by Lee Child
“Not busy,” Reacher said.
“It never is,” Helen said. “This doesn’t really go anywhere people need to get. It was a total waste of money. But I guess they’ve always got to be building something.”
“Look down,” Reacher said.
The highway was raised up on tall stilts. The roadbed was maybe forty feet above ground level. The parapet wall was three feet high. Beyond it, ahead and to their right, was the upper story of the library building. It had an intricate cornice, carved from limestone, and a slate roof. It felt close enough to touch.
“What?” Helen asked.
Reacher pointed with his thumb and then leaned way back so she could see across him. Directly to their right was an unobstructed view down into the plaza, with a perfectly straight line of sight along the narrow bottleneck between the end of the ornamental pool and the plaza wall. And beyond it, dead ahead, perfectly aligned, was the door of the DMV office.
“James Barr was a sniper,” Reacher said. “Not the best, not the worst, but he was one of ours and he trained for more than five years. And training has a purpose. It takes people who aren’t necessarily very smart and it makes them seem smart by beating some basic tactical awareness into them. Until it becomes instinctive.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This is where a trained sniper would have fired from. Up here on the highway. Because from here he’s got his targets walking directly toward him in a straight line. Single file, into a bottleneck. He sets up with one aiming point and never has to vary it. His targets just walk into it, one after the other. Shooting from the side is much harder. The targets are passing right to left in front of him, relatively quickly, he’s got to figure in deflection compensation, he’s got to move the rifle after each shot.”
“But he didn’t fire from here.”
“That’s my point. He should have, but he didn’t.”
“So?”
“He had a minivan. He should have parked it right where we are now. On this exact spot. He should have climbed through into the back seat and opened the sliding door. He should have fired from inside the minivan, Helen. It had tinted windows. The few cars that passed him wouldn’t have seen a thing. He should have fired his six shots, with the much easier aim, and the six cartridge cases would have ejected inside the van, and then he should have shut the door and climbed back into the driver’s seat and driven away. It would have been a much better firing position and he would have left nothing at all behind. No physical evidence of any kind, because nothing would have touched anything except his tires would have touched the road.”
“It’s farther away. It’s a longer distance to shoot.”
“It’s about seventy yards. Barr was reliable at five times that distance. Any military sniper is. With an M1A Super Match, seventy yards is the same thing as point-blank range.”
“Someone would have gotten his plate number. There’s always some traffic. They would have remembered him being here, afterward.”
“His plates were covered with mud. Probably on purpose. It would have been a great getaway. In five minutes he would have been five miles away. Much better than threading through the traffic on the surface streets.”
Helen Rodin said nothing.
“And he was expecting it to be sunny,” Reacher said. “You told me it usually is. Five o’clock in the afternoon, the sun would have been in the west, behind him. He would have been firing out of the sun. That’s an absolutely basic preference for a sniper.”
“Sometimes it rains.”
“That would have been OK, too. It would have washed his tire tracks out of this grit. Either way around, he should have been up here in his van. Every reason in the world says he should have been up here in his van.”
“But he wasn’t.”
“Evidently.”
“Why not?”
“We should get back to your office. That’s where you need to be now. You’ve got a lot of strategizing to do.”
Helen Rodin sat down at her desk. Reacher walked to her window and looked out into the plaza. Looked for the damaged man in the boxy suit. Didn’t see him.
“What strategizing?” Helen asked. “Barr made a choice about where to shoot from, that’s all, and it wasn’t a great choice, according to you, according to some fourteen-year-old military theory that he probably forgot all about the day he quit the service.”
“They don’t forget,” Reacher said.
“I’m not convinced.”
“That’s why he walked out on Chapman. Chapman wasn’t going to be convinced, either. That’s why he asked for me.”
“And you are convinced?”
“I’m looking at a situation where a trained sniper passed up an excellent location in favor of a much worse one.”
“He used a parking garage in Kuwait City. You said so yourself.”
“Because that was a good location. It was directly in line with the apartment building’s door. The four guys were walking directly toward him. They went down like dominoes.”
“This is fourteen years later. He’s not as good as he was. That’s all.”
“They don’t forget,” Reacher said again.
“Whatever; how does it make him less guilty?”
“Because if a person chooses a terrible B instead of a great A, there has to be a reason for it. And reasons have implications.”
“What was his reason?”
“It had to be a real good one, didn’t it? Because he trapped himself inside a building, down at street level, in a congested area, with a much harder shot, in a place whose very nature made it the best crime scene a twenty-year veteran like Emerson has ever seen.”
“OK, tell me why he would do that.”
“Because he was literally going out of his way to leave every last piece of evidence he could.”
She stared at him. “That’s crazy.”
