Free 17 A Wanted Man by Lee Child

in there now?’
    ‘Unless she sleepwalks. And she’s expecting to see her mommy in the morning.’
    ‘We shouldn’t tell her. Not yet. Not until we’re sure.’
    ‘We’re not going to tell her. Not now. But we have to talk to the neighbour. It’s still possible this whole thing is nothing. Something innocent might have come up, and Karen might have left a message.’
    ‘You think?’
    ‘No, not really. But we have to check.’
    So they cut across the other lawn together and Sorenson tried to weight her knock so that a sleeping adult might hear it, but sleeping children wouldn’t. Hard to do. Her first attempt woke nobody. Her second might have woken everybody. Certainly it brought a tired woman of about thirty to the door.
    There had been no message from Karen Delfuenso.

SEVENTEEN
    THE NEXT WORDS into Reacher’s empty mind had been spoken by the grizzled old State Police sergeant:
Not you
. Eventually they led to numbers, first six, then three, then one. Six because they contained six letters, and three because each word had three letters, and taken together they had three vowels and three consonants. Reacher had no patience for people who claimed that
y
was a vowel.
    Three, and six.
    Good numbers.
    A circle could be drawn through any three points not on a straight line.
    Take any three consecutive numbers, the largest divisible by three, and add them up, and then add the digits of the result, again and again if necessary, until just a single number is left.
    That number will be six.
    But eventually the words
Not you
led past the number six, and then past the number three, and then all the way down to the number one, simply because of their content. Reacher had asked:
Who are you looking for, sergeant?
The sergeant had answered:
Not you
. Not:
Not you guys
or
Not you people
.
    Not you
.
    They were looking for a lone individual.
    Which was consistent with what had happened at the earlier roadblock. Reacher had gotten a better view back there, and he had seen men driving alone getting extra scrutiny.
    But:
Not you
.
    Which meant that the cops had at least a rough description of the guy they were looking for, and that Reacher categorically wasn’t that guy. Why not? There could be a million reasons. Right off the bat Reacher was tall, white, old, and heavy. And so on, and so forth. Therefore the target might be short, black, young, and skinny. And so on, and so forth.
    But the sergeant had paused first, and thought, and smiled. The
Not you
had been emphatic, and a little wry. Maybe even a little rueful. As if the difference between Reacher and the description had been a total contrast. Or completely drastic. But it wasn’t possible to be drastically tall, unless they were looking for a dwarf or a midget, in which case the merest glance into the car would have sufficed. It wasn’t possible to be drastically white. White or black was an everyday difference. No one thought of degrees of blackness or whiteness. Not any more. Reacher wasn’t drastically old either, unless their target was a fetus. And Reacher wasn’t outstandingly heavy, unless their target was practically skeletal.
    Not you
. Said right after Reacher’s deliberate mistake about the guy’s rank, which would have been understood as a pro-forma compliment, just one regular guy to another, probably one veteran to another. Common ground.
    Not you
. Emphatic, wry, rueful, and good-natured. Just one regular guy to another, one vet to another, right back, equally. Still surfing on the earlier stuff about the busted nose. Referring back to it, in a way. A continuation of the banter. Common ground, established and repeated.
    Therefore the guy they were looking for didn’t have a busted nose.
    But then, most people didn’t have a busted nose.
    Which meant the sergeant had been generalizing. As if to say:
I’m pretty sure our description would have included that nose of yours, for instance
.
    Which meant they had been told their target didn’t have