The Essential Jack Reacher 10-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

“Like I said, the kid needs an ear. Grief is a long and complicated process.”

  “You do this for all the relatives?”

  “Only the ones that look like they belong in Playboy magazine.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “What’s your interest here?” Brewer asked again.

  “Like I said.”

  “Bullshit. Lane was a combat soldier. Now he’s a mercenary. You’re not worried about whether he offed someone he shouldn’t have five years ago. Find me a guy like Lane who didn’t.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “Something’s on your mind,” Brewer said.

  Silence for a moment.

  “One thing Patti told me,” Brewer said. “She hasn’t seen the new Mrs. Lane for a couple of days. Or the kid.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  Brewer said, “Maybe she’s missing and you’re looking for parallels in the past.”

  Reacher stayed quiet.

  Brewer said, “You were a cop, not a combat soldier. So now I’m wondering what kind of thing Edward Lane would want to hire you for.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  Brewer said, “Anything you want to tell me?”

  “I’m asking,” Reacher said. “Not telling.”

  More silence. A long hard look, cop to cop.

  “As you wish,” Brewer said. “It’s a free country.”

  Reacher finished his coffee and stepped into the kitchen. Rinsed his mug under the tap and left it in the sink. Then he leaned his elbows on the counter and stared straight ahead. The living room in front of him was framed by the pass-through. The high-backed chair was at the window. On the sill was the neat surveillance array. The notebook, the pen, the camera, the binoculars.

  “So what do you do with the stuff she calls in? Just bury it?”

  Brewer shook his head.

  “I pass it on,” he said. “Outside the department. To someone with an interest.”

  “Who?”

  “A private detective, downtown. A woman. She’s cute, too. Older, but hey.”

  “NYPD is working with private detectives now?”

  “This one is in an unusual position. She’s retired FBI.”

  “They’re all retired something.”

  “This one was the lead agent on the Anne Lane case.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  Brewer smiled. “So like I said, this one has an interest.”

  Reacher said, “Does Patti know?”

  Brewer shook his head. “Better that Patti doesn’t. Better that Patti never finds out. It would make for a bad combination.”

  “What’s this woman’s name?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Brewer said.

  CHAPTER 22

  Reacher left Patti Joseph’s apartment with two business cards. One was Brewer’s official NYPD issue and the other was an elegant item with Lauren Pauling engraved at the top and Private Investigator under the name. Then: Ex–Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. At the bottom was a downtown address, with 212 and 917 phone numbers for landline and cell, and e-mail, and a website URL. It was a busy card. But the whole thing looked crisp and expensive, professional and efficient. Better than Brewer’s NYPD card, and better even than Gregory’s OSC card.

  Reacher tossed Brewer’s card in a Central Park West trash can and put Lauren Pauling’s in his shoe. Then he took a circuitous route back toward the Dakota. It was close to one o’clock in the morning. He circled the block and saw a cop car on Columbus Avenue. Cops, he thought. The word hung up in his mind the same way it had down in SoHo. The way a twig on a swirling current catches on a riverbank. He stopped walking and closed his eyes and tried to catch it. But it spun away again. He gave it up and turned onto 72nd Street. Turned in to the Dakota’s lobby. The night crew doorman was a dignified old guy. He called upstairs and inclined his head like an invitation to proceed. On five Gregory was out in the corridor with the door open and ready. Reacher followed him inside and Gregory said, “Nothing yet. But we’ve got seven more hours.”

  The apartment was dead-of-night quiet and still smelled of Chinese food. Everyone was still in the living room. Except Burke. Burke wasn’t back yet. Gregory looked full of energy and Lane was upright in a chair but the others were slumped in various tired poses. The lights were low and yellow and the drapes were drawn and the air was hot.

  “Wait with us,” Lane said.

  “I need to sleep,” Reacher said. “Three or four hours.”

  “Use Jade’s room,” Lane said.

