Charlie stepped over Reacher’s feet and sat down in his wooden chair.
“What was Calvin working on?” Reacher asked again.
Angela Franz said, “Charlie, you should go out and play.”
Charlie said, “Mom, I want to stay here.”
Reacher asked, “Angela, what was Calvin working on?”
“Since Charlie came along he only did background checks,” Angela said. “It was a good business to be in. Especially here in LA. Everyone’s worried about hiring a thief or a junkie. Or dating one, or marrying one. Someone would meet someone on the internet or in a bar and the first thing they would do is Google the person and the second thing is they would call a private detective.”
“Where did he work?”
“He had an office in Culver City. You know, just a rental, one room. Where Venice meets La Cienega. It was an easy hop on the 10. He liked it there. I guess I’ll have to go and bring his things home.”
Neagley asked, “Would you give us permission to search it first?”
“The deputies already searched it.”
“We should search it again.”
“Why?”
“Because he must have been working on something bigger than background checks.”
“Junkies kill people, don’t they? And thieves, sometimes.”
Reacher glanced at Charlie, and saw Franz looking back at him. “But not in the way that it seems to have happened.”
“OK. Search it again if you want.”
Neagley asked, “Do you have a key?”
Angela got up slowly and stepped to the kitchen. Came back with two unmarked keys, one big, one small, on a steel split ring an inch in diameter. She cradled them in her palm for a moment and then she handed them to Neagley, a little reluctantly.
“I would like them back,” she said. “This is his own personal set.”
Reacher asked, “Did he keep stuff here? Notes, files, anything like that?”
“Here?” Angela said. “How could he? He gave up wearing undershirts when we moved here, to save on drawer space.”
“When did you move here?”
Angela was still standing. A slight woman, but she seemed to fill the tiny space.
“Just after Charlie came along,” she said. “We wanted a real home. We were very happy here. Small, but it was all we needed.”
“What happened the last time you saw him?”
“He went out in the morning, same as always. But he never came back.”
“When was that?”
“Five days before the deputies came over to tell me they had found his body.”
“Did he ever talk to you about his work?”
Angela said, “Charlie, do you need a drink?”
Charlie said, “I’m OK, Mom.”
Reacher asked, “Did Calvin ever talk to you about his work?”
“Not very much,” Angela said. “Sometimes the studios would want an actor checked out, to find out what bodies were buried. He would give me the showbiz gossip. That’s all, really.”
Reacher said, “When we knew him he was a pretty blunt guy. He would say what was on his mind.”
“He stayed that way. You think he upset someone?”
“No, I just wondered whether he ever got around to toning it down. And if not, whether you liked it or not.”
“I loved it. I loved everything about him. I respect honesty and openness.”
“So would you mind if I was blunt?”
“Go right ahead.”
“I think there’s something you’re not telling us.”
11
Angela Franz sat down again and asked, “What do you think I’m not telling you?”
“Something useful,” Reacher said.
“Useful? What could possibly be useful to me now?”
“Not just to you. To us, too. Calvin was yours, because you married him, OK. But he was ours too, because we worked with him. We have a right to find out what happened to him, even if you don’t want to.”
“Why do you think I’m hiding something?”
“Because every time I get close to asking you a question, you duck it. I asked you what Calvin was working on, and you made a big fuss about sitting us down. I asked you again, and you talked to Charlie about going out to play. Not to spare him hearing your answer, because you used the time you gained to decide you don’t have an answer.”
Angela looked across the tiny room, straight at him. “Are you going to break my arm now? Calvin told me he saw you break someone’s arm in an interview. Or was that Dave O’Donnell?”
“Me, probably,” Reacher said. “O’Donnell was more of a leg breaker.”
“I promise you,” Angela said. “I’m not hiding anything. Nothing at all. I don’t know what Calvin was working on and he didn’t tell me.”
Reacher looked back at her, deep into her bewildered blue eyes, and he believed her, just a little bit. She was hiding something, but it wasn’t necessarily about Calvin Franz.
“OK,” he said. “I apologize.”
He and Neagley left shortly after that, with directions to Franz’s Culver City office, after further brief condolences and another shake of the cold, fragile hand.
The man called Thomas Brant watched them go. He was twenty yards from his Crown Victoria, which was parked forty yards west of Franz’s house. He was walking up from a corner bodega with a cup of coffee. He slowed his gait and watched Reacher and Neagley from behind until they turned the corner a hundred yards ahead. Then he sipped his coffee and speed-dialed his boss, Curtis Mauney, one-handed, and left a voice mail describing what he had seen.
At that same moment, the man in the dark blue suit was walking back to his dark blue Chrysler sedan. The sedan was parked in the Beverly Wilshire’s valet lane. The man in the suit was poorer by the fifty bucks that the desk clerk had accepted as a bribe, and therefore correspondingly richer in new information, but he was puzzled by the new information’s implications. He called his boss on his cell and said, “According to the hotel the big guy’s name is Thomas Shannon, but there was no Thomas Shannon on our list.”
