Tripwire by Lee Child

‘Enjoy your stay, Mr Jacob,’ she said.

The honeymoon suite was the whole of the attic. It had the same honey oak floor, thickly varnished to a high shine, with antique rugs scattered across it. The ceiling was a complicated geometric arrangement of

slopes and dormer windows. There was a sitting room at one end with two sofas in pale floral patterns. The bathroom was next, and then the bedroom area. The bed was a gigantic four-poster, swathed in the same floral fabric and high off the ground. Jodie jumped up and sat there, her hands under her knees, her legs swinging in space. She was smiling and the sun was in the window behind her. Reacher put her bag down on the floor and stood absolutely still, just looking at her. Her shirt was blue, somewhere between the blue of a cornflower and the blue of her eyes. It was made from soft material, maybe silk. The buttons looked like small pearls. The first two were undone. The weight of the collar was pulling the shirt open. Her skin showed through at the neck, paler honey than the oak floor. The shirt was small, but it was still loose around her body. It was tucked deep into her belt. The belt was black leather, cinched tight around her tiny waist. The free end was long, hanging down outside the loops on her jeans. The jeans were old, washed many times and immaculately pressed. She wore her shoes on bare feet. They were small blue penny loafers, fine leather, low heels, probably Italian. He could see the soles as she swung her legs. The shoes were new. Barely worn at all.

‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.

She held her head at an angle, shy and mischievous.

‘You,’ he said.

The buttons were pearls, exactly like the pearls from a necklace, taken off the string and sewn individually on to the shirt. They were small and slippery under his clumsy fingers. There were five of them. He fiddled four of them out through their buttonholes and gently tugged the shirt out of the waistband of her jeans and

undid the fifth. She held up her hands, left and right in turn, so he could undo the cuffs. He eased the shirt backward off her shoulders. She was wearing nothing underneath it.

She leaned forward and started on his buttons. She started from the bottom. She was dextrous. Her hands were small and neat and quick. Quicker than his had been. His cuffs were already open. His wrists were too wide for any store-bought cuff to close over them. She smoothed her hands up over the slab of his chest and pushed the shirt away with her forearms. It fell off his shoulders and she tugged it down over his arms. It fell to the floor with the sigh of cotton and the lazy click of buttons on wood. She traced her finger across the teardrop-shaped burn on his chest.

‘You bring the salve?’

‘No,’ he said.

She locked her arms around his waist and bent her head down and kissed the wound. He felt her mouth on it, firm and cool against the tender skin. Then they made love for the fifth time in fifteen years, in the four-poster bed at the top of the old mansion while the sun in the window fell away west towards Kansas.

The NYPD’s Domestic Violence Unit borrowed squad-room space wherever it could find it, which was currently in a large upstairs room above the administrative offices at One Police Plaza. O’Hallinan and Sark got back there an hour before the end of their shift. That was the paperwork hour, and they went straight to their desks and opened their notebooks to the start of the day and began typing.

They reached their visit to the St Vincent’s ER with fifteen minutes to go. They wrote it up as a probable

incident with a non-co-operative victim. O’Hallinan spooled the form out of her typewriter and noticed the Tahoe’s plate number scrawled at the bottom of her notebook page. She picked up the phone and called it in to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

‘Black Chevrolet Tahoe,’ the clerk told her. ‘Registered to Cayman Corporate Trust with an address in the World Trade Center.’

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