Black Jack

by Diane Capri

  Otherwise, Reacher was the most off-the-grid paranoid she’d ever heard of. Which she hadn’t truly believed, even as the evidence stared her in the face.

  No one could live in the twenty-first century without leaving data footprints, and plenty of them. Very few people could pull that off. Even fewer actually tried.

  Reacher hadn’t tried either. Hell, he’d owned a house. Aside from death and taxes, nothing required more paperwork than real estate. Harper said he’d owned a car, too. None of those documents were provided to her. Over and over again, she was told they didn’t exist.

  Sure, Reacher was smart and clever. He moved around. He was careful. He had certain skills. A guy like that could stay out of the spotlight, maybe.

  But Reacher could never have managed the level of invisibility she’d noticed in that very first file. She was mostly outraged that she’d allowed herself to be persuaded otherwise. She felt duped. Betrayed.

  Nothing could be done about that now, of course. History was always water under the bridge, over the waterfall, and every other damn place. She paused. She took several deep breaths.

  Going forward? Trust but verify. In the future, she’d also follow her own lead and to hell with protocol.

  She disconnected her laptop from the secure satellite and moved from the uncomfortable desk to the king-sized bed to read. She had a lot of catching up to do.

  Gaspar had summarized the main points of the original bathtub murders. He’d included more detail, but in the main, Gaspar’s summary dovetailed with the highlights Deerfield and Brice had already told her.

  Gaspar included a few new details that were not released to the media at that time.

  When the victims were found, their clothes were gone. At the Garrison house, the victim’s clothes were piled on the floor at the end of the tub.

  In the original cases, the tubs were filled right to the rim with paint, estimated at twenty to thirty gallons. At the Garrison house, the victim’s neck and head were not covered, and the tub was about half-filled.

  The only similarity between the original paint and the Garrison house paint was the color, which wasn’t an exact match, either.

  The original paint’s chemistry was completely different. Identified as army camouflage base coat, flat green, manufactured in Illinois. It skinned over in a couple of hours. Below the surface, it jellified. Left long enough, the whole tub of paint might have dried solid with the bodies encased inside, she supposed. Not so at the Garrison house.

  Gaspar’s notes repeated that the cause of death for each victim was suffocation, but the mechanism was never identified. He included a laundry list of methods that were not used. The victims were not stabbed, bludgeoned, beaten, strangled, or shot. Definitely not death by natural causes or accidental death. No evidence of suicide.

  After that, he listed the evidence that didn’t exist. No trace evidence left at the scenes by the killer. No hair, fibers, blood, saliva, prints, skin cells, or DNA.

  The original victims were found in their homes in California, Florida, Idaho, Oregon, and New Hampshire. As Harper had said, none of the original victims were killed in New York. All were easily identified.

  They were all Army vets, and their Army careers varied. Different roles, different locations. The new Garrison victim, assuming she was Jodie Jacob, never served in the Army, but her father had. She was an Army brat. Close enough, maybe. But not the same.

  There seemed to be only one thing all the victims had in common. The original victims all knew Reacher. If Jodie Jacob was the Garrison victim, then she’d known Reacher, too. Of course, they might all have had more colleagues and friends in common, and they probably had. Because they were all involved with the Army in or around the same time frame, other connections between them were impossible to rule out.

  Gaspar’s conclusion was plainly stated. The Garrison victim could have been murdered by a copycat killer. Or the original killer could have changed a few details for a variety of reasons and started up again. Either or both killers could have been Reacher. Or not.

  “Thanks a lot for that extremely helpful analysis,” Kim said sarcastically.

  She glanced at the digital clock on the bedside table. She’d been reading for two hours. She rubbed her sore neck and climbed off the bed, muscles stiff and complaining about the inactivity.

  She picked up the phone and ordered more coffee, this time with extra cream and sugar for Gaspar, and a few snacks. She included pastries and cookies because Gaspar’s sweet tooth was insatiable. Delivery was promised for less than thirty minutes.

