by Diane Capri
An average sized man bundled in an oversized parka approached. He threw his hood back to reveal a round, boyish face. Longish brown hair, sharp brown eyes. His nose and cheeks were dusted with freckles and reddened by the cold. She wondered how long he’d been waiting.
He held out a badge wallet, right arm extended. She recognized the worn gold shield with the eagle on it. He came close enough for her to examine the plastic card, like a driver’s license, printed with the words Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration. The photo was definitely the same guy, although he’d been a little younger and a little neater back then.
“I’m Kirk Noble, DEA Special Agent.” His name sounded like one of the comic book characters her brothers would have loved when they were kids.
Kirk Noble, Boy Detective. She could imagine him in a boy scout uniform, holding a magnifying glass. The thought made her smile.
“How can I help you, Agent Noble?” She struggled to prevent her teeth from chattering. Her nose probably resembled a ripe tomato.
“I’m looking for information about a witness.”
She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “Why didn’t you call my office? I don’t have an eidetic memory for every witness I’ve interviewed over the years. Access to my files would be a big help, don’t you think?”
“Unfortunately not.” He shrugged inside the bulky parka that made him look a lot bigger than he probably was. “Nothing on this witness in your computers. I already checked.”
“What do you mean?” She frowned.
The FBI was a government agency operating in what critics called the surveillance state. Which meant the FBI was a data-collecting machine. Absolutely everything could be found in FBI computers these days, whether it should be there or not.
If she’d interviewed a witness, the data would be stored in FBI computers somewhere.
Unless someone made sure it wasn’t there.
Only a few men on the planet had the power to make that so, and one of those men was her boss.
Which meant the Boss might be listening now. He usually was.
Noble cleared his throat. “For the past few months, you’ve been working a classified assignment. Off the books. If you help me, I can help you.”
How did he know that?
Her assignment, running under the radar, should have been invisible to him and to everyone else. Strictly need-to-know.
Yet, he knew something. Enough to claim he had information to share. The Boss wouldn’t have authorized that kind of leak. Where did Noble’s intel come from?
The unpleasant sensation running along her spine confirmed her uneasy feeling. Her mother would say a cat had walked on her grave. The weight felt more like a giant tiger.
The Boy Detective said, “I need to find two women. It’s important. A matter of life and death, in fact.”
Otto relaxed a bit. The subject of her top-secret assignment was one man, not two women. “Why do you believe I can help you?”
“Because the witness I’m looking for is Jack Reacher.”
Her mouth dried up.
CHAPTER 4
Thursday, February 10
8:30 p.m.
Chicago, Illinois
Thorn pulled up in front of T. Rex Cleaners, a small dry cleaner on the north side of the run-down old buildings along the decrepit Chicago street. The shop windows were covered with old posters promising cheap and fast service. The paper was yellowed and curling, suggesting they’d been in place a long time.
On the door, an old-fashioned sign that said, “Closed. Please come again,” hung from a string. The flip side probably said, “Open.”
The interior of the shop was dark. Scorpio saw no lights of any kind that might have suggested Rex Mackenzie or anyone else was inside.
Overall, Mackenzie’s office was even less impressive than Scorpio’s backroom headquarters at the laundromat in Rapid City, which was okay. A guy like Scorpio never wants to draw too much attention. He was barely surprised to see that Mackenzie might feel the same.
One big difference between the two was that Scorpio’s laundromat had no customers to impress, and no need to impress any who showed up. Laundromats were self-serve anyway, and Scorpio’s enterprise wasn’t intended to produce a profit.
Mackenzie’s operation was different. Or at least it should have been.
Dry cleaners required staff. Someone to take in the dirty items dropped off by customers and deliver the clean ones. Someone to collect the money, clean the laundry, press things, and so on. Dry cleaners kept regular hours, too. Usually.
Mackenzie’s place was closed and dark tonight, which might have made sense. The posted business hours were seven in the morning until noon, three days a week. With hours like that, how prosperous could he possibly get? Not wealthy enough to own that Lake Forest mansion, Scorpio figured. The asking price for the house and grounds was over four million dollars.
Which meant Scorpio’s suspicions were most likely true. No way Mackenzie made a legitimate fortune out of this decrepit place.
“Drive around the back. See if there’s an alley entrance,” Scorpio said.
“Ten-four, boss.”
Thorn put the SUV in gear and drove around the block. On the second pass, he found the entrance to the alley, which had been blocked by another vehicle the first time. Scorpio peered through the SUV’s foggy window. He pushed the button to lower the window and clean off the condensation.
“Pull in here. Check that back door. It looks like somebody applied a crowbar to it with a good amount of force. Stay alert,” Scorpio said from habit more than concern.
Thorn was the size of a brick building. He rarely had occasion to prove it, but he could handle himself. His linebacker shoulders alone were intimidating enough. He had the bulk and fortitude to handle a thug like Reacher. Which was precisely why Scorpio had hired him.
Scorpio rolled down the window again. Thorn pulled his weapon and held it down to his side as he walked the few steps to the back door. Scorpio couldn’t see past Thorn’s broad back. He turned and nodded and pulled the open door wide. He turned sideways and stepped through the narrow doorway into the dark interior.
