Without Fail (24 page)

"Was it just Maria on her own? Did Julio and Anita come out first?"

"No."

"So who put it there? My secretary?"

"No."

The room went quiet.

"Are you saying I did?" Stuyvesant asked.

Reacher shook his head. "All I'm doing is asking why the cleaners spent fifteen minutes in an office that was already very clean."

"They were resting?" Neagley said.

Reacher shook his head again. Froelich smiled suddenly.

"Doing something to make themselves dishevelled?" she said.

Reacher smiled back. "Like what?"

"Like having sex?"

Stuyvesant went pale. "I sincerely hope not," he said. "And there were three of them, anyway."

"Threesomes aren't unheard of," Neagley said.

"They live together," Stuyvesant said. "They want to do that, they can do it at home, can't they?"

"It can be an erotic adventure," Froelich said. "You know, making out at work."

"Forget the sex," Reacher said. "Think about the dishevelment. What exactly created that impression for us?"

Everybody shrugged. Stuyvesant was still pale. Reacher smiled.

"Something else on the tape," he said. "Going in, the garbage bag is reasonably empty. Coming out, it's much fuller. So was there a lot of trash in the office?"

"No," Stuyvesant said, like he was offended. "I never leave trash in there."

Froelich sat forward. "So what was in the bag?"

"Trash," Reacher said.

"I don't understand," Froelich said.

"Fifteen minutes is a long time, people," Reacher said. "They worked efficiently and thoroughly in the secretarial area and had it done in nine minutes. That's a slightly bigger and slightly more cluttered area. Things all over the place. So compare the two areas, compare the complexity, assume they work just as hard everywhere, and tell me how long they should have spent in the office."

Froelich shrugged. "Seven minutes? Eight? About that long?"

Neagley nodded. "I'd say nine minutes, tops."

"I like it clean," Stuyvesant said. "I leave instructions to that effect. I'd want them in there for ten minutes, at least."

"But not fifteen," Reacher said. "That's excessive. And we asked them about it. We asked them, why so long in there? And what did they say?"

"They didn't answer," Neagley said. "Just looked puzzled."

"Then we asked them whether they spent the same amount of time in there every night. And they said yes, they did."

Stuyvesant looked to Neagley for confirmation. She nodded. "OK," Reacher said. "We've boiled it down. We're looking at fifteen particular minutes. You've all seen the tapes. Now tell me how they spent that time."

Nobody spoke.

"Two possibilities," Reacher said. "Either they didn't, or they spent the time growing their hair."

"What?" Froelich said.

"That's what makes them look dishevelled. Julio especially. His hair is a little longer coming out than going in."

"How is that possible?"

"It's possible because we weren't looking at one night's activities. We were looking at two separate nights spliced together. Two halves of two different nights."

Silence in the room.

"Two tapes," Reacher said. "The tape change at midnight is the key. The first tape is kosher. Has to be, because early on it shows Stuyvesant and his secretary going home. That was the real thing. The real Wednesday. The cleaners show up at eleven fifty-two. They look tired, because maybe that's the first night in their shift pattern. Maybe they've been up all day doing normal daytime things. But it's been a routine night at work so far. They're on time. No spilled coffee anywhere, no huge amount of trash anywhere. The garbage bag is reasonably empty. My guess is they had the office finished in about nine minutes. Which is probably their normal speed. Which is reasonably fast. Which is why they were puzzled when we claimed it was slow. My guess is in reality they came out at maybe one minute past midnight and spent another nine minutes on the secretarial station and left the area at ten past midnight."

"But?" Froelich asked.

"But after midnight we were looking at a different night altogether. Maybe from a couple of weeks ago, before the guy got his latest haircut. A night when they arrived in the area later, and therefore left the area later. Because of some earlier snafu in some other office. Maybe some big pile of trash that filled up their bag. They looked more energetic coming out because they were hurrying to catch up. And maybe it was a night in the middle of their work week and they'd adjusted to their pattern and slept properly. So we saw them go in on Wednesday and come out on a completely different night."

"But the date was correct," Froelich said. "It was definitely Thursday's date."

Reacher nodded. "Nendick planned it ahead of time."

"Nendick?"

"Your tape guy," Reacher said. "My guess is for a whole week he had that particular camera's midnight-to-six tape set up to show that particular Thursday's date. Maybe two whole weeks. Because he needed three options. Either the cleaners would be in and out before midnight, or in before midnight and out after midnight, or in and out after midnight. He had to wait to match his options. If they'd been in and out before midnight, he'd have given you a matching tape showing nothing at all between midnight and six. If they'd been in and out after midnight, that's what you'd have seen. But the way it happened, he had to use one that showed them leaving only."

"Nendick left the letter?" Stuyvesant asked.

Reacher nodded. "Nendick is the insider. Not the cleaners. What that particular camera really recorded that night was the cleaners leaving just after midnight and then sometime before six in the morning Nendick himself stepping in through the fire door with gloves on and the letter in his hand. Probably around five thirty, I would guess, so he wouldn't have to wait long before trashing the real tape and choosing his substitute."

"But it showed me arriving in the morning. My secretary, too."

"That was the third tape. There was another change at six a.m., back to the real thing. Only the middle tape was swapped." Silence in the room.

"He probably described the garage cameras for them too," Reacher said. "For the Sunday night delivery."

"How did you spot it?" Stuyvesant asked. "The hair?"