  Reacher nodded and headed off through the interior hallways to Jade’s room. The nightlight was still burning. The room smelled faintly of baby powder and clean skin. The bed was way too small for a guy Reacher’s size. Too small for any guy, really. It was some kind of a half-sized piece, probably from a specialized children’s boutique. There was an attached bathroom carved out of another maid’s room. A sink, a toilet, a tub with a shower over it. The shower head was on a sliding pole. It was set about three feet above the drain hole. The shower curtain was clear plastic with yellow ducks on it.

  Reacher slid the head all the way to the top and stripped and took a fast shower, with a cake of pink soap shaped like a strawberry, and baby shampoo. No tears, the bottle said. I wish, he thought. Then he dried himself on a small pink towel and put the tiny fragrant pajamas on a chair and took the pillow and the sheet and the comforter off the bed and made himself a bivouac on the floor. He cleared bears and dolls out of his way. The bears were all plush and new and the dolls looked untouched. He moved the desk a foot to one side to make room and all the papers fell off it. Drawings, in crayon on cheap paper. Trees, like bright green lollipops on brown sticks, with a big gray building beyond. The Dakota, from Central Park, maybe. There was another of three stick figures, one much smaller than the others. The family, maybe. Mother, daughter, stepfather. Mother and daughter were smiling but Lane was drawn with black holes in his mouth like someone had punched half his teeth out. There was a picture of an airplane low in the sky. Green earth below, a stripe of blue above, a yellow ball for the sun. The plane’s fuselage was shaped like a sausage and had three portholes with faces in them. The wings were drawn as if from above. Like the plane was in a panic turn. The last picture was of the family again, but twice over. Two Lanes close together and side by side, two Kates, two Jades. It was like looking at the second picture again with double vision.

  Reacher restacked the papers neatly and switched out the nightlight. Burrowed into the bedclothes. They covered him from his chest to his knees. He could smell baby shampoo. From his own hair, or from Jade’s pillow. He wasn’t sure. He set the alarm in his head for five in the morning. He closed his eyes, breathed once, breathed twice, and fell asleep, on a floor made hard and dense and solid by three feet of Central Park clay.

  Reacher woke as planned at five o’clock in the morning, uncomfortable, still tired, and cold. He could smell coffee. He found Carter Groom in the kitchen, next to a big Krups drip machine.

  “Three hours to go,” Groom said. “Think they’re going to call?”

  “I don’t know,” Reacher said. “Do you think they will?”

  Groom didn’t reply. Just drummed his fingers on the counter as he waited for the machine to finish. Reacher waited with him. Then Burke came in. He looked like he hadn’t slept. He didn’t say anything. Nothing pleasant, nothing hostile. He just acted like the previous evening had never existed. Groom filled three mugs with coffee. Took one, and left the room. Burke took one and followed him. Reacher drank his sitting on the counter. The clock on the wall oven said five-ten. He figured it was a little slow. He felt it was closer to a quarter past.

  Time for ex–Special Agent Lauren Pauling’s wake-up call.

  He stopped in the living room on his way out. Lane was still in the same chair. Immobile. Still upright. Still composed. Still stoic. Real or phony, either way, it was one hell of a display of endurance. Gregory and Perez and Kowalski were asleep on sofas
. Addison was awake but inert. Groom and Burke were drinking their coffee.

  “I’m going out,” Reacher said.

  “Another walk?” Burke asked, sourly.

  “Breakfast,” Reacher said.

  The old guy in the lobby was still on duty. Reacher nodded to him and turned right on 72nd and headed for Broadway. Nobody came after him. He found a pay phone and used coins from his pocket and the card from his shoe and dialed Pauling’s cell. He figured she would keep it switched on, top of her nightstand, near her pillow.

  She answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?” she said.

  Rusty voice, not sleepy, just not yet used today. Maybe she lived alone.

  Reacher asked, “You heard the name Reacher recently?”

  “Should I have?” Pauling asked back.

