company letterhead, complete with the same corporate logo they had seen twice on the billboards south of Colorado Springs. Main office address, inside the metal plant, two cabins down.
“Thurman owns Olympic,” Reacher said. “Where your husband is.”
Vaughan was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “I don’t think I like that.”
Reacher said, “I wouldn’t either.”
“I should get him out of there.”
“Or get Thurman out of there.”
“How?”
“Keep digging.”
They got back to work. Reacher got throughV, andU, and skippedT because they had already checked it. He learned that Thurman’s oxyacetylene supplier was Utah Gases and his kerosene supplier was Union City Fuels. He found no reference to trichloroethylene. He was opening the last of the S drawers when Vaughan said, “Got it.”
“Kearny Chemical of New Jersey,” she said. “TCE purchases going back seven years.”
She lifted the whole file cradle out of the drawer and shone the flashlight on it and riffed through the papers with her thumb. Reacher saw the word trichloroethylene repeated over and over, jumping around from line to line like a kid’s badly drawn flip cartoon.
“Take the whole thing,” he said. “We’ll add up the quantities later.”
Vaughan jammed the file under her arm and pushed the drawer shut with her hip. Reacher moved the chair and opened the door and they stepped out together to the dark. Reacher stopped and used the flashlight and found the fallen screws and pushed them back into their holes with his thumb. They held loosely and made the lock look untouched. Then he followed Vaughan as she retraced their steps, past Operations, past Thurman’s digs, past the security office. She waited for him and they dodged around the China Lines container together and headed out into open space.
Then Reacher stopped again.
Turned around.
“Flashlight,” he said.
Vaughan gave up the flashlight and he switched it on and played the beam across the side of the container. It loomed up, huge and unreal in the sudden light, high on its trailer like it was suspended in midair. It was forty feet long, corrugated, boxy, metal. Completely standard in every way. It hadCHINA LINES painted on it in large letters, dirty white, and a vertical row of Chinese characters, plus a series of ID numbers and codes stenciled low in one corner.