Reacher was quiet for a beat.
"It's possible," he said. "I guess. I mean, it never struck me that way. Never. But that could just be a preconception on my part. An unconscious bias. Because those machines are tough. They could make Minnie Mouse sound like Darth Vader."
"You said there was a lightness to the voice. Like a small man."
Reacher nodded. "Yes, I did."
"Therefore like a woman. With the pitch altered an octave, it's plausible."
"It could be," Reacher said. "Certainly whoever it was knew the West Village streets pretty well."
"Like a ten-year resident would. Plus military jargon, from having had a husband and a brother in the Marine Corps."
"Maybe," Reacher said. "Gregory told me a woman showed up in the Hamptons. A fat woman."
"Fat?"
"Gregory said heavyset."
"Surveillance?"
"No, she and Kate talked. They went walking on the beach."
"Maybe it was Dee Marie. Maybe she's fat. Maybe she was asking for money. Maybe Kate blew her off and that was the last straw."
"This is about more than money."
"But that doesn't mean this isn't at least partly about money," Pauling said. "And judging by where she's living Dee Marie needs money. Her share would be more than five million dollars. She might think of it like compensation. For five years of stonewalling. A million dollars a year."
"Maybe," Reacher said again.
"It's a hypothesis," Pauling said. "We shouldn't rule it out."
"No," Reacher said. "We shouldn't."
Pauling pulled a city directory off her shelf and checked the Hudson Street address.
"They're south of Houston," she said. "Between Vandam and Charlton. Not between Clarkson and Leroy. We were wrong."
"Maybe they like a bar a few blocks north," Reacher said. "He couldn't have called himself Charlton Vandam anyway. That's way too phony."
"Whatever, they're only fifteen minutes from here."
"Don't get your hopes up. This is another brick in the wall, that's all. One or both of them, whichever, they must be long gone already. They'd be crazy to stick around."
"You think?"
"They've got blood on their hands and money in their pockets, Pauling. They'll be in the Caymans by now. Or Bermuda, or Venezuela, or wherever the hell people go these days."
"So what do we do?"
"We head over to Hudson Street, and we hope like crazy that the trail is still a little bit warm."
Chapter 36
BETWEEN THEM IN their previous lives and afterward Reacher and Pauling had approached probably a thousand buildings that may or may not have contained hostile suspects. They knew exactly how to do it. There was efficient back-and-forth tactical discussion. They were coming from a position of weakness, in that neither of them was armed and Hobart had met Pauling twice before. She had interviewed Lane's whole crew at length after Anne Lane's disappearance. Chances were Hobart would remember her even after the traumatic five-year interval. Balancing those disadvantages was Reacher's strong conviction that the Hudson Street apartment would be empty. He expected to find nothing there except hastily tossed closets and one last can of rotting trash.
There was no doorman. It wasn't that kind of a building. It was a boxy five-story tenement faced with dull red brick and a black iron fire escape. It was the last hold-out on a block full of design offices and bank branches. It had a chipped black door with an aluminum squawk box chiseled sideways into the frame. Ten black buttons. Ten nametags. Graziano was written neatly against 4L.
"Walk-up," Pauling said. "Central staircase. Long thin front-to-back apartments, two to a floor, one on the left, one on the right. Four-L will be on the fourth floor, on the left."
Reacher tried the door. It was locked and solid.
"What's at the back?" he asked.
"Probably an air shaft between this and the back of the building on Greenwich."
"We could rappel off the roof and come in through her kitchen window."
"I trained for that at Quantico," Pauling said. "But I never did it for real."
"Neither did I," Reacher said. "Not a kitchen. I did a bathroom window once."
"Was that fun?"
"Not really."
"So what shall we do?"
Normally Reacher would have hit a random button and claimed to be a UPS or FedEx guy. But he wasn't sure whether that would work with this particular building. Courier deliveries probably weren't regular occurrences there. And he figured it was almost four o'clock in the afternoon. Not a plausible time for pizza or Chinese food. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner. So he just hit every button except 4L's and said in a loud slurred voice, "Can't find my key." And at least two households must have had an errant member missing because the door buzzed twice and Pauling pushed it open.
Inside was a dim center hallway with a narrow staircase on the right. The staircase ran up one floor and then doubled back and started over again at the front of the building. It was covered in cracked linoleum. It was illuminated with low wattage bulbs. It looked like a death trap.
"Now what?" Pauling asked.
"Now we wait," Reacher said. "At least two people are going to be sticking their heads out looking for whoever lost their key."
So they waited. One minute. Two. Way above them in the gloom a door opened. Then closed again. Then another door opened. Closer. Second floor, maybe. Thirty seconds later it slammed shut.
"OK," Reacher said. "Now we're good to go."
He put his weight on the bottom tread of the staircase and it creaked loudly. The second tread was the same. And the third. As he stepped onto the fourth Pauling started up behind him. By the time he was halfway up the whole structure was creaking and cracking like small arms fire.
They made it to the second floor hallway with no reaction from anywhere.
In front of them at the top of the stairs were two paired doors, one on the left and one on the right. 2L and 2R. Clearly these were railroad flats with front-to-back corridors that dog-legged halfway along their lengths to accommodate the entrances. Probably there were wall-mounted coat hooks just inside the doors. Straight ahead to the living rooms. Kitchens in the back. Turn back on yourself at the door, you would find the bathroom, and then the bedroom at the front of the building, overlooking the street.
"Not so bad," Reacher said, quietly.
Pauling said, "I wouldn't want to carry my groceries up to five."
Since childhood Reacher had never carried groceries into a home. He said, "You could throw a rope off the fire escape. Haul them up through the bedroom."
Pauling said nothing to that. They turned one-eighty together and walked the length of the hallway to the foot of the next flight of stairs. Stepped noisily up to three. 3L and 3R were right there in front of them, identical to the situation one floor below and presumably identical to the situation one floor above.
"Let's do it," Reacher said.
They walked through the hallway and turned and glanced up into the fourth floor gloom. They could see 4R's door. Not 4L's. Reacher went first. He took the stairs two at a time to cut the number of creaks and cracks by half. Pauling followed, putting her feet near the edges of the treads where any staircase is quieter. They made it to the top. Stood there. The building hummed with the kind of subliminal background noises you find in any packed dwelling in a big city. Muted traffic sounds from the street. The blare of car horns and the wail of sirens, dulled by the thickness of walls. Ten refrigerators running, window air conditioners, room fans, TV, radio, electricity buzzing through faulty fluorescent ballasts, water flowing through pipes.