  “It will save us a lot of time if you just say yes. From Anne Lane’s sister Patti, through a cop called Brewer, am I right?”

  “Yes,” Pauling said. “Late yesterday.”

  “I need an early appointment,” Reacher said.

  “You’re Reacher?”

  “Yes, I am. Half an hour, at your office?”

  “You know where it is?”

  “Brewer gave me your card.”

  “Half an hour,” Pauling said.

  And so half an hour later Reacher was standing on a West 4th Street sidewalk, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a doughnut in the other, watching Lauren Pauling walk toward him.

  CHAPTER 23

  Reacher knew it was Lauren Pauling walking toward him because of the way her eyes were fixed on his face. Clearly Brewer had passed on his physical description as well as his name. So Pauling was looking for a tall, wide, blond, untidy man waiting near her office door, and Reacher was the only possibility that morning on West 4th Street.

  Pauling herself was an elegant woman of about fifty. Or maybe a little more, in which case she was carrying it well. Brewer had said she’s cute too, and he had been right. She was about an inch taller than average, dressed in a black pencil skirt that fell to her knees. Black hose, black shoes with heels. An emerald green blouse that could have been silk. A rope of big fake pearls at her neck. Hair frosted gold and blonde. It fell in big waves to her shoulders. Green eyes that smiled. A look on her face that said: I’m very pleased to meet you but let’s get straight to the good stuff. Reacher could imagine the kind of team meetings she must have run for the Bureau.

  “Jack Reacher, I presume,” she said.

  Reacher shoved his doughnut between his teeth and wiped his fingers on his pants and shook her hand. Then he waited at her shoulder as she unlocked her street door. Watched as she deactivated an alarm with a keypad in the lobby. The keypad was a standard three-by-three cluster with the zero alone at the bottom. She was right-handed. She used her middle finger, index finger, ring finger, index finger, without moving her hand much. Brisk, decisive motion. Like typing. Probably 8461, Reacher thought. Dumb or distracted to let me see. Distracted, probably. She can’t be dumb. But it was the building’s alarm. Not her personal choice of numbers. So she hadn’t given away her home system or her ATM card.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  Reacher followed her up a narrow staircase to the second floor. He finished his doughnut on the way. She unlocked a door and led him into an office. It was a two-room suite. Waiting room first, and then a back room for her desk and two visitor chairs. Very compact, but the décor was good. Good taste, careful application. Full of the kind of expensive stuff a solo professional leases to create an impression of confidence in a client. A little bigger, it could have been a lawyer’s place, or a cosmetic surgeon’s.

  “I spoke to Brewer,” she said. “I called him at home after you called me. I woke him up. He wasn’t very happy about that.”

  “I can imagine,” Reacher said.

  “He’s curious about your motives.”

  Lauren Pauling’s voice was low and husky, like she had been recovering from laryngitis for the last thirty years. Reacher could have sat and listened to it all day long.

  “Therefore I’m curious, too,” she said.

  She pointed at a leather client chair. Reacher sat down in it. She squeezed sideways around the end of her desk. She was slender and she moved well. She turned her chair to face him. Sat down.

  “I’m just looking for information,” Reacher said.

  “But why?”

  “Let’s see if it leads me to where I need to tell you.”

  “Brewer said you were a military cop.”

  “Once upon a time.”

  “A good one?”

  “Is there any other kind?”

  Pauling smiled, a little sadly, a little wistfully.

  “Then you know you shouldn’t be talking to me,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not a reliable witness. I’m hopelessly biased.”

  “Why?”

  “Think about it,” she said. “Isn’t it obvious? If Edward Lane didn’t kill his wife, then who the hell did? Well, I did, that’s who. Through my own carelessness.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Reacher moved in his chair and said, “Nobody scores a hundred percent. Not in the real world. Not me, not you, not anybody. So get over it.”

  “That’s your response?” Pauling said.

  “I probably got more people killed than you ever met. I don’t beat myself up over them. Shit happens.”

