He stacked the films and carried them out into the corridor. Unlocked the plain door in the cinder-block wall and walked past the aluminum caskets to the alcove at the far end. There was a computer terminal on a wide shelf, out of sight around a corner. He booted it up and clicked on the search menu. The screen scrolled down and revealed a detailed questionnaire.

Filling out the questionnaire was a matter of simple logic. He clicked on ALL BONES and entered NO CHILDHOOD BREAKS, POTENTIAL ADULT BREAKS. The kid didn’t break his leg playing football in high school, but he might have broken it later in a training accident. Service medical records were sometimes lost. He spent a lot of time on the dental section of the questionnaire. He entered a full description of each tooth as last recorded. He marked the filled cavities, and against each good tooth he entered POTENTIAL CAVITY. It was the only way to prevent mistakes. Simple logic. A good tooth can go bad later and need treatment, but a filled cavity can’t ever disappear. He stared at the X rays and against SPACING he entered EVEN, and against SIZE he entered EVEN again. The rest of the questionnaire he left blank. Some diseases show up in the skeleton, but not colds and flu and bronchitis.

He reviewed his work and at seven o’clock exactly he hit SEARCH. The hard disk whirred and chattered in the morning silence and the software started its patient journey through the database.

THEY LANDED TIN minutes ahead of schedule, just before the peak of noon, East Coast time. They came in low over the glittering waters of Jamaica Bay and put down facing east before turning back and taxiing slowly to the terminal. Jodie reset her watch and was on her feet before the plane stopped moving, which was a transgression they don’t chide you for in first class.

“Let’s go,” she said. “I’m real tight for time.”

They were lined up by the door before it opened. Reacher carried her bag out into the jetway and she hurried ahead of him all the way through the terminal and outside. The Lincoln Navigator was still there in the short-term lot, big and black and obvious, and it cost fifty-eight of Rutter’s dollars to drive it out.

“Do I have time for a shower?” she asked herself.

Reacher put his comment into hustling faster than he should along the Van Wyck. The Long Island Expressway was moving freely west to the tunnel. They were in Manhattan within twenty minutes of touching down and heading south on Broadway near her place within thirty.

“I’m still going to check it out,” he told her. “Shower or no shower.”

She nodded. Being back in the city had brought back the worry.

“OK, but be quick.”

He limited it to stopping on the street outside her door and making a visual check of the lobby. Nobody there. They dumped the car and went up to five and down the fire stairs to four. The building was quiet and deserted. The apartment was empty and undisturbed. The Mondrian copy glowed in the bright daylight. Twelve-thirty in the afternoon.

“Ten minutes,” she said. “Then you can drive me to the office, OK?”

“How will you get to the meeting?”

“We have a driver,” she said. “He’ll take me.”

She ran through the living room to the bedroom, shedding clothes as she went.

“You need to eat?” Reacher called after her.

“No time,” she called back.

She spent five minutes in the shower and five minutes in the closet. She came out with a charcoal dress and a matching jacket.

“Find my briefcase, OK?” she yelled.

She combed her hair and used a hair dryer on it. Limited her makeup to a touch of eyeliner and lipstick. Checked herself in the mirror and ran back to the living room. He had her briefcase waiting for her. He carried it down to the car.

“Take my keys,” she said. “Then you can get back in. I’ll call you from the office and you can come pick me up.”

It took seven minutes to get opposite the little plaza outside her building. She slid out of the car at five minutes to one.

“Good luck,” Reacher called after her. “Give them hell.”

She waved to him and skipped across to the revolving door. The security guys saw her coming and nodded her through to the elevator bank. She was upstairs in her office before one o’clock. Her secretary followed her inside with a thin file in his hand.

“There you go,” he said, ceremoniously.

She opened it up and flipped through eight sheets of paper.

“Hell is this?” she said.

“They were thrilled about it at the partners’ meeting,” the guy said.

She went back through the pages in reverse order. “I don’t see why. I never heard of either of these corporations and the amount is trivial.”

“That’s not the point, though, is it?” the guy said.

She looked at him. “So what is the point?”

“It’s the creditor who hired you,” he said. “Not the guy who owes all the money. It’s a preemptive move, isn’t it? Because word is getting around. The creditor knows if you get alongside the guy who owes him money, you can cause him a big problem. So he hired you first, to keep that from happening. It means you’re famous. That’s what the partners are thrilled about. You’re a big star now, Mrs. Jacob.”

16

REACHER DROVE SLOWLY back to lower Broadway. He bumped the big car down the ramp to the garage. Parked it in Jodie’s slot and locked it. He didn’t go upstairs to the apartment. He walked back up the ramp to the street and headed north in the sun to the espresso bar. He had the counter guy put four shots in a cardboard cup and sat at the chromium table Jodie had used when he was checking the apartment the night he had gotten back from Brighton. He had walked back up Broadway and found her sitting there, staring at Rutter’s faked photograph. He sat down in the same chair she had used and blew on the espresso foam and smelled the aroma and took the first sip.

What to tell the old folks? The only humane thing to do would be to go up there and tell them nothing at all. Just tell them he had drawn a blank. Just leave it completely vague. It would be a kindness. Just go up there, hold their hands, break the news of Rutter’s deception, refund their money, and then describe a long and fruitless search backward through history that ended up absolutely nowhere. Then plead with them to accept he must be long dead, and beg them to understand nobody would ever be able to tell them where or when or how. Then disappear and leave them to live out the short balance of their lives with whatever dignity they could find in being just two out of the tens of millions of parents who gave up their children to the night and the fog swirling through a ghastly century.

He sipped his way through the coffee, with his left hand clenched on the table in front of him. He would lie to them, but out of kindness. Reacher had no great experience of kindness. It was a virtue that had always run parallel to his life. He had never been in the sort of position where it counted for anything. He had never drawn duty breaking bad news to relatives. Some of his contemporaries had. After the Gulf, duty squads had been formed, a senior officer from the unit concerned teamed up with a military policeman, and they had visited the families of the casualties, walking up long, lonely driveways, walking upstairs in apartment houses, breaking the news that their formal uniformed arrival had already announced in advance. He guessed kindness counted for a lot during that type of duty, but his own career had been locked tight inside the service itself, where things were always simple, either happening or not happening, good or bad, legal or not legal. Now two years after leaving the service, kindness was suddenly a factor in his life. And it would make him lie.

But he would find Victor Hobie. He unclenched his hand and touched the burn scar through his shirt. He had a score to settle. He tilted the cup until he felt the espresso mud on his teeth and tongue. Then he dropped the cup in the trash and stepped back out to the sidewalk. The sun was full on Broadway, coming slightly from the south and west of directly overhead. He felt it on his face and turned toward it and walked down to Jodie’s building. He was tired. He had slept only four hours on the plane. Four hours, out of more than twenty-four. He remembered reclining the enormous first-class seat and falling asleep in it. He had been thinking about Hobie then, like he was thinking about him now. Victor Hobie had Costello killed, so he could stay hidden.