“Makes no sense to me,” Neagley said. “It implies there’s something they’re more worried about than their children.”
“Which would be what?” Froelich asked.
“Green cards? Are they legal?”
Stuyvesant nodded. “Of course they are. They’re United States Secret Service employees, same as anybody else in this building. Background-checked from here to hell and back. We snoop on their financial situation and everything. They were clean, far as we knew.”
Reacher let the talk drift into the background. He rubbed the back of his neck with the palm of his hand. The stubble from his haircut was growing out. It felt softer. He glanced at Neagley. Stared down at the carpet. It was gray nylon, ribbed, somewhere between fine and coarse. He could see individual hairy strands glittering in the halogen light. It was an immaculately clean carpet. He closed his eyes. Thought hard. Ran the surveillance video in his head all over again. Watched it like there was a screen inside his eyelids. It went like this: eight minutes before midnight, the cleaners enter the picture. They walk into Stuyvesant’s office. Seven minutes past midnight, they come out. They spend nine minutes cleaning the secretarial station. They shuffle off the way they had come at sixteen minutes past midnight. He ran it again, forward and then backward. Concentrated on every frame. Every movement. Then he opened his eyes. Everybody was staring at him like he had been ignoring their questions. He glanced at his watch. It was almost nine o’clock. He smiled. A wide, happy grin.
“I liked Mr. Gálvez,” he said. “He seemed really happy to be a father, didn’t he? All those lunch boxes lined up? I bet they get whole wheat bread. Fruit, too, probably. All kinds of good nutrition.”
They all looked at him.
“I was an Army kid,” he said. “I had a lunch box. Mine was an old ammunition case. We all had them. It was considered the thing back then, on the bases. I stenciled my name on it, with a real Army stencil. My mother hated it. Thought it was way too militaristic, for a kid. But she gave me good stuff to eat anyway.”
Neagley stared at him. “Reacher, we’ve got big problems here, two people are dead, and you’re talking about lunch boxes?”
He nodded. “Talking about lunch boxes, and thinking about haircuts. Mr. Gálvez had just been to the barber, you notice that?”
“So?”
“And with the greatest possible respect, Neagley, I’m thinking about your ass.”
Froelich stared at him. Neagley blushed.
“Your point being?” she said.
“My point being, I don’t think there is anything more important to Julio and Anita than their children.”
“So why are they still clamming up?”
Froelich sat forward and pressed her finger on her earpiece. Listened for a second and raised her wrist.
“Copy,” she said. “Good work, everybody, out.”
Then she smiled.
“Armstrong’s home,” she said. “Secure.”
Reacher looked at his watch again. Nine o’clock exactly. He glanced across at Stuyvesant. “Can I see your office again? Right now?”
Stuyvesant looked blank, but he stood up and led the way out of the room. They followed the corridors and arrived at the rear of the floor. The secretarial station was quiet and deserted. Stuyvesant’s door was closed. He pushed it open and hit the lights.
There was a sheet of paper on the desk.
They all saw it. Stuyvesant stood completely still for a second and then walked across the floor and stared down at it. Swallowed. Breathed out. Picked it up.
“Fax from Boulder PD,” he said. “Preliminary ballistics. My secretary must have left it.”
He smiled with relief.
“Now check,” Reacher said. “Concentrate. Is this how your office usually looks?”
Stuyvesant held the fax and glanced around the room.
“Exactly,” he said.
“So this is how the cleaners see it every night?”
“Well, the desk is usually clear,” Stuyvesant said. “But otherwise, yes.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Let’s go.”
They walked back to the conference room. Stuyvesant read the fax.
“They found six shell cases,” he said. “Nine millimeter Parabellums. Strange impact marks on the sides. They’ve sent a drawing.”
He slid the paper to Neagley. She read it through. Made a face. Slid it across to Reacher. He looked at the drawing and nodded.
“Heckler & Koch MP5,” he said. “It punches the empty brass out like nobody’s business. The guy had it set to bursts of three. Two bursts, six cases. They probably ended up twenty yards away.”
