by Lee Child
“Neither of you is a suspect,” Reacher said.
“Why not?” Stuyvesant asked.
“Because Froelich came to me voluntarily, and she knew something about me from my brother. You hired us directly after seeing our military records. Neither of you would have done those things if you had something to hide. Too much risk.”
“Maybe we think we’re smarter than you are. An internal investigation that missed us would be the best cover there is.”
Reacher shook his head. “Neither of you is that dumb.”
“Good,” Stuyvesant replied. He looked satisfied. “So let’s agree it’s a jealous rival elsewhere in the department. Let’s assume he conspired with the cleaners.”
“Or she,” Froelich said.
“Where are the cleaners now?” Reacher asked.
“Suspended,” Stuyvesant said. “At home, on full pay. They live together. One of the women is the man’s wife and the other woman is his sister-in-law. The other crew is working overtime to make up, and costing me a fortune.”
“What’s their story?”
“They know nothing about anything. They didn’t bring in any sheet of paper, they never saw it, it wasn’t there when they were there.”
“But you don’t believe them.”
Stuyvesant was quiet for a long moment. He fiddled with his shirt cuffs and then laid his hands flat on the table again.
“They’re trusted employees,” he said. “They’re very nervous about being under suspicion. Very upset. Frightened, even. But they’re also calm. Like we won’t be able to prove anything, because they didn’t do anything. They’re a little puzzled. They passed a lie-detector test. All three of them.”
“So you do believe them.”
Stuyvesant shook his head. “I can’t believe them. How can I? You saw the tapes. Who else put the damn thing there? A ghost?”
“So what’s your opinion?”
“I think somebody they knew inside the building asked them to do it, and explained it away as a routine test procedure, like a war game or a secret mission, said there was no harm in it, and coached them through what would happen afterward in terms of the video and the questioning and the lie detector. I think that might give a person enough composure to pass the polygraph. If they were convinced they weren’t in the wrong and there would be no adverse consequences. If they were convinced they were really helping the department somehow.”
“Have you pursued that with them yet?”
Stuyvesant shook his head.
“That’ll be your job,” he said. “I’m not good at interrogation.”
Reacher said nothing.
He left as suddenly as he had arrived. Just upped and walked out of the room. The door swung shut behind him and left Reacher and Neagley and Froelich sitting together at the table in the bright light and the silence.
“You won’t be popular,” Froelich said. “Internal investigators never are.”
“I’m not interested in being popular,” Reacher said.
“I’ve already got a job,” Neagley said.
“Take some vacation time,” Reacher said. “Stick around, be unpopular with me.”
“Will I get paid?”
“I’m sure there’ll be a fee,” Froelich said.
Neagley shrugged. “OK, I guess my partners could see this as a prestige thing. You know, government work? I could go back to the hotel, make some calls, see if they can cope without me for a spell.”
“You want to get that dinner first?” Froelich asked.
Neagley shook her head. “No, I’ll eat in my room. You two get dinner.”
They wound their way back through the corridors to Froelich’s office and she called a driver for Neagley. Then she escorted her down to the garage and came back upstairs to find Reacher sitting quiet at her desk.
“Are you two having a relationship?” she asked.
“Who?”
“You and Neagley.”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“She was weird about dinner.”
He shook his head. “No, we’re not having a relationship.”
“Did you ever? You seem awful close.”
“Do we?”
“She obviously likes you, and you obviously like her. And she’s cute.”
He nodded. “I do like her. And she is cute. But we never had a relationship.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? It just never happened. You know what I mean?”
“I guess.”
“I’m not sure what it’s got to do with you, anyway. You’re my brother’s ex, not mine. I don’t even know your name.”
“M. E.,” she said.
“Martha Enid?” he said. “Mildred Eliza?”
“Let’s go,” she said. “Dinner, my place.”
“Your place?”
“Restaurants are impossible here on Sunday night. And I can’t afford them anyway. And I’ve still got some of Joe’s things. Maybe you should have them.”
She lived in a small warm row house in an unglamorous neighborhood across the Anacostia River near Bolling Air Force Base. It was one of those city homes where you close the drapes and concentrate on the inside. There was street parking and a wooden front door with a small foyer behind it that led directly into a living room. It was a comfortable space. Wood floors, a rug, old-fashioned furniture. A small television set with a big cable box wired to it. Some books on a shelf, a small music system with a yard of CDs propped against it. The heaters were turned up high so Reacher peeled off his black jacket and dumped it on the back of a chair.
“I don’t want it to be an insider,” Froelich said.
“Better that than a real outside threat.”
She nodded and moved toward the back of the room where an arch opened into an eat-in kitchen. She looked around, a little vague, like she was wondering what all the machines and cabinets were for.
“We could send out for Chinese food,” Reacher called.
She took off her jacket and folded it in half and laid it on a stool.
“Maybe we should,” she said.
