Tripwire

a half-finished letter. The cursor was blinking patiently in the middle of an uncompleted word. That morning’s date sat underneath a letterhead. Reacher thought about Costello’s body, sprawled out on the sidewalk next to the Key West graveyard, and he glanced between the tidy placement of the absent woman’s bag, the open door, the uncompleted word, and he shivered.
    Then he used the pencil to exit the word processor. A window opened and asked him if he wanted to save the changes to the letter. He paused and hit no. Opened the file manager screen and checked the directories. He was looking for an invoice. It was clear from looking around that Costello ran a neat operation. Neat enough to invoice for a retainer before he went looking for Jack Reacher. But when did that search start? It must have followed a clear sequence. Mrs. Jacob’s instructions coming at the outset, nothing except a name, a vague description about his size, his Army service. Costello must then have called the military’s central storage facility, a carefully guarded complex in St. Louis that holds every piece of paper relating to every man and woman who has ever served in uniform. Carefully guarded in two ways, physically with gates and wire, and bureaucratically with a thick layer of obstruction designed to discourage frivolous access. After patient inquiries he would have discovered the honorable discharge. Then a puzzled pause, staring at a dead end. Then the long shot with the bank account. A call to an old buddy, favors called in, strings pulled. Maybe a blurry faxed printout from Virginia, maybe a blow-by-blow narrative of credits and debits over the telephone. Then the hurried flight south, the questions up and down Duval, the two guys, the fists, the linoleum knife.
    A reasonably short sequence, but St. Louis and Virginia would have been major delays. Reacher’s guess was getting good information out of the records office would take three days, maybe four, for a citizen like Costello. The Virginia bank might not have been any quicker. Favors aren’t necessarily granted immediately. The timing has got to be right. Call it a total of seven days’ bureaucratic fudge, separated by a day’s thinking time, plus a day at the start and a day at the end. Maybe altogether ten days since Mrs. Jacob set the whole thing in motion.
    He clicked on a subdirectory labeled INVOICES. The right-hand side of the screen came up with a long field of file names, stacked alphabetically. He ran the cursor down the list and spooled them up from the bottom. No Jacob in the Js. Mostly they were just initials, long acronyms maybe standing for law firm names. He checked the dates. Nothing from exactly ten days ago. But there was one nine days old. Maybe Costello was faster than he thought, or maybe his secretary was slower. It was labeled SGR&T-09. He clicked on it and the hard drive chattered and the screen came up with a thousand-dollar retainer against a missing persons inquiry, billed to a Wall Street firm called Spencer Gutman Ricker and Talbot. There was a billing address, but no phone number.
    He quit file manager and entered the database. Searched for SGR&T again and came up with a page showing the same address, but this time with numbers for phone, fax, telex and E-mail. He leaned down and used his fingers and thumb to pull a couple of tissues from the secretary’s pack. Wrapped one around the telephone receiver and opened the other flat and laid it across the keypad. Dialed the number by pressing through it. There was ring tone for a second, and then the connection was made.
    “Spencer Gutman,” a bright voice said. “How may we help you?”
    “Mrs. Jacob, please,” Reacher said, busily.
    “One moment,” the voice said.
    There was tinny music and then a man’s voice. He sounded quick, but deferential. Maybe an assistant.
    “Mrs. Jacob, please,” Reacher said again.
    The guy sounded busy and harrassed. “She already left for Garrison, and I really don’t know when she’ll be in the office again, I’m afraid.”
    “Do you have her address in Garrison?”
    “Hers?” the guy said, surprised. “Or his?”
    Reacher paused and listened to the surprise and took a chance.
    “His, I mean. I seem to have lost it.”
    “Just as well you did,” the voice said back. “It was misprinted, I’m afraid. I must have redirected at least fifty people this morning.”
    He recited an address, apparently from memory. Garrison, New York, a town about