“We figured that,” Harper said. “Feeling was he could name names, maybe lead us to somebody more likely.”
“A bigger fish?”
Harper nodded. “Somebody doing enough business to make it worth killing witnesses.”
Leighton nodded back.
“Theoretically, there might be such a person,” he said, cautiously.
“You got a name?”
Leighton looked at her and shook his head. Leaned back in his chair and rubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes. Suddenly looked very tired.
“Problem?” Reacher asked.
“How long have you been out?” Leighton asked back, eyes closed.
“About three years, I guess,” Reacher said.
Leighton yawned and stretched and returned to an upright position.
“Things have changed,” he said. “Time marches on, right?”
“What’s changed?”
“Everything,” Leighton said. “Well, this, mainly.” He leaned over and tapped his computer monitor with his nail. It made a glassy ringing
“So?”
“So we keep track of everything, much better than we used to. For instance, we know how many M9 Berettas have ever been delivered, we know how many have ever been legitimately issued, and we know how many we got in store. And if those numbers didn’t add up, we’d be worrying about it, believe me.”
“So do the numbers add up?”
Leighton grinned, briefly. “They do now. That’s for damn sure. Nobody’s stolen an M9 Beretta from the U.S. Army in the last year and a half.”
“So what was Bob McGuire doing two months ago?” Reacher asked.
“Selling out the last of his stockpile. He’d been thieving ten years, at least. A little computer analysis made it obvious. Him, and a couple dozen others in a couple dozen different locations. We put procedures in place to dry up the stealing and we rounded up all the bad guys selling whatever they still had left.”
“All of them?”
“Computer says so. We were leaking weapons like crazy, all kinds of descriptions, couple of dozen locations, so we arrest a couple dozen guys, and the leakage has stopped. McGuire was about the last, maybe second-to-last, I’m not sure.”
“No more weapons theft?”
“Yesterday’s news,” Leighton said. “You’re behind the times.”
There was silence.
“Good job,” Reacher said. “Congratulations.”
“Smaller Army,” Leighton said. “More time on our hands.”
“You got them
Leighton just nodded. “All of them. Big push, worldwide. There weren’t that many. Computers did the trick.”
Silence in the office.
“Well, shit, there goes that theory,” she said.
She stared at the floor. Leighton shook his head, cautiously.
“Maybe not,” he said. “We’ve got a theory of our own.”
She looked up again. “The big fish?”
Leighton nodded. “Right.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s only theoretical, as of now.”
“Theoretical?”
“He’s not active,” Leighton said. “He’s not stealing anything. Like I told you, we identified all the leaks and we plugged them all. Couple dozen guys waiting for trial, all the leak locations accounted for. But the way we picked them up was we sent undercover guys in, to buy the stuff. Entrapment. Bob McGuire, for instance, he sold a couple of Berettas to a couple of lieutenants in a bar.”
'We were just there,” Harper said. 'MacStiophan’s, near the New Jersey Turnpike.”
“Right,” Leighton said. “Our guys bought two M9s out of the trunk of his car, two hundred bucks apiece, which is about a third of what the Army pays for them, by the by. So then we haul McGuire in and we start ripping him apart. We know more or less exactly how many pieces he’s stolen over the years, because of the inventory analysis on the computer, and we figure an average price, and we start looking for where the money has gone. And we find about a half of it, either in bank accounts or in the form of stuff he’s bought.”
“So?” Reacher said.
“So nothing, not right then. But we’re pooling information and the story is pretty much the same everywhere. They’ve all got about a half of their money missing. More or less the exact same proportion everywhere. And these guys are not the smartest guys you’ve ever met, right? They couldn’t hide their money from us. And even if they could, why would they all hide exactly half of it? Why wouldn’t some of them hide all of it, or two thirds, or three quarters? You know, whatever, a different proportion in each case?”
“Enter the theoretical big fish,” Reacher said.
Leighton nodded. “Exactly. How else to explain it? It was like a puzzle with a missing piece. We started to figure some kind of a godfather figure, you know, some big guy in the shadows, maybe organizing everything, maybe offering protection in exchange for half the profit.”
“Or half the guns,” Reacher said.
“Right,” Leighton said.
“Somebody running a protection racket,” Harper said. “Like a scam inside a scam.”
“Right,” Leighton said again.
There was a long pause.
“Looks good from our point of view,” Harper said. “Guy like that, he’s smart and capable, and he has to run around taking care of problems in various random locations. Could explain why he’s interested in so many different women. Not because all the women knew
“Timing is good for you too,” Leighton said. “If our guy is your guy, he started planning two, three months ago, when he heard his clients were starting to go down.”
Harper sat forward. “What was the volume of business like two, three years ago?”
'Pretty heavy,” Leighton said. 'You’re really asking how much these women could have seen, right?”
“Right.”
“They could have seen plenty,” Leighton said.
“So how good is your case?” she asked. “Against Bob McGuire, for instance?”
Leighton shrugged. “Not brilliant. We’ve got him for the two pieces he sold to our guys, of course, but that’s only two pieces. The rest of it is basically circumstantial, and the fact the money doesn’t tie up properly weakens the hell out of it.”
“So eliminating the witnesses before the trials makes sense.”
Leighton nodded. “Makes a hell of a lot of sense, I guess.”
“So who is this guy?”
Leighton rubbed his eyes again. “We have no idea. We don’t even know for sure there
“Nobody’s saying anything?”
“Not a damn word. We’ve been asking, two months solid. We’ve got two dozen guys, all of them with their mouths shut tight. We figure the big guy’s really put the frighteners on.”
