17 A Wanted Man

bouncing circle in the dirt and saw Dawson and Mitchell passing Puller at about seventy and Puller lighting up his strobes and his siren and pulling out behind them. Reacher continued the circular turn and thumped back up on the road and headed south, fast, back the way he had come, all the way to the turn he had seen on the left, which was now on the right. He braked hard and took it and pattered over the lumpy surface and turned in on a rutted track and came to a dead stop behind the old swaybacked barn. He got out and ran to the far corner of the ramshackle structure and peered out north.
    Nothing in the distance. No sign of Dawson and Mitchell. Not yet. They were still out of sight, more than a mile to the north. He counted out time and space in his head. Right then they would be slowing, stopping, turning around, hassling with Puller, showing ID, arguing, yelling, getting frustrated.
    Getting delayed.
    Then they would be coming back south, as fast as they could. They would have seen his tight turn on the dirt, and they would be planning on chasing him all the way back to town.
    Three minutes, he figured.
    Maybe three minutes and ten seconds.
    He waited.
    And then he saw them, right on time, far away on the main drag, hustling left to right, north to south, doing about a hundred again. An impressive sight. The big stately sedan was really picking up its skirts. Its paint was winking in the watery sun. It was planted firmly on the blacktop, squatting at the rear, straddling the centre line. Reacher ran back past Goodman’s car and peered out from the barn’s other corner. He got a rear view of the blue Crown Vic blasting south. After ten seconds it was a tiny dot. After twenty seconds it was gone altogether.
    He breathed out and walked back to the car. He got back in and closed the door. He sat slumped in the seat with his hands on his knees.
    Silence. Nothing but the faithful idle of the engine, and clicks and ticks as stressed components cooled back down.
    Sorenson said, ‘You’re not such a terrible driver.’
    He said, ‘Thank you.’
    ‘What now?’
    ‘We wait.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘I guess this place is as good as any.’
    She unzipped her black leather bag and took out Goodman’s phone. She clipped it in its dashboard cradle. It chimed once to tell them it was charging.
    Then it started to ring.
    She leaned over and checked the window.
    ‘My tech team,’ she said.

FIFTY-THREE
    SORENSON TOUCHED THE green button and Reacher heard telephone sounds over the speakers again, weirdly clear and detailed, like before. Sorenson said, ‘You have something for me?’
    A man’s voice said, ‘Yeah, we have some preliminary results.’
    The voice was tired, and a little breathless. Reacher thought the guy was walking and talking at the same time. Probably stumbling out to the fresh air and the bright sunlight, after long and unpleasant hours in a white-tiled basement room. Breathing deep, blinking, yawning and stretching. Reacher could picture the scene. A pair of institutional doors, a short flight of concrete steps, a parking lot. Maybe planters and benches. Back in the day the guy would have been pausing at that point, to light a welcome cigarette.
    Sorenson said, ‘Go ahead.’
    The guy said, ‘You want me to be honest?’
    ‘You usually are.’
    ‘Then I can’t promise you the incineration was post mortem. It might have been. Or it might not have been. There’s something that might have been damage to what might have been a rib. If I squint a bit I could see it as a gunshot wound to the chest. Which might have been enough. It’s in what would have been the general area of the heart. But I wouldn’t say so in court. The other side would laugh me out of the room. There’s far too much heat damage for conclusions about external injuries.’
    ‘Gut feeling?’
    ‘Right now my gut feeling is I want to retrain as a hairdresser. This thing was about the worst I’ve ever seen.’
    Sorenson was quiet for a long moment.
    Then she said, ‘Anything else?’
    ‘I started from the beginning, with the pelvic girdle. That’s the only way to confirm gender with a case like this. And it was totally clear. The pelvic bones had been reasonably well protected by a thick layer of fat.’
    Reacher looked up.
Delfuenso wasn’t fat. She was thin
.
    Sorenson said, ‘And?’
    ‘It’s beyond a reasonable doubt the corpse was male.’
    Sorenson ran through the details with her guy. Like a crash course in forensic