Without Fail

“I guessed,” Reacher said.

Froelich nodded apologetically and picked up the envelope. Opened the flap and pulled out a clear vinyl page protector. There was something in it.

“This is a copy of something that came in the mail,” she said.

She dropped it on the table and Reacher and Neagley inched their chairs closer to take a look. The page protector was a standard office product. The thing inside it was an eight-by-ten color photograph of a single sheet of white paper. It was shown lying on a wooden surface and had a wooden office ruler laid alongside it to indicate scale. It looked like a normal letter-sized sheet. Centered left to right on it, an inch or so above the middle, were five words: You are going to die. The words were crisp and bold, obviously printed from a computer.

The room stayed quiet.

“When did it come?” Reacher asked.

“The Monday after the election,” Froelich said. “First-class mail.”

“Addressed to Armstrong?”

Froelich nodded. “At the Senate. But he hasn’t seen it yet. We open all public mail addressed to protectees. We pass on whatever is appropriate. We didn’t think this was appropriate. What do you think of it?”

“Two things, I guess. First, it’s true.”

“Not if I can help it.”

“You discovered the secret of immortality? Everybody’s going to die, Froelich. I am, you are. Maybe when we’re a hundred, but we aren’t going to live forever. So technically it’s a statement of fact. An accurate prediction, as much as a threat.”

“Which raises a question,” Neagley said. “Is the sender smart enough to have phrased it that way on purpose?”

“What would be the purpose?”

“To avoid prosecution if you find him? Or her? To be able to say, hey, it wasn’t a threat, it was a statement of fact? Anything we can infer from the forensics about the sender’s intelligence?”

Froelich looked at her in surprise. And with a measure of respect.

“We’ll get to that,” she said. “And we’re pretty sure it’s a him, not a her.”

“Why?”

“We’ll get to that,” Froelich said again.

“But why are you worrying about it?” Reacher asked. “That’s my second reaction. Surely those guys get sackloads of threats in the mail.”

Froelich nodded. “Several thousand a year, typically. But most of them are sent to the President. It’s fairly unusual to get one directed specifically at the Vice President. And most of them are on old scraps of paper, written in crayon, bad spelling, crossings out. Defective, in some way. And this one isn’t defective. This one stood out from the start. So we looked at it pretty hard.”

“Where was it mailed?”

“Las Vegas,” Froelich said. “Which doesn’t really help us. In terms of Americans traveling inside America, Vegas has the biggest transient population there is.”

“You’re sure an American sent it?”

“It’s a percentage game. We’ve never had a written threat from a foreigner.”

“And you don’t think he’s a Vegas resident?”

“Very unlikely. We think he traveled there to mail it.”

“Because?” Neagley asked.

“Because of the forensics,” Froelich said. “They’re spectacular. They indicate a very careful and cautious guy.”

“Details?”

“Were you a specialist? In the military police?”

“She was a specialist in breaking people’s necks,” Reacher said. “But I guess she took an intelligent interest in the other stuff.”

“Ignore him,” Neagley said. “I spent six months training in the FBI labs.”

Froelich nodded. “We sent this to the FBI. Their facilities are better than ours.”

There was a knock at the door. Reacher stood up and walked over and put his eye to the peephole. The room-service guy, with the coffee. Reacher opened the door and took the tray from him. A large pot, three upside-down cups, three saucers, no milk or sugar or spoons, and a single pink rose in a thin china vase. He carried the tray back to the table and Froelich moved the photograph to give him room to put it down. Neagley righted the cups and started to pour.

“What did the FBI find?” she asked.

“The envelope was clean,” Froelich said. “Standard brown letter size, gummed flap, metal butterfly closure. The address was printed on a self-adhesive label, presumably by the same computer that printed the message. The message was inserted unfolded. The flap gum was wetted with faucet water. No saliva, no DNA. No fingerprints on the metal closure. There were five sets of prints on the envelope itself. Three of them were postal workers. Their prints are on file as government workers. It’s a condition of their employment. The fourth was the Senate mail handler who passed it on to us. And the fifth was our agent who opened it.”

Neagley nodded. “So forget the envelope. Except inasmuch as the faucet water was pretty thoughtful. This guy’s a reader, keeps up with the times.”

“What about the letter itself?” Reacher asked.

Froelich picked up the photograph and tilted it toward the room light.

“Very weird,” she said. “The FBI lab says the paper was made by the Georgia-Pacific company, their high-bright, twenty-four-pound heavyweight, smooth finish, acid-free laser stock, standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch letter size. Georgia-Pacific is the third-largest supplier into the office market. They sell hundreds of tons a week. So a single sheet is completely untraceable. But it’s a buck or two more expensive per ream than basic paper, so that might mean something. Or it might not.”

“What about the printing?”

“It’s a Hewlett-Packard laser. They can tell by the toner chemistry. Can’t tell which model, because all their black-and-white lasers use the same basic toner powder. The typeface is Times New Roman, from Microsoft Works 4.5 for Windows 95, fourteen point, printed bold.”

“They can narrow it down to a single computer program?”

Froelich nodded. “They’ve got a guy who specializes in that. Typefaces tend to change very subtly between different word processors. The software writers fiddle with the kerning, which is the spacing between individual letters, as opposed to the spacing between words. If you look long enough, you can kind of sense it. Then you can measure it and identify the program. But it doesn’t help us much. There must be a million zillion PCs out there with Works 4.5 bundled in.”

“No prints, I guess,” Neagley said.

“Well, this is where it gets weird,” Froelich answered. She moved the coffee tray an inch and laid the photograph flat. Pointed to the top edge. “Right here on the actual edge we’ve got microscopic traces of talcum dust.” Then she pointed to a spot an inch below the top edge. “And here we’ve got two definite smudges of talcum dust, one on the back, one on the front.”

“Latex gloves,” Neagley said.

“Exactly,” Froelich said. “Disposable latex gloves, like a doctor’s or a dentist’s. They come in boxes of fifty or a hundred pairs. Talcum powder inside the gloves, to help them slip on. But there’s always some loose talcum in the box, so it transfers from the outside of the glove, too. The dust on the top edge is baked, but the smudges aren’t.”

“OK,” Neagley said. “So the guy puts on his gloves, breaks open a new ream of paper, fans it out so it won’t jam, which puts talcum dust on the top edge where he flips it, then he loads the printer, prints out his message, whereby he bakes the dust.”

“Because a laser printer uses heat,” Froelich said. “The toner powder is attracted to the paper by an electrostatic charge in the shape of the required letters, and then a heater bakes it into place permanently. Somewhere around two hundred degrees, I think, momentarily.”

Neagley leaned close. “Then he lifts the paper out of the output tray by clamping it between his finger and thumb, which accounts for the smudges front and back near the top, which aren’t baked because it’s after the heat treatment. And you know what? This is a home office, not a work office.”