Bad Luck and Trouble

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.

O’Donnell fitted them to his hand and balled his fist. He stepped to the kitchen door and tapped the glass backhand, quite gently, like he was trying to attract an occupant’s attention without startling him. The glass broke and a triangular shard fell backward into the kitchen. O’Donnell’s coordination was so good that his real knuckles stopped before they reached the jagged edges. He tapped twice more and cleared a hole big enough to get a hand through. Then he slipped the knuckles off and pushed his sleeve up on his forearm and threaded his hand through and turned the inside handle.

The door sagged open.

No alarm.

Reacher went in first. Took two steps and stopped. Inside, the hum he had sensed was louder. And there was a smell in the air. Both were unmistakable. He had heard similar sounds and smelled similar smells more times than he wanted to remember.

The hum was a million flies going crazy.

The smell was dead flesh, rotting and decomposing, leaking putrid fluids and gases.

Neagley and O’Donnell crowded in behind him. And stopped.

“We knew anyway,” O’Donnell said, maybe to himself. “This is not a shock.”

“It’s always a shock,” Neagley said. “I hope it always will be.”

She covered her mouth and nose. Reacher stepped to the kitchen door. There was nothing on the hallway floor. But the smell was worse out there, and the noise was louder. There were stray flies in the air, big and blue and shiny, buzzing and darting and hitting the walls with tiny papery sounds. They were in and out of a door that was standing partially open.

“The bathroom,” Reacher said.

The house was laid out like Calvin Franz’s, but it was bigger because the lots were larger in Santa Ana than they had been in Santa Monica. Cheaper real estate, more scope. There was a center hallway and each room was a real room, not just a corner of an open plan space. Kitchen in back, living room in front, separated by a walk-in closet. On the other side of the hallway, two bedrooms separated by a bathroom.

Impossible to say where the smell was coming from. It filled the house.

But the flies were interested in the bathroom.

The air was hot and foul. No sound, except the insane thrashing of the flies. On porcelain, on tile, on papered walls, on the hollow wood of the door.

“Stay here,” Reacher said.

He walked down the hallway. Two paces. Three. He stopped outside the bathroom. Nudged the door with his foot. An angry black cloud of flies billowed out at him. He turned away and batted the air. Turned back. Used his foot again and pushed the door all the way open. Fanned the air and peered through the buzzing insects.

There was a body on the floor.

It was a dog.

Once it had been a German shepherd, big, beautiful, maybe a hundred pounds, maybe a hundred and ten. It was lying on its side. Its hair was dead and matted. Its mouth was open. Flies were feasting on its tongue and its nose and its eyes.

Reacher stepped right into the bathroom. Flies swarmed around his shins. There was nothing in the tub. The toilet was empty. All the water was gone from the throat. There were towels undisturbed on the rails. Dried brown stains on the floor. Not blood. Just leakage from failed sphincters.

Reacher backed out of the bathroom.

“It’s his dog,” he said. “Check the other rooms and the garage.”

There was nothing in the other rooms or the garage. No signs of struggle or disturbance, no sign of Swan himself. They regrouped in the hallway. The flies had settled back to their business in the bathroom.

“What happened here?” Neagley asked.

“Swan went out,” O’Donnell said. “Didn’t come back. The dog starved to death.”

“It died of thirst,” Reacher said.

Nobody spoke.

“The water bowl in the kitchen is dry,” Reacher said. “Then it drank what it could from the toilet. Probably lasted about a week.”

“Awful,” Neagley said.

“You bet. I like dogs. If I lived anywhere I’d have three or four. We’re going to rent a helicopter and we’re going to throw these guys out one by one in little pieces.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

O’Donnell said, “We’re going to need more than we’ve got now.”

Reacher said, “So let’s start looking.”

They took scraps of paper towel from the kitchen and balled them up and shoved them up their noses to combat the smell. Settled down to a long and serious search. O’Donnell took the kitchen. Neagley took the living room. Reacher took Swan’s bedroom.

