Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “Damage?”

  “Broken bones, at least. Maybe he gets a head injury. Maybe he winds up in the coma ward along with his buddy James Barr.”

  “What about the lawyer?”

  “Leave her alone. For now. We’ll open that can of worms later. If we need to.”

  Helen Rodin spent an hour at her desk. She took three calls. The first was from Franklin. He was bailing out.

  “I’m sorry, but you’re going to lose,” the investigator said. “And I’ve got a business to run. I can’t put in unbilled hours on this anymore.”

  “Nobody likes hopeless cases,” Helen said diplomatically. She was going to need him again in the future. No point in holding his feet to the fire.

  “Not pro bono hopeless cases,” Franklin said.

  “If I get a budget, will you come back on board?”

  “Sure,” Franklin said. “Just call me.”

  Then they hung up, all proprieties observed, their relationship preserved. The next call came ten minutes later. It was from her father, who sounded full of concern.

  “You shouldn’t have taken this case, you know,” he said.

  “It wasn’t like I was spoiled for choice,” Helen said.

  “Losing might be winning, if you know what I mean.”

  “Winning might be winning, too.”

  “No, winning will be losing. You need to understand that.”

  “Did you ever set out to lose a case?” she asked.

  Her father said nothing. Then he went fishing.

  “Did Jack Reacher find you?” he asked, meaning: Should I be worried?

  “He found me,” she said, keeping her voice light.

  “Was he interesting?” Meaning: Should I be very worried?

  “He’s certainly given me something to think about.”

  “Well, should we discuss it?” Meaning: Please tell me.

  “I’m sure we will soon. When the time is right.”

  They small-talked for a minute more and arranged to meet for dinner. He tried again: Please tell me. She didn’t. Then they hung up. Helen smiled. She hadn’t lied. Hadn’t even really bluffed. But she felt she had participated. The law was a game, and like any game it had a psychological component.

  The third call was from Rosemary Barr at the hospital.

  “James is waking up,” she said. “He coughed up his breathing tube. He’s coming out of the coma.”

  “Is he talking?”

  “The doctors say he might be tomorrow.”

  “Will he remember anything?”

  “The doctors say it’s possible.”

  An hour later Reacher left the Metropole. He stayed east of First Street and headed north toward the off-brand stores he had seen near the courthouse. He wanted clothes. Something local. Maybe not a set of bib overalls, but certainly something more generic than his Miami gear. Because he figured he might head to Seattle next. For the coffee. And he couldn’t walk around Seattle in a bright yellow shirt.

  He found a store and bought a pair of pants that the label called taupe and he called olive drab. He found a flannel shirt almost the same color. Plus underwear. And he invested in a pair of socks. He changed in the cubicle and threw his old stuff away in the store’s own trash bin. Forty bucks, for what he hoped would be four days’ wear. Extravagant, but it was worth ten bucks a day to him not to carry a bag.

  He came out and walked west toward the afternoon sun. The shirt was too thick for the weather, but he could regulate it by rolling up the sleeves and opening a second button. It was OK. It would be fine for Seattle.

  He came out into the plaza and saw that the fountain had been restarted. It was refilling the pool, very slowly. The mud on the bottom was an inch deep and moving in slow swirls. Some people were standing and watching it. Others were walking. But nobody was using the short route past the memorial tributes, where Barr’s victims had died. Maybe nobody would ever again. Instead everyone was looping the long way around, past the NBC sign. Instinctively, respectfully, fearfully; Reacher wasn’t sure.

  He picked his way among the flowers and sat on the low wall, with the sound of the fountain behind him and the parking garage in front of him. One shoulder was warmed by the sun and the other was cool in the shade. He could feel the leftover sand under his feet. He looked to his left and watched the DMV building’s door. Looked to his right and watched the cars on the raised highway. They tracked through the curve, high up in the air, one after the other, single file, in a single lane. There weren’t many of them. Traffic up there was light, even though First Street itself was already building up to the afternoon rush hour. Then he looked to his left again and saw Helen Rodin sitting down beside him. She was out of breath.

