The Hard Way

CHAPTER 35

PAULING SAID, “HOBART moved in with his sister. To a building on Hudson Street that I’m betting is on the block between Clarkson and Leroy.”

“A married sister,” Reacher said. “Otherwise we would have found her name in the phone book.”

“Widowed,” Pauling said. “I guess she kept her married name, but she lives alone now. Or at least she did, until her brother came home from Africa.”

The widowed sister was called Dee Marie Graziano and she was right there in the phone book at an address on Hudson. Pauling dialed up a city tax database and confirmed her domicile.

“Rent-stabilized,” she said. “Been there ten years. Even with the cheap lease it’s going to be a small place.” She copied Dee Marie’s Social Security number and pasted it into a box in a different database. “Thirty-eight years old. Marginal income. Doesn’t work much. Doesn’t even get close to paying federal income taxes. Her late husband was a Marine, too. Lance Corporal Vincent Peter Graziano. He died three years ago.”

“In Iraq?”

“I can’t tell.” Pauling closed the databases and opened Google and typed Dee Marie Graziano. Hit the return key. Glanced at the results and something about them made her click off Google and open LexisNexis. The screen rolled down and came up with a whole page of citations.

“Well, look at this,” she said.

“Tell me,” Reacher said.

“She sued the government. State and the DoD.”

“For what?”

“For news about her brother.”

Pauling hit the print button and fed Reacher the pages one by one as they came off the machine. He read the hard copy and she read the screen. Dee Marie Graziano had waged a five-year campaign to find out what had happened to her brother Clay James Hobart. It had been a long, hard, bitter campaign. That was for sure. At the outset Hobart’s employer Edward Lane of Operational Security Consultants had signed an affidavit swearing that Hobart had been a subcontractor for the United States Government at the relevant time. So Dee Marie had gone ahead and petitioned her congressman and both her senators. She had called out of state to the chairmen of the Armed Services Committees in both the House and the Senate. She had written to newspapers and talked to journalists. She had been prepped for the Larry King show but had been canceled prior to the recording. She had hired an investigator, briefly. Finally she had found a pro bono lawyer and sued the Department of Defense. The Pentagon had denied any knowledge of Clay James Hobart’s activities subsequent to his last day in a USMC uniform. Then Dee Marie had sued the Department of State. Some fifth-rung State lawyer had come back and promised that Hobart would be put on file as a tourist missing in West Africa. So Dee Marie had gone back to pestering journalists and had filed a string of Freedom of Information Act petitions. More than half of them had already been denied and the others were still choked in red tape.

“She was really going at it,” Pauling said. “Wasn’t she? Metaphorically she was lighting a candle for her brother every single day for five years.”

“Like Patti Joseph,” Reacher said. “This is a tale of two sisters.”

“The Pentagon knew Hobart was alive after twelve months. And they knew where he was. But they kept quiet for four years. They let this poor woman suffer.”

“What was she going to do anyway? Lock and load and go to Africa and rescue him single-handed? Bring him back to stand trial for Anne Lane’s homicide?”

“There was never any evidence against him.”

“Whatever, keeping her in the dark was probably the best policy.”

“Spoken like a true military man.”

“Like the FBI is a fount of free information?”

“She could have gone over there and petitioned the new government in Burkina Faso personally.”

“That only works in the movies.”

“You’re very cynical, you know that?”

“I don’t have a cynical bone in my body. I’m realistic, is all. Shit happens.”

Pauling went quiet.

“What?” Reacher said.

“You said lock and load. You said Dee Marie could lock and load and go to Africa.”

“No, I said she couldn’t.”

“But we agree that Hobart picked up a new partner, right?” she said. “As soon as he got back? One that he trusts, and real fast?”

“Clearly,” Reacher said.

“Could it be the sister?”

Reacher said nothing.

“The trust would be there,” Pauling said. “Wouldn’t it? Automatically? And she was there, which would explain the speed. And the commitment would have been there, on her part. Commitment, and a lot of anger. So is it possible that the voice you heard on the car phone was a woman?”

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.”