CHAPTER THREE

Four months later

Thursday, January 13

3:00 a.m.

Detroit, Michigan

FBI Special Agent Kim Otto’s size five shoes pounded the treadmill as she ran, mouthing the words breathlessly with each footfall.

Jack Reacher was dead.

Had to be.

Everybody said so.

Time to move on.

Long past time.

Let it go.

He’s dead.

It’s over.

Move on.

Get a life.

That last one made her smile ruefully. A life. What was that? She hadn’t had a real life since her divorce. The Bureau was her life. And that’s the way she liked it.

She’d covered ten miles already, but fatigue eluded her. She couldn’t sleep until she was exhausted enough to erase the visions that plagued her dreams, and she wasn’t quite there yet.

She faced the magnificent moonlit view of the Detroit River and the twinkling lights of Windsor to the South, but she noticed nothing.

Instead, she relived the explosion that killed Reacher and very nearly killed her team.

She’d visualized the events thousands of times. She knew he was dead. Knew it the same way she knew the basic laws of physics.

Yet, Reacher felt like unfinished business.

How could that be?

Only one more time, she promised herself again.

She re-experienced all of it.

Gooseflesh raised on her whole body as it had with the cold, sharp wind off the frigid Atlantic six weeks ago. The salty air stung her nostrils.

Her heart pounded hard with terror and exertion as she ran from the bomb.

She saw the magnificent old house on Maine’s Rocky Pointe explode into millions of pieces.

The vision replayed in her head.

Again, and again, and again.

Her shoe tread caught on the edge of the treadmill belt, jerking her attention to the present. She stumbled and lifted her foot and worked to stay upright.

When she’d regained her balance, she cocked her head and considered the provable facts objectively once more, arguing the evidence.

“Reacher could have escaped after he set that bomb and before it detonated,” she had said to her partner when they argued during the post mortem.

Reacher had plenty of experience with C-4. He knew precisely how it functioned. He understood how much time he had to take cover.

Reacher was a guy who lived comfortably with violence. He accepted that he might lose his life at any moment.

But he wasn’t suicidal.

Not even remotely.

He’d constructed the bomb. He would have built in enough time to run upstairs from the basement, down the back hallway, and out through the kitchen door to safety.

She believed these facts deep in her bones.

On the treadmill, she gasped with each quick inhale. Her heart pounded against her chest from exertion and exhaustion.

She struggled to stay focused. Sweat soaked her headband and glistened on her body as she argued the same hard evidence she’d covered every day since the explosion.

More likely that Reacher was inside when the C-4 detonated. That’s what everyone said.

No evidence to the contrary had been located after six weeks of diligent searching by every qualified tech on the east coast and beyond.

The former owner of that house had tried to kill Reacher nine years before. Reacher won.

But this time, Reacher was nine years older. Nine years weaker. Nine years slower.

New owners of the house this time, too. Tougher ones.

Reacher had lost that last battle.

He must have.

Reacher must be dead.

He must be.

But was he?

She struggled for every ragged breath, but she didn’t stop running, and her mind was mired in Reacher’s horrific death like a car spinning four tires in the mud.

For twenty-six days in November, she’d chased Reacher’s scent around the country and across the oceans like an old bloodhound.

But she wasn’t that old, and her sense of smell wasn’t that keen. Maybe that’s why she’d failed. She’d never found him.

Even so, she’d noticed his scent, heard his voice, dodged bullets meant to kill him. She’d caught glimpses of him a few times, she was sure. She’d noticed his scent after he’d left the room.

No more than that.

She drew ragged breaths and wiped the sweat from her eyes with her forearm and bumped up the incline on the treadmill with her fist.

And now Reacher was dead. He must be. No alternative theories she’d conjured up over the past six weeks had panned out.

The final conclusion was the most likely answer.

The man who seemed to have survived longer than Count Dracula had finally lived his last. She didn’t know much about vampires, but she recalled that even the undead could be killed with the right weapon.

What was she to do now? Return to busting drug dealers and traffickers and wannabe airplane terrorists carrying explosives in their underwear?

She felt the bile rise in her throat.

Once, her FBI job had been challenging enough. Perhaps it would be so again. Or maybe it was time to move on.

But where would she go?

Should she actually try to get a life?