"OK," Neagley said. She used her cell to call Chicago, right there at the table, and looked more like a movie executive than ever. O'Donnell leaned forward and looked across her to Reacher and said, "Go over the time line for me."
"The dragon lady at New Age said Swan got fired more than three weeks ago. Call it twenty-four or twenty-five days. Twenty-three days ago Franz went out and never came back. His wife called Neagley fourteen days after the body was found."
"For what reason?"
"Notification, pure and simple. She's relying on the deputies from up where it happened."
"What's she like?"
"She's a civilian. She looks like Michelle Pfeiffer. She's halfway resentful of us for having been such good friends with her husband. Their son looks just like him."
"Poor kid."
Neagley covered her phone with her hand and said, "We got cell numbers for Sanchez, Orozco, and Swan." She fumbled one-handed and took paper and pen from her purse. Wrote three numbers, ten digits each.
"Use them to get addresses," Reacher said.
Neagley shook her head. "They don't help. Sanchez's and Orozco's are corporate and Swan's comes back to New Age." She clicked off with her guy in Chicago and dialed the numbers she had listed, one after another.
"Straight to voice mail," she said. "Switched off, all of them."
"Inevitable," Reacher said. "All the batteries ran out three weeks ago."
"I really hate hearing their voices," she said. "You know, you record your mail-box greeting, you have absolutely no idea what's going to happen to you."
"A little bit of immortality," O'Donnell said.
A busboy took their plates away. Their waiter came back with dessert menus. Reacher scanned a list of confections priced higher than a night in a motel in most parts of the United States.
"Nothing for me," he said. He thought Neagley was going to press him, but her cell phone rang. She answered it and listened and wrote some more on her slip of paper.
"Swan's address," she said. "Santa Ana, near the zoo."
O'Donnell said, "Let's hit the road."
They used his car, a Hertz four-door with GPS navigation, and started the slow crawl south and east to the 5.
The man called Thomas Brant watched them go. His Crown Vic was parked a block away and he was sitting on a bench in the mouth of Rodeo Drive, surrounded by two hundred tourists. He used his cell and called Curtis Mauney, his boss. Said, "There are three of them now. It's working like a charm. It's like the gathering of the clans."
Forty yards west, the man in the blue suit watched them go, too. He was slumped low in his blue Chrysler in a hairdresser's lot on Wilshire. He dialed his boss and said, "There are three of them now. I think the new one must be O'Donnell. Therefore the bum is Reacher. They look like they've got the bit between their teeth."
And three thousand miles away in New York City the dark-haired forty-year-old was in the shared airline offices at Park and 42nd. He was buying an open round-trip ticket from LaGuardia to Denver, Colorado. He was paying for it with a Visa Platinum card in the name of Alan Mason.
21
Santa Ana was way south and east, past Anaheim, down in Orange County. The township itself was twenty miles west of the Santa Ana Mountains, where the infamous winds came from. Time to time they blew in, dry, warm, steady, and they sent the whole of LA crazy. Reacher had seen their effects a couple of times. Once he had been in town after liaising with the jarheads at Camp Pendleton. Once he had been on a weekend pass from Fort Irwin. He had seen minor barroom brawls end up as multiple first-degree homicides. He had seen burnt toast end up in wife-beating and prison and divorce. He had seen a guy get bludgeoned to the ground for walking too slow on the sidewalk.
But the winds weren't blowing that day. The air was hot and still and brown and heavy. O'Donnell's rented GPS had a polite insistent female voice that took them off the 5 south of the zoo, opposite Tustin. Then it led them through the spacious grid of streets toward the Orange County Museum of Art. Before they got there it turned them left and right and left again and told them they were approaching their destination. Then it told them they had arrived.
Which they clearly had.
O'Donnell coasted to a stop next to a curbside mail box tricked out to look like a swan. The box was a standard USPS-approved metal item set on a post and painted bright white. Along the spine at the top was attached a vertical shape jigsawed from a wooden board. The shape had a long graceful neck and a scalloped back and a kicked-up tail. It was painted white too, except for the beak, which was dark orange, and the eye, which was black. With the bulk of the box suggesting the swell of the bird's body it was a pretty good representation.
O'Donnell said, "Tell me Swan didn't make that."
"Nephew or niece," Neagley said. "Probably a housewarming gift."
"Which he had to use in case they visited."
"I think it's nice."
Behind the box a cast concrete driveway led to a double gate in a four-foot fence. Parallel to the driveway was a narrower concrete walkway that led to a single gate. The fence was made of green plastic-coated wire. All four gateposts were topped with tiny alloy pineapples. Both gates were closed. Both had store-bought Beware of the Dog signs on them. The driveway led to an attached one-car garage. The walkway led to the front door of a small plain stucco bungalow painted a sun-baked tan. The windows had corrugated metal awnings over them, like eyebrows. The door had a similar thing, narrower, set high. As a whole the place was serious, severe, adequate, unfrivolous. Masculine.
And quiet, and still.
"Feels empty," Neagley said. "Like there's nobody home."
Reacher nodded. The front yard was grass only. No plantings. No flowers. No shrubs. The grass looked dry and slightly long, like a meticulous owner had stopped watering it and mowing it about three weeks ago.
There was no visible alarm system.
"Let's check it out," Reacher said.
They got out of the car and walked to the single gate. It wasn't locked or chained. They walked to the door. Reacher pushed the bell. Waited. No response. There was a slab path around the perimeter of the building. They followed it counterclockwise. There was a personnel door in the side of the garage. It was locked. There was a kitchen door in the back wall of the house. It was locked, too. The top half of it was a single glass panel. Through it was visible a small kitchen, old-fashioned, unrenovated in maybe forty years, but clean and efficient. No mess. No dirty dishes. Appliances in speckled green enamel. A small table and two chairs. Empty dog bowls neatly side by side on a green linoleum floor.
Beyond the kitchen door was a slider with a step down to a small concrete patio. The patio was empty. The slider was locked. Behind it, drapes were partially drawn. A bedroom, maybe used as a den.
The neighborhood was quiet. The house was still and silent, except for a tiny subliminal hum that raised the hairs on Reacher's arms and sounded a faint alarm in the back of his mind.
"Kitchen door?" O'Donnell asked.
Reacher nodded. O'Donnell put his hand in his pocket and came out with his brass knuckles. Ceramic knuckles, technically. But they didn't have much in common with cups and saucers. They were made from some kind of a complex mineral powder, molded under tremendous pressure and bound with epoxy adhesives. They were probably stronger than steel and certainly they were harder than brass. And the molding process allowed wicked shapes in the striking surfaces. Being hit by a set wielded by a guy as big as David O'Donnell would be like being hit by a bowling ball studded with sharks' teeth.