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