17 A Wanted Man

usual. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Excuse the pun. He saw the dead guy go in, followed by the two perps. He saw the perps come out and drive away.’
    ‘Where was their own car? Didn’t they have one?’
    ‘No one knows.’
    ‘If they had their own car, they’d have used it, surely. They must have driven in with the guy they stabbed.’
    ‘My tech person thinks they didn’t.’
    ‘Who was the guy they stabbed?’
    ‘A trade attaché. Like a foreign service guy. He worked in our embassies overseas. He was an Arabic speaker, apparently.’
    ‘What did they stab him with?’
    ‘Not sure. Something big. An eight- or nine-inch blade. A hunting knife, probably.’
    ‘What was the foreign service guy doing in Nebraska?’
    ‘No one knows. They say he was between postings. The red car was rented in Denver. At the airport. So presumably the guy flew in from somewhere and drove the rest of the way. No one has mentioned a reason why he would do that. Or from where. But the State Department is worried about it. They sent a guy.’
    ‘Already?’
    ‘My tech team fingerprinted the dead guy, and it’s been fun and games ever since. Bureau counterterrorism showed up un-announced, and the State Department guy came, and my SAC has been up all night, and the eyewitness disappeared.’
    ‘Weird,’ Reacher said.
    In the end the fire died just as fast as the sun came up. On the left the eastern skies cracked purple and pink and gold, and dead ahead the unspent gas ran out, and the smaller blaze ebbed, and the bigger blaze came over the horizon. Cold daylight lit the scene and gave heft and form to the blackened shell. The car was parked on the shoulder, facing south, as far off the road as Sorenson was. The tyres were burned away. All the glass was gone. The paint had vaporized. The sheet metal was scorched grey and purple in fantastic whorls. For twenty yards all around the winter stubble had burned and blackened. An arc of blacktop was bubbling and smoking. There were last licks of flame here and there, low and timid and hesitant compared to what had come before.
    Sorenson bumped back on to the road and drove closer. Reacher looked at the shell. Ashes to ashes. It had started out that way, all bare and shiny in the factory, and it was ending up the same way, all gutted and empty.
    It was an Impala. No question about it. Reacher knew the shape of its trunk, the flat of its flanks, the hump of its roof, the pitch of its hood. He was getting a three-quarters rear view, but he was totally sure. It was Delfuenso’s Chevy.
    All gutted and empty.
    My car
.
    Reacher stared.
    It wasn’t empty.

THIRTY-SEVEN
    REACHER WAS THE first to get out. He closed his door and stood next to the Crown Vic’s hood, with cold on his back and heat on his face. He was five feet closer than he had been before, and therefore his angle was five feet better.
    All the glass was gone. All the rubber was gone, all the plastics, all the vinyl, all the high-tech space age materials. All that was left was metal, the parts designed to be visible still curved and moulded, the parts designed to be hidden all sharp and knifelike and exposed. In particular the rear parcel shelf had lost its padding and its loudspeakers and its soundproof mat and its mouse-fur covering. What was left was a stamped steel cross-member, corrugated here and there for strength, drilled here and there with holes, but otherwise as plain and brutal as a blade. Its front edge was perfectly straight.
    Except it wasn’t.
    Reacher took three more steps. The heat was astonishing. The front of the parcel shelf looked different on the right than the left. On the right its straight edge was compromised by a humped shape completely unrelated to engineering necessity. It was an organic shape, odd and random, in no way similar to the stamped angularity all around it.
    It was a human head, burned smooth and tiny by the fire.
    Sorenson got out of her car.
    Reacher said, ‘Stay there, OK?’
    He turned away and took a breath from the cold side, and another, until his lungs were full. He turned back and started walking. He kept his distance, looping wide, until he was level with the side of the shell. Then he darted in, until he felt the blacktop hot and sticky under the soles of his boots.
    The Chevy’s rear seat was burned away completely. But the person on it wasn’t. Not completely. On the right, directly behind the blackened frame of the front passenger seat, fallen down through