‘Nobody at all.’
He hit fast rewind and stared at nothing until he found eight
o’clock in the evening. The secretary got up from her desk,
put her head round Stuyvesant’s door, and went home. He
wound back to seven thirty-one and watched Stuyvesant himself
leave.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘he cleaners did it. On their own initiative?’
‘I seriously doubt it.’
‘So who told them to?’
They stopped in the foyer and found Nendick and sent him
back to tidy up his equipment room. Then they went in search
of Froelich and found her deep in a stack of paperwork at her
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desk, on the phone, co-ordinating Brook Armstrong’s return
from Camp David.
‘We need to speak with the cleaners,’ Reacher said.
‘Now?’ Froelich said.
‘No better time. Late-night interrogation always works best.’
She looked blank. ‘OK. I’ll drive you, I guess.’
‘Better that you’re not there,’ Neagley said.
‘Why not?’
‘We’re military. We’ll probably want to slap them around
some.’
Froelich stared at her. ‘You can’t do that. They’re department
members, no different than me.’
‘She’s kidding,’ Reacher said. ‘But they’re going to feel
better talking to us if there’s nobody else from the department
around.’
‘OK, I’ll wait outside. But I’m going with you.’
She finished up her phone calls and tidied up her paperwork
and then led them back to the elevator and down to the garage.
They climbed into the Suburban and Reacher closed his eyes
for twenty minutes as she drove. He was tired. He had been
working hard for six days straight. Then the car came to a stop
and he opened his eyes again in a mean neighbourhood full of
ten-year-old sedans and hurricane fencing.. There was an orange
glow from streetlights here and there. Patched blacktop and
scrawny weeds in the sidewalks. The thump of a loud car stereo
blocks away.
qhis is it,’ Froelich said. ‘Number 2301.’
2301 was the left-hand half of a two-family house. It was a low
clapboard structure with paired front doors in the centre and
symmetrical windows left and right. There was a low wire fence
defining a front yard. The yard had a lawn that was partly dead.
No bushes or flowers or shrubs. But it was neat enough. No
trash. The steps up to the door were swept clean.
‘I’ll wait right here,’ F’oelich said.
Reacher and Neagley climbed out of the car. The night air
was cold and the distant stereo was louder. They went in
through the gate. Up a cracked Concrete walk to the door.
Reacher pressed the bell and heard it sound inside the house.
They waited. Heard the slap of footsteps on what sounded like a
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bare floor, and then something metal being hauled out of
the way. The door opened and a man stood there, holding the
handle. He was the cleaner from the video, no doubt about it.
They had looked at him forward and backward for hours. He
was not young, not old. Not short, not tall. Just a completely
average guy. He was wearing cotton pants and a Redskins
sweatshirt. His skin was dark and his cheekbones were high
and flat. His hair was black and glossy, with an old-fashioned
cut still crisp and neat around the edges.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘We need to talk about the thing at the office,’ Reacher said.
The guy didn’t ask any questions. Didn’t ask for ID. Just
glanced at Reacher’s face and stepped backward and over the
thing he had moved to get the door open. It was a children’s
seesaw made out of brightly coloured curved metal tubes. It
had little seats at each end, like you might see on a children’s
tricycle, and plastic horses’ heads with little handlebars coming
out of the sides below the ears.
‘Can’t leave it outside at night,’ the guy said. ‘It would be
stolen.’
Neagley and Reacher climbed over it into a narrow hallway.
There were more toys neatly packed onto shelves. Bright
grade-school paintings visible on the front of the refrigerator in
the kitchen. The smell of cooking. There was a living room off
the hallway with two silent, scared women in it. They were
wearing Sunday dresses, which ,were very different from their