Make Me

“You especially. You don’t look like what you say you are. Not like an FBI agent on the television.”

“I was undercover. Pretending to be a bad guy.”

“Your act was convincing.”

“So you called 911.”

“Immediately.”

“What did you say?”

“I had armed terrorists in my house.”

“Why that?”

“This is Chicago. That’s the only way to get a response in less than four hours.”

Chang said, “We should probably get going.”

Reacher said, “No, let’s stay a little longer. Five more minutes can’t hurt.”

They got refills of coffee, and the old lady wanted more cake, so Reacher and Chang got more too, to keep her company. The TV changed to a split screen, with the park on the left, and the house on the right, over individual labels saying Lincoln Park Homicide and Terror Alert, both of those labels centered over the main ticker, which said Busy Day for Cops.

The second cup of coffee was as good as the first. As was the cake. A body bag showed up in the park, and an ambulance arrived at the house. The body bag was zipped up and carried to the coroner’s wagon, and EMTs came out of the ambulance and ran up the stoop and in the house. Later they came out again with an injured man on a gurney. Hackett, presumably, although it was hard to be sure. The guy’s face was bandaged from the neck up, like an Egyptian mummy, and his clothes were covered with a sheet.

Then like a slow-burn visual effect in a movie the cops drove out of the park, and four long minutes later they showed up at the house, in the same cars, all the way from the left of the screen to the right, a short electronic hop but a circuitous real-world route. The same detectives got out and rushed up the stoop and went inside the house, and a minute later they came back out again, talking urgently on their cell phones.

The ticker changed to Official Says Cases Are Connected.

Reacher said, “Ma’am, I’m very sorry for your loss, and I’m very sorry for the intrusion you’re about to suffer. The Chicago PD will want to ask you questions. And it’s not like it is in the television shows. The FBI can’t come in and take over their case. We have to leave them alone. So we’d appreciate it if you don’t even tell them we’ve talked. There are all kinds of sensitivities there. Better not to tell them about us at all. Even about us being at the house earlier. They don’t need to know we beat them to it.”

“Are you asking me to lie to them?”

“I will, if they ask me who told them terrorists, and why.”

“Then very well, I will too,” the old lady said.

“Do you really have no idea what McCann’s problem was?”

“I told you, I’m his neighbor, not his sister. You should really ask her.”

“Who?”

“His sister.”

“He has a sister?”

“I told you before.”

“I thought it was a figure of speech.”

“No, she’s real. They’re very close. She’d be the one he shared secrets with.”

Chapter 37

They sent Mrs. Hopkins home in the Town Car, and told the driver that was the last of his engagements for the day, and therefore he was off-duty thereafter, free to go home, or back to the garage, or wherever else it was he was supposed to go. The guy took the news cheerfully. But Reacher figured his last engagement wouldn’t be his finest. He figured they wouldn’t make it all the way. They would get within a couple of streets of the old lady’s house, and then they would hit the roadblocks. If the old lady could produce proof of name and address, she would be allowed to continue on foot. Or in the back of a real government car, depending how much sooner or later they wanted to talk to the neighbor. Either way she would end up cool and comfortable, plied with water and coffee, talking to polite young women.

Safe enough.

Chang switched on her cell phone. Also safe enough. Hackett’s tracking operation was out of business, at least temporarily. And they needed maps, and satellite images, and flight schedules, and search engines. Mrs. Hopkins had told them Peter McCann’s sister was a woman named Lydia Lair. She was younger by a number of years. She had married a doctor and moved away, to a tony suburb outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Her husband was rich, but McCann had asked for nothing except her time and her ear. There was a street address for her, a scribbled note intended for the old lady’s Christmas card list, still wedged in a pocket diary in her purse. But there was no phone number. Chang found the husband’s practice on-line, but the medical receptionist wouldn’t give out a home number. The phone company database said it was unlisted. Neither husband nor wife showed up anywhere in Chang’s secret databases. Google brought nothing back either, except one anodyne image of the couple at a charity event. Dr. and Mrs. Evan Lair. A kidney foundation. He was in black tie, and she was in an evening gown. She looked in good health. She glittered with diamonds, and her teeth were very white.