by Lee Child
“What questions?” I asked.
First she offered me coffee and the bathroom. I said yes to both. Docherty escorted me down the corridor and when we got back there were three foam cups on the table, next to the file. Two coffees, one tea. I took a coffee and tried it. It was OK. Lee took the tea. Docherty took the second coffee and said, “Run through it all again.”
So I did, concisely, bare bones, and Docherty fussed a bit about how the Israeli list had produced a false positive, the same way that Lee had. I answered him the same way I had answered her, that a false positive was better than a false negative, and that looking at it from the dead woman’s point of view, whether she was heading for a solo exit or planning to take a crowd with her might not alter the personal symptoms she would be displaying. For five minutes we had a collegiate atmosphere going, three reasonable people discussing an interesting phenomenon.
Then the tone changed.
Docherty asked, “How did you feel?”
I asked, “About what?”
“While she was killing herself.”
“Glad that she wasn’t killing me.”
Docherty said, “We’re homicide detectives. We have to look at all violent deaths. You understand that, right? Just in case.”
I said, “Just in case of what?”
“Just in case there’s more than meets the eye.”
“There isn’t. She shot herself.”
“Says you.”
“No one can say different. Because that’s what happened.”
Docherty said, “There are always alternative scenarios.”
“You think?”
“Maybe you shot her.”
Theresa Lee gave me a sympathetic look.
I said, “I didn’t.”
Docherty said, “Maybe it was your gun.”
I said, “It wasn’t. It was a two-pound piece. I don’t have a bag.”
“You’re a big guy. Big pants. Big pockets.”
Theresa Lee gave me another sympathetic look. Like she was saying, I’m sorry.
I said, “What is this? Good cop, dumb cop?”
Docherty said, “You think I’m dumb?”
“You just proved it. If I shot her with a .357 Magnum, I’d have residue on me up to my elbow. But you just stood outside the men’s room while I washed my hands. You’re full of shit. You haven’t fingerprinted me and you haven’t Mirandized me. You’re blowing smoke.”
“We’re obliged to make certain.”
“What does the medical examiner say?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“There were witnesses.”
Lee shook her head. “No use. They didn’t see anything.”
“They must have.”
“Their view was blocked by your back. Plus they weren’t looking, plus they were half-asleep, and plus they don’t speak much English. They had nothing to offer. Basically I think they wanted to get going before we started checking green cards.”
“What about the other guy? He was in front of me. He was wide awake. And he looked like a citizen and an English speaker.”
“What other guy?”
“The fifth passenger. Chinos and a golf shirt.”
Lee opened the file. Shook her head. “There were only four passengers, plus the woman.”
Chapter 9
Lee took a sheet of paper out of the file and reversed it and slid it halfway across the table. It was a handwritten list of witnesses. Four names. Mine, plus a Rodriguez, a Frlujlov, and an Mbele.
“Four passengers,” she said again.
I said, “I was on the train. I can count. I know how many passengers there were.” Then I reran the scene in my head. Stepping off the train, waiting among the small milling crowd. The arrival of the paramedic crew. The cops, stepping off the train in turn, moving through the throng, taking an elbow each, leading the witnesses away to separate rooms. I had gotten grabbed first, by the big sergeant. Impossible to say whether four cops had followed behind us, or only three.
I said, “He must have slipped away.”
Docherty asked, “Who was he?”
“Just a guy. Alert, but nothing special about him. My age, not poor.”
“Did he interact in any way with the woman?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Did he shoot her?”
“She shot herself.”
Docherty shrugged. “So he’s just a reluctant witness. Doesn’t want paperwork showing he was out and about at two in the morning. Probably cheating on his wife. Happens all the time.”
“He ran. But you’re giving him a free pass and looking at me instead?”
“You just testified that he wasn’t involved.”
“I wasn’t involved, either.”
“Says you.”
“You believe me about the other guy but not about myself?”
“Why would you lie about the other guy?”
I said, “This is a waste of time.” And it was. It was such an extreme, clumsy waste of time that I suddenly realized it wasn’t for real. It was stage-managed. I realized that, in fact, in their own peculiar way, Lee and Docherty were doing me a small favor.
There’s more than meets the eye.
I said, “Who was she?”
Docherty said, “Why should she be someone?”
“Because you made the ID and the computers lit up like Christmas trees. Someone called you and told you to hold on to me until they get here. You didn’t want to put an arrest on my record so you’re stalling me with all this bullshit.”
“We didn’t particularly care about your record. We just didn’t want to do the paperwork.”
“So who was she?”
“Apparently she worked for the government. A federal agency is on its way to question you. We’re not allowed to say which one.”
They left me locked in the room. It was an OK space. Grimy, hot, battered, no windows, out-of-date crime prevention posters on the walls and the smell of sweat and anxiety and burnt coffee in the air. The table, and three chairs. Two for the detectives, one for the suspect. Back in the day maybe the suspect got smacked around and tumbled out of the chair. Maybe he still did. It’s hard to say exactly what happens, in a room with no windows.
