Without Fail

glanced across at Stuyvesant. “Can I see your office again? Right now?”
    Stuyvesant looked blank, but he stood up and led the way out of the room. They followed the corridors and arrived at the rear of the floor. The secretarial station was quiet and deserted. Stuyvesant’s door was closed. He pushed it open and hit the lights.
    There was a sheet of paper on the desk.
    They all saw it. Stuyvesant stood completely still for a second and then walked across the floor and stared down at it. Swallowed. Breathed out. Picked it up.
    “Fax from Boulder PD,” he said. “Preliminary ballistics. My secretary must have left it.”
    He smiled with relief.
    “Now check,” Reacher said. “Concentrate. Is this how your office usually looks?”
    Stuyvesant held the fax and glanced around the room.
    “Exactly,” he said.
    “So this is how the cleaners see it every night?”
    “Well, the desk is usually clear,” Stuyvesant said. “But otherwise, yes.”
    “OK,” Reacher said. “Let’s go.”
    They walked back to the conference room. Stuyvesant read the fax.
    “They found six shell cases,” he said. “Nine millimeter Parabellums. Strange impact marks on the sides. They’ve sent a drawing.”
    He slid the paper to Neagley. She read it through. Made a face. Slid it across to Reacher. He looked at the drawing and nodded.
    “Heckler & Koch MP5,” he said. “It punches the empty brass out like nobody’s business. The guy had it set to bursts of three. Two bursts, six cases. They probably ended up twenty yards away.”
    “Probably the SD6 version,” Neagley said. “If it was silenced. That’s a nice weapon. Quality submachine gun. Expensive. Rare, too.”
    “Why did you want to see my office?” Stuyvesant asked.
    “We’re wrong about the cleaners,” Reacher said.
    The room went quiet.
    “In what way?” Neagley asked.
    “In every way,” Reacher said. “Every possible way we could be. What happened when we talked to them?”
    “They stonewalled like crazy.”
    He nodded. “That’s what I thought too. They went into some kind of a stoic silence. All of them. Almost like a trance. I interpreted that as a response to some kind of danger. Like they were really digging deep and defending against whatever hold somebody had over them. Like it was vitally important. Like they knew they couldn’t afford to say a single word. But you know what?”
    “What?”
    “They just didn’t have a clue what we were talking about. Not the first idea. We were two crazy white people asking them impossible questions, is all. They were too polite and too inhibited to tell us to get lost. They just sat there patiently while we rambled on.”
    “So what are you saying?”
    “Think about what else we know. There’s a weird sequence of facts on the tape. They look a little tired going into Stuyvesant’s office, and a little less tired coming out. They look fairly neat going in, and a little disheveled coming out. They spend fifteen minutes in there, and only nine in the secretarial area.”
    “So?” Stuyvesant asked.
    Reacher smiled. “Your office is probably the world’s cleanest room. You could do surgery in there. You keep it that way deliberately. We know about the thing with the briefcase and the wet shoes, by the way.”
    Froelich looked blank. Stuyvesant’s turn to blush.
    “It’s tidy to the point of obsession,” Reacher said. “And yet the cleaners spent fifteen minutes in there. Why?”
    “They were unpacking the letter,” Stuyvesant said. “Placing it in position.”
    “No, they weren’t.”
    “Was it just Maria on her own? Did Julio and Anita come out first?”
    “No.”
    “So who put it there? My secretary?”
    “No.”
    The room went quiet.
    “Are you saying I did?” Stuyvesant asked.
    Reacher shook his head. “All I’m doing is asking why the cleaners spent fifteen minutes in an office that was already very clean.”
    “They were resting?” Neagley said.
    Reacher shook his head again. Froelich smiled suddenly.
    “Doing something to make themselves disheveled?” she said.
    Reacher smiled back. “Like what?”
    “Like having sex?”
    Stuyvesant went pale.
    “I sincerely hope not,” he said. “And there were three of them, anyway.”
    “Threesomes aren’t unheard of,” Neagley said.
    “They live together,” Stuyvesant said. “They want to do that, they can do it at home, can’t they?”
    “It can be an erotic adventure,” Froelich said. “You know, making out at