the whole year. I guess he didn’t need them.’
‘He must have had a lot of suits.’
‘Couple of dozen, I guess,’ she said.
96
‘How can a person have twenty-four suits?’
‘He was a dresser,’ she said. ‘You must remember that.’
He stood still. The way he remembered it, Joe had lived in
one pair of shorts and one T-shirt. In the winters he wore
khakis. When it was very cold he added a worn-out leather
pilot’s jacket. That was it. At their mother’s funeral he wore
a very formal black suit, which Reacher had assumed was
rented. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe working in Washington had
changed his approach.
‘You should have them,’ Froelich Said. q’hey’re your
property, anyway. You were his next of kin, I guess.’
‘I guess I was,’ he said.
q’here’s a box, too,’ she said. ‘Stuff he left around and never
came back for.’
He followed her gaze to the closet floor and saw a cardboard
box sitting underneath the hanging rail. The flaps were folded
over each other.
I’ell me about Molly Beth Gordon,’ he said.
‘What about her?’
‘After they died I kind of inferred they’d had a thing going.’
She shook her head. if’hey were close. No doubt about that.
But they worked together. She was his assistant. He wouldn’t
date people in the office.’
‘Why did you break up?’ he asked.
The doorbell rang downstairs. It sounded loud in the Sunday
hush.
q’he food,’ Froelich said.
They went down and ate together at the kitchen table,
silently. It felt curiously intimate, but also distant. Like sitting
next to a stranger on a long plane ride. You feel connected, but
also not connected.
‘You can stay here tonight,’ she said. ‘If you like.’
‘I didn’t check out of the hotel.’
She nodded. ‘So check out tomorrow. Then base yourself
here.’
‘What about Neagley?’
Silence for a second.
‘Her, too, if she wants. There’s another bedroom on the third
floor.’
97
‘OK,’ he said.
They finished the meal and he put the containers in the trash
and rinsed the plates. She set the dishwasher going. Then her
phone rang. She stepped through to the living room to answer
it. Talked for a long moment and then hung up and came back.
qhat was Stuyvesant,’ she said. ‘He’s giving you the formal
go-ahead.’
He nodded. ‘So call Neagley and tell her to get her ass in
gear.’
‘Now?’
‘Get a problem, solve a problem,’ he said. ‘That’s my way. Tell
her to be out front of the hotel in thirty minutes.’
‘Where are you going to start?’
‘With the video,’ he said. ‘I want to watch the tapes again.
And I want to meet with the guy who runs that part of the
operation.’
Thirty minutes later they scooped Neagley off the sidewalk in
front of the hotel. She had changed into a black suit with a short
jacket. The pants were cut tight. They looked pretty good from
the back, in Reacher’s opinion. He saw Froelich arrive at the
same conclusion. But she said nothing. Just drove, five minutes,
and then they were back in the Secret Service offices. Froelich
headed straight for her desk and left Reacher and Neagley
with the agent who ran the video surveillance. He was a small
thin nervous guy in Sunday clothes who had come in at short
notice to meet with them. He looked a little dazed about it. He
led them to a closet-sized equipment room full of racks of
recorders. One wall was a floor-to-ceiling shelving unit with
hundreds of VHS tapes stacked neatly in black plastic boxes.
The recorders themselves were plain grey industrial units. The
whole tiny space was full of neat wiring and procedural memos
tacked to the walls and soft noise from small motors turning
and the smell of warm circuit boards and the green glow of LED
numbers ticking over relentlessly.
‘System really looks after itself,’ the guy said. q’here are four
recorders slaved to each camera, six hours to a tape, so we
change all the tapes once a day, file them away, keep them
three months and then reuse them.’
98
‘Where are the originals from the night in question?’ Reacher