They found nothing of any significance in any of those three places. Quite apart from the dog’s predicament, it was clear that Swan had gone out expecting to return. The dishwasher was half-loaded and had not been run. There was food in the refrigerator and trash in the kitchen pail. Pajamas were folded under the pillow. A half-finished book was resting on the night table. It had one of Swan’s own business cards jammed in it as a placeholder: Anthony Swan, U.S. Army (Retired), Assistant Director of Corporate Security, New Age Defense Systems, Los Angeles, California. On the bottom of the card was an e-mail address and the same direct-line phone number that Reacher and Neagley had tried so many times.

“What exactly does New Age make?” O’Donnell asked.

“Money,” Reacher said. “Although less than it used to, I guess.”

“Does it have a product or is it all research?”

“The woman we saw claimed they’re manufacturing something somewhere.”

“What exactly?”

“We have no idea.”

The three of them tackled the second bedroom together. The one at the back of the house, with the draped slider and the step down to the empty patio. The room had a bed in it but was clearly used as a den most of the time. There was a desk and a phone and a file cabinet and a wall of shelves piled high with the kind of junk that a sentimental person accumulates.

They started with the desk. Three pairs of eyes, three separate assessments. They found nothing. They moved on to the file cabinet. It was full of the kind of routine paperwork any homeowner has. Property taxes, insurance, canceled checks, paid bills, receipts. There was a personal section. Social Security, state and federal income taxes, a contract of employment from New Age Defense Systems, paycheck stubs. It looked like Swan had made a decent living. In a month he had pulled down what Reacher could make last a year and a half.

There was stuff from a veterinarian. The dog had been female. Her name had been Maisi and her shots had all been up-to-date. She had been old but in good health. There was stuff from an organization called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Swan had been a contributor. Big money. Therefore a worthwhile cause, Reacher guessed. Swan was nobody’s fool.

They checked the shelves. Found a shoe box full of photographs. They were random snaps from Swan’s life and career. Maisi the dog was in some of them. Reacher and Neagley and O’Donnell were in others, and Franz, and Karla Dixon, and Sanchez and Orozco, and Stan Lowrey. All of them long ago in the past, younger, different in crucial ways, blazing with youth and vigor and preoccupation. There were random pairings and trios from offices and squad rooms all over the world. One was a formal group portrait, all nine of them in Class A uniforms after a ceremony for a unit citation. Reacher didn’t remember who had taken the picture. An official photographer, probably. He didn’t remember what the citation had been for, either.

“We need to get going,” Neagley said. “Neighbors might have seen us.”

“We’ve got probable cause,” O’Donnell said. “A friend who lives alone, no answer when we knocked on the door, a bad smell from inside.”

Reacher stepped to the desk and picked up the phone. Hit redial. There was a rapid sequence of electronic blips as the circuit remembered the last number called. Then a purring ring tone. Then Angela Franz answered. Reacher could hear Charlie in the background. He put the phone down.

“The last call he made was to Franz,” he said. “At home in Santa Monica.”

“Reporting for duty,” O’Donnell said. “We knew that already. Doesn’t help us.”

“Nothing here helps us,” Neagley said.

“But what isn’t here might,” Reacher said. “His piece of the Berlin Wall isn’t here. There’s no box of stuff from his desk at New Age.”

“How does that help us?”

“It might establish a time line. You get canned, you box up your stuff, you throw it in the trunk of your car, how long do you leave it there before you bring it in the house and deal with it?”

“A day or two, maybe,” O’Donnell said. “A guy like Swan, he’s extremely pissed when it happens, but fundamentally he’s a squared-away personality. He’d suck it up and move on fast enough.”

“Two days?”

“Max.”

“So all of this went down within two days of when New Age let him go.”

“How does that help us?” Neagley asked again.

“No idea,” Reacher said. “But the more we know the luckier we’ll get.”

They left through the kitchen and closed the door but didn’t relock it. No point. The broken glass made it superfluous. They followed the slab path around the side of the garage to the driveway. Headed back to the curb. It was a quiet neighborhood. A dormitory. Nothing was moving. Reacher scanned left and right for signs of nosy neighbors and saw none. No onlookers, no furtive eyes behind twitching drapes.

But he did see a tan Crown Victoria parked forty yards away.

Facing them.

A guy behind the wheel.