I timed the delay in my head. The clock had already been running about an hour, since Theresa Lee’s whispered talk in the Grand Central corridor. So I knew it wasn’t the FBI coming for me. Their New York field office is the largest in the nation, based down in Federal Plaza, near City Hall. Ten minutes to react, ten minutes to assemble a team, ten minutes to drive uptown with lights and sirens. The FBI would have arrived long ago. But that left a whole bunch of other three-letter agencies. I made a bet with myself that whoever was heading my way would have IA as the last two letters on their badges. CIA, DIA. Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency. Maybe others recently invented and hitherto unpublicized. Middle-of-the-night panics were very much their style.
After a second hour tacked on to the first I figured they must be coming all the way from D.C., which implied a small specialist outfit. Anyone else would have a field office closer to hand. I gave up speculating and tipped my chair back and put my feet on the table and went to sleep.
I didn’t find out exactly who they were. Not then. They wouldn’t tell me. At five in the morning three men in suits came in and woke me up. They were polite and businesslike. Their suits were mid-priced and clean and pressed. Their shoes were polished. Their eyes were bright. Their haircuts were fresh and short. Their faces were pink and ruddy. Their bodies were stocky but toned. They looked like they could run half-marathons without much trouble, but without much enjoyment, either. My first impression was recent ex-military. Gung-ho staff officers, head-hunted into some limestone building inside the Beltway. True believers, doing important work. I asked to see ID and badges and credentials, but they quoted the Patriot Act at me and said they weren’t obliged to identify themselves. Probably true, and they certainly enjoyed saying so. I c
onsidered clamming up in retaliation, but they saw me considering, and quoted some more of the Act at me, which left me in no doubt at all that a world of trouble lay at the end of that particular road. I am afraid of very little, but hassle with today’s security apparatus is always best avoided. Franz Kafka and George Orwell would have given me the same advice. So I shrugged and told them to go ahead and ask their questions.
They started out by saying that they were aware of my military service and very respectful of it, which was either a bullshit boilerplate platitude, or meant that they had been recruited out of the MPs themselves. Nobody respects an MP except another MP. Then they said that they would be observing me very closely and would know whether I was telling the truth or lying. Which was total bullshit, because only the best of us can do that, and these guys weren’t the best of us, otherwise they would have been in very senior positions, meaning that right then they would have been home and asleep in a Virginia suburb, rather than running up and down I-95 in the middle of the night.
But I didn’t have anything to hide, so I told them again to go ahead.
They had three areas of concern. The first: Did I know the woman who had killed herself on the train? Had I ever seen her before?
I said, “No.” Short and sweet, quiet but firm.
They didn’t follow up with supplementaries. Which told me roughly who they were and exactly what they were doing. They were somebody’s B-team, sent north to dead-end an open investigation. They were walling it off, burying it, drawing a line under something somebody had been only half-suspicious about to begin with. They wanted a negative answer to every question, so that the file could be closed and the matter put to bed. They wanted a positive absence of loose ends, and they didn’t want to draw attention to the issue by making it a big drama. They wanted to get back on the road with the whole thing forgotten.
The second question was: Did I know a woman called Lila Hoth?
I said, “No,” because I didn’t. Not then.
The third question was more of a sustained dialog. The lead agent opened it. The main man. He was a little older and a little smaller than the other two. Maybe a little smarter, too. He said, “You approached the woman on the train.”
I didn’t reply. I was there to answer questions, not to comment on statements.
The guy asked, “How close did you get?”
“Six feet,” I said. “Give or take.”
“Close enough to touch her?”
“No.”
“If you had extended your arm, and she had extended hers, could you have touched hands?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“It’s a maybe. I know how long my arms are. I don’t know how long hers were.”
“Did she pass anything to you?”
“No.”
“Did you accept anything from her?”
“No.”
“Did you take anything from her after she was dead?”
“No.”
“Did anyone else?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Did you see anything fall from her hand, or her bag, or her clothing?”
“No.”
“Did she tell you anything?”
“Nothing of substance.”
“Did she speak to anyone else?”
“No.”
The guy asked, “Would you mind turning out your pockets?”
I shrugged. I had nothing to hide. I went through each pocket in turn and dumped the contents on the battered table. A folded wad of cash money, and a few coins. My old passport. My ATM card. My clip-together toothbrush. The Metrocard that had gotten me into the subway in the first place. And Theresa Lee’s business card.
The guy stirred through my stuff with a single extended finger and nodded to one of his underlings, who stepped up close to pat me down. He did a semi-expert job and found nothing more and shook his head.
The main guy said, “Thank you, Mr. Reacher.”
And then they left, all three of them, as quickly as they had come in. I was a little surprised, but happy enough. I put my stuff back in my pockets and waited for them to clear the corridor and then I wandered out. The place was quiet. I saw Theresa Lee doing nothing at a desk and her partner Docherty walking a guy across the squad room to a cubicle in back. The guy was a worn-out mid-sized forty-something. He had on a creased gray T-shirt and a pair of red sweatpants. He had left home without combing his hair. That was clear. It was gray and sticking up all over the place. Theresa Lee saw me looking and said, “Family member.”
