17 A Wanted Man

could be sixty miles away by now.’
    Sorenson didn’t answer that. She just clicked off the call and howled around the on-ramp and headed west close to a hundred miles an hour.
    Ten high-speed minutes later Reacher gave Sorenson her Glock back and asked, ‘Is your boss going to ignore a missing kid too?’
    Sorenson put the gun back on her hip and said, ‘My boss is an ambitious guy. He dreams of bigger things. He wants to be an Assistant Director one day. Therefore he’ll do whatever the Hoover Building tells him to do, right or wrong. Some SACs are like that. And the Hoover Building will do whatever the CIA tells it to do. Or the State Department, or Homeland Security, or the West Wing, or whoever the hell is calling the shots here.’
    ‘That’s crazy.’
    ‘That’s modern law enforcement. Get used to it.’
    ‘How much freedom of action are you going to get?’
    ‘None at all, as soon as they figure out where I am.’
    ‘So don’t answer your phone.’
    ‘I’m not going to. Not the first couple of times, anyway.’
    ‘And after that?’
    ‘They’ll leave voice messages. They’ll send texts and e-mails. I can’t go rogue. I can’t disobey direct orders.’
    Reacher said nothing.
    Sorenson said, ‘Well, would you?
Did
you?’
    ‘Sometimes,’ Reacher said.
    ‘And now you’re a homeless unemployed veteran with no stable relationships.’
    ‘Exactly. These things are never easy. But you can make a start. You can get something done before they shut you down.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘Motive,’ Reacher said. ‘That’s what you need to think about. Who the hell snatches a dead woman’s kid? And why? Especially a kid who knows nothing at all about what happened to her mom?’
    ‘But this can’t be unrelated, surely. This can’t be a coincidence. This is not the father showing up after some custody battle. This is not some random paedophile on the prowl.’
    ‘Maybe it was the neighbour’s kid they were looking for. Maybe they got them confused. It was the neighbour’s house, after all. Is the neighbour divorced too?’
    ‘This is not a coincidence, Reacher.’
    ‘So what is it?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Neither do I,’ Reacher said. ‘It makes no sense at all.’
    Sheriff Goodman was into his thirtieth hour without sleep. He was dazed and groggy and barely upright. But he kept on going. No reason to believe the abductors had stayed in the vicinity, but he had his guys out checking any and all vacant buildings, barns, huts, shelters, and empty houses. He himself was supplementing their efforts by covering the places they weren’t getting to. He had found nothing. They had found nothing. Radio traffic was full of tired and resigned negativity.
    He ended up back in front of Delfuenso’s neighbour’s house. He parked and sat there and fought to stay awake. Fought to make himself think. He recalled how the kid had acted on the stoop, first thing that morning. Mute with incomprehension, nodding politely, fidgeting. She was a country girl. Ten years old. Not a prodigy. She would have believed any kind of halfway-legitimate adult. She would have been convinced by any kind of show of knowledge or authority. She would have bought into any kind of promise.
Come with us, little girl. We found your mommy. We’ll take you to her
.
    But who?
    Who even knew Delfuenso was missing in the first place? His whole department, obviously, plus the neighbours and presumably some of the other locals. And the bad guys. But why would they kill the mother and then come back for the child?
    Why?
    He got out of his car to clear his head in the cold air. He stumped around for a minute, and then he rested on the passenger-side front fender. The heat from the engine bay kept him warm. There was rain in the east. He could see the clouds. They were scooting towards him. Then he stared straight ahead at the two houses in front of him, Delfuenso’s and her neighbour’s, looking for inspiration. He found none at all. He looked down at the muddy gutter. The mud was criss-crossed with his tyre tracks. Like a record of futility, written there in rubber and dirt and water. He had parked on that street four separate times in the space of a few hours. First, after the sprint over from Missy Smith’s place in the middle of the night. With Sorenson. Then again early in the morning, on his own, to break some of the news. Then again later, to touch base, like a good chief should, which was when he had found Lucy missing. And