The Hard Way

red marker pen. The bed had been slept in. The pillow was dented and the sheets had been thrown back.
    No sign of the child herself.
    The next room belonged to the Jacksons. That was clear. There was a vanity table cluttered with British cosmetic brands and tortoiseshell hairbrushes and matching hand mirrors. There were framed photographs of a girl that wasn’t Jade. Melody, Reacher guessed. On the back wall there was a bed with a high headboard and freestanding armoires in matching dark veneers, full of clothes, men’s and women’s. There was a backhoe catalog on one of the night tables. Tony Jackson’s bedtime reading.
    No sign of Jackson himself.
    The next room was Kate’s and Taylor’s. An old queen bed, an oak night table. Austere, undecorated, like a guest room. The photograph was propped on a dresser. Kate and Jade, together. The original print. No frame. The two faces glowed in the Maglite’s beam. Love, captured on film. There was an empty tote bag. Kate’s luggage. No sign of the money. Just three empty leather duffels piled together in a corner. Reacher had carried one of them himself, down in the Dakota’s elevator to the black BMW, with Burke restless at his side.
    He moved on, looking for box rooms or bathrooms. Then he stopped, halfway along the upstairs hallway.
    Because there was blood on the floor.

----

    It was a small thin stain, a foot long, curved, like flung paint. Not a puddle. Not neat. It was dynamic, suggestive of rapid movement. Reacher stepped back to the head of the stairs. Sniffed the air. There was a faint smell of gunpowder. He sighted down the hallway with the Maglite beam and saw an open bathroom door at the far end. A smashed tile on the back wall, at chest height. A neat burst, contained by a single six-inch by six-inch ceramic square. A running target, a raised gun, a squeezed trigger, three shots, a through-and-through flesh wound, probably to an upper arm. A short shooter, otherwise the downward angle would be more pronounced. The smashed tile would be lower. Perez, probably. Perez, firing maybe the first of at least seven bursts that night. This one, inside the house. Then the two Mini Cooper tires. Then four Land Rover tires, for sure. A four-wheel-drive vehicle would need all four tires taken out for a cautious man to be satisfied. A desperate driver might get somewhere on two.
    Seven submachine gun bursts in the dead of night. Maybe more. Forty or more minutes ago.
People here have phones,
Jackson had said.
Some of them even know how to use them.
But they hadn’t used them. That was for sure. The Norwich cops would have arrived in less than forty minutes. Thirty miles, empty roads, lights and sirens, they could have done it in twenty-five or less. So nobody had called. Because of the MP5’s other-worldly rate of fire. Machine guns on TV or in the movies were generally old-fashioned and much slower. In order to be properly convincing. So forty or more minutes ago people wouldn’t have known what they were hearing. Just a random series of inexplicable blurred purrs, like sewing machines. Like jamming your tongue on the roof of your mouth and blowing. If they had heard anything at all.
    So,
Reacher thought.
At least one wounded and the cavalry ain’t coming.
    He eased down the stairs and back out into the night.

----

    He circled the house, clockwise. The barns were distant and dark and quiet. The old Land Rover was collapsed on its rims, as he had been certain it would be. Four blown tires. He walked straight past it and stopped against the south gable wall. Turned the Maglite off and stared down the driveway into the darkness.
    How had it happened?
    He trusted Pauling because he knew her and he trusted Taylor and Jackson even without knowing them. Three professionals. Experience, savvy, plenty of active brain cells. Tired, but functioning. A long perilous approach from the intruders’ point of view. No contest. He should have been looking at four riddled bodies and a wrecked rental car. Right about then Jackson should have been firing up the backhoe. Pauling should have been cracking cans of beer and Kate should have been making toast and heating beans.
    So why weren’t they?
    Distraction,
he figured. As ever, the answer was in Jade’s pictures. The animals in the barns.
She’s not sleeping great,
Kate had said.
The jet lag has screwed her up.
Reacher pictured the child waking, maybe around midnight, getting out of bed, running out of the house into the