Nothing to Lose

anyway. An unexplained death out in open country, that’s at least a county matter. Which means it would show up on the State Police system about a minute later.”
    “So why didn’t they call it in?”
    “I don’t know. But that’s not our problem.”
    Reacher sat down at the other desk. It was a plain government-issue piece of furniture, with steel legs and a thin six-by-three fiberboard top laminated with a printed plastic approximation of rosewood or koa. There was a modesty panel and a three-drawer pedestal bolted to the right-hand legs. The chair had wheels and was covered with gray tweed fabric. Military Police furniture had been different. The chairs had been covered with vinyl. The desks had been steel. Reacher had sat behind dozens of them, all over the world. The views from his windows had been dramatically different, but the desks had been all the same. Their contents, too. Files full of dead people and missing people. Some mourned, some not.
    He thought of Lucy Anderson, called Lucky by her friends. The night before, in the diner. He recalled the way she had wrung her hands. He looked across at Vaughan and said, “It is our problem, kind of. The kid might have people worried about him.”
    Vaughan nodded. Went back to her book. Reacher saw her flip forward from C for Colorado State Police to D for Despair Police Department. She dialed and he heard a loud reply in her ear, as if physical proximity made for more powerful electrical current in the wires. She ran through the same faked inquiry, missing person, Caucasian male, about twenty, five-eight, one-forty, no name, coloring unclear because of a monochrome photograph. There was a short pause and then a short reply.
    Vaughan hung up.
    “Nothing to report,” she said. “They never saw such a guy.”

19
    Reacher sat quiet and Vaughan moved stuff around on her desk. She put her keyboard in line with her monitor and put her mouse in line with her keyboard and squared her phone behind it and then adjusted everything until all the edges were either parallel or at perfect right angles to each other. Then she put pencils away in drawers and flicked at dust and crumbs with the edge of her palm.
    “The gurney marks,” she said.
    “I know,” Reacher said. “Apart from them, I could have invented this whole thing.”
    “If they were gurney marks.”
    “What else could they have been?”
    “Nothing, I guess. They were from one of those old-fashioned stretchers, with the little skids, not the wheels.”
    “Why would I invent anything anyway?”
    “For attention.”
    “I don’t like attention.”
    “Everyone likes attention. Especially retired cops. It’s a recognized pathology. You try to insinuate yourselves back into the action.”
    “Are you going to do that when you retire?”
    “I hope not.”
    “I don’t, either.”
    “So what’s going on over there?”
    “Maybe the kid was local,” Reacher said. “They knew who he was, so he wasn’t a candidate for your missing persons inquiry.”
    Vaughan shook her head. “Still makes no sense. Any unexplained death out-of-doors has got to be reported to the county coroner. In which case it would have showed up on the state system. Purely as a statistic. The State Police would have said, Well, hey, we heard there was a dead guy in Despair this morning, maybe you should check it out. ”
    “But they didn’t.”
    “Because nothing has been called in from Despair. Which just doesn’t add up. What the hell are they doing with the corpse? There’s no morgue over there. Not even any cold storage, as far as I know. Not even a meat locker.”
    “So they’re doing something else with him,” Reacher said.
    “Like what?”
    “Burying him, probably.”
    “He wasn’t road kill.”
    “Maybe they’re covering something up.”
    “You claim he died of natural causes.”
    “He did,” Reacher said. “From wandering through the scrub for days. Maybe because they ran him out of town. Which might embarrass them. Always assuming they’re capable of embarrassment.”
    Vaughan shook her head again. “They didn’t run him out of town. We didn’t get a call. And they always call us. Always. Then they drive them to the line and dump them. This week there’s been you and the girl. That’s all.”
    “They never dump them to the west?”
    “There’s nothing there. It’s unincorporated land.”
    “Maybe they’re just slow. Maybe they’ll call it in later.”
    “Doesn’t compute,” Vaughan