Worth Dying For

isn’t it? A misdemeanour at best. Should medical practitioners indulge in criminal behaviour?’
    ‘I guess not.’
    ‘But you did.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘Don’t apologize to us. We’re not a court of law. Or a state board. But you should rehearse an excuse. You might lose your job. Then what would your wife do for money? She might have to return to her old ways. A comeback tour, of sorts. Not that we would have her back. I mean, who would? A raddled old bitch like that?’
    The doctor said nothing.
    ‘And you treated my daughter-in-law,’ Jacob Duncan said. ‘After being told not to.’
    ‘I’m a doctor. I had to.’
    ‘The Hippocratic oath?’
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘Which says, first, do no harm.’
    ‘I didn’t do any harm.’
    ‘Look at my son’s face.’
    The doctor looked.
    ‘You did that,’ Jacob said.
    ‘I didn’t.’
    ‘You caused it to be done. Which is the same thing. You did harm.’
    ‘That wasn’t me.’
    ‘So who was it?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘I think you do. The word is out. Surely you’ve heard it? We know you people talk about us all the time. On the phone tree. Did you think it was a secret?’
    ‘It was Reacher.’
    ‘Finally,’ Jacob said. ‘We get to the point. You were his coconspirator.’
    ‘I wasn’t.’
    ‘You asked him to drive you to my son’s house.’
    ‘I didn’t. He made me go.’
    ‘Whatever,’ Jacob said. ‘There’s no use crying over spilt milk. But we have a question for you.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘Where is Reacher now?’

TWENTY-NINE
    R EACHER WAS IN HIS GROUND FLOOR ROOM AT THE C OURTYARD Marriott, knee deep in old police reports. He had used the flat-bladed screwdriver from his pocket to slit the tape on all eleven cartons, and he had sampled the first page out of every box to establish the correct date order. He had shuffled the cartons into a line, and then he had started a quick-and-dirty overview of the records, right from the very beginning.
    As expected, the notes were comprehensive. It had been a high-profile case with many sensitivities, and there had been three other agencies on the job, the State Police, the National Guard, and the FBI . The county PD had taken pains to be very professional. Multi-agency cases were essentially competitions, and the county PD hadn’t wanted to lose. The department had recorded every move and covered every base and covered every ass. In some ways the files were slices of history. They had been nowhere near a computer. They were old-fashioned, human, and basic. They were typewritten, probably on old IBM electric machines. They had misaligned lines and corrections made with white fluid. The paper itself was foxed and brown,thin and brittle, and musty. There were no reams of cell phone records, because no one had had cell phones back then, not even the cops. No DNA samples had been taken. There were no GPS coordinates.
    The files were exactly like the files Reacher himself had created, way back at the start of his army career.
    Dorothy had called the cops from a neighbour’s house, at eight in the evening on an early summer Sunday. Not 911, but the local switchboard number. There was a transcript of the call, by the look of it probably not from a recording. Probably reconstructed from the desk sergeant’s memory. Dorothy’s last name was Coe. Her only child Margaret had last been seen more than six hours previously. She was a good girl. No problems. No troubles. No reasons. She had been wearing a green dress and had ridden away on a pink bicycle.
    The desk sergeant had called the captain and the captain had called a detective who had just gotten off the day shift. The detective was called Miles Carson. Carson had sent squad cars north and the hunt had begun. The weather had been good and there had been an hour of twilight and then darkness had fallen. Carson himself had arrived on scene within forty minutes. The next twelve hours had unfolded pretty much the way Dorothy had described over breakfast, the house to house canvass, the flashlight searches, the loudhailer appeals to check every barn and outbuilding, the all-night motor patrols, the arrival of the dogs at first light, the State Police contribution, the National Guard’s loan of a helicopter.
    Miles Carson was a thorough man, but he had gotten no result.
    In principle Reacher might have criticized a couple of things. No reason to wait until dawn to call in the dogs, for instance. Dogs could work in the dark. But it was a moot