She had a white blouse on and without the jacket it looked softer and more feminine. The kitchen was lit with regular bulbs turned low and they were kinder to her skin than the bright office halogen had been. He looked at her and saw what Joe must have seen, eight years previously. She found a take-out menu in a drawer and dialed a number and called in an order. Hot and sour soup and General Tso’s chicken, times two.
“That OK?” she asked.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “It’s what Joe liked.”
“I’ve still got some of his things,” she said. “You should come see them.”
She walked ahead of him back to the foyer and up the stairs. There was a guest room at the front of the house. It had a deep closet with a single door. A light bulb came on automatically when she opened it. The closet was full of miscellaneous junk, but the hanging rail had a long line of suits and shirts still wrapped in the dry cleaner’s plastic. The plastic had turned a little yellow and brittle with age.
“These are his,” Froelich said.
“He left them here?” Reacher asked.
She touched the shoulder of one of the suits through the plastic.
“I figured he’d come back for them,” she said. “But he didn’t, the whole year. I guess he didn’t need them.”
“He must have had a lot of suits.”
“Couple dozen, I guess,” she said.
“How can a person have twenty-four suits?”
“He was a dresser,” she said. “You must remember that.”
He stood still. The way he remembered it, Joe had lived in one pair of shorts and one T-shirt. In the winters he wore khakis. When it was very cold he added a worn-out leather pilot’s jacket. That was it. At their mother’s funeral he wore a very formal black suit, which Reacher had assumed was rented. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe working in Washington had changed his approach.
�
��You should have them,” Froelich said. “They’re your property, anyway. You were his next of kin, I guess.”
“I guess I was,” he said.
“There’s a box, too,” she said. “Stuff he left around and never came back for.”
He followed her gaze to the closet floor and saw a cardboard box sitting underneath the hanging rail. The flaps were folded over each other.
“Tell me about Molly Beth Gordon,” he said.
“What about her?”
“After they died I kind of inferred they’d had a thing going.”
She shook her head. “They were close. No doubt about that. But they worked together. She was his assistant. He wouldn’t date people in the office.”
“Why did you break up?” he asked.
The doorbell rang downstairs. It sounded loud in the Sunday hush.
“The food,” Froelich said.
They went down and ate together at the kitchen table, silently. It felt curiously intimate, but also distant. Like sitting next to a stranger on a long plane ride. You feel connected, but also not connected.
“You can stay here tonight,” she said. “If you like.”
“I didn’t check out of the hotel.”
She nodded. “So check out tomorrow. Then base yourself here.”
“What about Neagley?”
Silence for a beat.
“Her, too, if she wants. There’s another bedroom on the third floor.”
“OK,” he said.
They finished the meal and he put the containers in the trash and rinsed the plates. She set the dishwasher going. Then her phone rang. She stepped through to the living room to answer it. Talked for a long moment and then hung up and came back.
“That was Stuyvesant,” she said. “He’s giving you the formal go-ahead.”
He nodded. “So call Neagley and tell her to get her ass in gear.”
“Now?”
“Get a problem, solve a problem,” he said. “That’s my way. Tell her to be out front of the hotel in thirty minutes.”
“Where are you going to start?”
“With the video,” he said. “I want to watch the tapes again. And I want to meet with the guy who runs that part of the operation.”
Thirty minutes later they scooped Neagley off the sidewalk in front of the hotel. She had changed into a black suit with a short jacket. The pants were cut tight. They looked pretty good from the back, in Reacher’s opinion. He saw Froelich arrive at the same conclusion. But she said nothing. Just drove, five minutes, and then they were back in the Secret Service offices. Froelich headed straight for her desk and left Reacher and Neagley with the agent who ran the video surveillance. He was a small thin nervous guy in Sunday clothes who had come in at short notice to meet with them. He looked a little dazed about it. He led them to a closet-sized equipment room full of racks of recorders. One wall was a floor-to-ceiling shelving unit with hundreds of VHS tapes stacked neatly in black plastic boxes. The recorders themselves were plain gray industrial units. The whole tiny space was full of neat wiring and procedural memos tacked to the walls and soft noise from small motors turning and the smell of warm circuit boards and the green glow of LED numbers ticking over relentlessly.
“System really looks after itself,” the guy said. “There are four recorders slaved to each camera, six hours to a tape, so we change all the tapes once a day, file them away, keep them three months, and then reuse them.”
“Where are the originals from the night in question?” Reacher asked.
“Right here,” the guy said. He fiddled in his pocket and came out with a bunch of small brass keys on a ring. Squatted down in the limited space and opened a low cupboard. Took out three boxes.
“These are the three I copied for Froelich,” he said, on his knees.
“Some place where we can look at them?”
“They’re no different than the copies.”
“Copying causes detail loss,” Reacher said. “First rule, start with the originals.”
“OK,” the guy said. “You can look at them right here, I guess.”
He stood up awkwardly and pushed and pulled some equipment around on a bench and angled a small monitor outward and switched on a stand-alone player. A blank gray square appeared on the screen.
“No remotes on these things,” he said. “You have to use the buttons.”
