They’d traveled the county road for eighteen miles under smothering gray skies, which allowed plenty of time for brooding. Thin snow covered the empty fields like a dirty blanket. Perhaps a riot of color had dressed the hardwoods before Halloween, but now only a few dead leaves dangled from dried stems beneath spindly branches. Even the vehicle in which they traveled was dull inside and out.She felt captured in a monochrome movie. Yet, she welcomed the dreary weather because while the low, dense cloud ceiling interfered with the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle surveillance drones, she enjoyed a thin slice of breathing room.Not the atmospheric gloom, then, but her quarry was responsible for her personal brain cloud. He was toying with her, which was okay. But he was winning the game, which wasn’t.“Tell me again why you think we’ll find Reacher in New Hope,” she said.FBI Special Agent Kim Louisa Otto didn’t mind matching wits with Jack (none) Reacher at the right time and place. Actually, she hoped this assignment grew in that direction.Meanwhile, a better profile of Reacher slowly developed in her mind the way an old fashioned photographic image revealed itself when blank paper was submerged in the proper fluids.
