The Essential Jack Reacher 10-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

  “I’ll get my wife,” the guy said.

  He came back a minute later with a handsome woman a little younger than himself. She was wearing pressed jeans and a sweatshirt the same yellow as the hallway walls. Penny loafers on her feet. No socks. She had hair that had been expensively styled to look casual and windswept. She was medium height and lean in a way that spoke of diet books and serious time in aerobics classes.

  “What’s this about?” she asked.

  “Ted Archer,” Helen said.

  “Ted? I thought you told my husband it was about Oline.”

  “We think there may be a connection. Between his situation and hers.”

  “How could there be a connection? Surely what happened to Oline was completely out of the blue.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We suspect that Oline might have been a specific target, kind of hidden behind the confusion of the other four victims.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a matter for the police?”

  Helen paused. “At the moment the police seem satisfied with what they’ve got.”

  The woman glanced at her husband.

  “Then I’m not sure we should talk about it,” he said.

  “At all?” Yanni asked. “Or just to me?”

  “I’m not sure if we would want to be on television.”

  Reacher smiled to himself. The other side of the tracks.

  “This is deep background only,” Yanni said. “It’s entirely up to you whether your names are used.”

  The woman sat down on a sofa and her husband sat next to her, very close. Reacher smiled to himself again. They had subconsciously adopted the standard couple-on-a-sofa pose that television interviews used all the time. Two faces close together, ideally framed for a tight camera shot. Yanni took her cue and sat in an armchair facing them, perched right on the edge, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, a frank and open expression on her face. Helen took another chair. Reacher stepped away to the window. Used a finger to move the drapes aside. It was fully dark outside.

  Time ticking away.

  “Tell us about Ted Archer,” Yanni said. “Please.” A simple request, only six words, but her tone said: I think you two are the most interesting people in the world and I would love to be your friend. For a moment Reacher thought Yanni had missed her way. She would have been a great cop.

  “Ted had business problems,” the woman said.

  “Is that why he disappeared?” Yanni asked.

  The woman shrugged. “That was Oline’s initial assumption.”

  “But?”

  “Ultimately she rejected that explanation. And I think she was right to. Ted wasn’t that kind of a man. And his problems weren’t those kind of problems. The fact is, he was getting screwed rotten and he was mad as hell about it and he was fighting. And people who fight don’t just walk away. I mean, do they?”

  “How was he getting screwed?”

  The woman glanced at her husband. He leaned forward. Boy stuff. “His principal customer stopped buying from him. Which happens. Power in the marketplace ebbs and flows. So Ted offered to renegotiate. Offered to drop his price. No dice. So he offered to drop it more. He told me he got to the point where he was giving it away. Still no dice. They just wouldn’t buy.”

  “What do you think was happening?” Yanni asked. Keep talking, sir.

  “Corruption,” the guy said. “Under-the-table inducements. It was completely obvious. One of Ted’s competitors was offering kickbacks. No way for an honest man to compete with that.”

  “When did this start?”

  “About two years ago. It was a major problem for them. Financially they went downhill very fast. No cash flow. Ted sold his car. Oline had to go out to work. The DMV thing was all she could find. They made her supervisor after about a month.” He smiled a thin smile, proud of his class. “Another year, she’d have been running the place. She’d have been Commissioner.”

  “What was Ted doing about it? How was he fighting?”

  “He was trying to find out which competitor it was.”

  “Did he find out?”

  “We don’t know. He was trying for a long time, and then he went missing.”

  “Didn’t Oline include this in her report?”

  The guy sat back and his wife leaned forward again. Shook her head. “Oline didn’t want to. Not back then. It was all unproven. All speculation. She didn’t want to throw accusations around. And it wasn’t definitely connected. I guess the way we’re telling it now it sounds more obvious than it was at the time. I mean, Ted wasn’t Sherlock Holmes or anything. He wasn’t on the case twenty-four/ seven. He was still doing normal stuff. He was just talking to people when he could, you know, asking questions, comparing notes, comparing prices, trying to put it all together. It was a two-year period. Occasional conversations, phone calls, inquiries, things like that. It didn’t seem dangerous, certainly.”

  “Did Oline ever go to anyone with this? Later, maybe?”

  The woman nodded. “She stewed for two months after he disappeared. We talked. She was up and down with it. Eventually she decided there had to be a connection. I agreed with her. She didn’t know what to do. I told her she should call the police.”

  “And did she?”

  “She didn’t call. She went personally. She felt they would take her more seriously face-to-face. Not that they did, apparently. Nothing happened. It was like dropping a stone down a well and never hearing the splash.”

  “When did she go?”

  “A week before the thing in the plaza last Friday.”

  Nobody spoke. Then, kindly, gently, Ann Yanni asked the obvious question: “You didn’t suspect a connection?”

  The woman shook her head. “Why would we? It seemed to be a total coincidence. The shootings were random, weren’t they? You said so yourself. On the television news. We heard you say it. Five random victims, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Nobody spoke.

  Reacher turned away from the window.

