Tripwire

bent down and whispered in his ear.
    “OK, that’s the before part. Let’s go before you forget the comparison.”
    SEVEN O’CLOCK IN the morning in New York happened an hour before seven o’clock in the morning in St. Louis, and O’Hallinan and Sark spent that hour in the squad room planning their shift. The overnight messages were stacked deep in the in-trays. There were calls from the hospitals, and reports from night-shift beat cops who had gone out to domestic disturbances. They all needed sifting and evaluating, and an itinerary had to be worked out, based on geography and urgency. It had been an average night in New York City, which meant O’Hallinan and Sark compiled a list of twenty-eight brand-new cases that required their attention, which meant the call to the Fifteenth Precinct traffic squad got delayed until ten minutes to eight in the morning. O’Hallinan dialed the number and reached the desk sergeant on the tenth ring.
    “You towed a black Suburban,” she said. “It got wrecked on lower Broadway couple of days ago. You doing anything about it?”
    There was the sound of the guy scraping through a pile of paperwork.
    “It’s in the pound. You got an interest in it?”
    “We got a woman with a busted nose in the hospital, got delivered there in a Tahoe owned by the same people.”
    “Maybe she was the driver. We had three vehicles involved, and we only got one driver. There was the Suburban that caused the accident, driver disappeared. Then there was an Olds Bravada which drove away into an alley, driver and passenger disappeared. The Suburban was corporate, some financial trust in the district.”
    “Cayman Corporate Trust?” O’Hallinan asked. “That’s who owns our Tahoe.”
    “Right,” the guy said. “The Bravada is down to a Mrs. Jodie Jacob, but it was reported stolen prior. That’s not your woman with the busted nose, is it?”
    “Jodie Jacob? No, our woman is Sheryl somebody.”
    “OK, probably the Suburban driver. Is she small?”
    “Small enough, I guess,” O’Hallinan said. “Why?”
    “The airbag deployed,” the guy said. “Possible a small woman could get injured that way, by the airbag. It happens.”
    “You want to check it out?”
    “No, our way of thinking, we got their vehicle, they want it, they’ll come to us.”
    O’Hallinan hung up and Sark looked at her inquiringly.
    “So what’s that about?” he asked. “Why would she say she walked into a door if it was really a car wreck?”
    O’Hallinan shrugged. “Don’t know. And why would a real-estate woman from Westchester be driving for a firm out of the World Trade Center?”
    “Could explain the injuries,” Sark said. “The airbag, maybe the rim of the steering wheel, that could have done it to her.”
    “Maybe,” O’Hallinan said.
    “So should we check it out?”
    “We should try, I guess, because if it was a car wreck it makes it a closed instead of a probable.”
    “OK, but don’t write it down anywhere, because if it wasn’t a car wreck it’ll make it open and pending again, which will be a total pain in the ass later.”
    They stood up together and put their notebooks in their uniform pockets. Used the stairs and enjoyed the morning sun on the way across the yard to their cruiser.
    THE SAME SUN rolled west and made it seven o’clock in St. Louis. It came in through an attic dormer and played its low beam across the four-poster from a new direction. Jodie had gotten up first, and she was in the shower. Reacher was alone in the warm bed, stretching out, aware of a muffled chirping sound somewhere in the room.
    He checked the nightstand to see if the phone was ringing, or if Jodie had set an alarm clock he hadn’t noticed the night before. Nothing there. The chirping kept on going, muffled but insistent. He rolled over and sat up. The new angle located the sound inside Jodie’s carry-on bag. He slid out of bed and padded naked across the room. Unzipped the bag. The chirping sounded louder. It was her mobile telephone. He glanced at the bathroom door and pulled out the phone. It was chirping loudly in his hand. He studied the buttons on it and pressed SEND. The chirping stopped.
    “Hello?” he said.
    There was a pause. “Who’s that? I’m trying to reach Mrs. Jacob.”
    It was a man’s voice, young, busy, harassed. A voice he knew. Jodie’s secretary at the law firm, the guy who had dictated Leon’s address.
    “She’s in the shower.”
    “Ah,” the voice