Jack In A Box by Diane Capri Read Free Book Online

1.
    FBI SPECIAL AGENT KIM OTTO’S slowly descending eyelids abraded like forty-grit sandpaper along her corneas and rested briefly before ascending in gouging retraction. How long had she been sitting here? The FBI headquarters building was quiet here in the basement. Activity was limited to higher floors where essential matters were handled.
    “What are you missing?” she asked the empty room as if she expected the answer to be revealed, when she expected nothing of the sort. If she was going to find anything at all, she’d have found it long before now. But she couldn’t give up, so she thought it through again.
    She’d begun by searching for general information. Finding none, she’d narrowed her search to the fingerprints. Fingerprints never changed, never disappeared, never failed to identify. Every law enforcement officer knew a fingerprint was worth a thousand eyewitness reports and often better even than DNA.
    But like DNA, fingerprints were only useful when compared to known identities. Law enforcement files around the globe were filled with unidentified prints and DNA. The first order of business was to find proof of positive identity. She’d thought that would be easy. Wrong.
    Jack Reacher must have been fingerprinted by the Army, like every other soldier. Maybe a single set of prints made all those years ago could have been misplaced in the days before computers ruled the world. Or maybe accidentally destroyed somehow.
    Kim thought not.
    Relevant military files were integrated with FBI and other agency files now, Kim knew. But Reacher’s army discharge was long before 9/11. Back in those days, government agencies didn’t share information in the way they did now. Some old files involving military personnel instead of criminal defendants were not searchable in the various FBI databases Kim had the necessary security clearance to examine without raising the alarms she didn’t want to trigger.
    Her plan was to check the military files last because they were the oldest. Her accounting background led her to prioritize the most recent information first, or first in, last out.
    Reacher wasn’t an army grunt who’d been drafted, served a quick term, and mustered out. He’d spent thirteen years in service to his country, including his last stint with the military police. As an MP his reference fingerprints would have been routinely used to exclude his prints from those left by witnesses and suspects at crime scenes.
    Kim should have found at least a few Reacher exemplars in the FBI databases. But she hadn’t.
    Nor had she really expected to find anything relevant, although she hadn’t abandoned all hope. But her realistic plan was only to confirm her assumption that nothing concerning Jack Reacher existed in FBI files. After that, she and Gaspar could move on to conducting additional interviews with victims, witnesses, reporting parties, and informants. Always assuming they could find any of the above.
    “Coffee. You need a caffeine jolt,” Kim said aloud.
    She stood, eyes closed to avoid the gouging, stretched like a cat, then a downward dog, working the kinks out of her stiff muscles. She heard nothing but her own breathing. She stretched her neck and shoulders again before making her way to the elevator in search of java, nectar of the gods.
    Kim pressed the elevator button and completed another round of stretches while she waited. Lights above the door flashed up and down and up and down, stopping at floors high above. The basement was low priority, below stops where others were consumed by important activity, Kim concluded. The only coffee at this hour would be inside the busiest sectors of the building, places she didn’t want to be seen. Yet. . . She sighed, shrugged, headed for the stairs.
    When she exited on the ground floor her personal cell phone vibrated. She checked the caller ID before answering.
    “Good morning, Dad. You’re up early.”

2.
    FBI SPECIAL AGENT CARLOS GASPAR had planned to