There was a map in the file. Most of the ambushes had taken place inside a pear-shaped pocket of territory enclosing maybe a hundred square miles. It was marked on the map like a stain. It was centered on a long north-south axis with the southerly bulge sitting mostly inside the Echo County line. That meant the victims had already made it fifty miles or more. By then they would be weak and tired and in no shape to resist.
Border patrol brass launched a full-scale investigation one August, eleven months after the first vague rumors surfaced. There was one more attack at the end of that month, and then nothing ever again. Denied an ongoing forensic basis for examination, the investigation got nowhere at all. There were preventive measures enforced, like strict accounting of ammunition and increased frequency of radio checks. But no conclusions were reached. It was’a thorough job, and to their credit the brass kept hard at it, but a retrospective investigation into a closed paramilitary world where the only witnesses denied ever having been near the border in the first place was hopeless. The matter wound down. Time passed. The homicides had stopped, the survivors were building new lives, the immigration amnesties had insulated the outrage. The tempo of investigation slowed to a halt. The files were sealed four years later.
“So?” Alice said.
Reacher butted the papers together with the heel of his hand. Closed the file. Pitched it behind him into the rear seat.
“Now I know why she lied about the ring,” he said.
“Why?”
“She didn’t lie. She was telling the truth.”
“She said it was a fake worth thirty bucks.”
“And she thought that was the truth. Because some jeweler in Pecos laughed at her and told her it was a fake worth thirty bucks. And she believed him. But he
was trying to rip her off, was all, trying to buy it for thirty bucks and sell it again for sixty thousand. Oldest scam in the world. Exact same thing happened to some of these immigrants in the file. Their first experience of America.”
“The jeweler lied?”
He nodded. “I should have figured it before, because it’s obvious. Probably the exact same guy we went to. I figured he didn’t look like the Better Business Bureau’s poster boy.”
“He didn’t try to rip us off.”
“No, Alice, he didn’t. Because you’re a sharp-looking white lawyer and I’m a big tough-looking white guy. She was a small Mexican woman, all alone and desperate and scared. He saw an opportunity with her that he didn’t see with us.”
Alice was quiet for a second.
“So what does it mean?” she asked.
Reacher clicked off the dome light. Smiled in the dark and stretched. Put his palms on the dash in front of him and flexed his massive shoulders against the pressure.
“It means we’re good to go,” he said. “It means all our ducks are in a neat little row. And it means you should drive faster, because right now we’re maybe twenty minutes ahead of the bad guys, and I want to keep it that way as long as I can.”
She blew Straight through the sleeping crossroads hamlet once again and made the remaining sixty miles in forty-three minutes, which Reacher figured was pretty good for a yellow four-cylinder import with a bud vase next to the steering wheel. She made the turn in under the gate and braked hard and stopped at the foot of the porch steps. The porch lights were on and the VW’s dust fogged up around them in a khaki cloud. It was close to two o’clock in the morning.
“Leave it running,” Reacher said.
He led her up to the door. Hammered hard on it and got no reply. Tried the handle. It was unlocked. Why would it be locked? We’re sixty miles from the nearest crossroads. He swung it open and they stepped straight into the red-painted foyer.
“Hold your arms out,” he said.
He unloaded all six .22 hunting rifles out of the rack on the wall and laid them in her arms, alternately muzzle to stock so they would balance. She staggered slightly under the weight.