by Diane Capri
“I was having lunch and he walked into the diner.”
“Was he working at that time?”
“I didn’t ask.” Not exactly an answer.
“Do you have a current address for him?”
“He gets a pension, doesn’t he? The Army would know where they send it. So would the IRS. Ask them. You federal types are supposed to cooperate with each other these days. So cooperate.”
This was the longest answer Neagley had provided and wasn’t even close to straight up. Kim wondered why.
Gaspar asked, “How about a last known address?”
Neagley grinned. The effect was not reassuring. “You can’t find him. That’s the problem, isn’t it?” She took a breath that Kim hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Don’t waste your time, Agent Gaspar. You won’t find Reacher unless he wants you to find him.”
Kim replied, “We’re not looking for Reacher at the moment. Whether we will be looking for him or not depends on what we learn during our background check. We’re only interested in him if he’s qualified, as we said.”
Neagley’s eyes narrowed and she looked at them as if she could see directly into their souls and divine absolutely everything about them through sheer force of will. Maybe she could.
After a couple of moments, she reached some sort of decision. She stood and folded her hands in front of her taught stomach. Her tone was friendlier than anything she’d used thus far.
“I haven’t seen Reacher in years. I don’t have any knowledge about his present qualifications. He’s a pretty straightforward guy. Just find him and ask him whatever you want to know. He’ll tell you or he won’t. If he doesn’t, then he’s not qualified for the job. Problem solved.” She stepped to the side of her desk and gestured toward the door. “Meanwhile, as I said, I’ve got clients waiting. Then I need to get my brother home and as you no doubt noticed, he’s not very flexible in his routines. So if there’s nothing else?”
Neither Kim nor Gaspar rose from their chairs. Neagley didn’t seem at all flustered or bothered by their recalcitrance. She simply turned and moved to depart. Kim thought she’d leave them sitting in the office until they gave up and left.
Kim waited until the last possible moment before she said, “You know Dave O’Donnell was murdered in his office last week, don’t you? Executed, in fact. Shot with a single bullet to the head and left to bleed out.”
Neagley stopped. She turned her gaze toward Kim. Offered no response.
Kim watched Neagley carefully. “And do you also know that Karla Dixon is missing, probably also dead?”
Still, Neagley said nothing.
Kim lowered her voice, the better to hold Neagley’s attention. “You probably know that Reacher was there. In DC. At the time O’Donnell was murdered. And in New York when Dixon disappeared. You knew that, didn’t you?”
Neagley remained standing, but she didn’t leave the room. Nor did she respond to Kim’s questions.
Gaspar said, “No good cop believes in that kind of coincidence, Neagley. You know that, too.”
“Is Reacher in Chicago?” Kim asked. “Has he been here? Or are you worried that he’s on his way?”
Neagley glanced down at her watch and made some sort of assessment of the situation and the two agents. She returned to her desk, flipped through a neat stack of flat manila folders, pulled two and handed them to Gaspar, who was sitting closest to her. No wasted movement. No wasted words, either.
She remained standing. “Yes, I knew about O’Donnell and Dixon. The detective in charge of O’Donnell’s case contacted me the day they found his body. I flew out to DC and evaluated the situation. I’m satisfied that they’re doing a proper job.”
“You don’t seem very concerned about it,” Kim said.
“O’Donnell handled private investigations for high profile politicians and their enemies, Agent Otto. His case files are full of potential suspects. It’s likely there are more who haven’t been identified yet. Seven days since he died. We all know the chances of solving the case diminish with time and it’s unlikely that his killer will be found now. Fact is, O’Donnell lived a dangerous life and he’d survived more than his share of murder attempts. Everybody has to die sometime. Last Friday was his day.”
Neagley was easily the coldest woman Kim had met in a very long time. Could her heart possibly be as icy as her words?
“What’s in these two folders?” Gaspar asked.
“One contains a copy of the O’Donnell homicide file materials the detective shared with me.”