  Pauling nodded. “It’s the sister. She’s up there in that weird little aerie all the time. She’s like my conscience.”

  “I met her,” Reacher said.

  “She weighs on my mind.”

  “Tell me about the three of clubs,” Reacher said.

  Pauling paused, like a gear change.

  “We concluded it was meaningless,” she said. “There had been a book or a movie or something where assassins left calling cards. So we tended to get a lot of that at the time. But usually they were picture cards. Mostly aces, mostly spades. There was nothing in the databases about threes. Not much about clubs, either. Then we thought maybe this was one of three connected things, you know, but there was never anything else similar to put with it. We studied symbolism and number theory. We checked with UCLA, talked to the people who study gang culture. Nothing there. We talked to semiotics people at Harvard and Yale and the Smithsonian. We talked to Wesleyan in Connecticut, got some linguistics person working on it. Nothing there. We had a grad student at Columbia working on it. We had people with brains the size of planets working on it. Nothing anywhere. So the three of clubs meant nothing. It was designed to make us chase our tails. Which in itself was a meaningless conclusion. Because what we needed to know was who would want us to chase our tails.”

  “Did you look at Lane back then? Even before you heard Patti’s theories?”

  Pauling nodded. “We looked at him very carefully, and all his guys. More from the point of view of threat assessment, back then. Like, who knew him? Who knew he had money? Who even knew he had a wife?”

  “And?”

  “He’s not a very pleasant man. He’s borderline mentally ill. He has a psychotic need to command.”

  “Patti Joseph says the same things.”

  “She’s right.”

  “And you know what?” Reacher said. “His men are mostly a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, too. They’ve got a psychotic need to be commanded. I’ve talked to some of them. They’re civilians, but they’re holding fast to their old military codes. Like security blankets. Even when they don’t really enjoy the results.”

  “They’re a weird bunch. All Special Forces and black ops, so naturally the Pentagon wasn’t very forthcoming. But we noticed two things. Most of them had been around the block many, many times, but there were far fewer medals among them than you would normally expect to see. And most of them got general discharges. Not honorable discharges. Including Lane himself. What do you think all of that means?”

  “I suspect you know exac
tly what it means.”

  “I’d like to hear it from your professional perspective.”

  “It means they were bad guys. Either low-level and irritating, or bigger deals but with charges not proven.”

  “What about the lack of medals?”

  “Messy campaigns,” Reacher said. “Gratuitous collateral damage, looting, prisoner abuse. Maybe prisoners got shot. Maybe buildings got burned.”

  “And Lane himself?”

  “Ordered abuse or failed to prevent it. Or maybe participated in it. He told me he quit after the Gulf the first time around. I was there. There were pockets of bad behavior.”

  “Stuff like that can’t be proved?”

  “Special Forces operate on their own miles from anywhere. It’s a clandestine world. There would have been rumors, that’s all. Maybe a whistleblower or two. But no hard evidence.”

  Pauling nodded again. “Those were our conclusions. Internally generated. We employed a lot of ex-military in the Bureau.”

  “Employed,” Reacher said. “You employed the good ones. The ones with honorable discharges and medals and recommendations.”

  “Is that what you got?”

  “All of the above. But I had a couple of promotion hiccups, because I’m not a very cooperative guy. Gregory asked me about that. The first one of them I spoke to. The first conversation we had. He asked if I’d had career problems. He seemed happy that I had.”

  “Puts you in the same boat.”

  Reacher nodded. “And it kind of explains why they’re sticking with Lane. Where else are they going to get twenty-five grand a month with their records?”

  “Is that what they get? That’s three hundred thousand a year.”

  “It was back when I learned math.”

  “Is that what Lane offered you? Three hundred grand?”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “What is he hiring you for?”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “We’re not done with the information yet.”

  “Anne Lane died, five years ago, in a vacant lot near the New Jersey Turnpike. That’s all the hard data we’ll ever have.”