“Probably the SD6 version,” Neagley said. “If it was silenced. That’s a nice weapon. Quality submachine gun. Expensive. Rare, too.”
“Why did you want to see my office?” Stuyvesant asked.
“We’re wrong about the cleaners,” Reacher said.
The room went quiet.
“In what way?” Neagley asked.
“In every way,” Reacher said. “Every possible way we could be. What happened when we talked to them?”
“They stonewalled like crazy.”
He nodded. “That’s what I thought too. They went into some kind of a stoic silence. All of them. Almost like a trance. I interpreted that as a response to some kind of danger. Like they were really digging deep and defending against whatever hold somebody had over them. Like it was vitally important. Like they knew they couldn’t afford to say a single word. But you know what?”
“What?”
“They just didn’t have a clue what we were talking about. Not the first idea. We were two crazy white people asking them impossible questions, is all. They were too polite and too inhibited to tell us to get lost. They just sat there patiently while we rambled on.”
“So what are you saying?”
“Think about what else we know. There’s a weird sequence of facts on the tape. They look a little tired going into Stuyvesant’s office, and a little less tired coming out. They look fairly neat going in, and a little disheveled coming out. They spend fifteen minutes in there, and only nine in the secretarial area.”
“So?” Stuyvesant asked.
Reacher smiled. “Your office is probably the world’s cleanest room. You could do surgery in there. You keep it that way deliberately. We know about the thing with the briefcase and the wet shoes, by the way.”
Froelich looked blank. Stuyvesant’s turn to blush.
“It’s tidy to the point of obsession,” Reacher said. “And yet the cleaners spent fifteen minutes in there. Why?”
“They were unpacking the letter,” Stuyvesant said. “Placing it in position.”
“No, they weren’t.”
“Was it just Maria on her own? Did Julio and Anita come out first?”
“No.”
“So who put it there? My secretary?”
“No.”
The room went quiet.
“Are you saying I did?” Stuyvesant asked.
Reacher shook his head. “All I’m doing is asking why the cleaners spent fifteen minutes in an office that was already very clean.”
“They were resting?” Neagley said.
Reacher shook his head again. Froelich smiled suddenly.
“Doing something to make themselves disheveled?” she said.
Reacher smiled back. “Like what?”
“Like having sex?”
Stuyvesant went pale.
“I sincerely hope not,” he said. “And there were three of them, anyway.”
“Threesomes aren’t unheard of,” Neagley said.
“They live together,” Stuyvesant said. “They want to do that, they can do it at home, can’t they?”
“It can be an erotic adventure,” Froelich said. “You know, making out at work.”
“Forget the sex,” Reacher said. “Think about the dishevelment. What exactly created that impression for us?”
Everybody shrugged. Stuyvesant was
still pale. Reacher smiled.
“Something else on the tape,” he said. “Going in, the garbage bag is reasonably empty. Coming out, it’s much fuller. So was there a lot of trash in the office?”
“No,” Stuyvesant said, like he was offended. “I never leave trash in there.”
Froelich sat forward. “So what was in the bag?”
“Trash,” Reacher said.
“I don’t understand,” Froelich said.
“Fifteen minutes is a long time, people,” Reacher said. “They worked efficiently and thoroughly in the secretarial area and had it done in nine minutes. That’s a slightly bigger and slightly more cluttered area. Things all over the place. So compare the two areas, compare the complexity, assume they work just as hard everywhere, and tell me how long they should have spent in the office.”
Froelich shrugged. “Seven minutes? Eight? About that long?”
Neagley nodded. “I’d say nine minutes, tops.”
“I like it clean,” Stuyvesant said. “I leave instructions to that effect. I’d want them in there for ten minutes, at least.”
“But not fifteen,” Reacher said. “That’s excessive. And we asked them about it. We asked them, why so long in there? And what did they say?”
“They didn’t answer,” Neagley said. “Just looked puzzled.”
“Then we asked them whether they spent the same amount of time in there every night. And they said yes, they did.”
