17 A Wanted Man

You never heard about it?’
    ‘Not a word. Are the others here too?’
    Reacher nodded. ‘Delfuenso and her kid, and the eyewitness. Safe and sound. They’re all having a good time, actually.’
    ‘Even though they’re locked up?’
    ‘They’ve been told they’re sequestered. Like a jury. For their own good. Not the same thing as being locked up. They’re all treating it like a vacation. Mini golf and free beer.’
    ‘Is it legal?’
    ‘I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. But it probably is. Except that it probably shouldn’t be. You know how these things are.’
    ‘Who brought them here?’ she said. ‘Who burned in the car?’
    ‘Alan King burned in the car,’ Reacher said. ‘But he was shot in the heart first. By McQueen. McQueen is one of you, undercover. Out of Kansas City. Which is why Dawson and Mitchell came straight up to babysit you at the pumping station. They were doing damage control. McQueen burned the car and he and Delfuenso were picked up by part of his Bureau support team. In a Bureau sedan, like the tyre marks showed, again out of Kansas City. McQueen came here with them but left again immediately. Apparently he said he had to get back in position.’
    ‘Poor guy. He’s going to be under a hell of a lot of pressure. With King dead? How is he going to explain that?’
    ‘With great difficulty, I would think.’
    ‘But you were right. He missed you deliberately. He fired over your head.’
    ‘But there was nothing he could fake when it came time to punch Delfuenso’s ticket. So he offed King instead.’
    ‘Good man. I hope he’s OK.’
    ‘What happened with you?’ Reacher asked again.
    Sorenson sat down on the bed. She said, ‘Me? It started out OK. In fact it started out just fine. I drove back to Delfuenso’s place and got my phone and got back in my own car and called my SAC. I told him I had managed to overpower you and hand you over to the Kansas City boys. My SAC was very impressed. And he was very pleased. But I couldn’t quite let it go. I asked a few too many questions. He didn’t like that so much. I could tell. Then at one point he changed completely. He wasn’t pleased any more. Not pleased at all. I could hear it in his voice.’
    ‘At what point?’
    ‘I checked the glove box when I locked up Goodman’s car. Purely out of habit. I didn’t want any unsecured weapons left in it, and who knows what a country sheriff keeps in his glove box? But as it happened there was nothing in there except a notebook and a pen. So I looked through the notebook, naturally. Turns out Sheriff Goodman was a very thorough guy. He’d been doing his research overnight, and he’d been making notes about Karen Delfuenso. I guess he figured the more the merrier, when it came to information. I guess he thought it would help, if we didn’t get her back fast, although I can’t see how it would.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘There was something in there that struck me as odd, so I asked my SAC about it. Except I didn’t actually ask about it. I just mentioned it, really. But whichever, that was when he went all weird on me.’
    ‘What something was odd?’
    ‘I took Delfuenso to be a long-term resident. Maybe not necessarily a fourth generation farm girl or anything, but I got the impression she’d been there a good long time. Certainly I figured Lucy would have been born and raised there.’
    ‘But she wasn’t?’
    ‘They’ve only been there seven months. The neighbour on the other side said they moved there after a divorce. So it seems to have been a much more recent divorce than I thought.’
    ‘Are we even sure she was married in the first place?’ Reacher said.
    ‘There’s a kid.’
    ‘That doesn’t confirm marriage.’
    ‘Why wouldn’t she have been married?’
    ‘She copes on her own,’ Reacher said. ‘She copes really well. Like she’s always been obliged to. And she’s smart. Looking after some guy would drive her crazy.’
    ‘Smart women shouldn’t get married?’
    ‘Are you married?’
    She didn’t answer that. She said, ‘I don’t care if it was a wedding with a thousand guests on a beach in Hawaii or a one-night stand in a motel in New Jersey. The point wasn’t that she was a single mom. The point is she’s a single mom who moved to town just seven months ago.’
    Reacher said, ‘The Kansas City boys told me this operation is seven months old.’
    ‘That’s impossible.’
    ‘Why would they lie?’
    ‘No, I mean Delfuenso can’t be connected.