GREENWICH AVENUE WAS a long, straight street running diagonally southeast from Fourteenth Street and Eighth to Eighth Street and Sixth. It was lined on both sides with pleasant low-rise Village buildings, some of them with scooped-out semibasement floors in use as small stores and galleries. Reacher walked the northern side first, and found nothing. Dodged the traffic at the bottom and came back on the other side and found a small brass plaque exactly halfway up the street, fixed to the stone frame of a doorway. The plaque was a well-polished rectangle, one of a cluster, and it said Costello. The door was black, and it was open. Inside was a small lobby with a notice board, ridged felt press-in white plastic letters, indicating the building was subdivided into ten small office suites. Suite five was marked Costello. Beyond the lobby was a glass door, locked. Reacher pressed the buzzer for five. No reply. He used his knuckle and leaned on it, but it got him nowhere. So he pressed six. A voice came back, distorted.

“Yes?”

“UPS,” he said, and the glass door buzzed and clicked open.

It was a three-floor building, four if you counted the separate basement. Suites one, two and three were on the first floor. He went up the stairs and found suite four on his left, six on his right, and five right at the back of the building with its door tucked under the angle of the staircase as it wound up to the third story.

The door was a polished mahogany affair, and it was standing open. Not wide open, but open enough to be obvious. Reacher pushed it with his toe, and it swung on its hinges to reveal a small quiet reception area the size of a motel room. It was decorated in a pastel color somewhere between light gray and light blue. Thick carpet on the floor. A secretary’s desk in the shape of the letter L, with a complicated telephone and a sleek computer. A filing cabinet and a sofa. There was a window with pebbled glass and another door leading straight ahead to an inner office.

The reception area was empty, and it was quiet. Reacher stepped inside and closed the door behind him with his heel. The lock was latched back, like the office had been opened up for business. He padded across the carpet to the inner door. Wrapped his hand in his shirttail and turned the knob. Stepped through into a second room of equal size. Costello’s room. There were framed black-and-white photographs of younger versions of the man he had met in the Keys standing with police commissioners and captains and local politicians Reacher did not recognize. Costello had been a thin man, many years ago. The pictures showed him getting fatter as he got older, like a diet advertisement in reverse. The photographs were grouped on a wall to the right of a desk. The desk held a blotter and an old-fashioned inkwell and a telephone and behind it was a leather chair, crushed into the shape of a heavy man. The left-hand wall held a window with more obscure glass and a line of locked cabinets. In front of the desk was a pair of client chairs, neatly arranged at a comfortable and symmetrical angle.

Reacher stepped back to the outer office. There was a smell of perfume in the air. He threaded around the secretary’s desk and found a woman’s bag, open, neatly stowed against the vanity panel to the left of the chair. The flap was folded back, revealing a soft leather wallet and a plastic pack of tissues. He took out his pencil and used the eraser end to poke the tissues aside. Underneath them was a clutter of cosmetics and a bunch of keys and the soft aroma of expensive cologne.

The computer monitor was swirling with a watery screensaver. He used the pencil to nudge the mouse. The screen crackled and cleared and revealed a half-finished letter. The cursor was blinking patiently in the middle of an uncompleted word. That morning’s date sat underneath a letterhead. Reacher thought about Costello’s body, sprawled out on the sidewalk next to the Key West graveyard, and he glanced between the tidy placement of the absent woman’s bag, the open door, the uncompleted word, and he shivered.

Then he used the pencil to exit the word processor. A window opened and asked him if he wanted to save the changes to the letter. He paused and hit no. Opened the file manager screen and checked the directories. He was looking for an invoice. It was clear from looking around that Costello ran a neat operation. Neat enough to invoice for a retainer before he went looking for Jack Reacher. But when did that search start? It must have followed a clear sequence. Mrs. Jacob’s instructions coming at the outset, nothing except a name, a vague description about his size, his Army service. Costello must then have called the military’s central storage facility, a carefully guarded complex in St. Louis that holds every piece of paper relating to every man and woman who has ever served in uniform. Carefully guarded in two ways, physically with gates and wire, and bureaucratically with a thick layer of obstruction designed to discourage frivolous access. After patient inquiries he would have discovered the honorable discharge. Then a puzzled pause, staring at a dead end. Then the long shot with the bank account. A call to an old buddy, favors called in, strings pulled. Maybe a blurry faxed printout from Virginia, maybe a blow-by-blow narrative of credits and debits over the telephone. Then the hurried flight south, the questions up and down Duval, the two guys, the fists, the linoleum knife.

A reasonably short sequence, but St. Louis and Virginia would have been major delays. Reacher’s guess was getting good information out of the records office would take three days, maybe four, for a citizen like Costello. The Virginia bank might not have been any quicker. Favors aren’t necessarily granted immediately. The timing has got to be right. Call it a total of seven days’ bureaucratic fudge, separated by a day’s thinking time, plus a day at the start and a day at the end. Maybe altogether ten days since Mrs. Jacob set the whole thing in motion.

He clicked on a subdirectory labeled INVOICES. The right-hand side of the screen came up with a long field of file names, stacked alphabetically. He ran the cursor down the list and spooled them up from the bottom. No Jacob in the Js. Mostly they were just initials, long acronyms maybe standing for law firm names. He checked the dates. Nothing from exactly ten days ago. But there was one nine days old. Maybe Costello was faster than he thought, or maybe his secretary was slower. It was labeled SGR amp;T-09. He clicked on it and the hard drive chattered and the screen came up with a thousand-dollar retainer against a missing persons inquiry, billed to a Wall Street firm called Spencer Gutman Ricker and Talbot. There was a billing address, but no phone number.

He quit file manager and entered the database. Searched for SGR amp;T again and came up with a page showing the same address, but this time with numbers for phone, fax, telex and E-mail. He leaned down and used his fingers and thumb to pull a couple of tissues from the secretary’s pack. Wrapped one around the telephone receiver and opened the other flat and laid it across the keypad. Dialed the number by pressing through it. There was ring tone for a second, and then the connection was made.

“Spencer Gutman,” a bright voice said. “How may we help you?”

“Mrs. Jacob, please,” Reacher said, busily.

“One moment,” the voice said.

There was tinny music and then a man’s voice. He sounded quick, but deferential. Maybe an assistant.

“Mrs. Jacob, please,” Reacher said again.

The guy sounded busy and harrassed. “She already left for Garrison, and I really don’t know when she’ll be in the office again, I’m afraid.”

“Do you have her address in Garrison?”

“Hers?” the guy said, surprised. “Or his?”

Reacher paused and listened to the surprise and took a chance.