  “What business was Ted Archer in?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, I assumed you knew,” the husband said. “He owns a quarry. Huge place about forty miles north of here. Cement, concrete, crushed stone. Vertically integrated, very efficient.”

  “And who was the customer who backed off?”

  “The city,” the guy said.

  “Big customer.”

  “As big as they come. All this construction going on right now is manna from heaven for people in that business. The city sold ninety million in tax-free municipals just to cover the first year. Add in the inevitable overruns and it’s a nine-figure bonanza for somebody.”

  “What car did Ted sell?”

  “A Mercedes-Benz.”

  “Then what did he drive?”

  “He used a truck from work.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Every day for two years.”

  “What was it?”

  “A pickup. A Chevy, I think.”

  “An old brown Silverado? Plain steel wheels?”

  The guy stared. “How did you know that?”

  “One more question,” Reacher said. “For your wife.”

  She looked at him.

  “After Oline went to the cops, did she tell you who it was she talked to? Was it a detective called Emerson?”

  The woman was already shaking her head. “I told Oline if she didn’t want to call she should go to the station house, but she said it was too far, because she never got that long of a lunch hour. She said she’d go to the DA instead. His office is much closer to the DMV. And Oline was like that anyway. She preferred to go straight to the top. So she took it to Alex Rodin himself.”

  Helen Rodin was completely silent on the drive back to town. So silent she quivered and vibrated and shook with it. Her lips were clamped and her cheeks were sucked in and her eyes were wide-open. Her silence made it impossible for Reacher or Yanni to speak.
She drove like a robot, competently, not fast, not slow, displaying a mechanical compliance with lane markers and stoplights and yield signs. She parked on the apron below Franklin’s office and left the motor running and said, “You two go on ahead. I just can’t do this.”

  Ann Yanni got out and walked over to the staircase. Reacher stayed in the car and leaned forward over the seat.

  “It’ll be OK,” he said.

  “It won’t.”

  “Helen, pull the keys and get your ass upstairs. You’re an officer of the court and you’ve got a client in trouble.” Then he opened his door and climbed out of the car and by the time he had walked around the trunk she was waiting for him at the foot of the stairs.

  Franklin was in front of his computer, as always. He told Reacher that Cash was on his way up from Kentucky, no questions asked. Told him that Ted Archer hadn’t shown up anywhere else in the databases. Then he noticed the silence and the tension.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “We’re one step away,” Reacher said. “Ted Archer was in the concrete business and he was frozen out of all these new city construction contracts by a competitor who was offering bribes. He tried to prove it and must have been getting very close to succeeding, because the competitor offed him.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “Only by inference. We’ll never find his body without digging up First Street again. But I know where his truck is. It’s in Jeb Oliver’s barn.”

  “Why there?”

  “They used Oliver for things they can’t do themselves. For when they don’t want to show their faces, or for when they can’t. Presumably Archer knew them and wouldn’t have gone near them. But Oliver was just a local kid. Maybe he staged a flat tire or hitched a ride. Archer would have walked right into it. Then the bad guys hid the body and Oliver hid the truck.”

  “Oline Archer didn’t suspect anything?”

  “She did eventually,” Reacher said. “She sat on it two months and then presumably she pieced together enough to make some kind of sense out of it. Then she started to go public with it and all kinds of private alarm bells must have gone off, because a week later she was dead. Staged the way it was because to have a missing husband and then a murdered wife two months later would have raised too many flags. But as long as it looked random it was going to be seen as coincidental.”

  “Who had Oline taken it to? Emerson?”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “She took it to my father,” Helen Rodin said.

  There was silence for a long moment.

  “So what now?” Franklin said.

  “You need to hit that keyboard again,” Reacher said. “Whoever got the city contracts has pretty much defined himself as the bad guy here. So we need to know who he is. And where he’s based.”

  “Public record,” Franklin said.

  “So check it.”

  Franklin turned away in the silence and started his fingers pattering over the keys. He pointed and clicked for a minute. Then he came up with the answer.

  “Specialized Services of Indiana,” he said. “They own all the current city contracts for cement, concrete, and crushed stone. Many, many millions of dollars.”

  “Where are they?”

  “That was the good news.”

  “What’s the bad?”

  “There’s no paperwork. They’re a trust registered in Bermuda. They don’t have to file anything.”

  “What kind of a system is that?”

  Franklin didn’t answer.

  “A Bermuda trust needs a local lawyer.” Helen’s voice was low, quiet, resigned. Reacher recalled the plate outside A. A. Rodin’s office: the name, followed by the letters that denoted the law degree.

  Franklin clicked his way through two more screens.

  “There’s a phone number,” he said. “That’s all we’ve got.”

  “What is it?” Helen asked.

  Franklin read it out.

  “That’s not my father’s number,” Helen said.

  Franklin clicked his way into a reverse directory. Typed in the number and the screen changed and gave him a name and a business address.

  “John Mistrov,” he said.

  “Russian name,” Reacher said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Vaguely. He’s a wills and trusts guy. One-man band. I’ve never worked for him.”

