“He will.”
THERE WAS GOOD news and bad news at the public library. Plenty of people called Jacob listed in the phone books for Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Long Island, Westchester, the Jersey shore, Connecticut. Reacher gave it an hour’s radius from the city. People an hour away turn instinctively to the city when they need something. Farther out than that, maybe they don’t. He made marks with his pencil in his notebook and counted 129 potential candidates for the anxious Mrs. Jacob.
But the Yellow Pages showed no private investigators called Costello. Plenty of private Costellos in the white pages, but no professional listings under that name. Reacher sighed. He was disappointed, but not surprised. It would have been too good to be true to open up the book and see Costello Investigations-We Specialize in Finding Ex-MPs Down in the Keys.
Plenty of the agencies had generic names, a lot of them competing for the head of the alphabetical listings with a capital A as their first letter. Ace, Acme, A-One, AA Investigators. Others had plain geographical connotations, like Manhattan or the Bronx. Some were heading upmarket by using the words Paralegal Services. One was claiming the heritage trade by calling itself Gumshoe. Two were staffed only by women, working only for women.
He pulled the White Pages back and turned the page in his notebook and copied fifteen numbers for the NYPD. Sat for a while, weighing his options. Then he walked outside, past the giant crouching lions and over to a pay phone on the sidewalk. He propped his notebook on top of the phone with all the quarters he had in his pocket and started down his list of precinct houses. Each one, he asked for administration. He figured he would get some grizzled old desk sergeant who would know everything worth knowing.
He got the hit on his fourth call. The first three precincts were unable to help, without sounding any too regretful about it. The fourth call started the same way, a ring tone, a quick transfer, a long pause, then a wheezing acknowledgment as the phone was answered deep in the bowels of some grimy file room.
“I’m looking for a guy called Costello,” he said. “Retired from the job and set up private, maybe on his own, maybe for somebody else. Probably about sixty.”
“Yeah, who are you?” a voice replied. Identical accent. Could have been Costello himself on the line.
“Name’s Carter,” Reacher said. “Like the president.”
“So what you want with Costello, Mr. Carter?”
“I got something for him, but I lost his card,” Reacher said. “Can’t find his number in the book.”
“That’s because Costello ain’t in the book. He only works for lawyers. He don’t work for the general public.”
“So you know him?”
“Know him? Of course I know him. He worked detective out of this building fifteen years. Not surprising I would know him.”
“You know where his office is?”
“Down in the Village someplace,” the voice said, and stopped.
Reacher sighed away from the phone. Like pulling teeth.
“You know where in the Village?”
“ Greenwich Avenue, if I recall.”
“You got a street number?”
“No.”
“Phone number?”
“No.”
“You know a woman called Jacob?”
“No, should I?”
“Just a long shot,” Reacher said. “She was his client.”
“Never heard of her.”
“OK, thanks for your help,” Reacher said.
“Yeah,” the voice said.
Reacher hung up and walked back up the steps and inside. Checked the Manhattan white pages again for a Costello on Greenwich Avenue. No listing. He put the books back on the shelf and went back out into the sun and started walking.
GREENWICH AVENUE WAS a long, straight street running diagonally southeast from Fourteenth Street and Eighth to Eighth Street and Sixth. It was lined on both sides with pleasant low-rise Village buildings, some of them with scooped-out semibasement floors in use as small stores and galleries. Reacher walked the northern side first, and found nothing. Dodged the traffic at the bottom and came back on the other side and found a small brass plaque exactly halfway up the street, fixed to the stone frame of a doorway. The plaque was a well-polished rectangle, one of a cluster, and it said Costello. The door was black, and it was open. Inside was a small lobby with a notice board, ridged felt press-in white plastic letters, indicating the building was subdivided into ten small office suites. Suite five was marked Costello. Beyond the lobby was a glass door, locked. Reacher pressed the buzzer for five. No reply. He used his knuckle and leaned on it, but it got him nowhere. So he pressed six. A voice came back, distorted.
“Yes?”
“UPS,” he said, and the glass door buzzed and clicked open.
It was a three-floor building, four if you counted the separate basement. Suites one, two and three were on the first floor. He went up the stairs and found suite four on his left, six on his right, and five right at the back of the building with its door tucked under the angle of the staircase as it wound up to the third story.
The door was a polished mahogany affair, and it was standing open. Not wide open, but open enough to be obvious. Reacher pushed it with his toe, and it swung on its hinges to reveal a small quiet reception area the size of a motel room. It was decorated in a pastel color somewhere between light gray and light blue. Thick carpet on the floor. A secretary’s desk in the shape of the letter L, with a complicated telephone and a sleek computer. A filing cabinet and a sofa. There was a window with pebbled glass and another door leading straight ahead to an inner office.
The reception area was empty, and it was quiet. Reacher stepped inside and closed the door behind him with his heel. The lock was latched back, like the office had been opened up for business. He padded across the carpet to the inner door. Wrapped his hand in his shirttail and turned the knob. Stepped through into a second room of equal size. Costello’s room. There were framed black-and-white photographs of younger versions of the man he had met in the Keys standing with police commissioners and captains and local politicians Reacher did not recognize. Costello had been a thin man, many years ago. The pictures showed him getting fatter as he got older, like a diet advertisement in reverse. The photographs were grouped on a wall to the right of a desk. The desk held a blotter and an old-fashioned inkwell and a telephone and behind it was a leather chair, crushed into the shape of a heavy man. The left-hand wall held a window with more obscure glass and a line of locked cabinets. In front of the desk was a pair of client chairs, neatly arranged at a comfortable and symmetrical angle.
Reacher stepped back to the outer office. There was a smell of perfume in the air. He threaded around the secretary’s desk and found a woman’s bag, open, neatly stowed against the vanity panel to the left of the chair. The flap was folded back, revealing a soft leather wallet and a plastic pack of tissues. He took out his pencil and used the eraser end to poke the tissues aside. Underneath them was a clutter of cosmetics and a bunch of keys and the soft aroma of expensive cologne.
The computer monitor was swirling with a watery screensaver. He used the pencil to nudge the mouse. The screen crackled and cleared and revealed a half-finished letter. The cursor was blinking patiently in the middle of an uncompleted word. That morning’s date sat underneath a letterhead. Reacher thought about Costello’s body, sprawled out on the sidewalk next to the Key West graveyard, and he glanced between the tidy placement of the absent woman’s bag, the open door, the uncompleted word, and he shivered.
Then he used the pencil to exit the word processor. A window opened and asked him if he wanted to save the changes to the letter. He paused and hit
