Make Me

“It’s a fairly wide category.”

“Give me an example.”

“Smoke alarms are compulsory in homes because they contain cameras and microphones wirelessly linked to the government. With poison gas capsules too, in case the government doesn’t like what you’re saying or doing.”

“Keever wouldn’t waste time on a thing like that.”

“And I wouldn’t ignore something more serious.”

“Maybe it wasn’t well explained.”

“I guess it can’t have been.”

“You sure you don’t remember this Maloney guy at all?”

As a response Westwood clicked his way through to an unfiltered list of all the calls he had received. The screens were big and he had two of them, but even so there was space only for a small part of the calendar year.

Reacher said, “Are we in there?”

Westwood nodded. “From this morning.”

“What folder did you put us in?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

Chang took out her phone and dialed Maloney’s number. The 501 area code, and seven more digits. She put her phone on speaker. There was hiss and dead air as the cellular system hooked her up. Then the number rang.

And rang, and rang.

No answer, and no voice mail.

Chang hung up, after a whole long minute, and the office went quiet.

Reacher said, “We need to know where the 501 area code is.”

Westwood clicked off his database and opened up a web browser. Then he glanced at the door and said, “So I guess we’re really doing this.”

“No one will know,” Reacher said. “Until the movie comes out.”

The computer told them 501 was one of three area codes given to cell phones in Arkansas. Chang said, “Was there an Arkansas number you blocked about nine weeks ago? Maybe our guy switched from his land line to his cell, simple as that.”

Westwood went back into his database, to the unfiltered list of calls, and he scrolled back nine weeks, and said, “How much limbo should we give him? How fast would he have come up with the idea of changing his name and number?”

“Pretty fast,” Reacher said. “It isn’t brain surgery. But I’m guessing there was some limbo. Most likely because of hurt feelings. You rejected him. It might have taken him a week to swallow his pride and call you back.”

Westwood scrolled some more. Ten weeks back. He opened the list of area codes on his second screen, and went back and forth, comparing, line by line, and when he was finished he said, “I blocked four guys that week. But none of them was from Arkansas.”

Reacher said, “Try the week before. Maybe he’s more sensitive than we thought.”

Westwood scrolled again, backward through the next seven days, and then forward again, checking against the list of area codes, and he said, “I blocked two guys the previous week, for a fourteen-day total of six, but still no one from Arkansas.”

Reacher said, “We’re getting somewhere anyway. The Maloney calls started nine weeks ago, from a guy who had just gotten blocked, in a recent window of time, and in that category there are six possible candidates. Logic says our guy is one of them. And we could be talking to him thirty seconds from now. On his other line. Because you have all the original phone numbers.”

Chapter 26

Westwood copied and pasted the six names and numbers to a new blank screen. The names were a standard American mixture. They could have been the first six up for any team in the Majors, or they could have been any six guys in line at the pawn shop, or the ER, or the first-class lounge at the airport. Half the numbers were cell phones, Reacher guessed, because he didn’t recognize the area codes, but there was a 773 for Chicago in there, and a 505 for somewhere in New Mexico, and a 901, which he figured could be Memphis, Tennessee.

Westwood put his phone in a dock on his desk and dialed the first number direct from his computer. There were speakers in the dock, and Reacher heard the beep-boop-bap of the electronic pulses, and then nothing but hiss, and then a pre-recorded voice, pitched somewhere between scolding and sympathetic.

The number was out of service.

Westwood hung up and checked the area code on his screen. He said, “That was a cell phone, in northern Louisiana, maybe Shreveport, or close by. The contract was probably terminated or canceled, as happens in the normal run of things, and the number will be reissued sooner or later.”

He dialed the second number.

Same thing. The dialing sounds, then nothing, then the phone company voice, its script apologetic, its tone faintly incredulous that anyone would do anything as pitifully dumb as try to call a telephone number that was currently out of service.

“A cell in Mississippi,” Westwood said. “Somewhere north. Oxford, probably. A lot of college students there. Maybe his parents threw him off the family plan.”

“Or maybe it was a burner phone,” Reacher said. “A pay-as-you-go from a drugstore, that ran out of minutes. Or was trashed. Maybe they’re all burners.”