Nothing to Lose

Vaughan shook her head. “Still makes no sense. Any unexplained death out-of-doors has got to be reported to the county coroner. In which case it would have showed up on the state system. Purely as a statistic. The State Police would have said,Well, hey, we heard there was a dead guy in Despair this morning, maybe you should check it out. ”

“But they didn’t.”

“Because nothing has been called in from Despair. Which just doesn’t add up. What the hell are they doing with the corpse? There’s no morgue over there. Not even any cold storage, as far as I know. Not even a meat locker.”

“So they’re doing something else with him,” Reacher said.

“Like what?”

“Burying him, probably.”

“He wasn’t road kill.”

“Maybe they’re covering something up.”

“You claim he died of natural causes.”

“He did,” Reacher said. “From wandering through the scrub for days. Maybe because they ran him out of town. Which might embarrass them. Always assuming they’re capable of embarrassment.”

Vaughan shook her head again. “They didn’t run him out of town. We didn’t get a call. And they always call us. Always. Then they drive them to the line and dump them. This week there’s been you and the girl. That’s all.”

“They never dump them to the west?”

“There’s nothing there. It’s unincorporated land.”

“Maybe they’re just slow. Maybe they’ll call it in later.”

“Doesn’t compute,” Vaughan said. “You find a dead one, you put one hand on your gun and the other on your radio. You call for backup, you call for the ambulance, you call the coroner. One, two, three. It’s completely automatic. There and then.”

“Maybe they aren’t as professional as you.”

“It’s not about being unprofessional. It’s about making a spur-of-the-moment decision to break procedure and not to call the coroner. Which would require some kind of real reason.”

Reacher said nothing.

Vaughan said, “Maybe there were no cops involved. Maybe someone else found him.”

“Civilians don’t carry stretchers in their cars,” Reacher said.

Vaughan nodded vaguely and got up. Said, “We should get out of here before the day guy gets in. And the watch commander.”

“Embarrassed to be seen with me?”

“A little. And I’m a little embarrassed that I don’t know what to do.”

The breakfast rush at the diner was over. A degree of calm had been restored. Reacher ordered coffee. Vaughan said she was happy with tap water. She sipped her way through half a glass and drummed her fingers on the table.

“Start over,” she said. “Who was this guy?”

“Caucasian male,” Reacher said.

“Not Hispanic? Not foreign?”

“I think Hispanics are Caucasians, technically. Plus Arabs and some Asians. All I’m going on is his hair. He wasn’t black. That’s all I know for sure. He could have been from anywhere in the world.”

“Dark-skinned or pale?”

“I couldn’t see anything.”

“You should have taken a flashlight.”

“I’m still glad I didn’t.”

“How did his skin feel?”

“Feel? It felt like skin.”

“You should have been able to tell something. Olive skin feels different from pale skin. A little smoother and thicker.”

“Really?”

“I think so. Don’t you?”

Reacher touched the inside of his left wrist with his right forefinger. Then he tried his cheek, under his eye.

“Hard to tell,” he said.

Vaughan stretched her arm across the table. “Now compare.”

He touched the inside of her wrist, gently.

She said, “Now try my face.”

“Really?”

“Purely for research purposes.”

He paused a beat, then touched her cheek with the ball of his thumb. He took his hand away and said, “Texture was thicker than either one of us. Smoothness was somewhere between the two of us.”

“OK.” She touched her own wrist where he had touched it, and then her face. Then she said, “Give me your wrist.”

He slid his hand across the table. She touched his wrist, with two fingers, like she was taking his pulse. She rubbed an inch north and an inch south and then leaned over and touched his cheek with her other hand. Her fingertips were cold from her water glass and the touch startled him. He felt a tiny jolt of voltage in it.

She said, “So he wasn’t necessarily white, but he was younger than you. Less lined and wrinkled and weather-beaten. Less of a mess.”

“Thank you.”

“You should use a good moisturizer.”

“I’ll bear that advice in mind.”

“And sunscreen.”

“Likewise.”

“Do you smoke?”

“I used to.”

“That’s not good for your skin either.”

Reacher said, “He might have been Asian, with the skimpy beard.”

“Cheekbones?”

“Pronounced, but he was thin anyway.”

“Wasted, in fact.”

“Noticeably. But he was probably wiry to begin with.”

“How long does it take for a wiry person to get wasted?”

“I don’t know for sure. Maybe five or six days in a hospital bed or a cell, if you’re sick or on a hunger strike. Less if you’re moving about out-of-doors, keeping warm, burning energy. Maybe only two or three days.”

Vaughan was quiet for a moment.

“That’s a lot of wandering,” she said. “We need to know why the good folks of Despair put in two or three days sustained effort to keep him out of there.”