Tripwire

and died along the road.
    “Where’s he buried?” Reacher asked.
    “The town cemetery,” she said. “He could have chosen Arlington, of course, but he didn’t want that. You want to go up there?”
    He shook his head.
    “No, I don’t do stuff like that. Makes no difference to him now, does it? He knew I’ll miss him, because I told him so, a long time ago.”
    She nodded. Held his arm.
    “We need to talk about Costello,” he said again.
    “Why?” she asked. “He gave you the message, right?”
    He shook his head.
    “No, he found me, but I was wary. I said I wasn’t Jack Reacher.”
    She looked up at him, astonished. “But why?”
    He shrugged.
    “Habit, I guess. I don’t go around looking for involvement. I didn’t recognize the name Jacob, so I just ignored him. I was happy, living quiet down there.”
    She was still looking at him.
    “I guess I should have used Garber,” she said. “It was Dad’s business anyway, not mine. But I did it through the firm, and I never even thought about it. You’d have listened to him if he’d said Garber, right?”
    “Of course,” he said.
    “And you needn’t have worried, because it was no kind of a big deal.”
    “Can we go inside?” he asked.
    She was surprised again. “Why?”
    “Because it was some kind of a very big deal.”
    THEY SAW HER lead him in through the front door. She pulled the screen and he held it while she turned the knob and opened up. Some kind of a big front door, dull brown wood. They went inside and the door closed behind them. Ten seconds later a dim light came on in a window, way off to the left. Some kind of a sitting room or den, they guessed, so shaded by the runaway plantings outside that it needed lights on even in the middle of the day. They crouched in their damp hollow and waited. Insects were drifting through the sunbeams all around them. They glanced at each other and listened hard. No sound.
    They pushed through to the driveway. Ran crouched to the comer of the garage. Pressed up against the siding and slid around to the front. Across the front toward the house. They went into their jackets for the pistols. Held them pointed at the ground and went one at a time for the front porch. They regrouped and eased slowly over the old timbers. Ended up squatting on the floor, backs pressed against the house, one on either side of the front door, pistols out and ready. She’d gone in this way. She’d come back out. Just a matter of time.
    “SOMEBODY KILLED HIM?” Jodie repeated.
    “And his secretary, probably,” Reacher said.
    “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Why?”
    She had led him through a dark hallway to a small den in the far corner of the house. A tiny window and dark wood paneling and heavy brown leather furniture made it gloomy, so she switched on a desk lamp, which changed it into a cozy man’s space like the pre-war bars Reacher had seen in Europe. There were shelves of books, cheap editions bought by subscription decades ago, and curled faded photographs thumbtacked to the front edges of the shelves. There was a plain desk, the sort of place where an old underemployed man does his bills and taxes in imitation of how he used to work when he had a job.
    “I don’t know why,” Reacher said. “I don’t know anything. I don’t even know why you sent him looking for me.”
    “Dad wanted you,” she said. “He never really told me why. I was busy, I had a trial, complex thing, lasted months. I was preoccupied. All I know is, after he got sick he was going to the cardiologist, right? He met somebody there and got involved with something. He was worried about it. Seemed to me he felt he was under some kind of a big obligation. Then later when he got worse, he knew he would have to drop it, and he started saying he should find you and let you take a look at it, because you were a person who could maybe do something about it. He was getting all agitated, which was really not a good idea, so I said I’d get Costello to locate you. We use him all the time at the firm, and it felt like the least I should do.”
    It made some kind of sense, but Reacher’s first thought was why me? He could see Garber’s problem. In the middle of something, health failing, unwilling to abandon an obligation, needing help. But a guy like Garber could get help anywhere. The Manhattan Yellow Pages were full of investigators. And if it was something too arcane or too personal for a city investigator, then all he had to