  After room service, she called next door. He answered on the third ring. The phone woke him. She could tell. “Yeah.”

  “Coffee and snacks are on the way up,” she said. “Come on over.”

  “Let me get a quick shower. Be there in ten.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sunday, January 30

  11:45 a.m.

  New York City, New York

  Her stomach growled. She rummaged through the mini-bar and located a small can of mixed nuts and a bottle of water. She munched thoughtfully, considering the facts she knew and the impressions she’d formed of all the players.

  The biggest question was still the same. Why was she here?

  She’d been requested. Deerfield had called his counterpart in the Detroit Field Office, and the Agent in Charge had put her on the next plane.

  The Boss hadn’t interfered with her assignment. At least, not at first. Maybe because he didn’t know about it. He might have planned to send her to Garrison anyway, and the official request made it easier to get her embedded. Either way, she’d had no reason or means to connect to him for several hours because Brice hadn’t given her the envelope with the cell phone in it.

  Maybe Brice had withheld the envelope intentionally. Maybe on orders from Deerfield. Or maybe not. But initially, she’d been without the intel she needed to do her job. Which didn’t feel like an oversight. It felt intentional. Deerfield was pulling the strings. Brice didn’t have the nerve or the smarts to try something like that on his own.

  She heard a knock on the door.

  “Room service,” a male voice said.

  This time she checked through the peephole to confirm before she opened the door.

  He set up the order in her room, requested her signature, and left. As he walked out, Gaspar came in and closed the door behind him.

  His hair was still wet from his shower, and he’d changed clothes. He looked loads better. He poured a half-cup of coffee and filled the rest with cream, and then he added enough sugar to rot his teeth in one sip.

  Gaspar fueled up by mainlining sugar. He claimed his sweet tooth was essential to his Cuban DNA. Kim figured he’d eaten too many frosted cereals as a kid.

  “I read your notes, but I haven’t reviewed the original files,” she said, still pacing. If she stopped now, her muscles might petrify after her grueling uphill run on the treadmill earlier.

  “You know everything you need to know. All the relevant facts are in my notes. The files contain the blow-by-blow, but most of it’s useless,” he replied, refilling his coffee cup and this time, snagging one of the pastries, too.

  “Good to have you back, Chico,” Kim said, somewhat surprised to realize how true her sentiment was. “But really, why are you here? You’re obviously not ready to return to work yet. What’s the rush?”

  “I’m a highly paid courier. I’ve got some video to show you. The Boss didn’t want to risk getting it to you any other way. You’re behind enemy lines here or something, I guess.” He left his coffee on the tray and held the pastry in his teeth. He fished an unfamiliar phone out of his pocket and pushed a few buttons. He handed the phone to her.

  Loaded on the screen was a video ready to play when she pushed the start icon. “What am I looking at here?”

  “I don’t know how he got it, but it’s surveillance footage from Brice’s team. The date is thirteen days ago. Monday, January 17. No sound, bu
t the quality’s pretty good, under the circumstances,” Gaspar said, scarfing down sweets.

  The video began with an establishing shot of the Garrison house. The driveway was clear of snow, as was the sidewalk leading to the front door, probably because the snow had thawed. There was no snow lining the edges like she’d expect if the driveway had been plowed.

  A sporty red sedan pulled into the driveway and parked close to the garage door. A tall, thin woman with blonde hair, dressed in black, and wearing sunglasses, got out. She walked up the sidewalk to the front door. She bent over the doorknob for a second or so. She opened the door and went inside.

  The video zoomed in on the sedan’s New York license plate, which was too dirty to read.

  “Let me guess,” Kim said. “This is Jodie Jacob arriving at the Garrison house.”

  Gaspar replied, “We think so. She owns a red Lexus IS F Sport with a New York plate. Traffic cams show the car coming in from Manhattan. The woman looks like her.”

  “Brice said she went into the house and never came out. Can we confirm? Did you see FBI surveillance video for every single minute after this until I arrived to view the body?” Kim asked.

