“Look at this,” he said.

He turned the right shoe over and pulled a pin out of the heel with his fingernails. Then he swiveled the heel rubber like a little door and turned the shoe the right way up. He shook it. A small black plastic rectangle clattered out on the table. It landed facedown. He turned it over.

It was a wireless e-mail device, exactly identical to my own.

He passed me the shoe. I took it. Stared at it, blankly. It was a woman’s size six. Made for a small foot. But it had a wide bulbous toe, and therefore a wide thick heel to balance it visually. Some kind of a clumsy fashion statement. The heel had a rectangular cavity carved out of it. Identical to mine. It had been done neatly. It had been done with patience. But not by a machine. It showed the same faint tool marks that mine did. I pictured some guy in a lab somewhere, a line of shoes on a bench in front of him, the smell of new leather, a small arc of woodcarving tools laid out in front of him, curls and slivers of rubber accumulating on the floor around him as he labored. Most government work is surprisingly low-tech. It’s not all exploding ballpoint pens and cameras built into watches. A trip to the mall to buy a commercial e-mail device and a pair of plain shoes is about as cutting-edge as most of it gets.

“What are you thinking?” Beck asked.

I was thinking about how I was feeling. I was on a roller-coaster. She was still dead, but I hadn’t killed her anymore. The government computers had killed her again. So I was relieved, personally. But I was more than a little angry, too. Like, what the hell was Duffy doing? What the hell was she playing at? It was an absolute rule of procedure that you never put two or more people undercover in the same location unless they’re aware of each other. That was absolutely basic. She had told me about Teresa Daniel. So why the hell hadn’t she told me about this other woman?

“Unbelievable,” I said.

“The battery is dead,” he said. He was holding the device in both hands. Using both thumbs on it, like a video game. “It doesn’t work, anyway.”

He passed it to me. I put the shoe down and took it from him. Pressed the familiar power button. But the screen stayed dead.

“How long was she here?” I asked.

“Eight weeks,” Beck said. “It’s hard for us to keep domestic staff. It’s lonely here. And there’s Paulie, you know. And Duke wasn’t a very hospitable guy, either.”

“I guess eight weeks would be a long time for a battery to last.”

“What would be their procedure now?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was never federal.”

“In general,” he said. “You must have seen stuff like this.”

I shrugged.

“I guess they’d have expected it,” I said. “Communications are always the first things to get screwed up. She drops off the radar, they wouldn’t worry right away. They’d have no choice but to leave her in the field. I mean, they can’t contact her to order her home, can they? So I guess they would trust her to get the battery charged up again, as soon as she could.” I turned the unit on its edge and pointed to the little socket on the bottom. “Looks like it needs a cell phone charger, something like that.”

“Would they send people after her?”

“Eventually,” I said. “I guess.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”

“We plan to deny she was ever here. Deny we ever saw her. There’s no evidence she was ever here.”

“You better clean her room real good,” I said. “There’ll be fingerprints and hair and DNA all over the place.”

“She was recommended to us,” he said. “We don’t advertise in the paper or anything. Some guys we know in Boston put her in touch.”

He glanced at me. I thought: Some guys in Boston begging for a plea bargain, helping the government any which way they could. I nodded.

“Tricky,” I said. “Because what does that say about them?”

He nodded back sourly. He agreed with me. He knew what I was saying. He picked up the big bunch of keys from where they were lying next to the chisel.

“I think these are Angel Doll’s,” he said.

I said nothing.

“So it’s a three-way nightmare,” he said. “We can tie Doll to the Hartford crew, and we can tie our Boston friends to the feds. Now we can tie Doll to the feds, too. Because he gave his keys to the undercover bitch. Which means the Hartford crew must be in bed with the feds as well. Doll’s dead, thanks to Duke, but I’ve still got Hartford, Boston, and the government on my back. I’m going to need you, Reacher.”

I glanced at Harley. He was looking out the window at the rain.

“Was it just Doll?” I asked.

Beck nodded. “I’ve been through all of that. I’m satisfied. It was just Doll. The rest are solid. They’re still with me. They were very apologetic about Doll.”

“OK,” I said.

There was silence for a long moment. Then Beck rewrapped my stash in its rag and dumped it back in his bag. He threw the dead e-mail device in after it and piled the maid’s shoes on top. They looked sad and empty and forlorn.

“I’ve learned one thing,” he said. “I’m going to start searching people’s shoes, that’s for damn sure. You can bet your life on that.”

I bet my life on it right there and then. I kept my own shoes on. I got back up to Duke’s room and checked his closet. There were four pairs in there. Nothing I would have picked out for myself in a store, but they looked reasonable and they were close to the right size. But I left them there. To show up so soon in different shoes would raise a red flag. And if I was going to ditch mine, I was going to ditch them properly. No point leaving them in my room for casual inspection. I would have to get them out of the house. And there was no easy way of doing that right then. Not after the scene in the kitchen. I couldn’t just walk downstairs with them in my hands. What was I supposed to say? What, these? Oh, they’re the shoes I was wearing when I arrived. I’m just going out to throw them in the ocean. Like I was suddenly bored with them? So I kept them on.

And I still needed them, anyway. I was tempted, but I wasn’t ready to cut Duffy out. Not just yet. I locked myself in Duke’s bathroom and took the e-mail device out. It was an eerie feeling. I hit power and the screen came up with a message: We need to meet. I hit reply and sent: You bet your ass we do. Then I turned the unit off and nailed it back into my heel and went down to the kitchen again.

“Go with Harley,” Beck told me. “You need to bring the Saab back.”

The cook wasn’t there. The counters were neat and clean. They had been scrubbed. The stove was cold. It felt like there should be a Closed sign hanging on the door.

“What about lunch?” I said.

“You hungry?”

I thought back to the way the sea had swelled the bag and claimed the body. Saw the hair under the water, fluid and infinitely fine. Saw the blood rinsing away, pink and diluted. I wasn’t hungry.

“Starving,” I said.

Beck smiled sheepishly. “You’re one cold son of a bitch, Reacher.”

“I’ve seen dead people before. I expect to see them again.”

He nodded. “The cook is off duty. Eat out, OK?”

“I don’t have any money.”

He put his hand in his pants pocket and came out with a wad of bills. Started to count them out and then just shrugged and gave it up and handed the whole lot to me. It must have been close to a thousand dollars.

“Walking-around money,” he said. “We’ll do the salary thing later.”

I put the cash in my pocket.

“Harley is waiting in the car,” he said.

I went outside and pulled my coat collar up. The wind was easing. The rain was reverting to vertical. The Lincoln was still there at the corner of the house. The trunk lid was closed. Harley was drumming his thumbs on the wheel. I slid into the passenger seat and buzzed it backward to get some legroom. He fired up the engine and set the wipers going and took off. We had to wait while Paulie unchained the gate. Harley fiddled with the heater and set it on high. Our clothes were wet and the windows were steaming up. Paulie was slow. Harley started drumming again.