He stacked the three tape boxes in the correct time sequence.
“Got chairs?” Reacher asked.
The guy ducked out and came back dragging two typist’s chairs. They tangled in the doorway and he had trouble fitting them both in front of the narrow bench. Then he glanced around like he was unhappy about leaving strangers alone in his little domain.
“I guess I’ll wait in the foyer,” he said. “Call me when you’re through.”
“What’s your name?” Neagley asked.
“Nendick,” the guy said, shyly.
“OK, Nendick,” she said. “We’ll be sure to call you.”
He left the room and Reacher put the third tape in the machine.
“You know what?” Neagley said. “That guy didn’t sneak a peek at my ass.”
“Didn’t he?”
“Guys usually do when I’m wearing these pants.”
“Do they?”
“Usually.”
Reacher kept his gaze firmly on the blank video screen.
“Maybe he’s gay,” he said.
“He was wearing a wedding band.”
“Then maybe he tries hard to avoid inappropriate feelings. Or maybe he’s tired.”
“Or maybe I’m getting old,” she said.
He hit fast rewind. The motor whirred.
“Third tape,” he said. “Thursday morning. We’ll do this backward.”
The player spooled fast. He watched the counter and hit play and the picture came up with an empty office with the timecode burned in over it showing the relevant Thursday’s date and the time at seven fifty-five A.M. He hit forward scan and then froze the picture when the secretary entered the frame at exactly eight o’clock in the morning. He settled in his chair and hit play and the secretary walked into the square area and took off her coat and hung it on the rack. Walked within three feet of Stuyvesant’s door and bent down behind her desk.
“Stowing her purse,” Neagley said. “On the floor in the footwell.”
The secretary was a woman of maybe sixty. For a moment she was face-on to the camera. She was a matronly figure. Stern, but kindly. She sat down heavily and hitched her chair in and opened a book on the desk.
“Checking the diary,” Neagley said.
The secretary stayed firmly in her chair, busy with the diary. Then she started in on a tall stack of memos. She filed some of them in a drawer and used her rubber stamp on others and moved them right to left across her desk.
“You ever see so much paperwork?” Reacher said. “Worse than the Army.”
The secretary broke off from her memo stack twice, to answer the phone. But she didn’t move from her chair. Reacher fast-forwarded until Stuyvesant himself swept into view at ten past eight. He was wearing a dark raincoat, maybe black or charcoal. He was carrying a slim briefcase. He took off his coat and hung it on the rack. Advanced into the square area and the secretary’s head moved like she was speaking to him. He set his briefcase on her desk at an exact angle and adjusted its position. Bent to confer with her. Nodded once and straightened up and stepped to his door without his briefcase and disappeared into his office. The timer ticked off four seconds. Then he was back out in the doorway, calling to his secretary.
“He found it,” Reacher said.
“The briefcase thing is weird,” Neagley said. “Why would he leave it?”
“Maybe he had an early meeting,” Reacher said. “Maybe he left it out there because he knew he was leaving again right away.”
He fast-forwarded through the next hour. People ducked in and out of the office. Froelich made two trips. Then a forensic team arrived a
nd left twenty minutes later with the letter in a plastic evidence bag. He hit reverse scan. The whole morning’s activity unfolded again, backward. The forensic team left and then arrived, Froelich came out and in twice, Stuyvesant arrived and left, and then his secretary did the same.
“Now for the boring part,” Reacher said. “Hours and hours of nothing.”
The picture settled to a steady shot of an empty area with the timer rushing backward. Absolutely nothing happened. The level of detail coming off the original tape was better than the copy, but there wasn’t much in it. It was gray and milky. OK for a surveillance situation, but it wouldn’t have won any technical awards.
“You know what?” Reacher said. “I was a cop for thirteen years, and I never found anything significant on a surveillance tape. Not even once.”
“Me neither,” Neagley said. “The hours I spent like this.”
At six A.M. the tape jammed to a stop and Reacher ejected it and fast wound the second tape to the far end and started the patient backward search again. The timer sped through five o’clock and headed fast toward four. Nothing happened. The office just sat there, still and gray and empty.
“Why are we doing this tonight?” Neagley asked.
“Because I’m an impatient guy,” Reacher said.
“You want to score one for the military, don’t you? You want to show these civilians how the real pros work.”
“Nothing left to prove,” Reacher said. “We already scored three and a half.”
He bent closer to the screen. Fought to keep his eyes focused. Four o’clock in the morning. Nothing was happening. Nobody was delivering any letters.
“Or maybe there’s another reason we’re doing this tonight,” Neagley said. “Maybe you’re trying to outpoint your brother.”
“Don’t need to. I know exactly how we compared. And it doesn’t matter to me what anybody else thinks about it.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died.”
“I gathered that, belatedly. But how?”
“He was killed. In the line of duty. Just after I left the Army. Down in Georgia, south of Atlanta. Clandestine rendezvous with an informer from a counterfeiting operation. They were ambushed. He was shot in the head, twice.”