Nothing to Lose

He got out of bed at four o’clock and took another long hot shower. He knew he was out of step with the Western world in terms of how often he changed his clothes, but he tried to compensate by keeping his body scrupulously clean. The motel soap was white and came in a small thin paper-wrapped morsel, and he used the whole bar. The shampoo was a thick green liquid in a small plastic bottle. He used half of it. It smelled faintly of apples. He rinsed and stood under the water for a moment more and then shut it off and heard someone knocking at his door. He wrapped a towel around his waist and padded across the room and opened up.

Vaughan.

She was in uniform. Her HPD cruiser was parked neatly behind her. She was staring in at him, openly curious. Not an unusual reaction.Look at yourself. What do you see? He was a spectacular meso-morph, built of nothing except large quantities of bone and sinew and muscle. But with his shirt off most people saw only his scars. He had a dozen minor nicks and cuts, plus a dimpled.38 bullet hole in the left center of his chest, and a wicked spider web of white lacerations low down on the right side of his abdomen, all criss-crossed and puckered by seventy clumsy stitches done quick and dirty in a mobile army surgical hospital. Souvenirs, in the first instance of childhood mayhem, in the second of a psychopath with a small revolver, and in the third, shrapnel from a bomb blast. Survivable, because childhood mayhem was always survivable, and because the.38 that hit him had been packed with a weak load, and because the shrapnel had been someone else’s bone, not white-hot metal. He had been a lucky man, and his luck was written all over his body.

Ugly, but fascinating.

Vaughan’s gaze traveled upward to his face.

“Bad news,” she said. “I went to the library.”

“You get bad news at libraries?”

“I looked at some books and used their computer.”

“And?”

“Trichloroethylene is called TCE for short. It’s a metal degreaser.”

“I know that.”

“It’s very dangerous. It causes cancer. Breast cancer, prostate cancer, all kinds of cancers. Plus heart disease, problems with the nervous system, strokes, liver disease, kidney disease, even diabetes. The EPA says a concentration of five parts per billion is acceptable. Some places have been measured twenty or thirty times worse than that.”

“Like where?”

“There was a case in Tennessee.”

“That’s a long way from here.”

“This is serious, Reacher.”

“People worry too much.”

“This isn’t a joke.”

He nodded.

“I know,” he said. “And Thurman uses five thousand gallons at a time.”

“And we drink the groundwater.”

“You drink bottled water.”

“Lots of people use tap.”

“The plant is twenty miles away. There’s a lot of sand. A lot of natural filtration.”

“It’s still a concern.”

Reacher nodded. “Tell me about it. I had two cups of coffee right there. One in the restaurant and one at the judge’s house.”

“You feel OK?”

“Fine. And people seem OK here.”

“So far.”

She went quiet.

He said, “What else?”

“Maria is missing. I can’t find her anywhere. The new girl.”

42

Vaughan hung around in the open doorway and Reacher grabbed his clothes and dressed in the bathroom. He called out, “Where did you look?”

“All over,” Vaughan called back. “She’s not here in the motel, she’s not in the diner, she’s not in the library, she’s not out shopping, and there isn’t anywhere else to go.”

“Did you speak to the motel clerk?”

“Not yet.”

“Then that’s where we’ll go first. She knows everything.” He came out of the bathroom, buttoning his shirt. The shirt was almost due for the trash, and the buttonholes were still difficult. He ran his fingers through his hair and checked his pockets.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The clerk was in the motel office, sitting on a high stool behind the counter, doing something with a ledger and a calculator. But she had no useful information. Maria had left her room before seven o’clock that morning, dressed as before, on foot, carrying only her purse.

“She ate breakfast before seven,” Reacher said. “The waitress in the diner told me.”

The clerk said she hadn’t come back. That was all she knew. Vaughan asked her to open Maria’s room. The clerk handed over her passkey immediately. No hesitation, no fuss about warrants or legalities or due process.Small towns, Reacher thought. Police work was easy. About as easy as it had been in the army.

Maria’s room was identical to Reacher’s, with only very slightly more stuff in it. A spare pair of jeans hung in the closet. They were neatly folded over the bar of a hanger. Above them on the shelf were one spare pair of cotton underpants, one bra, and one clean cotton T-shirt, all folded together in a low pile. On the floor of the closet was an empty suitcase. It was a small, sad, battered item. Blue in color, made from fiberboard, with a crushed lid, as if it had been stored for years with something heavy on top of it.