His boss said, “I think we can be sure that our list was definitive.”
“I guess we can.”
“Therefore it’s safe to assume that Thomas Shannon is a phony name. Obviously old habits die hard with these guys. So let’s stay on it.”
Reacher waited until they were around the corner and out of Franz’s street and said, “Did you see a tan Crown Vic back there?”
“Parked,” Neagley said. “Forty yards west of the house, on the opposite curb. A base model ’02.”
“I think I saw the same car outside of the Denny’s we were in.”
“You sure?”
“Not certain.”
“Old Crown Vics are common cars. Taxis, gypsy cabs, rent-a-wrecks.”
“I guess.”
“It was empty anyway,” Neagley said. “We don’t need to worry about empty cars.”
“It wasn’t empty outside of Denny’s. There was a guy in it.”
“If it was the same car.”
Reacher stopped walking.
Neagley asked, “You want to go back?”
Reacher paused a beat and shook his head and started walking again.
“No,” he said. “It was probably nothing.”
The 10 was jammed eastbound. Neither one of them knew enough about LA geography to risk taking surface streets, so they covered the five freeway miles to Culver City slower than walking. They got to where Venice Boulevard crossed La Cienega Boulevard, and from there Angela Franz’s directions were good enough to take them straight to her late husband’s office. It was a bland storefront place in a long low tan strip that was anchored by a small post office. Not a flagship USPS operation. Just a single-wide store. Reacher didn’t know the terminology. A suboffice? A satellite? A postal delivery station? Next to it was a discount pharmacy, and then a nail salon and a dry cleaner’s. Then Franz’s place. Franz’s place h
ad the door glass and the window painted over from the inside with tan paint that reached head-high and left just a narrow strip above for light to come through. The top of the paint was banded with a gold coach line edged in black. The legend Calvin Franz Discreet Investigations and a telephone number had been written on the door in the same gold and black style, plain letters, three lines, chest-high, simple and to the point.
“Sad,” Reacher said. “Isn’t it? From the big green machine to this?”
“He was a father,” Neagley said. “He was taking the easy money. It was his free choice. This was all he wanted now.”
“But I’m guessing your place in Chicago doesn’t look like this.”
“No,” Neagley said. “It doesn’t.”
She took out the keyring Angela had parted with so reluctantly. She selected the bigger key and tripped the lock and pulled the door. But she didn’t go in.
Because the whole place was trashed from top to bottom.
It had been a plain square space, small for a store, large for an office. Whatever computers and telephones and other hardware it had contained were all long gone. The desk and the file cabinets had been searched and then smashed with hammers and every joint and subassembly had been torn apart in a quest for concealed hiding places. The chair had been ripped apart and the stuffing had been pulled out. The wall boards had been crowbarred off the studs and the insulation had been shredded. The ceiling had been torn down. The floor had been pulled up. The bathroom appliances had been smashed into porcelain shards. There was wreckage and paper strewn everywhere down in the crawl space, knee-high throughout and worse in places.
Trashed, from top to bottom. Like a bomb blast.
Reacher said, “LA County deputies wouldn’t be this thorough.”
“Not a chance,” Neagley said. “Not even close. This was the bad guys tying up the loose ends. Retrieving whatever Franz had on them. Before the deputies even got here. Probably days before.”
“The deputies saw this and didn’t tell Angela? She didn’t know. She said she had to come over and bring his stuff home.”
“They wouldn’t tell her. Why upset her more?”
Reacher backed away on the sidewalk. Stepped to his left and looked at the neat gold lettering on the door: Calvin Franz Discreet Investigations. He raised his hand and blocked out his old friend’s name and in his mind tried David O’Donnell in its place. Then a pair of names: Sanchez & Orozco. Then: Karla Dixon.
“I wish those guys were answering their damn phones,” he said.
“This thing is not about us as a group,” Neagley said. “It can’t be. It’s more than seventeen days old and nobody has come after me yet.”
“Or me,” Reacher said. “But then, neither did Franz.”
“What do you mean?”
“If Franz was in trouble, who would he call? The rest of us, that’s who. But not you, because you’re way upscale now and probably too busy. And not me, because nobody apart from you could ever find me. But suppose Franz got himself in deep shit and called the other guys? Because they were all more accessible than the two of us? Suppose they all came running out here to help? Suppose they’re all in the same boat now?”
“Including Swan?”
“Swan was the closest. He would have gotten here first.”
“Possible.”
“Likely,” Reacher said. “If Franz really needed someone, who else would he trust?”
“He should have called me,” Neagley said. “I would have come.”
“Maybe you were next on the list. Maybe at first he thought six people were enough.”
“But what kind of a thing can disappear six people? Six of our people?”
“I hate to think,” Reacher said, and then he went quiet. In the past he would have put his people up against anyone. Many times, he had. And they had always come through, against worse opponents than you normally find among the civilian population. Worse, because military training tended to enhance a criminal’s repertoire in several important areas.