  Reacher checked his watch. “Can you find a home address?”

  Franklin went into a regular directory. Typed in the name and came up with a domestic listing.

  “Should I call him?” he said.

  Reacher shook his head. “We’ll pay him a visit. Face-to-face works better when time is short.”

  Vladimir made his way down to the ground-floor surveillance room. Sokolov was in a rolling chair in front of the long table that carried the four television monitors. From left to right they were labeled North, East, South, and West, which made sense if a person viewed the world from a clockwise perspective. Sokolov was scooting his chair slowly down the line, examining each picture, moving on, returning from West to North with a powerful push off the wall. All four screens were misty and green, because it was dark outside and the thermal imaging had kicked in. Occasionally a bright dot could be seen moving fast in the distance. An animal. Nocturnal. Fox, skunk, raccoon, or a pet cat or a lost dog far from home. The North monitor showed a glow from the crushing plant. It would fade as the idle machines cooled. Apart from that all the backgrounds were a deep olive color, because there was nothing out there except for miles of fields constantly misted with cold water from the always-turning irrigation booms.

  Vladimir pulled up a second wheeled chair and sat down on Sokolov’s left. He would watch North and East. Sokolov would concentrate on the South and West. That way they each had responsibility for one likely direction and one unlikely. It was a fair distribution of labor.

  Upstairs in the third-floor hallway Chenko loaded his own Super Match. Ten rounds, Lake City .308s. One thing Americans did right was ammunition. He opened all the bedroom doors to speed his access north, south, east, or west, as required. He walked to a window and turned his night scope on. Set it for seventy-five yards. He figured he would get the call when the soldier was about a hundred and fifty yards out. That was about the practical limit for the cameras. He would step to the right window and acquire the target when it was still more than a hundred yards distant. He would track its progress. He would let it come to him. When it was seventy-five yards out, he would kill it.

  He raised the rifle. Checked the image. It was bright and clear. He watched a fox cross the open ground east to west. Good hunting, my little friend. He walked back to the hallway and propped the gun against the wall and sat down in a straight-backed chair to wait.

  Helen Rodin insisted on staying behind in Franklin’s office. So Reacher and Yanni went out alone, in the Mustang. The streets were dark and quiet. Yanni drove. She knew her way around. The address they were looking for was a loft building carved out of an old warehouse halfway between the river wharf and the railhead. Yanni said it was a part of the new urban strategy. SoHo comes to the heartland. She said she had thought about buying in the same building.

  Then she said, “We should put Helen on suicide watch.”

  “She’ll be OK,” Reacher said.

  “You think?”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “What if it was your old man?”

  Reacher didn’t answer that. Yanni slowed as the bulk of a large brick building loomed through the darkness.

  “You can ask first,” Reacher said. “If he doesn’t answer, I’ll ask second.”

  “He’ll answer,” Yanni said. “They all answer.”

  But John Mistrov didn’t. He was a thin guy of about forty-five. He was dressed like a post-divorce midlife-crisis victim. Acid-rinsed too-tight jeans, black T-shirt, no shoes. They found him all alone in a big white loft apartment eating Chinese food from p
aper cartons. Initially he was very pleased to see Ann Yanni. Maybe hanging out with celebrities was a part of the lifestyle glamour that the new development had promised. But his early enthusiasm faded fast. It disappeared completely when Yanni ran through her suspicions and then insisted on knowing the names behind the trust.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “Surely you understand there are confidentiality issues here. Surely you understand that.”

  “I understand that serious crimes have been committed,” Yanni said. “That’s what I understand. And you need to understand that, too. You need to choose up sides, right now, fast, before this thing goes public.”

  “No comment,” the guy said.

  “There’s no downside here,” Yanni said gently. “These names we want, they’ll all be in jail tomorrow. No comebacks.”

  “No comment,” the guy said again.

  “You want to go down with them?” Yanni asked. Sharply. “Like an accessory? Or do you want to get out from under? It’s your choice. But one way or the other you’re going to be on the news tomorrow night. Either doing the perp walk or standing there looking good, like, Oh my God, I had no idea, I was only too happy to help.”

  “No comment,” the guy said for the third time.

  Loud, clear, and smug.

  Yanni gave up. Shrugged, and glanced at Reacher. Reacher checked his watch. Time ticking away. He stepped up close.

  “You got medical insurance?” he asked.

  The guy nodded.

  “Dental plan?”

  The guy nodded again.

  Reacher hit him in the mouth. Right-handed, short swing, hard blow.

  “Get that fixed,” he said.

  The guy rocked back a step and doubled over and then came up coughing with blood all over his chin. Cut lips, loose teeth all rimed with red.

  “Names,” Reacher said. “Now. Or I’ll take you apart a piece at a time.”

  The guy hesitated. Mistake. Reacher hit him again. Then the guy came up with names, six of them, and descriptions, and an address, all from a position flat on the floor and all in a voice thick and bubbly with mouthfuls of blood.