  “I was wrong,” she said. “You are a hard man to find.”

  “But you triumphed nonetheless,” he said.

  “Only because I saw you from my window. I ran all the way down, hoping you wouldn’t wander off. That was a half hour after calling all the hotels in town and being told you aren’t registered anywhere.”

  “What hotels don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  “James Barr is waking up. He might be talking tomorrow.”

  “Or he might not.”

  “You know much about head injuries?”

  “Only the ones I cause.”

  “I want you to do something for me.”

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “You can help me,” she said. “With something important.”

  “Can I?”

  “And you can help yourself.”

  He said nothing.

  “I want you to be my evidence analyst,” she said.

  “You’ve got Franklin for that.”

  She shook her head. “Franklin’s too close to his old PD buddies. He won’t be critical enough. He won’t want to tear into them.”

  “And I will? I want Barr to go down, remember.”

  “Exactly. That’s exactly why you should do it. You want to confirm that they’ve got an unbreakable case. Then you can leave town and be happy.”

  “Would I tell you if I found a hole?”

  “I’d see it in your eyes. And I’d know from what you did next. If you go, it’s a strong case. If you stay around, it’s weak.”

  “Franklin quit, didn’t he?”

  She paused, and then she nodded. “This case is a loser, all ways around. I’m doing it pro bono. Because nobody else will. But Franklin’s got a business to run.”

  “So he won’t do it for free, but I will?”

  “You need to do it. I think you’re already planning to do it. That’s why you went to see my father first. He’s confident, for sure. You saw that. But you still want a peek at the data. You were a thorough investigator. You said so yourself. You’re a perfectionist. You want to be able to leave town knowing everything is buttoned down tight, according to your own standards.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “This gets you a real good look,” she said. “It’s their constitutional obligation. They have to show us everything. The defense gets a full discovery process.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “You’ve got no choice,” she said. “They’re not going to show you anything otherwise. They don’t show stuff to strangers off the street.”

  A real good look. Leave town and be happy. No choice.

  “OK,” Reacher said.

  She pointed. “Walk four blocks west and one block south. The PD is right there. I’ll go upstairs and call Emerson.”

  “We’re doing this now?”

  “James Barr is waking up. I need this stuff out of the way early. I’m going to be spending most of tomorrow trying to find a psychiatrist who will work for free. A medical plea is still our best bet.”

  ______

  Reacher walked four blocks west and one block south. It took him under the raised highway and brought him to a corner. The PD had the whole block. Their building occupied most of it and there was an L-shaped parking lot on the rest of
it for their vehicles. There were black-and-whites slotted in at angles, and unmarked detective cars, and a crime-scene van, and a SWAT truck. The building itself was made of glazed tan brick. It had a flat roof with big HVAC ducts all over it. There were bars on all the windows. Razor wire here and there around the perimeter.

  He went inside and got directions and found Emerson waiting for him behind his desk. Reacher recognized him from his TV spot on Saturday morning. Same guy, pale, quiet, competent, not big, not small. In person he looked like he had been a cop since birth. Since the moment of conception, maybe. It was in his pores. In his DNA. He was wearing gray flannel pants and a white short-sleeve shirt. Open neck. No tie. There was a tweed jacket on the back of his chair. His face and his body were a little shapeless, like he had been molded by constant pressures.

  “Welcome to Indiana,” he said.

  Reacher said nothing.

  “I mean it,” Emerson said. “Really. We love it when old friends of the accused show up to tear our work to shreds.”

  “I’m here for his lawyer,” Reacher said. “Not as a friend.”

  Emerson nodded.

  “I’ll give you the background myself,” he said. “Then my crime-scene guy will walk you through the particulars. You can see absolutely anything you want and you can ask absolutely anything you want.”