Stuyvesant looked to Neagley for confirmation. She nodded.
“OK,” Reacher said. “We’ve boiled it down. We’re looking at fifteen particular minutes. You’ve all seen the tapes. Now tell me how they spent that time.”
Nobody spoke.
“Two possibilities,” Reacher said. “Either they didn’t, or they spent the time growing their hair.”
“What?” Froelich said.
“That’s what makes them look disheveled. Julio especially. His hair is a little longer coming out than going in.”
“How is that possible?”
“It’s possible because we weren’t looking at one night’s activities. We were looking at two separate nights spliced together. Two halves of two different nights.”
Silence in the room.
“Two tapes,” Reacher said. “The tape change at midnight is the key. The first tape is kosher. Has to be, because early on it shows Stuyvesant and his secretary going home. That was the real thing. The real Wednesday. The cleaners show up at eleven fifty-two. They look tired, because maybe that’s the first night in their shift pattern. Maybe they’ve been up all day doing normal daytime things. But it’s been a routine night at work so far. They’re on time. No spilled coffee anywhere, no huge amount of trash anywhere. The garbage bag is reasonably empty. My guess is they had the office finished in about nine minutes. Which is probably their normal speed. Which is reasonably fast. Which is why they were puzzled when we claimed it was slow. My guess is in reality they came out at maybe one minute past midnight and spent another nine minutes on the secretarial station and left the area at ten past midnight.”
“But?” Froelich asked.
“But after midnight we were looking at a different night altogether. Maybe from a couple of weeks ago, before the guy got his latest haircut. A night when they arrived in the area later, and therefore left the area later. Because of some earlier snafu in some other office. Maybe some big pile of trash that filled up their bag. They looked more energetic coming out because they were hurrying to catch up. And maybe it was a night in the middle of their work week and they’d adjusted to their pattern and slept properly. So we saw them go in on Wednesday and come out on a completely different night.”
“But the date was correct,” Froelich said. “It was definitely Thursday’s date.”
Reacher nodded. “Nendick planned it ahead of time.”
“Nendick?”
“Your tape guy,” Reacher said. “My guess is for a whole week he had that particular camera’s midnight-to-six tape set up to show that particular Thursday’s date. Maybe two whole weeks. Because he needed three options. Either the cleaners would be in and out before midnight, or in before midnight and out after midnight, or in and out after midnight. He had to wait to match his options. If they’d been in and out before midnight, he’d have given you a matching tape showing nothing at all between midnight and six. If they’d been in and out after midnight, that’s what you’d have seen. But the way it happened, he had to use one that showed them leaving only.”
“Nendick left the letter?” Stuyvesant asked.
Reacher nodded. “Nendick is the insider. Not the cleaners. What that particular camera really recorded that night was the cleaners leaving just after midnight and then sometime before six in the morning Nendick himself stepping in through the fire door with gloves on and the letter in his hand. Probably around five-thirty, I would guess, so he wouldn’t have to wait long before trashing the real tape and choosing his substitute.”
“But it showed me arriving in the morning. My secretary, too.”
“That was the third tape. There was another change at six A.M., back to the real thing. Only the middle tape was swapped.”
Silence in the room.
“He probably described the garage cameras for them too,” Reacher said. “For the Sunday night delivery.”
“How did you spot it?” Stuyvesant asked. “The hair?”
“Partly. It was Neagley’s ass, really. Nendick was so nervous around the tapes he didn’t pay attention to Neagley’s ass. She noticed. She told me that’s very unusual.”
Stuyvesant blushed again, like maybe he was able to vouch for that fact personally.
“So we should let the cleaners go,” Reacher said. “Then we should talk with Nendick. He’s the one who met with these guys.”
Stuyvesant nodded. “And been threatened by them, presumably.”
“I hope so,” Reacher said. “I hope he’s not involved of his own free will.”