Neagley said, “No point standing here. We’re wasting time. We’re not going to find anything. I think we can assume they got what they came for.”
Reacher said, “I think we can assume they didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Rule of thumb,” Reacher said. “This place is trashed from top to bottom and side to side. Totally. And normally, when you find what you’re looking for, you stop looking. But these guys never stopped looking. So if they found what they came for, by chance they found it in the very last place they chose to look. And how likely is that? Not very. So I think they never stopped looking because they never found what they wanted.”
“So where is it?”
“I don’t know. What would it be?”
“Paperwork, a floppy disc, a CD-ROM, something like that.”
“Small,” Reacher said.
“He didn’t take it home. I think he was separating home and work.”
Think like them. Be them. Reacher turned around and put his back to Franz’s door as if he had just stepped out to the sidewalk. He cupped his hand and looked down at his empty palm. He had done plenty of paperwork in his life, but he had never used a computer disc or burned a CD-ROM. But he knew what one was. It was a five-inch round piece of polycarbonate. Often in a thin plastic case. A floppy disc was smaller. Square, about three inches, maybe? Letter-size paperwork would tri-fold down to eight and a half inches by about four.
Small.
But vital.
Where would Calvin Franz hide something small but vital?
Neagley said, “Maybe it was in his car. He drove back and forth, apparently. So if it was a CD, he could have kept it in his auto-changer. Like hiding it in plain sight. You know, maybe the fourth slot, after the John Coltrane stuff.”
“Miles Davis,” Reacher said. “He preferred Miles Davis. He only listened to John Coltrane on Miles Davis albums.”
“He could have made it look like stuff he had downloaded. You know, he could have written Miles Davis on it with a marker pen.”
“They’d have found it,” Reacher said. “Guys this thorough, they’d have checked everything. And I think Franz would have wanted more security than that. Plain sight means it’s right there in front of you all the time. You can’t relax. And I think Franz wanted to relax. I think he wanted to get home to Angela and Charlie and not have things on his mind.”
“So where? A safe deposit box?”
“I don’t see a bank here,” Reacher said. “And I don’t think he would have wanted to take much of a detour. Not with this traffic. Not if there was some kind of urgency. And a bank’s lobby hours don’t necessarily suit a working stiff.”
“There are two keys on the ring,” Neagley said. “Although it’s possible the smaller one was for the desk.”
Reacher turned again and looked through the gloom at the drifts of trash and wreckage. The desk lock was in there somewhere, presumably. A small steel rectangle, torn out of the wood and dumped. He turned back and stepped to the curb. Looked left, looked right. Cupped his hand again and looked down at his empty palm.
First: What would I hide?
“It’s a computer file,” he said. “Got to be. Because they knew to look for it. Any kind of handwritten paperwork, Franz wouldn’t have told them anything about it. But probably they took his computers first and found some kind of traces that told them he’d been copying files. That happens, right? Computers leave traces of everything. But Franz wouldn’t tell them where the copies were. Maybe that’s why they broke his legs. But he kept quiet, which is why they had to come out here on this wild-assed search.”
“So where is it?”
Reacher looked down at his hand again.
Where would I hide something small and vital?
“Not under any old rock,” he said. “I would want somewhere structured. Maybe somewhere kind of custodial. I would want someone to be responsible.”
“A safe deposit box,” Neagley said a
gain. “In a bank. The small key has no markings. Banks do that.”
“I don’t like banks,” Reacher said. “I don’t like the hours and I don’t like the detour. Once, maybe, but not often. Which is the issue. Because there’s some kind of regularity involved here. Isn’t there? Isn’t that what people do with computers? They back stuff up every night. So this wouldn’t be a one-time thing. It would be a matter of routine. Which changes things somewhat. A one-time thing, you might go to extraordinary lengths. Every night, you need something safe but easy. And permanently available.”
“I e-mail stuff to myself,” Neagley said.
Reacher paused a beat. Smiled.
“There you go,” he said.
“You think that’s what Franz did?”
“Not a chance,” Reacher said. “E-mail would have come straight back to his computer, which the bad guys had. They’d have spent their time trying to break down his password instead of busting up his building.”
“So what did he do?”
Reacher turned and glanced along the row of stores. The dry cleaner, the nail salon, the pharmacy.
The post office.
“Not e-mail,” he said. “Regular mail. That’s what he did. He backed up his stuff onto some kind of a disc and every night he put it in an envelope and dropped it in the mail. Addressed to himself. To his post office box. Because that’s where he got his mail. In the post office. There’s no slot in his door. Once the envelope was out of his hand it was safe. It was in the system. With a whole bunch of custodians looking after it all day and all night.”
“Slow,” Neagley said.
Reacher nodded. “He must have had three or four discs in rotation. Any particular day, two or three of them would be somewhere in the mail. But he went home every night knowing his latest stuff was safe. It’s not easy to rob a mail box or make a clerk give you something that doesn’t belong to you. USPS bureaucracy is about as safe as a Swiss bank.”
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