“The woman’s?”
Lee nodded. “She had contact details in her wallet. That’s her brother. He’s a cop himself. Small town in New Jersey. He drove straight over.”
“Poor guy.”
“I know. We didn’t ask him to make the formal ID. She’s too messed up. We told him that a closed casket is the way to go. He got the message.”
“So are you sure it’s her?”
Lee nodded again. “Fingerprints.”
“Who was she?”
“I’m not allowed to say.”
“Am I done here?”
“The feds finished with you?”
“Apparently.”
“Then beat it. You’re done.”
I made it to the top of the stairs and she called after me. She said, “I didn’t mean it about tipping her over the edge.”
“Yes, you did,” I said. “And you might have been right.”
I stepped out to the dawn cool and turned left on 35th Street and headed east. You’re done. But I wasn’t. Right there on the corner were four more guys waiting to talk to me. Similar types as before, but not federal agents. Their suits were too expensive.
Chapter 10
The world is the same jungle all over, but New York is its purest distillation. What is useful elsewhere is vital in the big city. You see four guys bunched on a corner waiting for you, you either run like hell in the opposite direction without hesitation, or you keep on walking without slowing down or speeding up or breaking stride. You look ahead with studied neutrality, you check their faces, you look away, like you’re saying, Is that all you got?
Truth is, it’s smarter to run. The best fight is the one you don’t have. But I have never claimed to be smart. Just obstinate, and occasionally bad-tempered. Some guys kick cats. I keep walking.
The suits were all midnight blue and looked like they came from the kind of store that has a foreign person’s name above the door. The men inside the suits looked capable. Like NCOs. Wise to the ways of the world, proud of their ability to get the job done. They were certainly ex-military or ex-law enforcement, or ex-both. They were the kind of guys who had taken a step up in salary and a step away from rules and regulations, and who regarded both moves as equally valuable.
They separated into two pairs when I was still four paces away. Left me room to pass if I wanted to, but the front guy on the left raised both palms a little and patted the air, in a kind of dual-purpose please stop and we’re no threat gesture. I spent the next step deciding. You can’t let yourself get caught in the middle of four guys. Either you stop early or you barge on through. At that point my options were still open. Easy to stop, easy to keep going. If they closed ranks while I was still moving, they would go down like bowling pins. I weigh two-fifty and was moving at four miles an hour. They didn’t, and weren’t.
Two steps out, the lead guy said, “Can we talk?”
I stopped walking. Said, “About what?”
“You’re the witness, right?”
“But who are you?”
The guy answered by peeling back the flap of his suit coat, slow and unthreatening, showing me nothing except a red satin lining and a shirt. No gun, no holster, no belt. He put his right fingers into his left inside pocket and came out with a business card. Leaned forward and handed it to me. It was a cheap product. The first line said: Sure and Certain, Inc. The second line said: Protection, Investigation, I
ntervention. The third line had a telephone number, with a 212 area code. Manhattan.
“Kinko’s is a wonderful place,” I said. “Isn’t it? Maybe I’ll get some cards that say John Smith, King of the World.”
“The card is legit,” the guy said. “And we’re legit.”
“Who are you working for?”
“We can’t say.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
“Better that you talk to us than our principal. We can keep things civilized.”
“Now I’m really scared.”
“Just a couple of questions. That’s all. Help us out. We’re just working stiffs, trying to get paid. Like you.”
“I’m not a working stiff. I’m a gentleman of leisure.”
“Then look down on us from your lofty perch and take pity.”
“What questions?”
“Did she give anything to you?”
“Who?”
“You know who. Did you take anything from her?”
“And? What’s the next question?”
“Did she say anything?”
“She said plenty. She was talking all the way from Bleecker to Grand Central.”
“Saying what?”
“I didn’t hear very much of it.”
“Information?”
“I didn’t hear.”
“Did she mention names?”
“She might have.”
“Did she say the name Lila Hoth?”
“Not that I heard.”
“Did she say John Sansom?”
I didn’t answer. The guy asked, “What?”
I said, “I heard that name somewhere.”
“From her?”
“No.”
“Did she give you anything?”
“What kind of a thing?”
“Anything at all.”
“Tell me what difference it would make.”
“Our principal wants to know.”
“Tell him to come ask me himself.”
“Better to talk to us.”
I smiled and walked on, through the alley they had created. But one of the guys on the right side-stepped and tried to push me back. I caught him shoulder-to-chest and spun him out of my way. He came after me again and I stopped and started and feinted left and right and slid in behind him and shoved him hard in the back so that he stumbled on ahead of me. His jacket had a single center vent. French tailoring. British suits favor twin side vents and Italian suits favor none at all. I leaned down and caught a coat tail in each hand and heaved and tore the seam all the way up the back. Then I shoved him again. He stumbled ahead and veered right. His coat was hanging off him by the collar. Unbuttoned at the front, open at the back, like a hospital gown.
