Make Me

“I mean this is bullshit.” He ducked away, to the cabinets below the shelves. He opened one after the other. The first held spare toner cartridges for the printer. The second held spare toner cartridges for the fax machine.

The third held spare legal pads.

And right next to them were spare spiral-bound notebooks, still shrink-wrapped in packs of five, and right behind them were spare memo blocks, solid cubes of crisp virgin paper, three and a half inches on a side.

“I’m sorry,” Reacher said.

“For what?”

“This doesn’t look too good anymore. This is a guy who uses a lot of paper. So much so he buys it in the economy size. I bet that desk was covered with paper. We could have pieced this whole thing together. But someone got here ahead of us. On the same mission. So now it’s all gone.”

“Who?”

“The how tells us who, I’m afraid. Keever is a prisoner. That’s the only way this thing can work. They found notes in his jacket pocket, maybe torn out from a legal pad, and in one pants pocket they found his wallet, with his driver’s license, which told them his address, which they assumed was where the rest of the legal pad was, maybe with more notes on it, and in the other pants pocket they found his house keys, which meant they could walk right in, even to the extent of these new alarms maybe having a thing you wave near the panel, to turn it off. A remote fob, on the keychain. A transponder. Which would be a mercy, I guess. It would mean they didn’t have to beat the code out of him.”

Chang said, “That’s very blunt.”

“I can’t explain it any other way.”

“It doesn’t tell me who.”

“Mother’s Rest,” Reacher said. “That’s his last known location.”

They went through Keever’s house room by room, in case something had been missed. The mud room held nothing of interest. The kitchen was a plain space, not much used. There was mismatched silverware, and odds and ends of canned food, presumably bought with temporary enthusiasm, but never eaten. There was nothing hidden, unless it had been walled up and artfully painted over with a finish exactly resembling twenty-year-old latex base coat, complete with grease and grime.

The living room and the dining nook were the same. Searching was easy. The guy wasn’t exactly camping out, but it was clear he had started over without much stuff, and hadn’t added a great deal along the way. The guest room with beds looked like it had been set up for his children. Visitation rights. Every other weekend, maybe. Whatever the lawyers had agreed. But Reacher felt the room had never been used.

The master suite smelled slightly sour. There was a bed with a single night table. There was a chest of drawers and a wooden apparatus that had a hanger for a jacket, and trays for watches and coins and wallets. Like in a fancy hotel. The bathroom smelled humid, and the towels were a mess.

The night table had a short stack of magazines, weighted down by a hardcover book. As he passed by, Reacher glanced down to see what it was. Purely out of interest.

He saw three things.

First, the magazine on the top of the pile was the Sunday supplement from the LA Times.

Second, it was only part consumed. There was a quarter-inch of bookmark visible.

Third, the hardcover book was also only part consumed. It had a bookmark, too.

The bookmarks were old slips of memo paper, folded once, lengthwise. They were the first paper Reacher had seen, anywhere in the house.

Chapter 17

The slip of paper in the hardcover book was blank, except for a single scribbled number 4. Which was a number of moderate technical interest, and most famous for being the only number in the entire universe that matched the number of letters in its own word in English: four. But other than that, it didn’t seem to mean much. Not in context.

Chang said, “I’m with the defense attorneys on that one.”

Reacher nodded. But the next one was better. Much better. Purely in terms of function, at first. The LA Times Sunday magazine came open at the start of a long article by science editor Ashley Westwood. It was about how modern advances in treating traumatic brain injuries were giving us a better understanding of the brain itself.

The magazine was less than two weeks old.

Chang said, “The defense attorneys would start by quoting the LA Times’s Sunday circulation.”

Reacher said, “Which is what?”

“Nearly a million, I think.”

“As in, it’s a million-to-one chance this is not a coincidence?”

“That’s what the defense attorneys would say.”

“What would an FBI agent say?”

“We were taught to think ahead. To what the defense attorneys would say.”

Reacher unfolded the bookmark. It was blank on one side.

It wasn’t blank on the other side.

The other side had two lines of handwriting.

At the top was the same 323 telephone number. Science editor Westwood himself, in Los Angeles, California.

At the bottom was written: Mother’s Rest — Maloney.

Reacher asked, “Now what would an FBI agent say?”