  “I did. More than once. Nothing noteworthy on it. In fact, nothing else ever happens except snowfall. I ran through every second for the two weeks before she arrived, too. Nothing on that video, either.” Gaspar refilled his sweet coffee again. “She never comes out of the front entrance, which is the only video we have. It’s possible there’s a back exit. But then we’d have seen her walk around to the front and get into the car.”

  “You didn’t see anything like that, I gather? And you didn’t see Reacher, either, right?”

  He shook his head. “But later that day, the car is gone.”

  Kim raised her eyebrows. “What do you mean, gone? Someone drove it away somewhere?”

  Gaspar shook his head. “Nope. I watched every single second of that video, several times. No one ever drove the vehicle away. But it’s gone later that same day. Did you see the sedan in the driveway when you were there?”

  “No. When we arrived, there was an unmarked FBI black SUV parked in that spot. Later, I learned it was Brice’s. No other vehicles unless they were in the garage,” Kim said.

  Gaspar nodded. “Right. That’s the next vehicle that shows up on the video. The SUV pulled into the driveway about six hours before you arrived on Friday. Brice and another agent, Terry Poulton, went inside. After half an hour, Poulton came out, and Brice stayed inside.”

  “So that’s when Brice and Poulton discovered the body? Brice called Deerfield, who called Detroit, and I was ordered to take a non-stop flight immediately.”

  “Seems like it,” Gaspar said, finishing up the pastry and choosing a cherry Danish next. “I checked the files. Brice is a nebbish. He’s been in the Organized Crime Unit for a few years. Mostly, he handles office work. Rarely gets into the field.”

  “Figures.”

  “Poulton is a little more interesting. He started out NYPD, worked up to detective, and then moved over to FBI’s Organized Crime Unit. By all accounts, a good cop and a better agent.” Gaspar paused to gobble another half a Danish. “What’s interesting is that Terry Poulton’s brother was FBI Special Agent Tony Poulton, Serial Crimes Unit. Tony worked the original bathtub murders. A couple of years later, he was killed in the line of duty down Alabama. He was shot during a raid on a human trafficking ring, apparently.”

  She carried the water bottle in her right hand and munched a cheese cube in her left while she thought about the video. “So what do we think happened here? Jodie Jacob walked into that house on her own two feet. We don’t know why. We don’t know what happened once she got inside. That it?”

  Gaspar shrugged. “We don’t have interior surveillance, unfortunately. The Boss is looking. So far, no luck.”

  “We still don’t know for certain if the woman in the red sedan is Jodie Jacob,” Kim said.

  “We don’t. Not for sure. But we have no reason to believe otherwise. Do you?”

  Kim shook her head and sipped the water and munched the cheese. “Jodie Jacob resigned from her firm a while back, according to the head of her department. He didn’t know when or where she went. Could have been something personal or maybe she just changed jobs, he said.”

  “You’re the lawyer here.” Gaspar cocked his head. “But that’s odd, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. But it’s not illegal. Adults are free to move around if they want to. Nothing requires her to leave a forwarding address, either, as far as I know.” Kim paced the room, just to move a little. Her muscles were still tight. Walking felt good, even though the room wasn’t large enough to rack up any mileage. “But she still has a residential address in Manhattan, NYPD Detective Grassley said.”

  “You saw the body. Is it Jacob? In the tub?” Gaspar popped the last of the cherry Danish into his mouth.

  “It could be. The victim looks like Jacob.” Kim stopped pacing. “The killer might have left her head out so the paint wouldn’t damage her face too much. So she’d be recognized. And Jacob is missing. It could be her.”

  “But?”

  “But it doesn’t feel right.”

  “Why?” Gaspar snagged the apricot turnover next and refilled his coffee.

  “I’ve been thinking about that.” She laid out her reasoning. “The house belonged to her father, who left it to Reacher. He lived there for a while, which was about three years after he left the Army. Jacob was having an affair with Reacher when he lived there. So she was tenuously connected to the house in at least three different ways.”

  “But?” he said, licking the sugar from his fingers, one at a time.