“What about Dixon?” Kim asked.
“The second is a copy of materials I collected from a private investigator in New York when I went to Dixon’s office the following day. He reports that Dixon had been gone for about two weeks before O’Donnell’s death. She travels for work.” Neagley moved to leave the room again. “There’s no evidence to suggest she’s dead. I’ve put a call in to her and when she has a chance, if she thinks it’s important, she’ll call me back.”
“Why were you having Dixon investigated?” Gaspar asked.
Neagley said, “You may keep those copies. You’d get more information from the relevant investigators directly, maybe. But call me tomorrow or another time if you have anything else. Right now, I have to deal with my brother and finish my business so I can get him home. I don’t have anything more to say to you tonight.” With that, she started again for the door.
Kim managed to stop her progress one last time. “What about Reacher?”
Neagley paused on the threshold, looked back. “What about him?”
“If he killed O’Donnell and Dixon, and the rest of the members of your old unit, you’re the only one left. He’s on his way here next,” Kim said. “We can keep you alive.”
Neagley smirked and delivered her parting shot. “I can take care of myself, thanks.”
“Okay, but take my card. If you can contact Reacher, do that. If he shows up here, let us know. We’ll do as you suggested and ask him our questions directly.”
“Sure,” she said, in a way that meant, “A decade after the zombie apocalypse.”
She headed toward wherever she’d parked her brother.
Gaspar shrugged, stood, stretched. Kim led. He followed.
Only two people remained in Neagley’s lobby. It was late Friday afternoon and most of the working world had closed up shop already. At this hour, it would be almost full dark outside. Neagley’s remaining clients were a man and a woman, seated together, not speaking. Something about them seemed vaguely familiar and made her more uneasy this time. But Kim felt she hadn’t met the couple before.
He sat with his left leg crossed over his right knee. Shiny metal prostheses protruded below both pant hems. The woman betrayed damage of her own. Her face was creased by scars that she’d attempted to cover with heavy makeup. Deep cuts that might have been caused when she went through glass during a high-velocity car wreck.
Neagley’s firm normally provided high-end security for influencers, government contractors, celebrities, and such. Why would she be working with accident victims?
CHAPTER NINE
Friday, November 12
5:35 p.m.
Chicago, IL
State Street was winding down for the weekend. A few shops were open until 7:00 p.m., but most of the working crowd were already headed home on the train or otherwise. The wind off Lake Michigan was frigid against Kim’s skin. Yesterday’s ice storm had moved through Chicago a couple of days before and today’s sunshine had melted the sidewalks well enough for walking but not for warmth. She felt the cold cement transfer through her shoes and wondered whether Neagley’s client would be more or less comfortable on cold surfaces with his prostheses. Did those metal rods transfer heat and cold or insulate his stumps?
“Any chance Neagley told us what she knows about O’Donnell or Dixon or even Reacher?” Kim asked.
“That’s a trick question, right?”
Gaspar led the way across the street
to a still open coffee shop where they’d be warm enough. From this vantage point, they should be able to catch Neagley leaving after her meeting. Maybe they’d have a chance to interview her again after her clients left. Once they’d collected their coffee and found a small table with a view of Neagley’s building entrance, he handed her one of Neagley’s manila folders and opened the other.
“Did you notice the couple sitting in Neagley’s lobby?” Kim asked.
Gaspar opened his slim folder to page through its contents.
“Did they look familiar to you?” Kim opened the second, thicker folder, but instead of examining it, she continued to see Neagley’s clients in her mind. They’d been seated near each other, but not too close. They weren’t speaking to or looking at one another. The woman had looked up, allowing Kim to see her face; he hadn’t. Not overly friendly toward each other.
“Looked like they’d experienced some serious misfortune to me. I guess that’s familiar, if that’s what you mean,” Gaspar said, preoccupied by the documents.
Kim gasped, snapped out of her reverie.
Her gasp pulled his gaze up from the pages.
“What?”