  Reacher smiled. He had been a cop of sorts himself for thirteen long years, on a tough beat, and he knew the language and all its dialects. He knew the tone and he understood the nuances. And the way Emerson spoke told him things. It told him that despite the initial hostility, this was a guy secretly happy to meet with a critic. Because he knew for sure he had a solid-gold slam-dunk case.

  “You knew James Barr pretty well, am I right?” Emerson asked.

  “Did you?” Reacher asked back.

  Emerson shook his head. “Never met him. There were no warning signs.”

  “Was his rifle legal?”

  Emerson nodded. “It was registered and unmodified. As were all his other guns.”

  “Did he hunt?”

  Emerson shook his head again. “He wasn’t an NRA member and he didn’t belong to a gun club. We never saw him out in the hills. He was never in trouble. He was just a low-profile citizen. A no-profile citizen, really. No warning signs at all.”

  “You seen this kind of thing before?”

  “Too many times. If you include the District of Columbia, then Indiana is tied for sixteenth place out of fifty-one in terms of homicide deaths per capita. Worse than New York, worse than California. This town isn’t the worst in the state, but it’s not the best, either. So we’ve seen it all before, and sometimes there are signs, and sometimes there aren’t, but either way around we know what we’re doing.”

  “I spoke with Alex Rodin,” Reacher said. “He’s impressed.”

  “He should be. We performed well. Your old buddy was toast six hours after the first shot. It was a textbook case, beginning to end.”

  “No doubts at all?”

  “Put it this way. I wrote it up Saturday morning and I haven’t given it a whole lot of thought since then. It’s a done deal. About the best done deal I ever saw, and I’ve seen a lot.”

  “So is there any point in me walking through it?”

  “Sure there is. I’ve got a crime-scene guy desperate to show off. He’s a good man, and he deserves his moment in the sun.”

  Emerson walked Reacher to the lab and introduced him as a lawyer’s scout, not as James Barr’s friend. Which helped a little with the atmosphere. Then he left him there. The crime-scene guy was a serious forty-year-old called Bellantonio. His name was more exuberant than he was. He was tall, dark, thin, and stooped. He could have been a mortician. And he suspected James Barr was going to plead guilty. He thought he wasn’t going to get his day in court. That was clear. He had laid out the evidence chain in a logical sequence on long tables in a sealed police garage bay, just so that he could give visitors the performance he would never give a jury.

  The tables were white canteen-style trestles and they ran all the way around the perimeter of the bay. Above them was a horizontal line of cork boards with hundreds of printed sheets of paper pinned to them. The sheets were encased in plastic page protectors and they related to the specific items found directly below. Trapped tight in the square made by the tables was James Barr’s beige Dodge Caravan. The bay was clean and brightly lit with harsh fluorescent tubes and the minivan looked huge and alien in there. It was old and dirty and smelled of gasoline and oil and rubber. The sliding rear door was open and Bellantonio had rigged a light to shine in on the carpet.

  “This all looks good,” Reacher said.

  “Best crime scene I ever worked,” Bellantonio said.

  “So walk me through it.”

  Bellantonio started with the traffic cone. It was sitting there on a square of butcher paper, looking large and odd and out of place. Reacher saw the print powder on it, read the notes above it. Barr had handled it, that was for sure. He had clamped his right hand around it, near the top, where it was narrow. More than once. There were fingerprints and palm prints. The match was a laugher. There were way more comparison points than any court would demand.

  Same for the quarter from the parking meter, same for the shell case. Bellantonio showed Reacher laser-printed stills from the parking garage video, showing the minivan coming in just before the event and going out again just after it. He showed him the interior of the Dodge, showed him the automotive carpet fibers recovered from the raw new concrete, showed him the dog hairs, showed him the denim fibers and the raincoat threads. Showed him a square of rug taken from Barr’s house, showed him the matching fibers found at the scene. Showed him the desert boots, showed him how crepe rubber was the best transfer mechanism going. Showed him how the tiny crumbs of rubber found at the scene matched new scuffs on the shoes’ toes. Showed him the cement dust tracked back into Barr’s house and recovered from the garage and the basement and the kitchen and the living room and the bedroom. Showed him a comparison sample taken from the parking garage and a lab report that proved it was the same.

