Die Trying by Lee Child

Checked the time. Smiled. Felt better. Thought some more. Checked

his watch again. He nodded to himself. Now he could tell McGrath

where Holly Johnson had gone at twelve o’clock yesterday.

Seventeen hundred and two miles away panic had set in. Numb shock had

carried the carpenter through the first hours. It had made him weak

and aquiescent. He had let the employer hustle him up the stairs and

into the room. Then numb shock had made him waste his first hours,

just sitting and staring. Then he had started up with a crazy optimism

that this whole thing was some kind of a bad Halloween joke. That made

him waste his next hours convinced nothing was going to happen. But

then, like prisoners everywhere locked up alone in the cold small hours

of the night, all his defenses stripped away and left him shaking and

desperate with panic.

With half his time gone, he burst into frantic action. But he knew it

was hopeless. The irony was crushing him. They had worked hard on

this room. They had built it right. Dollar signs had danced in front

of their eyes. They had cut no corners. They had left out all their

usual shoddy carpenters’ tricks. Every single board was straight and

tight. Every single nail was punched way down below the grain. There

were no windows. The door was solid. It was hopeless. He spent an

hour running around the room like a madman. He ran his rough palms

over every square inch of every surface. Floor, ceiling, walls. It

was the best job they had ever done. He ended up crouched in a corner,

staring at his hands, crying.

The dry-cleaner’s,” McGrath said. That’s where she went.”

He was in the third-floor conference room. Head of the table, seven

o’clock, Tuesday morning. Opening a fresh pack of cigarettes.

“She did?” Brogan said. The dry-cleaner’s?”

McGrath nodded.

Tell him, Milo,” he said.

Milosevic smiled.

“I just remembered,” he said. “I’ve worked with her five weeks, right?

Since she bust up her knee? Every Monday lunchtime, she takes in her

cleaning. Picks up last week’s stuff. No reason for it to be any

different yesterday.”

“OK,” Brogan said. “Which cleaners?”

Milosevic shook his head.

“Don’t know,” he said. “She always went on her own. I always offered

to do it for her, but she said no, every time, five straight Mondays.

OK if I helped her out on Bureau business, but she wasn’t about to have

me running around after her cleaning. She’s a very independent type of

a woman.”

“But she walked there, right?” McGrath said.

“Right,” Milosevic said. “She always walked. With maybe eight or nine

things on hangers. So we’re safe to conclude the place she used is

fairly near here.”

Brogan nodded. Smiled. They had some kind of a lead. He pulled the

Yellow Pages over and opened it up to D. “What sort of a radius are we

giving it?” he said.

McGrath shrugged.

Twenty minutes there, twenty minutes back,” he said. That would be

about the max, right? With that crutch, I can’t see her doing more

than a quarter-mile in twenty minutes. Limping like that? Call it a

square, a half-mile on a side, this building in the center. What does

that give us?”

Brogan used the AAA street map. He made a crude compass with his thumb

and forefinger. Adjusted it to a half-mile according to the scale in

the margin. Drew a square across the thicket of streets. Then he

flipped back and forth between the map and the Yellow Pages. Ticked

off names with his pencil. Counted them up.

Twenty-one establishments,” he said.

McGrath stared at him.

Twenty-one?” he said. “Are you sure?”

Brogan nodded. Slid the phone book across the shiny hardwood.

Twenty-one,” he said. “Obviously people in this town like to keep

their clothes real clean.”

“OK,” McGrath said. Twenty-one places. Hit the road, guys.”

Brogan took ten addresses and Milosevic took eleven. McGrath issued

them both with large color blow-ups of Holly Johnson’s file photograph.

Then he nodded them out and waited in his chair at the head of the

conference-room table, next to the telephones, slumped, staring into