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Holland’s wife, presumably. The child was a girl, maybe eight or nine, her face white and indistinct and unformed. Their daughter, presumably. There was a pair of dice on the desk. Big old bone cubes, worn from use and age, the dots rubbed and faded, the material itself veined where soft calcium had gone and harder minerals had remained. But apart from the photograph and the dice there was nothing personal in the room. Everything else was business.
    Holland sat down behind the desk in a worn leather chair. There was an undraped picture window behind his head, triple-glazed against the cold. Clean glass. Darkness outside. Snow on the outer sill, a heater under the inner sill.
    Reacher took a visitor chair in front of the desk.
    Holland didn’t speak.
    Reacher asked, ‘What am I waiting for?’
    ‘We wanted to offer you the same hospitality we offered the others.’
    ‘But I was a harder sell?’
    Holland smiled a tired smile. ‘Not really. Andrew Peterson volunteered to take you in himself. But he’s busy right now. So you’ll have to wait.’
    ‘Busy doing what?’
    ‘What cops do.’
    Reacher said, ‘This is a bigger place than I expected. The tour bus GPS showed it as a dot on the map.’
    ‘We grew. That GPS data is a little out of date, I guess.’
    The office was overheated. Reacher had stopped shivering and was starting to sweat. His clothes were drying, stiff and dirty. He said, ‘You grew because you got a prison built here.’
    ‘How do you figure that?’
    ‘New prison bus. New sign after the highway.’
    Holland nodded. ‘We got a brand-new federal facility. We competed for it. Everybody wanted it. It’s like getting Toyota to open an assembly plant. Or Honda. Lots of jobs, lots of dollars. Then the state put their new penitentiary in the same compound, which was more jobs and more dollars, and the county jail is there too.’
    ‘Which is why the motels are full tonight? Visiting day to-morrow?’
    ‘Total of three visiting days a week, all told. And the way the bus lines run, most people have to spend two nights in town. Heads on beds six nights a week. Motel owners are like pigs in shit. And the diners, and the pizza parlours, and the shuttle bus people. Like I told you, jobs and dollars.’
    ‘Where’s the compound?’
    ‘Five miles north. The gift that keeps on giving.’
    ‘Lucky you,’ Reacher said.
    Holland was quiet for a beat. Then he said, ‘I learned a long time ago, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’
    The guy in the parka knocked and walked straight in and handed Holland a closed file folder. The clock on the wall showed eight in the evening, which was about right according to the clock in Reacher’s head. Holland swivelled his chair and opened the file folder ninety degrees and kept it tilted up at an awkward angle, to stop Reacher seeing the contents. But they were clearly reflected in the window glass behind Holland’s head. They were crime scene photographs, glossy colour eight-by-tens with printed labels pasted in their bottom corners. Holland leafed through them. An establishing shot, then a progressive sequence of close-ups. A sprawled black-clad body, large, probably male, probably dead, snow on the ground, blunt force trauma to the right temple. No blood.
    In the tour bus Knox had closed his cell phone and said:
The town of Bolton has a police department. They’re sending a guy. But they’ve got problems of their own and it will take some time
.
    Holland closed the file. Said nothing. A reserved, taciturn man. Like Reacher himself. In the end they just sat opposite each other without speaking. Not a hostile silence, but even so there was an undercurrent to it. Holland kept his palm on the closed file and glanced from time to time between it and his visitor, as if he wasn’t yet sure which represented his bigger problem.
    Eight o’clock in the evening in Bolton, South Dakota, was nine o’clock in the evening in Mexico City. Seventeen hundred miles