Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child

Franz had on them. Before the deputies even got here. Probably days before.”
    “The deputies saw this and didn’t tell Angela? She didn’t know. She said she had to come over and bring his stuff home.”
    “They wouldn’t tell her. Why upset her more?”
    Reacher backed away on the sidewalk. Stepped to his left and looked at the neat gold lettering on the door: Calvin Franz Discreet Investigations. He raised his hand and blocked out his old friend’s name and in his mind tried David O’Donnell in its place. Then a pair of names: Sanchez & Orozco. Then: Karla Dixon.
    “I wish those guys were answering their damn phones,” he said.
    “This thing is not about us as a group,” Neagley said. “It can’t be. It’s more than seventeen days old and nobody has come after me yet.”
    “Or me,” Reacher said. “But then, neither did Franz.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “If Franz was in trouble, who would he call? The rest of us, that’s who. But not you, because you’re way upscale now and probably too busy. And not me, because nobody apart from you could ever find me. But suppose Franz got himself in deep shit and called the other guys? Because they were all more accessible than the two of us? Suppose they all came running out here to help? Suppose they’re all in the same boat now?”
    “Including Swan?”
    “Swan was the closest. He would have gotten here first.”
    “Possible.”
    “Likely,” Reacher said. “If Franz really needed someone, who else would he trust?”
    “He should have called me,” Neagley said. “I would have come.”
    “Maybe you were next on the list. Maybe at first he thought six people were enough.”
    “But what kind of a thing can disappear six people? Six of our people?”
    “I hate to think,” Reacher said, and then he went quiet. In the past he would have put his people up against anyone. Many times, he had. And they had always come through, against worse opponents than you normally find among the civilian population. Worse, because military training tended to enhance a criminal’s repertoire in several important areas.
    Neagley said, “No point standing here. We’re wasting time. We’re not going to find anything. I think we can assume they got what they came for.”
    Reacher said, “I think we can assume they didn’t.”
    “Why?”
    “Rule of thumb,” Reacher said. “This place is trashed from top to bottom and side to side. Totally. And normally, when you find what you’re looking for, you stop looking. But these guys never stopped looking. So if they found what they came for, by chance they found it in the very last place they chose to look. And how likely is that? Not very. So I think they never stopped looking because they never found what they wanted.”
    “So where is it?”
    “I don’t know. What would it be?”
    “Paperwork, a floppy disc, a CD-ROM, something like that.”
    “Small,” Reacher said.
    “He didn’t take it home. I think he was separating home and work.”
    Think like them. Be them. Reacher turned around and put his back to Franz’s door as if he had just stepped out to the sidewalk. He cupped his hand and looked down at his empty palm. He had done plenty of paperwork in his life, but he had never used a computer disc or burned a CD-ROM. But he knew what one was. It was a five-inch round piece of polycarbonate. Often in a thin plastic case. A floppy disc was smaller. Square, about three inches, maybe? Letter-size paperwork would tri-fold down to eight and a half inches by about four.
    Small.
    But vital.
    Where would Calvin Franz hide something small but vital?
    Neagley said, “Maybe it was in his car. He drove back and forth, apparently. So if it was a CD, he could have kept it in his auto-changer. Like hiding it in plain sight. You know, maybe the fourth slot, after the John Coltrane stuff.”
    “Miles Davis,” Reacher said. “He preferred Miles Davis. He only listened to John Coltrane on Miles Davis albums.”
    “He could