Gaspar’s limp. The obvious pain. Constantly popping Tylenol. Was it possible she’d missed something so essential? Could he have a prosthesis instead of his right limb?
She couldn’t stop her gaze from dipping to his leg.
He grinned.
“Oh man,” he said gently. “It’s okay, Kim. I’m fine. A little gimpy, maybe a little crotchety sometimes, but I still have my leg. Want to see it?” He stuck his right leg out into the aisle and pulled up his pant leg to reveal hairy shin above black crew sock. “God, my legs could use a shave, right? Bet that guy never has to worry about that.”
As he’d intended, humor lifted Kim’s tension. But unease lingered.
He returned to task, checking the entrance to Neagley’s building and continued his reading. “Dixon’s file’s pretty interesting. Do you want to hear about it now, or not until you’re done with O’Donnell’s?”
Message received. He didn’t want to talk about what was wrong with his leg. But soon, they would. A decision had to be made.
“I’ll have a look. Then we can swap. Then talk.”
“Get to it, then. I’m almost done.” He finished reading and set the folder on the table. Leaning back in the chair, legs crossed at the ankles, hands clasped over his flat belly, he closed his eyes in what she now recognized as his coping posture.
Keeping half an eye on Neagley’s building, Kim finished her pass through the O’Donnell murder file and swapped it for the Dixon folder. “There you go, Cheech,” she said. “Checking your eyelids for holes?”
Gaspar sat up and completed his scans while she thumbed through the Dixon documents. When they’d finished, the entire elapsed time from leaving Neagley’s office was maybe fifteen minutes.
“How long do you think they’ll be up there?” Gaspar asked.
“Neagley said they were new clients, didn’t she? Even though she’s in a hurry to get the kid home, it could be more than an hour. But we shouldn’t count on it.” She sat back in her chair. “In the meantime, we talk. Just the highlights now and we’ll cover the minutia later,” she said. “You start.”
“The messenger at Dixon’s building was not a messenger, as we suspected. He’s a private investigator. Been watching Dixon for weeks. Why?”
Kim nodded. “And who hired him? Neagley?”
Gaspar considered it a moment. Shook his head. “Probably not. Because if she’d hired him, she’d have known Dixon wasn’t home and had been gone for a couple of weeks before O’Donnell’s murder and Neagley wouldn’t have wasted her time going up there from DC.”
“Agreed. Someone redacted the employer’s information from this file, though. Did the investigator do that before he gave Neagley the file? Or did she do it afterward? And why is someone watching Dixon anyway?”
Gaspar shrugged. “One more thing to ask her when we see her next.”
“‘Her’ meaning Neagley or Dixon?” Kim asked.
Gaspar said nothing.
“Still no answer on whether Dixon is dead or involved or with Reacher. Agreed?” Kim asked.
“Right.”
Kim gave the Dixon file a little shove on the tabletop. “And he’s not much of an investigator if this is all the stuff he collected in more than a month.” She glanced over to Neagley’s building entrance to confirm the status quo and took a sip of her now-tepid coffee. “How about O’Donnell?”
“Nothing new or even remotely interesting in here that we didn’t know already. But curiously, no mention of any surveillance on him.”
“Because whoever was watching Dixon might have been watching him, too.”
“Right.”
Kim nodded. “Something else. Did you see it?”
Gaspar thought a minute. Came up empty. Shook his head.
“What private investigator with O’Donnell’s experience and the kind of clientele Neagley says he had would fail to have full surveillance of his own operation? Yet there’s not one word about cameras or security or anything else in this murder file.”
“Meaning Neagley removed the references?” Gaspar asked.
“Makes no sense. She didn’t know we were coming today so it’s unlikely she’d taken anything out before we got there. And she handed the folder to us without removing anything from it.” She waited a couple of beats while Gaspar thought it through.
“The equipment had to have been there before O’Donnell was killed,” he said, “but this is a copy of the police investigation file and there’s not a word about surveillance evidence.”
