Bad Luck and Trouble

do for you?” Reacher asked.
    “Can you raise the dead?”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “The way he used to talk about you, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could.”
    Neagley said, “We could find out who did it. That’s what we were good at. And that’s as close as we can come to bringing him back. In a manner of speaking.”
    “But it won’t actually bring him back.”
    “No, it won’t. I’m very sorry.”
    “Why are you here?”
    “To give you our condolences.”
    “But you don’t know me. I came later. I wasn’t a part of all that.” Angela moved away, toward the kitchen. Then she changed her mind and turned back and squeezed sideways between Reacher and Neagley and sat down in the living room. Laid her palms on the arms of her chair. Reacher saw her fingers moving. Just a slight imperceptible flutter, like she was typing or playing an invisible piano in her sleep.
    “I wasn’t part of the group,” she said. “Sometimes I wished I had been. It meant so much to Calvin. He used to say, You do not mess with the special investigators. He used it like a catchphrase, all the time. He would be watching football, and the quarterback would get sacked, something real spectacular, and he would say, Yeah baby, you do not mess with the special investigators. He would say it to Charlie. He would tell Charlie to do something, and Charlie would moan, and Calvin would say, Charlie, you do not mess with the special investigators. ”
    Charlie looked up and smiled. “You do not mess,” he said, in a little piping voice, but with his father’s intonation, and then he stopped, as if the longer words were too hard for him to say.
    Angela said, “You’re here because of a slogan, aren’t you?”
    “Not really,” Reacher said. “We’re here because of what lay behind the slogan. We cared about one another. That’s all. I’m here because Calvin would have been there for me if the shoe was on the other foot.”
    “Would he have been?”
    “I think so.”
    “He gave up all of that. When Charlie was born. No pressure from me. But he wanted to be a father. He gave it all up apart from the easy, safe stuff.”
    “He can’t have done.”
    “No, I guess not.”
    “What was he working on?”
    “I’m sorry,” Angela said. “I should have asked you to sit down.”
    There was no sofa in the room. No space for one. Any kind of a normal-sized sofa would have blocked access to the bedrooms. There were two armchairs instead, plus a half-sized wooden rocker for Charlie. The armchairs were either side of a small fireplace that held pale dried flowers in a raw china jug. Charlie’s rocker was to the left of the chimney. His name had been branded into the wood at the top of the back, with a hot poker or a soldering iron, seven letters, neat script. Tidy, but not a professional job. Franz’s own work, probably. A gift, father to son. Reacher looked at it for a moment. Then he took the armchair opposite Angela’s and Neagley perched on the arm next to him, her thigh less than an inch from his body, but not touching it.
    Charlie stepped over Reacher’s feet and sat down in his wooden chair.
    “What was Calvin working on?” Reacher asked again.
    Angela Franz said, “Charlie, you should go out and play.”
    Charlie said, “Mom, I want to stay here.”
    Reacher asked, “Angela, what was Calvin working on?”
    “Since Charlie came along he only did background checks,” Angela said. “It was a good business to be in. Especially here in LA. Everyone’s worried about hiring a thief or a junkie. Or dating one, or marrying one. Someone would meet someone on the internet or in a bar and the first thing they would do is Google the person and the second thing is they would call a private detective.”
    “Where did he work?”
    “He had an office in Culver City. You know, just a rental, one room. Where Venice meets La Cienega. It was an easy hop on the 10. He liked it there. I guess I’ll have to go and bring his things home.”
    Neagley asked, “Would you give us permission to search it first?”
    “The deputies already searched it.”
    “We should search it again.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he must have been working on something bigger than background checks.”
    “Junkies kill people, don’t they? And thieves, sometimes.”
    Reacher glanced at Charlie, and saw Franz looking back at him. “But not in the way that it seems to have happened.”
    “OK. Search it again if you want.”
    Neagley asked, “Do you