  “All of that was a while back. It’s not likely to be a motivating factor now.” Kim paused and turned at the end of her short track “Why would she go to the house thirteen days ago? Why would someone kill her and leave her body there? What happened to her car?”

  Gaspar said, “What we need is satellite surveillance of the house, including the back and the whole lot, as well as the front. With West Point across the river, there’s gotta be satellites aimed all around that area constantly. I asked the Boss to get the video. For some reason, he hasn’t found it yet.”

  “I agree.” She nodded. “That’s why I went to see Finlay.”

  “And?” Gaspar tensed at the mention of Finlay’s name. Kim could feel the hostile vibes all the way across the room.

  “I haven’t heard back from him yet. Give him a chance.” She shrugged. “I don’t know what went on inside that house. I don’t know why Jodie Jacob went there if she did. I don’t know why she didn’t come out unless that’s her body in the tub. But none of this makes sense. And when things don’t make sense, it means we’re missing something.”

  Gaspar said, “I’ve been over every word of those old bathtub killer files. Thousands of pages. But nothing in them seems like a reason to kill Jodie Jacob now when the killer didn’t target her back then.”

  “Other than her relationship to Reacher, you mean.”

  “Not even that. She and Reacher broke up years ago. She moved to Europe, and he moved on to wherever he goes. The house was sold. Twice.” Gaspar shook his head. “Humans are motivated to action. What caused Jacob to go back? Who objected to her being there?”

  Kim considered the question for a few seconds. Maybe there was another angle. “Who owns the house now? Could the owner be one of her clients? Or a witness in a case that Jacob was working?”

  Gaspar said, “Reacher gave the house to Jacob, and she sold it. A year later, a guy named Petrosian bought it. Not the chess champion. I checked.”

  Kim cocked her head. “How old a guy is he?”

  “Mid-thirties. Married. Two kids. His old man was a Syrian mobster, Almar Petrosian. And he isn’t involved in the family business, according to the New York Field Office,” Gaspar said. “Here’s the interesting part. The current owner of the house is missing.”

  “Son of a mobster gone
missing. Now there’s an original story,” Kim said dryly. “You believe that he’s not involved in the family business?”

  “Wanna buy some swamp land in the Everglades?” Gaspar grinned. “Of course, I don’t believe that. Crime families tend to include all the generations. Petrosian, the father, is dead. Gang war. Happened unexpectedly around the time Reacher was living in the Garrison house. Back when Jodie Jacob was Reacher’s lawyer.”

  “Given the timing, any chance Reacher killed the father? Maybe the son is carrying a grudge? Against Jacob and Reacher?” Kim drained her water bottle and shrugged. “I suppose that’s possible. But he could have dumped Jacob’s body in the river or a construction site or something. Presents the same question as Reacher doing this. Why abandon his own house and then use it for a crime scene?”

  Gaspar shrugged.

  Kim took another pass around the small track she’d created. “Here’s something else. This Petrosian guy? He’s spent a lot of money on that house. It’s a real showpiece. Market value’s well over five million, according to the real estate listing. When Reacher owned the house, it was what? Maybe half a million?”

  Gaspar nodded. “I looked deeper on Petrosian. Turns out Almar had three sons. Two older ones are living here in New York. Oldest is Samir. Second is Tariq. Business as usual with those two. They picked up where their old man left off. The sons have expanded the protection rackets in Tribeca the old man controlled to a much broader territory. Like I said, the third son, Farid Petrosian, owns the Garrison house. Maybe he’s a gangster, and maybe he’s not. Hasn’t been seen in several weeks.”

  “What about his family? Wife, kids?”

  “Again, interesting. Farid’s wife and kids are in witness protection. Deerfield set it up. Before you ask, no, we don’t know why. Yet.”

  “Feels like there’s way too many missing persons in this case, don’t you think?” Kim asked. “With Deerfield at the center of everything.”

  “He wants Reacher.” Gaspar shrugged. “He should get in line behind the rest of us.”