“So?”
“So either the cops were idiots and didn’t think to look for it, or . . . .”
Kim nodded. He was getting there. “Or?”
Both eyebrows converged at the top of his nose and his mouth set into a hard line. “Or Neagley beat them to it. And if they were too stupid to even look for it, she certainly was not. So either way, Neagley has the proof. She has the surveillance. She knows who killed O’Donnell and why. She’s not going to let that go.”
Gaspar sat up straight and thought some more. Kim waited for him to reach the only possible conclusions. Maybe he got there. But before she had a chance to ask him, sirens blaring outside caused her to look out the window for another spot check on the entrance to Neagley’s building.
An ambulance pulled up out in front and two paramedics bolted out of the cab, ran around to pull a rolling gurney out of the boxy rear doors, and rushed inside.
CHAPTER TEN
Friday, November 12
6:05 p.m.
Chicago, IL
After hustling across State Street, Kim and Gaspar reached the main lobby of Neagley’s high-rise to find almost nothing remarkable. The last few people still heading home for the day appeared barely curious. Maybe paramedics in Chicago were nothing too far out of the ordinary in an office tower normally filled with hundreds of people, any of whom might need transport to a hospital.
Kim couldn’t see the elevators from the entrance lobby. She approached the guy at the information desk, flashed her badge, and asked as if she had a right to ask, “Where did the paramedics go?”
The guy looked up from his sports page, startled, as if she was the first person who had spoken to him for hours. Maybe she was.
“Tenth floor,” he said.
“Did you call in the request?” Gaspar asked.
“Nobody asked me to. Means it’s probably nothing too serious.”
“Why is that?” Kim asked.
“It’s my job to call in first responders when anything serious happens. Figure they would have let me know if they needed me to make the call, you know?”
“Thanks,” Gaspar said, turning away, leaving the guy to his newspaper.
At the elevator bank, Kim glanced up to see the poky car was only at the second floor. “Come on,” she said, heading for the stairs.
<
br /> Gaspar pulled open the heavy fire door at the base of the stairs, and Kim entered the stairwell ahead of him. She started a dash up the steps and made it up the third flight before she realized how far Gaspar was lagging behind.
Two businessmen heading home had passed her on the first flight of stairs and walked through the fire door into the lobby. Two more tenants had passed her on their way down afterward. She heard more footsteps on the flights above. The building’s office workers didn’t want to use the poky elevators, either. Walking was a lot faster exit at the end of a long work week. Or maybe this was a fitness thing. But a trickle of tenants passed as if the stairwell was their usual route. No one seemed alarmed, just tired after a long workday.
She waited at the third floor landing a second until Gaspar caught up so she wouldn’t need to shout. “You think Reacher’s up there?”
Gaspar said, “If he is, we need backup.”
“By the time we got through the red tape, he’d already be in the wind.”
Gaspar said, “I’m right behind you. Don’t go in alone.”
Kim started up the stairs again. Surely some sort of panic would have ensued if violence had exploded anywhere in the building. And then she remembered how unnaturally soundproofed Neagley’s offices were. A gunshot like the one that killed O’Donnell exactly one week ago in a deserted office building could have gone unnoticed in this mostly vacant, soundproofed one.
Or, as the information desk guy said, it could have been nothing serious. Maybe a natural disaster of some sort rather than a Reacher-made one. She hoped.
Mid-flight between the sixth and seventh floors, after a group of five laughing women, Kim saw a familiar face coming down the stairs toward her. Neagley’s client. The woman with the scars on her face. She was alone, which alarmed Kim for a moment until she remembered. Maybe her companion couldn’t walk down the stairs on his prosthetics. He could have taken the elevator, instead, though it seemed unlikely that they’d split up.
When the woman got close enough, Kim would ask her if she knew why paramedics had been called to Neagley’s floor. Kim turned to glance at Gaspar and inclined her head toward the stairway, signaling to pay attention to someone on the way down. He nodded understanding.