Without Fail (23 page)

There was a one-minute wait and then the door opened and was stopped short by a chain. A bar of warm light flooded out. There was a one-minute conversation. The door eased forward to release the chain. The bar of light narrowed and widened again. Neagley turned and waved. Froelich and Stuyvesant and Reacher climbed out of the Suburban and walked up the path.

There was a small dark guy standing in the doorway, waiting for them, smiling shyly.

"This is Mr Gilvez," Neagley said. They introduced themselves and Gilvez backed into the hallway and made a follow-me gesture with the whole of his arm, like a butler. He was a small guy dressed in suit pants and a patterned sweater. He had a fresh haircut and an open expression. They followed him inside.

The house was small and clearly overcrowded, but it was very clean. There was a line of seven children's coats hung neatly on a row of pegs inside the door. Some of them were small, some of them were a little bigger. There were seven school backpacks lined up on the floor underneath them. Seven pairs of shoes. There were toys neatly piled here and there. Three women visible in the kitchen. Shy children peering out from behind their skirts. More easing their heads round the living room door. They kept moving. Kept appearing and disappearing in random sequences. They all looked the same. Reacher couldn't get an accurate count. There were dark eyes everywhere, open wide.

Stuyvesant seemed a little out of his depth, like he didn't know how to broach the subject. Reacher squeezed past him and moved ahead towards the kitchen. Stopped in the doorway. There were seven school lunch boxes lined up on a counter. The lids were up, like they were ready for assembly-line loading first thing in the morning. He moved back to the hallway. Squeezed past Neagley and looked at the little coats. They were all colourful nylon items, like small versions of the things he had browsed in the Atlantic City store. He lifted one off its peg. It had a white patch inside the collar. Somebody had used a laundry marker and written J. Gilvez on it in careful script. He put it back and checked the other six. Each was labelled with a surname and a single initial. Total of five Gilvez and two Alvrez.

Nobody was speaking. Stuyvesant looked awkward. Reacher caught Mr Gilvez's eye and nodded him through to the living room. Two children scuttled out as they stepped in. "You got five kids?" Reacher asked. Gilvez nodded. "I'm a lucky man."

"So who do the two Alvfirez coats belong to?"

"My wife's cousin Julio's children."

"Julio and Anita's?"

Glvez nodded. Said nothing.

"I need to see them," Reacher said.

"They're not here."

Reacher glanced away. "Where are they?" he asked quietly.

"I don't know," Glvez said. "At work, I guess. They work nights. For the federal government."

Reacher glanced back. "No, I mean their kids. Not them. I need to see their kids." Gilvez looked at him, puzzled. "See their kids?"

"To check they're OK."

"You just saw them. In the kitchen."

"I need to see which ones they are exactly."

"We're not taking money," Gilvez said. "Except for their food."

Reacher nodded. "This isn't about licences or anything. We don't care about that stuff. We just need to see their kids are OK."

Gilvez still looked puzzled. But he called out a long rapid sentence in Spanish and two small children separated themselves from the group in the kitchen and threaded between Stuyvesant and Froelich and trotted into the room. They stopped near the doorway and stood perfectly still, side by side. Two little girls, very beautiful, huge dark eyes, soft black hair, serious expressions. Maybe five and seven years old. Maybe four and six. Maybe three and five. Reacher had no idea. "Hey, kids," he said. "Show me your coats."

They did exactly what they were told, the way kids sometimes do. He followed them out to the hallway and watched as they stood up on tiptoe and touched the two little jackets he knew were marked Alvrez.

"OK," he said. "Now go get a cookie or something."

They scuttled back to the kitchen. He watched them go. Stood still and quiet for a second and then stepped back to the living room. Got close to Gilvez and lowered his voice again. "Anybody else been enquiring about them?" he asked. Gilvez just shook his head.

"You sure?" Reacher asked. "Nobody watching them, no strangers around?"

Gilvez shook his head again.

"We can fix it," Reacher said. "If you're worried about anything, you should go ahead and tell us right now. We'll take care of it."

Gilvez just looked blank. Reacher watched his eyes. He had spent his career watching eyes, and these two were innocent. A little disconcerted, a little puzzled, but the guy wasn't hiding anything. He had no secrets.

"OK," he said. "We're sorry to have interrupted your evening." He kept very quiet on the drive back to the office. They used the conference room again. It seemed to be the only facility with seating for more than three. Neagley let Froelich put herself next to Reacher. She sat with Stuyvesant on the opposite side of the table. Froelich got on the radio net and heard that Armstrong was about to leave the hotel. He was cutting the evening short. Nobody seemed to mind. It worked both ways. Spend a lot of time with them, and they're naturally thrilled about it. Rush it through, and they're equally delighted such a busy and important guy found any time for them at all. Froelich listened to her earpiece and tracked him all the way out of the ballroom, through the kitchens, into the loading bay, into the limo. Then she relaxed. All that was left was a high speed convoy out to Georgetown and a transfer through the tent in the darkness. She fiddled behind her back and turned the earpiece volume down a little. Sat back and glanced at the others, questions in her eyes.

"Makes no sense to me," Neagley said. "It implies there's something they're more worried about than their children."

"Which would be what?" Froelich asked. "Green cards? Are they legal?"

Stuyvesant nodded. "Of course they are. They're United States Secret Service employees, same as anybody else in this building. Background-checked from here to hell and back. We snoop on their financial situation and everything. They were clean, far as we knew."