A few minutes later, Thorn reemerged and approached the SUV. “The place is a mess. Looks like someone tossed it. If they found what they were looking for, they took it with them. There’s nothing of value in there now.”
Scorpio nodded. “I want to look around.”
Thorn opened the back door of the vehicle and Scorpio struggled out. Using his cane, he walked the few feet to the back door. The vinyl letters on the door identifying T. Rex Cleaners had peeled, and a couple had fallen off long ago.
Scorpio went inside. “Flashlight.”
“Right. Hang on.” He heard Thorn rummaging in his pockets and shortly, a concentrated microbeam illuminated the interior. Thorn attempted to place the flashlight in Scorpio’s hand. When that didn’t work, he shone it in all directions while Scorpio held the cane.
They were standing in the back of the shop. Scorpio looked directly ahead through the windows adjacent to the front door, which led to the sidewalk. Streetlights projected weakly, providing enough visibility through the yellowed paper signs to see the customer counter parallel to the entrance.
Small items were strewn about. The cash register drawer was open and the machine lay on its side, empty of whatever it might have contained. Cleaned clothes should have hung on the automated rack to his right, but they had been knocked to the floor and trampled.
“Check out that counter. And the cash register,” he said. “Sometimes they have hidden drawers or compartments.”
“Ten-four, boss,” Thorn replied, already moving as instructed.
On the opposite side was the shop’s only interior wall, which was covered with flimsy brown wood paneling that might have been salvaged from grandma’s basement decades before.
“Wait.” Scorpio nodded left.
Thorn turned the knob and pushed the hollow paneled
door inward. He shined the microbeam at the threshold and ducked his head to look inside.
When he moved, Scorpio saw dry-cleaning equipment filled most of the space. The rest was a row of shelves where chemicals and supplies were probably stored before they’d been knocked to the yellowing linoleum floor. Noxious fumes wafted toward him, irritating his eyes and burning his nose as he inhaled.
“I’ve seen enough.” Scorpio backed away and Thorn closed the door against the chemical odors inside.
Scorpio leaned against the flimsy wall while Thorn took the flashlight and examined the front of the shop.
He blinked his eyes several times to reduce the irritation. When he opened them the fourth time, he caught a flash glinting off the floor behind an overturned trash can.
He used his cane to move the trash can aside. The reflection came from the foil backing on an empty blister pack. Scorpio recognized it, even in the semi-darkness. He leaned on his cane and stooped awkwardly to pick it up.
There was not enough light inside the shop to examine the blister pack, but Scorpio didn’t need to study it. He knew what it was and where it came from. Grim satisfaction creased his brow. He was on the right track.
Thorn returned empty-handed, shaking his head.
“Didn’t find anything?”
“Nothing useful to us. They weren’t interested in cash, though. They left about three hundred bucks strewn all over the place,” Thorn replied, handing Scorpio a creased twenty.
He put the bill into his pocket along with the empty blister pack, took one last look around and left the building. Thorn stayed to remove any fingerprints they might have left before he followed.
When they were seated in the SUV again, Thorn drove through the alley and turned north, away from the center of town.
Scorpio paid little attention to his surroundings. At this point, he knew three things for sure. Things he had not expected. He ticked them off in his mind.
The Lake Forest house was unoccupied. He sensed that wherever the sisters had gone, they wouldn’t be back soon.
Rex Mackenzie’s business, whatever it was, might have operated from the dry cleaner location, but his fortune wasn’t made pressing wool suits.
And he’d underestimated his targets. By a wide margin.
Scorpio grimaced and patted his pockets to locate his phone. When he found it, in the same pocket was the hinged jewelry box he’d removed from Mackenzie’s bedroom wall safe.
He found the contact he wanted, placed the call, and held the phone to his ear with his shoulder.
While he waited, he looked at the box carefully. Four inches wide, six inches long, and almost four inches deep.
He propped the box against his thigh. He used his good right hand to force the hasp open and pry the lid up, despite the sturdy spring that held it tightly closed. When the box opened, Scorpio’s eyes widened right along with it.
The box was lined with purple satin and the interior was divided into three equal sections. The left section contained loose gemstones. Scorpio was no expert jeweler, but they appeared to be unset diamonds. Depending on the quality, he supposed they might have significant value.
The right section of the box also contained loose gemstones of various colors. Scorpio guessed they were emeralds, sapphires, and rubies, but they could have been more exotic stones for all he knew. Perhaps they were worth as much as the diamonds.
The center of the box held a high capacity data traveler flash drive with a zinc alloy metal casing. He recognized it immediately. Created for power users seeking to store massive amounts of data in a small form. He owned two smaller ones like this. Each one had set him back more than two grand.
Slowly, Scorpio closed the lid on the box and secured the latch. He disconnected the call and slipped the box into his pocket.
The contents of the flash drive could easily be worth more than the gemstones. Which proved one thing and raised several questions in his mind.
