Worth Dying For

think?’
    Jacob said, ‘About what?’
    ‘Should we call the county and stop them showing Reacher the files?’
    ‘I don’t see how we could do that.’
    ‘We could try.’
    ‘It would draw attention.’
    Jonas asked, ‘Should we call Eldridge Tyler? Strictly as a backup?’
    ‘Then we would owe him something.’
    ‘It would be a wise investment, if Reacher is coming back.’
    ‘I don’t think he’s coming back,’ Jacob said. ‘That’s my first thought, certainly.’
    ‘But?’
    ‘Ultimately I guess it depends on what he finds, and what he doesn’t find.’

THIRTY
    R EACHER FOUND A STATEMENT FROM THE LITTLE GIRL ’ S FATHER . I T was long and detailed. Cops weren’t dumb. Fathers were automatic suspects when little girls disappeared. Margaret’s father had been Arthur Coe, universally known as Artie. At the time of his daughter’s disappearance he was thirty-seven years old. Relatively ancient for a father of an eight-year-old, back in the 1980s. He was a local man. He was a Vietnam veteran. He had refused an offer from the local Selective Service board to classify his farm work as an essential occupation. He had served, and he had come back. A brave man. A patriot. He had been fixing machinery in an outbuilding when Margaret had ridden away, and he had still been fixing it four hours later, when his wife came to tell him that the kid was still out. He had dropped everything and started the search. His statement was full of the same kinds of feelings Dorothy had described over breakfast, the unreality, the hope against hope, the belief that the kid was just out playing somewhere, surely to God, maybe picking flowers, that she had lost track of time, that she would be home soon, right as rain. Even after twenty-fiveyears the typewritten words still reeked of shock and pain and misery.
    Arthur Coe was an innocent man, Reacher thought.
    He moved on, to a packet marked by hand
Margaret Coe Biography
. Just a regular manila envelope, quite thin, as would befit an eight-year-old’s short life story. The gummed flap had never been licked, but it was stuck down anyway, from dampness in the storage facility. Reacher eased it open. There were sheets of paper inside, plus a photograph in a yellowed glassine jacket. Reacher eased it out. And was surprised.
    Margaret Coe was Asian.
    Vietnamese, possibly, or Thai, or Cambodian, or Chinese, or Japanese, or Korean. Dorothy wasn’t. Arthur probably hadn’t been, either. Not a native Nebraskan farm worker. Therefore Margaret was adopted. She had been a sweet little thing. The photograph was dated on the back, in a woman’s handwriting, with an added note:
Nearly eight! Beautiful as ever!
It was a colour picture, probably amateur, but proficient. Better than a snapshot. It had been thought about and composed, and taken with a decent camera. A good likeness, obviously, to have been given to the police. It showed a little Asian girl, standing still, posing, smiling. She was small and slight and slender. She had trust and merriment in her eyes. She was wearing a plaid skirt and a white blouse.
    She was a lovely child.
    Reacher heard the stoner’s voice in his mind, from earlier in the day:
I hear that poor ghost screaming, man, screaming and wailing and moaning and crying, right here in the dark
.
    And at that point Reacher took a break.
    Sixty miles north Dorothy Coe took a pork chop from her refrigerator. The chop was part of a pig a friend had slaughtered a mile away, part of a loose cooperative designed to get people through tough times. Dorothy trimmed the fat, and put a little pepper on the meat, and a little mustard, and a little brown sugar. She put the chop in an open dish and put the dish in the oven. She set her table, one place, a knife, a fork, and a plate. She tooka glass and filled it with water and put it next to the plate. She folded a square of paper towel for a napkin. Dinner, for one.
    Reacher was hungry. He had eaten no lunch. He called the desk and asked for room service and the guy who had booked him in told him there was no room service. He apologized for the lack. Then he went ahead and mentioned the two restaurants named on the billboard Reacher had already seen. The guy promised a really excellent meal could be gotten at either one of them. Maybe he was on a retainer from the Chamber of Commerce.
    Reacher put his coat on and headed down the hallway to the lobby. Two more guests were checking in. Both men. They looked Middle Eastern.