It made some kind of sense, but Reacher’s first thought was why me? He could see Garber’s problem. In the middle of something, health failing, unwilling to abandon an obligation, needing help. But a guy like Garber could get help anywhere. The Manhattan Yellow Pages were full of investigators. And if it was something too arcane or too personal for a city investigator, then all he had to do was pick up the phone and a dozen of his friends from the military police would come running. Two dozen. A hundred. All of them willing and anxious to repay his many kindnesses and favours which stretched right back through their whole careers. So Reacher was sitting there asking himself why me in particular?
‘Who was the person he met at the cardiologist’s?’
She shrugged, unhappily.
‘I don’t know. I was preoccupied. We never really went into it.’
‘Did Costello come up here? Discuss it directly with him?’
She nodded. ‘I called him and told him we’d pay him through the firm, but he was to come here and get the details. He called me back a day or two later, said he’d discussed it with Dad and it all boiled down to finding you. He wanted me to retain him officially, on paper, because it could get expensive. So naturally I did that, because I didn’t want Dad worrying about the cost or anything.’
‘Which is why he told me his client was Mrs Jacob,’ Reacher said. ‘Not Leon Garber. Which is why I ignored him. Which is how I got him killed.’
She shook her head and looked at him sharply, like he was some kind of a new associate who had just done a piece of sloppy drafting. It took him by surprise. He was still thinking of her as a fifteen-year-old girl, not a thirty-year-old lawyer who spent her time getting preoccupied with long and complex trials.
‘Non sequitur,’ she said. ‘It’s clear what happened,
right? Dad told Costello the story, Costello tried some kind of a shortcut before he went looking for you, whereby he turned over the wrong stone and got somebody alerted. That somebody killed him to find out who was looking, and why. Makes no difference if you’d played ball right away. They’d still have got to Costello to ask him exactly who put him on the trail. So it’s me who got him killed, ultimately.’
Reacher shook his head. ‘It was Leon. Through you.’
She shook her head in turn. ‘It was the person at the cardiology clinic. Him, through Dad, through me.’
‘I need to find that person,’ he said.
‘Does it matter now?’
‘I think it does,’ he said. ‘If Leon was worried about something, then I’m worried about it, too. That’s how it worked for us.’
Jodie nodded quietly. Stood up quickly and stepped over to the bookshelves. Pincered her fingernails and levered the thumbtack out of one of the photographs. Looked hard at the photograph and then passed it across to him.
‘Remember that?’ she asked.
The photograph must have been fifteen years old, the colours fading to pale pastels the way old Kodak does with age and sunlight. It had the harsh bright sky of Manila above a dirt yard. Leon Garber was on the left, about fifty, dressed in creased olive fatigues. Reacher himself was on the right, twenty-four years old, a lieutenant, a foot taller than Garber, smiling with all the blazing vigour of youth. Between the two of them was Jodie, fifteen, in a sundress, one bare arm around her father’s shoulders, the other around Reacher’s waist. She was squinting in the sun, smiling,
leaning towards Reacher like she was hugging his waist with all the strength in her skinny brown frame.
‘Remember? He’d just bought the Nikon in the PX? With the self-timer? Borrowed a tripod and couldn’t wait to try it out?’
Reacher nodded. He remembered. He remembered the smell of her hair that day, in the hot Pacific sun. Clean, young hair. He remembered the feel of her body against his. He remembered the feel of her long thin arm around his waist. He remembered screaming at himself hold on, pal, she’s only fifteen and she’s your CO’s daughter.