They drove on. The car bounced and lurched, hitting potholes with regularity. Kim said, “Chief, we need to know about Reacher. Whatever you can tell us. Whatever you know. We need to find him. It’s important.”
It seemed to take Roscoe a couple of seconds to switch her mind back to Reacher. She asked, “What do you want him for?”
“He’s a potentially valuable asset. The FBI is telling you it needs him. Whose side are you on?”
Roscoe turned and stared a long time directly into Kim’s face. Still wary. Maybe searching for some hint that Kim could be trusted. The Blazer hit a big pothole. Roscoe smacked her head on the roof. She raised her hand to rub the sore spot, and glanced out the back window and realized where they were.
“Back up,” she said to Gaspar, and she pointed to a mailbox so obscured by weeds and kudzu only a previous visitor could find it. “The house is about a mile down that driveway you just passed.”
Deep dents marred every surface of the mailbox. Once painted white, now veined with rusty cracks, it dangled from its thick re-rod pole, held by a single remaining U-bolt and the grasping kudzu. The door to the mailbox was missing completely. “It wasn’t like that the last time I was here,” Roscoe said.
“When was that?” Kim asked.
“Couple of years ago, I guess. Maybe longer. Before they were married, I think.”
“Looks like extreme mailbox baseball,” Gaspar said. “Kids in a car with a bat. Vandalism, in other words. A federal crime, actually. If memory serves, $250,000 fine and three years in prison for each offense. And each blow counts as a separate offense.”
Kim asked Roscoe, “Was Black targeted in some way? Kids would have to be pretty determined to come all the way out here just to beat the snot out of a mailbox for the fun of it.”
“I didn’t hear anything about it,” Roscoe said. “I don’t know.”
The Blazer’s tires bounced from one hole to the next. Dead skunk perfume came in through the air vents. Kim held her breath. Then she saw a good-sized dirt lot and a pea-gravel driveway full of two GHP cruisers, two marked Margrave squad cars, an unmarked sedan with a portable bubble light on the dash, and a county ambulance. A coat of red dust already covered them all.
Kim asked, “Anything special you want us to do?”
Roscoe paused a moment and said, “Do whatever you think you should, I guess. I’ll catch up with you inside. Check in before you leave and we’ll see where we are.”
Then she said, “We’ll talk more about Reacher later. After I get this situation sorted out. OK?”
Kim watched as Roscoe followed a line of cracked sandstone slate pavers by taking a little hop from one to the next and over the dirt between them, like she was crossing stones in a running stream. Withered plants filled cracked red-dirt beds along each side of the pavers. Uncut yard weeds thrived, impersonating a lawn. Thirty feet ahead a frame shotgun style house rested on a cement block foundation. Its metal roof reflected the glare of the sun. Between the roof and the foundation were four windows cut into the walls, all grimy. A porch ran the twenty-foot width of the house. On one end, a gray weathered bench swing hung crooked on a rusty chain, and on the other end sat two white plastic dollar-store rockers with an overflowing ash tray between them.
Roscoe stepped over the last weed gap, up the single plank step to the porch, and entered the house through the open front door.
Kim stayed where she was.
Gaspar, too, seemed momentarily transfixed.
“What a hole,” he said. “My wife would never have moved out here in a million years. What kind of woman lives like this?”
“The killing kind, apparently,” Kim said. She reached into her bag and found her camera. Then she opened her door and stepped onto the hard red ground.
The first thing she noticed was the quiet noonday, bizarrely still. She was a city girl. Noise was normal; quiet was not.
Out in the woods, no one can hear you scream.
“Did you know?” she asked.
“Know what?” Gaspar said.
“Why he gave us the eleven-thirty deadline. Why he put us in that room at that time.”
“You don’t trust me, do you?”
“He wanted us to be there when the call came in. He wanted us out here at the crime scene. That how you read it?”
“Yes,” Gaspar said.
“What about Reacher?”
“Reacher’s irrelevant.”
“To what? This homicide? Or is the whole assignment bogus?”
He shrugged. “You’re number one. You figure it out.”
She could feel sweat above her lip. She couldn’t figure it out. She hated that. She said, “Take pictures, OK? And don’t be obvious about it.”
If Gaspar resented her orders, he didn’t show it. He just turned back to the Blazer and got his own camera. She watched him from behind her sunglasses.
Was he limping? FBI field agents didn’t limp. Physical fitness was one of the basic requirements of the job. Definitely no limping allowed. She reached up and dabbed the sweat from her lip, and then she headed for the house, matching Gaspar’s longer stride step for step. As they walked his limp became less pronounced. Maybe it was just a cramp.
Maybe she could rely on him.
Only one choice.