Gone Tomorrow

child.”
    “He’s been missing more than five days.”
    “Duration isn’t significant. He doesn’t live at home. And who is to say he’s missing? Who is to say what his normal pattern might be? Presumably he goes for long periods without contact with his family.”
    “This is different.”
    “What’s your policy over there in Jersey?”
    Jake didn’t answer.
    Lee said, “He’s an independent adult. It’s like he got on a plane and went on vacation. It’s like his friends were at the airport and watched him go. I can see where the LAPD is coming from on this.”
    “But he missed football practice. That doesn’t happen.”
    “It just did, apparently.”
    “Susan was being threatened,” Jake said.
    “By who?”
    Jake looked at me. “Tell her, Reacher.”
    I said, “Something to do with her job. There was a lot of leverage. Had to be. I think a threat against her son would be consistent.”
    “OK,” Lee said. She looked around the squad room and found her partner, Docherty. He was working at one of a pair of twinned desks in the back of the space. She looked back at Jake and said, “Go make a full report. Everything you know, and everything you think you know.”
    Jake nodded gratefully and headed toward Docherty. I waited until he was gone and asked, “Are you reopening the file now?”
    Lee said, “No. The file is closed and it’s staying closed. Because as it happens there’s nothing to worry about. But the guy’s a cop and we have to be courteous. And I want him out of the way for an hour.”
    “Why is there nothing to worry about?”
    So she told me her news.
    She said, “We know why Susan Mark came up here.”
    “How?”
    “ We got a missing persons report,” she said. “Apparently Susan was helping someone with an inquiry, and when she didn’t show, the individual concerned got worried and came in to report her missing.”
    “What kind of inquiry?”
    “Something personal, I think. I wasn’t here. The day guys said it all sounded innocent enough. And it must have been, really, or why else come to the police station?”
    “And Jacob Mark shouldn’t know this why?”
    “We need a lot more detail. And getting it will be easier without him there. He’s too involved. He’s a family member. He’ll scream and yell. I’ve seen it before.”
    “Who was the individual concerned?”
    “A foreign national briefly here in town for the purpose of conducting the research that Susan was helping with.”
    “Wait,” I said. “Briefly here in town? Staying in a hotel?”
    “Yes,” Lee said.
    “The Four Seasons?”
    “Yes,” Lee said.
    “What’s his name?”
    “It’s a her, not a him,” Lee said. “Her name is Lila Hoth.”

Chapter 30
    It was very late in the evening but Lee called anyway and Lila Hoth agreed to meet with us at the Four Seasons, right away, no hesitation. We drove over in Lee’s unmarked car and parked in the hotel’s curbside loading zone. The lobby was magnificent. All pale sandstone and brass and tan paint and golden marble, suspended halfway between dim intimacy and bright modernism. Lee showed her badge at the desk and the clerk called upstairs and then pointed us toward the elevators. We were headed for another high floor and the way the clerk had spoken made me feel that Lila Hoth’s room wasn’t going to be the smallest or the cheapest in the place.
    In fact Lila Hoth’s room was another suite. It had a double door, like Sansom’s in North Carolina, but no cop outside. Just a quiet empty corridor. There were used room service trays here and there, and some of the doorknobs had Do Not Disturb signs or breakfast orders on them. Theresa Lee paused and double-checked the number and knocked. Nothing happened for a minute. Then the right-hand panel opened and we saw a woman standing inside the doorway, with soft yellow light directly behind her. She was easily sixty, maybe more, short and thick and heavy, with steel-gray hair cut plain and blunt. Dark eyes, lined and hooded. A white slab of a face, meaty, immobile, and bleak. A guarded, unreadable expression. She was wearing an ugly brown housedress made of thick man-made material.
    Lee asked, “Ms. Hoth?”
    The woman ducked her head and blinked and moved her hands and made a kind of all-purpose apologetic sound. The universal dumb show for not understanding. I said, “She doesn’t speak English.” Lee said, “She spoke English fifteen minutes ago.” The light behind the woman was coming