Stuyvesant used his master key and entered the video recording room with the duty officer as a witness. They found that ten consecutive midnight-to-six tapes were missing prior to the Thursday in question. Nendick had entered them in a technical log as faulty recordings. Then they picked a dozen random tapes from the last three months and watched parts of them. They confirmed that the cleaners never spent more than nine minutes in his office. So Stuyvesant made a call and secured their immediate release.
Then there were three options: either call Nendick in on a pretext, or send agents out to arrest him, or drive themselves over to his house and get some questioning started before the Sixth Amendment kicked in and began to complicate things.
“We should go right now,” Reacher said. “Exploit the element of surprise.”
He was expecting resistance, but Stuyvesant just nodded blankly. He looked pale and tired. He looked like a man with problems. Like a man juggling a sense of betrayal and righteous anger against the standard Beltway instinct for concealment. And the instinct for concealment was going to be much stronger with a guy like Nendick than with the cleaners. Cleaners would be regarded as mere ciphers. Sooner or later somebody could spin it hey, cleaners, what can you do? But a guy like Nendick was different. A guy like that was a main component in an organization that should know better. So Stuyvesant booted up his secretary’s computer and found Nendick’s home address. It was in a suburb ten miles out in Virginia. It took twenty minutes to get there. He lived on a quiet winding street in a subdivision. The subdivision was old enough that the trees and the foundation plantings were mature but new enough that the whole place still looked smart and well kept. It was a medium-priced area. There were foreign cars on most of the driveways, but they weren’t this year’s models. They were clean, but a little tired. Nendick’s house was a long low ranch with a khaki roof and a brick chimney. It was dark except for the blue flicker of a television set in one of the windows.
Froelich swung straight onto the driveway and parked in front of the
garage. They climbed out into the cold and walked to the front door. Stuyvesant put his thumb on the bell and left it there. Thirty seconds later a light came on in the hallway. It blazed orange in a fan-shaped window above the door. A yellow porch light came on over their heads. The door opened and Nendick just stood in his hallway and said nothing. He was wearing a suit, like he was just home from work. He looked slack with fear, like a new ordeal was about to be piled on top of an old one. Stuyvesant looked at him and paused and then stepped inside. Froelich followed him. Then Reacher. Then Neagley. She closed the door behind her and took up station in front of it like a sentry, feet apart, hands clasped easy in the small of her back.
Nendick still said nothing. Just stood there, slack and staring. Stuyvesant put a hand on his shoulder and turned him around. Pushed him toward the kitchen. He didn’t resist. Just stumbled limply toward the back of his house. Stuyvesant followed him and hit a switch and fluorescent tubes sputtered to life above the countertops.
“Sit,” he said, like he was talking to a dog.
Nendick stepped over and sat on a stool at his breakfast bar. Said nothing. Just wrapped his arms around himself like a man chilled by fever.
“Names,” Stuyvesant said.
Nendick said nothing. He worked at saying nothing. He stared forward at the far wall. One of the fluorescent lights was faulty. It was struggling to kick in. Its capacitor put an angry buzz into the silence. Nendick’s hands started shaking, so he tucked them up under his arms to keep them still and began to rock back and forth on the stool. It creaked gently under his weight. Reacher glanced away and looked around the kitchen. It was a pretty room. There were yellow check drapes at the window. The ceiling was painted to match. There were flowers in vases. They were all dead. There were dishes in the sink. A couple of weeks’ worth. Some of them were crusted.
Reacher stepped back to the hallway. Into the living room. The television was a huge thing a couple of years old. It was tuned to a commercial network. The program seemed to be made up of clips from police traffic surveillance videos several years out of date. The sound was low. Just a constant murmur suggesting extreme and sustained excitement. There was a remote control balanced carefully on the arm of a chair opposite the screen. There was a low mantel above the fireplace with a row of six photographs in brass frames. Nendick and a woman featured in all six of them. She was about his age, maybe just lively enough and attractive enough not to be called plain. The photographs followed the couple from their wedding day through a couple of vacations and some other unspecified events. There were no pictures of children. And this wasn’t a house where children lived. There were no toys anywhere. No mess. Everything was frilly and considered and matched and adult.
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