Tripwire

Dental treatment had been very thorough. The boy had grown up through the era of aggressive dentistry. In Newman’s experience, it was absolutely typical of any he had seen from the New York metropolitan area in the fifties and early sixties. Dentistry through that era consisted of a war on cavities. Cavities had to be hunted down. They were hunted with powerful X rays, and when they were found they were enlarged with the drill and filled with amalgam. The result was a lot of trips to the dentist’s office, which no doubt had been miserable for the young Victor Hobie, but from Newman’s point of view the process had left him with a thick sheaf of films of the boy’s mouth. They were good enough and clear enough and numerous enough to be potentially definitive.
    He stacked the films and carried them out into the corridor. Unlocked the plain door in the cinder-block wall and walked past the aluminum caskets to the alcove at the far end. There was a computer terminal on a wide shelf, out of sight around a corner. He booted it up and clicked on the search menu. The screen scrolled down and revealed a detailed questionnaire.
    Filling out the questionnaire was a matter of simple logic. He clicked on ALL BONES and entered NO CHILDHOOD BREAKS, POTENTIAL ADULT BREAKS. The kid didn’t break his leg playing football in high school, but he might have broken it later in a training accident. Service medical records were sometimes lost. He spent a lot of time on the dental section of the questionnaire. He entered a full description of each tooth as last recorded. He marked the filled cavities, and against each good tooth he entered POTENTIAL CAVITY. It was the only way to prevent mistakes. Simple logic. A good tooth can go bad later and need treatment, but a filled cavity can’t ever disappear. He stared at the X rays and against SPACING he entered EVEN, and against SIZE he entered EVEN again. The rest of the questionnaire he left blank. Some diseases show up in the skeleton, but not colds and flu and bronchitis.
    He reviewed his work and at seven o’clock exactly he hit SEARCH. The hard disk whirred and chattered in the morning silence and the software started its patient journey through the database.
    THEY LANDED TIN minutes ahead of schedule, just before the peak of noon, East Coast time. They came in low over the glittering waters of Jamaica Bay and put down facing east before turning back and taxiing slowly to the terminal. Jodie reset her watch and was on her feet before the plane stopped moving, which was a transgression they don’t chide you for in first class.
    “Let’s go,” she said. “I’m real tight for time.”
    They were lined up by the door before it opened. Reacher carried her bag out into the jetway and she hurried ahead of him all the way through the terminal and outside. The Lincoln Navigator was still there in the short-term lot, big and black and obvious, and it cost fifty-eight of Rutter’s dollars to drive it out.
    “Do I have time for a shower?” she asked herself.
    Reacher put his comment into hustling faster than he should along the Van Wyck. The Long Island Expressway was moving freely west to the tunnel. They were in Manhattan within twenty minutes of touching down and heading south on Broadway near her place within thirty.
    “I’m still going to check it out,” he told her. “Shower or no shower.”
    She nodded. Being back in the city had brought back the worry.
    “OK, but be quick.”
    He limited it to stopping on the street outside her door and making a visual check of the lobby. Nobody there. They dumped the car and went up to five and down the fire stairs to four. The building was quiet and deserted. The apartment was empty and undisturbed. The Mondrian copy glowed in the bright daylight. Twelve-thirty in the afternoon.
    “Ten minutes,” she said. “Then you can drive me to the office, OK?”
    “How will you get to the meeting?”
    “We have a driver,” she said. “He’ll take me.”
    She ran through the living room to the bedroom, shedding clothes as she went.
    “You need to eat?” Reacher called after her.
    “No time,” she called back.
    She spent five minutes in the shower and five minutes in the closet. She came out with a charcoal dress and a matching jacket.
    “Find my briefcase, OK?” she yelled.
    She combed her hair and used a hair dryer on it. Limited her makeup to a touch of eyeliner and lipstick. Checked herself in the mirror and ran back to the living