by Lee Child
Eventually a pretty lady two streets away pulled her Toyota Camry out of a curbside spot and Neagley swerved the Mustang right in after her. She locked it up and they walked back together. It was late afternoon but still faintly warm. Reacher could smell the ocean.
He asked, “How many widows have we been to see?”
“Too many,” Neagley said.
“Where do you live?”
“Lake Forest, Illinois.”
“I’ve heard of that. It’s supposed to be a nice place.”
“It is.”
“Congratulations.”
“I worked hard for it.”
They turned together into Franz’s street, and then into his driveway. They slowed a little on the short walk to the door. Reacher wasn’t sure what they were going to find. In the past he had dealt with widows a lot fresher than one of seventeen days’ vintage. Very often they hadn’t even known they were widows until he had shown up and told them they were. He wasn’t sure what difference the seventeen days were going to make. Didn’t know where in the process she was going to be.
“What’s her name?” he asked.
“Angela,” Neagley said.
“OK.”
“The kid is called Charlie. A boy.”
“OK.”
“Four years old.”
“OK.”
They stepped up on the porch and Neagley found a bell push and laid a fingertip on it, gently, briefly, respectfully, as if the electric circuit could sense deference. Reacher heard the sound of a muted bell inside the house, and then nothing. He waited. About a minute and a half later the door was opened. Apparently by nobody. Then Reacher looked down and saw a little boy stretching up to the handle. The handle was high and the boy was small and his stretch was so extreme that the arc of the door’s travel was pulling him off his tiptoes.
“You must be Charlie,” Reacher said.
“I am,” the boy said.
“I was a friend of your dad’s.”
“My dad’s dead.”
“I know. I’m very sad about that.”
“Me too.”
“Is it OK to be opening the door all by yourself?”
“Yes,” the boy said. “It’s OK.”
He looked exactly like Calvin Franz. The resemblance was uncanny. The face was the same. The body shape was the same. The short legs, the low waist, the long arms. The shoulders were just skin and bone under a child’s T-shirt but somehow they already hinted at the simian bulk they would carry later. The eyes were Franz’s own, exactly, dark, cool, calm, reassuring. Like the boy was saying, Don’t worry, everything will turn out fine.
Neagley asked him, “Charlie, is your mom home?”
The boy nodded.
“She’s in back,” he said. He let the handle go and stepped away to let them enter. Neagley went first. The house was too small for any one part of it to be really in back of any other part. It was like one generous room divided into four quadrants. Two small bedrooms on the right with a bathroom between, Reacher guessed. A small living room in the left front corner and a small kitchenette behind it. That was all. Tiny, but beautiful. Everything was off-white and pale yellow. There were flowers in vases. The windows were shaded with white wooden shutters. Floors were dark polished wood. Reacher turned and closed the door behind him and the street noise disappeared and silence clamped down over the house. A good feeling, once upon a time, he thought. Now maybe not so good.
A woman stepped out of the kitchen area, from behind a half-wide dividing wall so abbreviated that it couldn’t have offered accidental concealment. Reacher felt she must have gone and hidden behind it, deliberately, when the doorbell rang. She looked a lot younger than him. A little younger than Neagley.
Younger than Franz had been.
She was a tall woman, white blonde, blue-eyed like a Scandinavian, and thin. She was wearing a light V-neck sweater and the bones showed in the front of her chest. She was clean and made up and perfumed and her hair was brushed. Perfectly composed, but not relaxed. Reacher could see wild bewilderment around her eyes, like a fright mask worn under the skin.
There was awkward silence for a moment and then Neagley stepped forward and said, “Angela? I’m Frances Neagley. We spoke on the phone.”
Angela Franz smiled in an automatic way and offered her hand. Neagley took it and shook it briefly and then Reacher stepped forward and took his turn. He said, “I’m Jack Reacher. I’m very sorry for your loss.” He took her hand, which felt cold and fragile in his.
“You’ve used those words more than a few times,” she said. “Haven’t you?”
“I’m afraid so,” Reacher said.
“You’re on Calvin’s list,” she said. “You were an MP just like him.”
Reacher shook his head. “Not just like him. Not nearly as good.”
“You’re very kind.”
“It’s how it was. I admired him tremendously.”
“He told me about you. All of you, I mean. Many times. Sometimes I felt like a second wife. Like he had been married before. To all of you.”
“It’s how it was,” Reacher said again. “The service was like a family. If you were lucky, that is, and we were.”
“Calvin said the same thing.”
“I think he got even luckier afterward.”
Angela smiled again, automatically. “Maybe. But his luck ran out, didn’t it?”
Charlie was watching them, Franz’s eyes half-open, appraising. Angela said, “Thank you very much for coming.”
“Is there anything we can do for you?” Reacher asked.
“Can you raise the dead?”
Reacher said nothing.
“The way he used to talk about you, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could.”
Neagley said, “We could find out who did it. That’s what we were good at. And that’s as close as we can come to bringing him back. In a manner of speaking.”
“But it won’t actually bring him back.”
“No, it won’t. I’m very sorry.”
“Why are you here?”
“To give you our condolences.”
“But you don’t know me. I came later. I wasn’t a part of all that.” Angela moved away, toward the kitchen. Then she changed her mind and turned back and squeezed sideways between Reacher and Neagley and sat down in the living room. Laid her palms on the arms of her chair. Reacher saw her fingers moving. Just a slight imperceptible flutter, like she was typing or playing an invisible piano in her sleep.
“I wasn’t part of the group,” she said. “Sometimes I wished I had been. It meant so much to Calvin. He used to say, You do not mess with the special investigators. He used it like a catchphrase, all the time. He would be watching football, and the quarterback would get sacked, something real spectacular, and he would say, Yeah baby, you do not mess with the special investigators. He would say it to Charlie. He would tell Charlie to do something, and Charlie would moan, and Calvin would say, Charlie, you do not mess with the special investigators.”
Charlie looked up and smiled. “You do not mess,” he said, in a little piping voice, but with his father’s intonation, and then he stopped, as if the longer words were too hard for him to say.
Angela said, “You’re here because of a slogan, aren’t you?”
“Not really,” Reacher said. “We’re here because of what lay behind the slogan. We cared about one another. That’s all. I’m here because Calvin would have been there for me if the shoe was on the other foot.”
“Would he have been?”
“I think so.”
“He gave up all of that. When Charlie was born. No pressure from me. But he wanted to be a father. He gave it all up apart from the easy, safe stuff.”
“He can’t have done.”
“No, I guess not.”
“What was he working on?”
“I’m sorry,” Angela said. “I should have asked you to sit down.”
There was no sofa in the room. No space for one. Any
kind of a normal-sized sofa would have blocked access to the bedrooms. There were two armchairs instead, plus a half-sized wooden rocker for Charlie. The armchairs were either side of a small fireplace that held pale dried flowers in a raw china jug. Charlie’s rocker was to the left of the chimney. His name had been branded into the wood at the top of the back, with a hot poker or a soldering iron, seven letters, neat script. Tidy, but not a professional job. Franz’s own work, probably. A gift, father to son. Reacher looked at it for a moment. Then he took the armchair opposite Angela’s and Neagley perched on the arm next to him, her thigh less than an inch from his body, but not touching it.
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 eastbou
nd. 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 had 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.