“It was a great crime scene. Everyone was so happy with how great it was, they never stopped to realize it was way too great. Me included. It was like Crime Scene 101, Helen. It was what they must have given Bellantonio on his first day in college. It was too good to be true, therefore it wasn’t true. Everything was wrong with it. Like, why would he wear a raincoat? It was warm and it wasn’t raining and he was in a car and he was never outside. He wore it so he could scrape unique fibers off it onto the pillar. Why would he wear those stupid shoes? You look at a pair of shoes like that and you just know they track every last piece of crap around. Why did he shoot out of the dark? So that people would see his muzzle flash and pinpoint the location so they could go up there afterward and find all the other clues. Why would he scrape his rifle on the wall? That’s a twenty-five-hundred-dollar purchase. Why didn’t he take the traffic cone away with him? It would have been easier just to throw it in the back of his van than leave it there.”
“This is crazy,” Helen said.
“Two clinchers,” Reacher said. “Why did he pay to park? That bothered me from the start. I mean, who does that? But he did. And he did it just so he could leave one little extra clue. Nothing else makes any sense. He wanted to leave a quarter in the meter with his prints on it. Just to tie it all in a nice little bow. To connect it with the shell case, which he probably also left there on purpose.”
“It fell in a trench.”
“He could have gotten it out. There was plenty of wire lying around, according to Bellantonio’s report. It would have taken a second and a half.”
Helen Rodin paused. “What’s the other clincher?”
“That’s easy, once you start looking through the right end of the telescope. He wanted to be looking at the pool from the south, not the west. That was crucial. He wanted to be looking at it lengthwise, not sideways.”
“Why?”
“Because he didn’t miss, Helen. He fired into the pool deliberately. He wanted to put a bullet in the water, down the long diagonal axis, from a low angle, just like a ballistics tank, just so it could be found later, undamaged.
Just so it could tie his barrel to the crime. Sideways wouldn’t have worked for him. Not enough travel distance through the water. The bullet would have hit the wall too hard. It would have gotten damaged.”
“But why the hell would he do all that?”
Reacher didn’t answer.
“Remorse? For fourteen years ago? So he could be found and punished?”
Reacher shook his head. “He would have confessed as soon as they found him. A remorseful person would have been wanting to confess.”
“So why did he do all that?”
“Because he was made to, Helen. Simple as that.”
She stared at him.
“Someone forced him to do it,” Reacher said. “He was forced to do it and he was forced to take the blame for it. He was told to go home afterward and wait for the arrest. That’s why he took the sleeping pill. He was probably going crazy, sitting there waiting for the shoe to fall.”
Helen Rodin said nothing.
“He was coerced,” Reacher said. “Believe it. It’s the only logical explanation. He wasn’t a lone nutcase. That’s why he said, They’ve got the wrong guy. It was a message. He was hoping someone would pick up on it. He meant they should be looking for the other guy. The guy who made him do it. The guy he feels is more responsible.”
Helen Rodin said nothing.
“The puppet master,” Reacher said.
Reacher checked the plaza again, from the window. The ornamental pool was about two-thirds full. The fountain was splashing merrily. The sun was out. There were no loiterers visible.
Helen Rodin got up from her desk. Just stood there behind it.
“I should be turning cartwheels,” she said.
“He still killed five people.”
“But if the coercion was substantial, it’s going to help him.”
Reacher said nothing.
“What do you think it was? A double-dare? Some kind of thrill-seeking?”
“Maybe,” Reacher said. “But I doubt it. On the face of it, James Barr is twenty years too old for double-dares. That’s a kid thing. And they’d have done it from the highway anyway. They would have wanted to survive to do it again.”
“So what was it?”
“Something else entirely. Something real.”
“Should we take it to Emerson?”
“No,” Reacher said.
“I think we should.”
“There are reasons not to.”
“Like?”
“For one, Emerson’s got the best done deal he ever saw. He’s not going to pick at the seams now. No cop would.”
“So what should we do?”
“We should ask ourselves three basic questions,” Reacher said. “Like who, and how, and why. It was a transaction. We need to figure out who benefits. Because James Barr certainly didn’t.”
“The who was whoever set those guys on you last night. Because he liked the way the transaction was going and he didn’t want the boat rocked by some new guy showing up.”
“Correct,” Reacher said.
“So I need to look for that person.”
“You might not want to do that.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“It might get your client killed,” Reacher said.
“He’s in the hospital, guarded night and day.”
“Your client isn’t James Barr. It’s Rosemary Barr. You need to think about what kind of a threat can have made James Barr do what he did. He was looking at life without parole at best. Getting strapped to the gurney at worst. He knew that well in advance. He must have. So why would he go along? Why would he walk meekly into all that? It had to have been one hell of an effective threat, Helen. And what’s the only thing Barr’s got to lose? No wife, no kids, no family at all. Except a sister.”
Helen Rodin said nothing.
“He was told to keep quiet, to the end. Obviously. That’s why he asked for me. It was like a coded communication. Because the puppet can’t talk about the puppet master, not now, not ever, because the threat is still out there. I think he might be trading his life for his sister’s. Which gives you a big problem. If the puppet master sees you poking around, he’ll think the puppet talked. That’s why you can’t go to Emerson.”
“But the puppet didn’t talk. You figured it out.”