Scorpio figured the jewelry box proved Rex Mackenzie was bent. No way did he make enough money out of that shabby old dry cleaners to buy the contents of that box. Besides, this was Chicago. A guy like Mackenzie got a mansion in Lake Forest by being a certain kind of businessman.
Where did he get all those gemstones? What did he plan to do with them? Scorpio shook his head, thinking the situation through as best he could. His brain was sluggish. He couldn’t come up with a plausible answer, so he moved on to the next question.
Why did Rex Mackenzie need so much portable data storage? Not for photos of his wife or home movies, for sure. The drive would probably hold more than six hundred thousand photographs and maybe a thousand high-definition movies. No casual photographer or film collector would need that much storage.
No, like the cleaners, the drive was probably used for criminal activities. Which is where his mind always went, even with people who’d never ripped him off before.
He grinned. Now he knew for sure that Rex Mackenzie, his wife, and her sister weren’t law abiding citizens. Not even close.
He tapped his lips with his knuckle. Why so much data storage? Could be anything from virtual reality porn to global blackmail. Mackenzie had plenty of room on there for lots of both.
But then why did Mackenzie keep the flash drive in the bedroom safe?
The only rationale he could think of was that even ruthless thieves wouldn’t expect to find it there. And only a knowledgeable person would assume the drive contained anything valuable, even if he found it.
He shook his head and a couple of sharp twinges pierced his temples. He closed his eyes a moment until the pain subsided.
For sure, Mackenzie was a more complicated man than Scorpio had expected.
Which meant he needed to see what was on that flash drive. As soon as possible.
CHAPTER 5
Thursday, February 10
9:35 p.m.
Detroit, Michigan
Noble had settled into the small kitchen in her apartment, surrounded by the heavenly aroma of the fresh pizza they’d picked up on the way.
Otto could handle herself. She wasn’t worried about being killed or maimed by a stranger she’d met in a parking garage and brought into her home. Although such behavior would have mortified her mother.
What she worried about was Noble. Where was he going with all his questions?
She watched as he swallowed pizza with a big swig from the brown Labatt longneck bottle. His second beer. Her first bottle remained almost full. She’d nibbled one square slice of pizza while he’d scarfed down six so far. Between swigs and swallows, he’d spent most of his conversation relating irrelevant background.
She’d let him talk, figuring he’d eventually get down to business. The Boss hadn’t intervened yet, either. Which probably meant he was still waiting for a reason to shut Noble down.
“Like I said, I’m DEA. My area of expertise is heroin trafficking. Over the past several years, that’s included the opioid epidemic. You know about that?” He arched his eyebrows as he licked the pizza sauce off his fingers.
She nodded. The more time she spent with him, the more he resembled the Boy Detective she’d first imagined. He was as irritating as any young boy could be, too.
“Every human in America is familiar with the opioid epidemic.” She frowned. He’d been going on about heroin for an hour already. She was tired and cranky and she wanted him to get to the point. “You know I’m FBI, Detroit Field Office, and you’re asking me if I’m aware of heroin and opioid trafficking? What do you think?”
He shrugged. “So, I can assume you know all the ins and outs? Like how prescription opioids are chemically the same as the street stuff? They can lead to serious addiction, and fatal overdoses, and all that?”
“Right.” She gritted her teeth. He was trying to be helpful, not condescending. Heroin was not only his job, it was also his passion.
“A couple of years ago we thought we’d locked down every possible way that prescription opioids could be stolen
and resold. At least, in mass quantities. We even knocked out the profiteering in naloxone,” he said.
“The injectable antidote to an opioid overdose,” Otto replied, hoping to avoid another half hour lecture on that topic.
“Basically, yeah. We went back to chasing the old-fashioned kind of heroin, the kind that gets smuggled into the country and sold in baggies and shot up at parties and in alleys and toilet stalls and stuff. The way we’ve been doing the job for a few decades.” He offered a quizzical look while pointing at the last piece of pizza.
She nodded. He snagged it and took a big bite while she replied, “The prescription opioids are still out there on the street, though. Still being sold and traded. Still causing more deaths per capita than heart disease and cancer.”
“Unfortunately, that’s true. It’s also why I hope we can help each other.” He grinned like he’d just found a decoder ring in a box of Cracker Jack. He polished off the last of the pizza, dusted his hands together, pushed away from the table, and leaned back with his beer.
She glanced at the clock. “You said Reacher is a witness. Witness to what exactly?”
“I have no evidence to prove it,” he cautioned.
She nodded. No surprise. One thing Reacher was very good at was operating outside the law without leaving an evidentiary trail. He’d been a military cop for thirteen years. He knew what to do and how to do it so that nothing could be proved against him. Which, she had to admit, worked to her advantage as well as his, more than once.
Reacher’s natural ability to avoid consequences was only half of the story. Someone very high up the food chain had intentionally deleted all mention of Reacher from all government databases since he left the Army.
Anyone looking for Reacher had a long, slow road ahead. Otto could say that much for sure, based on hard experience.
Noble said, “Reacher showed up out west, at the tail end of a long-term sting operation a while back. I thought we were on the same team, so I didn’t—”