  Reacher scanned the transcripts from the 911 calls and the radio chatter between the squad cars. Then he glanced through the crime-scene protocol. The initial sweep by the uniformed officers, the forensic examination by Bellantonio’s own people, Emerson’s inspiration with the parking meter. Then he read the arrest report. It was printed out and pinned up along with everything else. The SWAT tactics, the sleeping suspect, the ID from the driver’s license from the wallet in the pants pocket. The paramedics’ tests. The capture of the dog by the K9 officers. The clothes in the closet. The shoes. The guns in the basement. He read the witness reports. A Marine recruiter had heard six shots. A cell phone company had provided a recording. There was a graph attached. A gray smear of sound, with six sharp spikes. Left to right, they were arrayed in a pattern that matched what Helen Rodin had said she had heard. One, two-three, pause, four-five-six. The graph’s vertical axis represented volume. The shots had been faint but clear on the recording. The horizontal axis represented the time base. Six shots in less than four seconds. Four seconds that had changed a city. For a spell, at least.

  Reacher looked at the rifle. It was heat-sealed into a clear plastic sleeve. He read the report pinned above it. A Springfield M1A Super Match, ten-shot box magazine, four cartridges still in it. Barr’s prints all over it. Scratches on the forestock matching varnish scrapings found at the scene. The intact bullet recovered from the pool. A ballistics lab report matching the bullet to the barrel. Another report matching the shell case to the ejector. Slam dunk. Case closed.

  “OK, enough,” Reacher said.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” Bellantonio said.

  “Best I ever saw,” Reacher said.

  “Better than a hundred eyewitnesses.”

  Reacher smiled. Crime-scene techs loved to say that.

  “Anything you’re not happy with?” he asked.

&n
bsp; “I love it all,” Bellantonio said.

  Reacher glanced at his reflection in the Dodge’s tinted window. The black glass made his new shirt look gray.

  “Why did he leave the traffic cone behind?” he said. “He could have pitched it into the back of the van, easy as anything.”

  Bellantonio said nothing.

  “And why did he pay to park?” Reacher asked.

  “I’m forensics,” Bellantonio said. “Not psychology.”

  Then Emerson came back in and stood there, waiting to accept Reacher’s surrender. Reacher gave it up, no hesitation. He shook their hands and congratulated them on a well-worked case.

  He walked back, one block north and four blocks east, under the raised highway, heading for the black glass tower. It was after five o’clock and the sun was on his back. He arrived at the plaza and saw that the fountain was still going and the pool had filled another inch. He went in past the NBC sign and rode up in the elevator. Ann Yanni didn’t show. Maybe she was preparing for the six o’clock news.

  He found Helen Rodin at her secondhand desk.

  “Watch my eyes,” he said.

  She watched them.

  “Pick your own cliché,” he said. “It’s a cast-iron, solid-gold slam dunk. It’s Willie Mays under a fly ball.”

  She said nothing.

  “See any doubt in my eyes?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “So start calling psychiatrists. If that’s what you really want to do.”

  “He deserves representation, Reacher.”

  “He stepped out of line.”

  “We can’t just lynch him.”

  Reacher paused. Then he nodded. “The shrink should think about the parking meter. I mean, who pays for ten minutes even if they’re not shooting people? It strikes me as weird. It’s so law-abiding, isn’t it? It kind of puts the whole event into a law-abiding envelope. Maybe he really was nuts this time. You know, confused about what he was doing.”

  Helen Rodin made a note. “I’ll be sure to mention it.”