Reacher let the talk drift into the background. He rubbed the back of his neck with the palm of his hand. The stubble from his haircut was growing out. It felt softer. He glanced at Neagley. Stared down at the carpet. It was grey nylon, ribbed, somewhere between fine and coarse. He could see individual hairy strands glittering in the halogen light. It was an immaculately clean carpet. He closed his eyes. Thought hard. Ran the surveillance video in his head all over again. Watched it like there was a screen inside his eyelids. It went like this: eight minutes before midnight, the cleaners enter the picture. They walk into Stuyvesant's office. Seven minutes past midnight, they come out. They spend nine minutes cleaning the secretarial station. They shuffle off the way they had come at sixteen minutes past midnight. He ran it again, forward and then backward. Concentrated on every frame. Every movement.

Then he opened his eyes. Everybody was staring at him like he had been ignoring their questions. He glanced at his watch. It was almost nine o'clock. He smiled. A wide, happy grin.

"I liked Mr Gilvez," he said. "He seemed really happy to be a father, didn't he? All those lunch boxes lined up? I bet they get wholewheat bread. Fruit, too, probably. All kinds of good nutrition."

They all looked at him.

"I was an army kid," he said. "I had a lunch box. Mine was an old ammunition case. We all had them. It was considered the thing back then, on the bases. I stencilled my name on it, with a real army stencil. My mother hated it. Thought it was way too militaristic, for a kid. But she gave me good stuff to eat anyway."

Neagley stared at him. "Reacher, we've got big problems here, two people are dead, and you're talking about lunch boxes?"

He nodded. Talking about lunch boxes, and thinking about haircuts. Mr Gilvez had just been to the barber, you notice that?"

"So?"

"And with the greatest possible respect, Neagley, I'm thinking about your ass."

Froelich stared at him. Neagley blushed.

"Your point being?" she said.

"My point being, I don't think there is anything more important to Julio and Anita than their children."

"So why are they still clamming up?"

Froelich sat forward and pressed her finger on her earpiece. Listened for a second and raised her wrist.

"Copy," she said. "Good work, everybody, out."

Then she smiled.

"Armstrong's home," she said. "Secure."

Reacher looked at his watch again. Nine o'clock exactly. He glanced across at Stuyvesant. "Can I see your office again? Right now?"

Stuyvesant looked blank, but he stood up and led the way out of the room. They followed the corridors and arrived at the rear of the floor. The secretarial station was quiet and deserted. Stuyvesant's door was closed. He pushed it open and hit the lights.

There was a sheet of paper on the desk.

They all saw it. Stuyvesant stood completely still for a second and then walked across the floor and stared down at it. Swallowed. Breathed out. Picked it up.

"Fax from Boulder PD," he said. "Preliminary ballistics. My secretary must have left it." He smiled with relief.

"Now check," Reacher said. "Concentrate. Is this how your office usually looks?"

Stuyvesant held the fax and glanced around the room. "Exactly," he said.

"So this is how the cleaners see it every night?"

"Well, the desk is usually clear," Stuyvesant said. "But otherwise, yes."

"OK," Reacher said. "Let's go."

They walked back to the conference room. Stuyvesant read the fax.

"They found six shell cases," he said. "Nine-millimetre Parabellums. Strange impact marks on the sides. They've sent a drawing."

He slid the paper to Neagley. She read it through. Made a face. Slid it across to Reacher. He looked at the drawing and nodded.

"Heckler & Koch MP5," he said. "It punches the empty brass out like nobody's business. The guy had it set to bursts of three. Two bursts, six cases. They probably ended up twenty yards away."

"Probably the SD6 version," Neagley said. "If it was silenced. That's a nice weapon. Quality sub-machine gun. Expensive. Rare, too."

"Why did you want to see my office?" Stuyvesant asked.

"We're wrong about the cleaners," Reacher said. The room went quiet.

"In what way?" Neagley asked.

"In every way," Reacher said. "Every possible way we could be. What happened when we talked to them?"

"They stonewalled like crazy."

He nodded, "That's what I thought too. They went into some kind of a stoic silence. All of them. Almost like a trance. I interpreted that as a response to some kind of danger. Like they were really digging deep and defending against whatever hold somebody had over them. Like it was vitally important. Like they knew they couldn't afford to say a single word. But you know what?"

"What?"

"They just didn't have a clue what we were talking about. Not the first idea. We were two crazy white people asking them impossible questions, is all. They were too polite and too inhibited to tell us to get lost. They just sat there patiently while we rambled on."

"So what are you saying?"

"Think about what else we know. There's a weird sequence of facts on the tape. They look a little tired going into Stuyvesant's office, and a little less tired coming out. They look fairly neat going in, and a little dishevelled coming out. They spend fifteen minutes in there, and only nine in the secretarial area."

"So?" Stuyvesant asked.

Reacher smiled. "Your office is probably the world's cleanest room. You could do surgery in there. You keep it that way deliberately. We know about the thing with the briefcase and the wet shoes, by the way."

Froelich looked blank. Stuyvesant's turn to blush.

"It's tidy to the point of obsession," Reacher said. "And yet the cleaners spent fifteen minutes in there. Why?"

"They were unpacking the letter," Stuyvesant said. "Placing it in position."

"No, they weren't."