Lee Child - Without Fail

“Latex gloves,” Neagley said.

“Exactly,” Froelich said. “Disposable latex gloves, like a doctor’s or a dentist’s. They come in boxes of fifty or a hundred pairs. Talcum powder inside the gloves, to help them slip on. But there’s always some loose talcum in the box, so it transfers from the outside of the glove, too. The dust on the top edge is baked, but the smudges aren’t.”

“OK,” Neagley said. “So the guy puts on his gloves, breaks open a new ream of paper, fans it out so it won’t jam, which puts talcum dust on the top edge where he flips it, then he loads the printer, prints out his message, whereby he bakes the dust.”

“Because a laser printer uses heat,” Froelich said. “The toner powder is attracted to the paper by an electrostatic charge in the shape of the required letters, and then a heater bakes it into place permanently. Somewhere around two hundred degrees, I think, momentarily.”

Neagley leaned close. “Then he lifts the paper out of the output tray by clamping it between his finger and thumb, which accounts for the smudges front and back near the top, which aren’t baked because it’s after the heat treatment. And you know what? This is a home office, not a work office.”

“Why?”

“The front and back finger-clamping thing means the paper is coming out of the printer vertically. Popping up, like a toaster. If it was feeding out flat the marks would be different. There would be a smear on the front where he slides it. Less of a mark on the back. And the only Hewlett-Packard lasers that feed the paper vertically are the little ones. Home-office things. I’ve got one myself. It’s too slow to use high-volume. And the toner cartridge only lasts twenty-five hundred pages. Strictly amateur. So this guy did this in his den at home.”

Froelich nodded. “Stands to reason, I guess. He’s going to look a little strange using latex gloves in front of other people in an office.”

Neagley smiled, like she was making progress. “OK, he’s in his den, he lifts the message out of his printer and slides it straight into the envelope and seals it with faucet water while he’s still got his gloves on. Hence none of his prints.”

Froelich’s face changed. “No, this is where it gets very weird.” She pointed to the photograph. Laid her fingernail on a spot an inch below the printed message, and a little ways to the right of center. “What might we expect to find here, if this were a regular letter, for instance?”

“A signature,” Reacher said.

“Exactly,” Froelich said. She kept her fingernail on the spot. “And what we’ve got here is a thumbprint. A big, clear, definite thumbprint. Obviously deliberate. Bold as anything, exactly vertical, clear as a bell. Way too big to be a woman’s. He’s signed the message with his thumb.”

Reacher pulled the photograph out from under Froelich’s finger and studied it.

“You’re tracing the print, obviously,” Neagley said.

“They won’t find anything,” Reacher said. “The guy must be completely confident his prints aren’t on file anywhere.”

“We’ve come up blank so far,” Froelich said.

“Which is very weird,” Reacher said. “He signs the note with his thumbprint, which he’s happy to do because his prints aren’t on file anywhere, but he goes to extraordinary lengths to make sure his prints don’t appear anywhere else on the letter or the envelope. Why?”

“Effect?” Neagley said. “Drama? Neatness?”

“But it explains the expensive paper,” Reacher said. “The smooth coating holds the print. Cheap paper would be too porous.”

“What did they use at the lab?” Neagley asked. “Iodine fuming? Ninhydrin?”

Froelich shook her head. “It came right up on the fluoroscope.”

Reacher was quiet for a spell, just looking at the photograph. Full dark had fallen outside the window. Shiny, damp, city dark.

“What else?” he said to Froelich. “Why are you so uptight?”

“Should she need something else?” Neagley asked him.

He nodded. You know how these organizations work , he had told her.

“There has to be something else,” he said. “I mean, OK, this is scary and challenging and intriguing, I guess, but she’s really panicking here.”

Froelich sighed and picked up her envelope and slid out a second item. It was identical to the first in almost every respect. A plastic page protector, with an eight-by-ten color photograph inside it. The photograph showed a sheet of white paper. There were eight words printed on it: Vice-President-elect Armstrong is going to die . The paper was lying on a different surface, and it had a different ruler next to it. The surface was gray laminate, and the ruler was clear plastic.

“It’s virtually identical,” Froelich said. “The forensics are the same, and it’s got the same thumbprint for a signature.”

“And?”

“It showed up on my boss’s desk,” Froelich said. “One morning, it was just there . No envelope, no nothing. And absolutely no way of telling how it got there.”

Reacher stood up and moved to the window. Found the track cord and pulled the drapes closed. No real reason. It just felt like the appropriate thing to do.

“When did it show up?” he asked.

“Three days after the first one came in the mail,” Froelich said.

“Aimed at you,” Neagley said. “Rather than Armstrong himself. Why? To make sure you take the first one seriously?”

“We were already taking it seriously,” Froelich said.

“When does Armstrong leave Camp David?” Reacher asked.

“They’ll have dinner there tonight,” Froelich said. “Probably shoot the breeze for a spell. They’ll fly back after midnight, I guess.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“Guy called Stuyvesant,” Froelich said. “Like the cigarette.”

“You tell him about the last five days?”

Froelich shook her head. “I decided not to.”

“Wise,” Reacher said. “Exactly what do you want us to do?”

Froelich was quiet for a spell.

“I don’t really know,” she said. “I’ve asked myself that for six days, ever since I decided to find you. I asked myself, in a situation like this, what do I really want? And you know what? I really want to talk to somebody. Specifically, I really want to talk to Joe. Because there are complexities here, aren’t there? You can see that, right? And Joe would find a way through them. He was smart like that.”

“You want me to be Joe?” Reacher said.

“No, I want Joe to be still alive.”

Reacher nodded. “You and me both. But he ain’t.”

“So maybe you could be the next best thing.”

Then she was quiet again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That didn’t come out very well.”

“Tell me about the Neanderthals,” Reacher said. “In your office.”

She nodded. “That was my first thought, too.”

“It’s a definite possibility,” he said. “Some guy gets all jealous and resentful, lays all this stuff on you and hopes you’ll crack up and look stupid.”

“My first thought,” she said again.

“Any likely candidates in particular?”

She shrugged. “On the surface, none of them. Below the surface, any of them. There are six guys on my old pay grade who got passed over when I got the promotion. Each one of them has got friends and allies and supporters in the grades below. Like networks inside networks. Could be anybody.”

“Gut feeling?”

She shook her head. “I can’t come up with a favorite. And all their prints are on file. Condition of employment for us too. And this period between the election and the inauguration is very busy. We’re stretched. Nobody’s had time for a weekend in Vegas.”