Without Fail

me.”
    “She’s kidding,” Reacher said. “But they’re going to feel better talking to us if there’s nobody else from the department around.”
    “OK, I’ll wait outside. But I’m going with you.”
    She finished up her phone calls and tidied up her paperwork and then led them back to the elevator and down to the garage. They climbed into the Suburban and Reacher closed his eyes for twenty minutes as she drove. He was tired. He had been working hard for six days straight. Then the car came to a stop and he opened his eyes again in a mean neighborhood full of ten-year-old sedans and hurricane fencing. There was orange glow from streetlights here and there. Patched blacktop and scrawny weeds in the sidewalks. The thump of a loud car stereo blocks away.
    “This is it,” Froelich said. “Number 2301.”
    Number 2301 was the left-hand half of a two-family house. It was a low clapboard structure with paired front doors in the center and symmetrical windows left and right. There was a low wire fence defining a front yard. The yard had a lawn that was partly dead. No bushes or flowers or shrubs. But it was neat enough. No trash. The steps up to the door were swept clean.
    “I’ll wait right here,” Froelich said.
    Reacher and Neagley climbed out of the car. The night air was cold and the distant stereo was louder. They went in through the gate. Up a cracked concrete walk to the door. Reacher pressed the bell and heard it sound inside the house. They waited. Heard the slap of footsteps on what sounded like a bare floor, and then something metal being hauled out of the way. The door opened and a man stood there, holding the handle. He was the cleaner from the video, no doubt about it. They had looked at him forward and backward for hours. He was not young, not old. Not short, not tall. Just a completely average guy. He was wearing cotton pants and a Redskins sweatshirt. His skin was dark and his cheekbones were high and flat. His hair was black and glossy, with an old-fashioned cut still crisp and neat around the edges.
    “Yes?” he said.
    “We need to talk about the thing at the office,” Reacher said.
    The guy didn’t ask any questions. Didn’t ask for ID. Just glanced at Reacher’s face and stepped backward and over the thing he had moved to get the door open. It was a child’s seesaw made out of brightly colored curved metal tubes. It had little seats at each end, like you might see on a child’s tricycle, and plastic horses’ heads with little handlebars coming out of the sides below the ears.
    “Can’t leave it outside at night,” the guy said. “It would be stolen.”
    Neagley and Reacher climbed over it into a narrow hallway. There were more toys neatly packed onto shelves. Bright grade-school paintings visible on the front of the refrigerator in the kitchen. The smell of cooking. There was a living room off the hallway with two silent, scared women in it. They were wearing Sunday dresses, which were very different from their work overalls.
    “We need to know your names,” Neagley said.
    Her voice was halfway between warm friendliness and the cold knell of doom. Reacher smiled to himself. That was Neagley’s way. He remembered it well. Nobody ever argued with her. It was one of her strengths.
    “Julio,” the man said.
    “Anita,” the first woman said. Reacher assumed she was Julio’s wife, by the way she glanced at him before answering.
    “Maria,” the second woman said. “I’m Anita’s sister.”
    There was a small sofa and two armchairs. Anita and Maria squeezed up to let Julio sit with them on the sofa. Reacher took that as an invitation and sat down in one of the armchairs. Neagley took the other. It put the two of them at a symmetrical angle, like the sofa was a television screen and they were sitting down to watch it.
    “We think you guys put the letter in the office,” Neagley said.
    There was no reply. No reaction at all. No expression on the three faces. Just some kind of silent blank stoicism.
    “Did you?” Neagley asked.
    No reply.
    “The kids in bed?” Reacher asked.
    “They’re not here,” Anita said.
    “Are they yours or Maria’s?”
    “They’re mine.”
    “Boys or girls?”
    “Both girls.”
    “Where are they?”
    She paused a beat. “With cousins.”
    “Why?”
    “Because we work nights.”
    “Not for much longer,” Neagley said. “You won’t be working at all, unless you tell somebody something.”
    No response.
    “No more health