"Partly. It was Neagley's ass, really. Nendick was so nervous around the tapes he didn't pay attention to Neagley's ass. She noticed. She told me that's very unusual."

Stuyvesant blushed again, like maybe he was able to vouch for that fact personally.

"So we should let the cleaners go," Reacher said. "Then we should talk to Nendick. He's the one who's met with these guys."

Stuyvesant nodded. "And been threatened by them, presumably."

"I hope so," Reacher said. "I hope he's not involved of his own free will." Stuyvesant used his master key and entered the video recording room with the duty officer as a witness. They found that ten consecutive midnight-to-six tapes were missing prior to the Thursday in question. Nendick had entered them in a technical log as faulty recordings. Then they picked a dozen random tapes from the last three months and watched parts of them. They confirmed that the cleaners never spent more than nine minutes in his office. So Stuyvesant made a call and secured their immediate release.

Then there were three options: call Nendick in on a pretext, or send agents out to arrest him, or drive themselves over to his house and get some questioning started before the Sixth Amendment kicked in and began to complicate things.

"We should go right now," Reacher said. "Exploit the element of surprise."

He was expecting resistance, but Stuyvesant just nodded blankly. He looked pale and tired. He looked like a man with problems. Like a man juggling a sense of betrayal and righteous anger against the standard Beltway instinct for concealment. And the instinct for concealment was going to be much stronger with a guy like Nendick than with the cleaners. Cleaners would be regarded as mere ciphers. Sooner or later somebody could spin it hey, cleaners, what can you do. But a guy like Nendick was different. A guy like that was a main component in an organization that should know better. So Stuyvesant booted up his secretary's computer and found Nendick's home address. It was in a suburb ten miles out in Virginia.

It took twenty minutes to get there. He lived on a quiet winding street in a subdivision. The subdivision was old enough for the trees and the foundation plantings to be mature but new enough for the whole place still to look smart and well kept. It was a medium-priced area. There were foreign cars on most of the driveways, but they weren't this year's models. They were clean, but a little tired. Nendick's house was a long low ranch with a khaki roof and a brick chimney. It was dark except for the blue flicker of a television set in one of the windows. Froelich swung straight onto the driveway and parked in front of the garage. They climbed out into the cold and walked to the front door. Stuyvesant put his thumb on the bell and left it there.

Thirty seconds later a light came on in the hallway. It blazed orange in a fan-shaped window above the door. A yellow porch light came on over their heads. The door opened and Nendick just stood in his hallway and said nothing. He was wearing a suit, like he was just home from work. He looked slack with fear, like a new ordeal was about to be piled on top of an old one. Stuyvesant looked at him and paused and then stepped inside. Froelich followed him. Then Reacher. Then Neagley. She closed the door behind her and took up station in front of it like a sentry, feet apart, hands clasped easy in the small of her back.

Nendick still said nothing. Just stood there, slack and staring. Stuyvesant put a hand on his shoulder and turned him round. Pushed him towards the kitchen. He didn't resist. Just stumbled limply towards the back of his house. Stuyvesant followed him and hit a switch and fluorescent tubes sputtered to life above the countertops.

"Sit," he said, like he was talking to a dog. Nendick stepped over and sat on a stool at his breakfast bar. Said nothing. Just wrapped his arms around himself like a man chilled by fever.

"Names," Stuyvesant said.

Nendick said nothing. He worked at saying nothing. He stared forward at the far wall. One of the fluorescent lights was faulty. It was struggling to kick in. Its capacitor put an angry buzz into the silence. Nendick's hands started shaking, so he tucked them up under his arms to keep them still and began to rock back and forth on the stool. It creaked gently under his weight. Reacher glanced away and looked around the kitchen. It was a pretty room. There were yellow check drapes at the window. The ceiling was painted to match. There were flowers in vases. They were all dead. There were dishes in the sink. A couple of weeks' worth. Some of them were crusted.

Reacher stepped back to the hallway. Into the living room. The television was a huge thing a couple of years old. It was tuned to a commercial network. The programme seemed to be made up of clips from police traffic surveillance videos several years out of date. The sound was low. Just a constant murmur suggesting extreme and sustained excitement. There was a remote control balanced carefully on the arm of a chair opposite the screen. There was a low mantel above the fireplace with a row of six photographs in brass frames. Nendick and a woman featured in all six of them. She was about his age, maybe just lively enough and attractive enough not to be called plain. The photographs followed the couple from their wedding day through a couple of vacations and some other unspecified events. There were no pictures of children. And this wasn't a house where children lived. There were. no toys anywhere. No mess. Everything was frilly and considered and matched and adult.

The remote on the arm of the chair was labelled Video, not TV. Reacher glanced at the screen and pressed play. The cop radio sound died instantly and the video machine clicked and whirred and a second later the picture went black and was replaced by an amateur video of a wedding. Nendick and his wife smiled into the camera from several years in the past. Their heads were close together. They looked happy. She was all in white. He was wearing a suit. They were on a lawn. A blustery day. Her hair was blowing and the soundtrack was dominated by wind noise. She had a nice smile. Bright eyes. She was saying something for posterity, but Reacher couldn't hear the words.

He pressed stop and a night-time car chase resumed. He stepped back into the kitchen. Nendick was still shaking and rocking. He still had his hands trapped up under his arms. He still wasn't saying anything. Reacher glanced again at the dirty dishes and the dead flowers.