Running Blind (The Visitor)

information and the story is pretty much the same everywhere. They’ve all got about a half of their money missing. More or less the exact same proportion everywhere. And these guys are not the smartest guys you’ve ever met, right? They couldn’t hide their money from us. And even if they could, why would they all hide exactly half of it? Why wouldn’t some of them hide all of it, or two thirds, or three quarters? You know, whatever, a different proportion in each case?”
    “Enter the theoretical big fish,” Reacher said.
    Leighton nodded. “Exactly. How else to explain it? It was like a puzzle with a missing piece. We started to figure some kind of a godfather figure, you know, some big guy in the shadows, maybe organizing everything, maybe offering protection in exchange for half the profit.”
    “Or half the guns,” Reacher said.
    “Right,” Leighton said.
    “Somebody running a protection racket,” Harper said. “Like a scam inside a scam.”
    “Right,” Leighton said again.
    There was a long pause.
    “Looks good from our point of view,” Harper said. “Guy like that, he’s smart and capable, and he has to run around taking care of problems in various random locations. Could explain why he’s interested in so many different women. Not because all the women knew him , but because maybe each one of them knew one of his clients.”
    “Timing is good for you too,” Leighton said. “If our guy is your guy, he started planning two, three months ago, when he heard his clients were starting to go down.”
    Harper sat forward. “What was the volume of business like two, three years ago?”
    "Pretty heavy,” Leighton said. "You’re really asking how much these women could have seen, right?”
    “Right.”
    “They could have seen plenty,” Leighton said.
    “So how good is your case?” she asked. “Against Bob McGuire, for instance?”
    Leighton shrugged. “Not brilliant. We’ve got him for the two pieces he sold to our guys, of course, but that’s only two pieces. The rest of it is basically circumstantial, and the fact the money doesn’t tie up properly weakens the hell out of it.”
    “So eliminating the witnesses before the trials makes sense.”
    Leighton nodded. “Makes a hell of a lot of sense, I guess.”
    “So who is this guy?”
    Leighton rubbed his eyes again. “We have no idea. We don’t even know for sure there is a guy. He’s just a guess right now. Just our theory.”
    “Nobody’s saying anything?”
    “Not a damn word. We’ve been asking, two months solid. We’ve got two dozen guys, all of them with their mouths shut tight. We figure the big guy’s really put the frighteners on.”
    “He’s scary, that’s for sure,” Harper said. “From what we know about him.”
    There was silence in Leighton’s office. Just the brittle patter of rain on the windows.
    “If he exists,” Leighton said.
    “He exists,” Harper said.
    Leighton nodded. “We think so too.”
    “Well, we need his name, I guess,” Reacher said.
    No reply.
    “I should go talk to McGuire for you,” Reacher said.
    Leighton smiled. “I figured you’d be saying that before long. I was all set to say no, it’s improper. But you know what? I just changed my mind. I just decided to say yes, go ahead. Be my guest.”
    THE CELL BLOCK was underground, like it always is in a regional HQ, below a squat brick building with an iron door, standing alone on the other side of the rose bed. Leighton led them over there through the rain, their collars turned up against the damp and their chins ducked down to their chests. Leighton used an old-fashioned bellpull outside the iron door and it opened after a second to reveal a bright hallway with a huge master sergeant standing in it. The sergeant stepped aside and Leighton led them in.
    Inside, the walls were made of brick faced with white porcelain glaze. The floors and the ceilings were smooth troweled concrete painted shiny green. Lights were fluorescent tubes behind thick metal grilles. Doors were iron, with square barred openings at the top. There was a cubbyhole office on the right, with a wooden rack of keys on four-inch metal hoops. There was a big desk, piled high with video recorders taping milky-gray flickering images from twelve small monitor screens. The screens showed twelve cells, eleven of them empty and one of them with a humped shape under a blanket on the bed.
    “Quiet night at the Hilton,” Reacher said.
    Leighton nodded. “Gets