“We could put an announcement in the paper. Think anyone would believe it?”
“So what should I do?”
“Nothing,” Reacher said. “There’s nothing you can do. Because the more you try to help James Barr, the more likely you are to get Rosemary Barr killed for it.”
Helen Rodin was quiet for a long moment.
“Can we protect her?” she asked.
“No,” Reacher said. “We can’t. There’s only two of us. We’d need four guys minimum, and a safe house. That would cost a lot of money.”
Helen Rodin came out from behind her desk. Walked around and stood next to Reacher and gazed out of the window. She put her hands on the sill, lightly, like a pianist’s on a keyboard. Then she turned around and leaned against the glass. She was fragrant. Some clean scent a little like soap.
“You could look for him,” she said.
“Could I?” he answered, nothing in his voice.
She nodded. “He made a mistake. He gave you a reason that’s not connected to James Barr. Not directly. He set those boys on you. Therefore you’ve got a legitimate interest in finding their employer. An independent interest. You could go after him and he wouldn’t necessarily conclude that James Barr had talked.”
“I’m not here to help the defense.”
“Then look at it as helping the prosecution. If two people were involved, then two people deserve to go down. Why let the patsy take the fall on his own?”
Reacher said nothing.
“Just look at it as helping me,” Helen said.
Grigor Linsky dialed his cell phone.
“They’re back in her office,” he said. “I can see both of them in the window.”
CHAPTER 6
Reacher rode the elevator to the top of the black glass tower and found a maintenance stairwell that led to the roof. He came out through a triangular metal hutch next to the water tank and the elevator winding gear. The roof was gray tar paper covered with gravel. It was fifteen stories up, which wasn’t much in comparison with some cities. But it felt like the highest point in Indiana. He could see the river to the south. South and west, he could see where the raised highway separated. He walked to the northwest corner, and wind whipped at him and flattened his shirt against his body and his pants against his legs. Directly below him the highway spur curled around behind the library and the tower and ran away due east. Far beyond it in the distance the northward spur carried on straight and met a cloverleaf about two miles away in the haze. A long straight road came off the cloverleaf and ran back toward him. He fixed its position in his mind, because that was the road he wanted.
He rode down to the lobby and set out walking. At street level the air was warm and still. He went north and west, which meant he missed the sports bar by a block. The road he wanted came in at a shallow angle south of it and diverted him away. It was straight and wide. Four lanes. Closest to downtown it had small run-down establishments. There was a gun store with heavy mesh on the windows. There was a barbershop with a sign: Any Style $7. There was an old-fashioned motor court on a lot that once must have stood on the edge of town. Then there was a raw cross street and beyond it the lots got bigger and the buildings got newer. Fresh commercial territory. No existing leases, nothing to tear down. Once-virgin land, now paved over.
He kept on walking and after a mile he passed a fast-food drive-through. Then a tire store. Four New Radials $99! Then a lube franchise and a dealership for small cars from Korea. America’s Best Warranty! He looked ahead, because he figured he was getting close.
Are you a hooker?
No way. I work at the auto parts store.
Not an auto parts store. The auto parts store
. Maybe the only one, or at least the main one. The biggest one. Which in any city is always right there on the same strip as the tire stores and the auto dealers and the lube shops. Which in any city is always a wide new strip near a highway cloverleaf. Cities are all different, but they’re also all the same.
He spent ten minutes hiking past a Ford dealership with about a thousand new pickup trucks lined up shoulder to shoulder with their front wheels up on ramps. Behind them was a giant inflatable gorilla tied down with guy wires. The wires had tinsel bunting attached to them. Beyond the new trucks were old trucks. Trade-ins, Reacher guessed, looking for new homes. Beyond the used lot was a fire road.
And then an auto parts store.
It was a franchise operation, long and low, neat and clean. New blacktop in the lot, urgent messages in the windows. Cheap oil filters, cheap antifreeze, guaranteed brake parts, superduty truck batteries. The parking lot was about a quarter full. There were slammed Hondas with wide pipes and blue headlight bulbs and rubber-band tires on chrome wheels. There were listing pickup trucks with broken springs. There were tired sedans halfway through their third hundred thousand miles. There were two cars alone together in the end bays. The store staff’s cars, Reacher figured. They weren’t allowed to park in the prime front-and-center slots, but they wanted their rides where they could see them through the windows. One was a four-cylinder Chevy, and the other was a small Toyota SUV. The Chevy had chromed silhouettes of reclining women on the mud flaps, which made the Toyota the redhead’s car. That was Reacher’s conclusion.
He went inside. The air was set very cold and smelled of sharp chemical flavors. There were maybe a half-dozen customers walking around, looking. At the front of the store were racks full of glass and chrome things. Dress-up accessories, Reacher guessed. In back were racks of things in red cardboard boxes. Clutch plates, brake pads, radiator hoses, stuff like that, he guessed. Parts. He had never put parts on a car. In the army there had been guys to do it for him, and since the army he had never had a vehicle of his own.
