Lee Child - One Shot

“It was old.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Should it?”

“The dog didn’t do anything to anyone.”

Helen said nothing.

“Which hotel will Hutton use?” Reacher asked.

“I have no idea. You’ll have to catch her at the airport.”

“What flight?”

“I don’t know that, either. But there’s nothing direct from D.C. So I expect she’ll change planes in Indianapolis. She won’t get here before eleven in the morning.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I apologize,” Helen said. “For telling Danuta we didn’t have any evidence for the puppet master. I didn’t mean it to sound dismissive.”

“You were right,” Reacher said. “We didn’t have any evidence. At the time.”

She looked at him. “But?”

“We do now.”

“What?”

“They’ve been gilding the lily over at the police station. They’ve got fibers, ballistics, dog DNA, a receipt for the ammunition all the way from someplace in Kentucky. The traced the traffic cone to the city. They’ve got all kinds of stuff.”

“But?” Helen said again.

“But they haven’t got James Barr on tape driving in to place the cone in the garage beforehand.”

“Are you sure?”

Reacher nodded. “They must have looked at the tapes a dozen times by now. If they had found him, they’d have printed the stills and pinned them up for the world to see. But they’re not there, which means they didn’t find them. Which means James Barr didn’t drive in and leave the cone beforehand.”

“Which means someone else did.”

“The puppet master,” Reacher said. “Or another of his puppets. Sometime after Tuesday night. Barr thinks the cone was still in his garage Tuesday.”

Helen looked at him again. “Whoever it was must be on the tapes.”

“Correct,” Reacher said.

“But there’ll be hundreds of cars.”

“You can narrow it down some. You’re looking for a sedan. Something too low-slung to get itself down a farm track.”

“The puppet master really exists, doesn’t he?”

“No other explanation for how it went down.”

“Alan Danuta is probably right, you know,” Helen said. “My father will trade Barr for the puppet master. He’d be a fool not to.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Which means Barr is going to walk,” Helen said. “You understand that, right? There’s no alternative. The prosecution’s legal problems are overwhelming.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I’m not happy about it, either,” Helen said. “But for me it’s just a PR problem. I can spin my way out of it. At least I hope I can. I can blame it all on the way the jail was run. I can claim that it wasn’t me who got him off.”

“But?” Reacher said.

“What are you going to do? You came here to bury him and he’s going to walk.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Reacher said. “What choices do I have?”

“Only two that I’m scared of. One, you could give up on helping me find the guy who’s pulling the strings. I can’t do it alone and Emerson won’t even be willing to try.”

“And two?”

“You could settle things with Barr yourself.”

“That’s for sure.”

“But you can’t do that. You’d go to prison for life if you were lucky.”

“If I got caught.”

“You would get caught. I would know you did it.”

Reacher smiled. “You’d rat me out?”

“I would have to,” Helen said.

“Not if you were my lawyer. You couldn’t say a word.”

“I’m not your lawyer.”

“I could hire you.”

“Rosemary Barr would know too, and she’d rat you out in a heartbeat. And Franklin. He heard you tell the story.”

Reacher nodded.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said again.

“How do we find this guy?”

“Like you said, why would I want to?”

“Because I don’t think you’re the type who settles for half a loaf.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I think you want the truth,” Helen said. “I don’t think you like it when the wool gets pulled over your eyes. You don’t like being played for a sucker.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Plus, this whole situation stinks,” Helen said. “There were six victims here. The five who died and Barr himself.”

“That expands the definition of victimhood a little too far for me.”

“Dr. Niebuhr expects we’ll find a preexisting relationship. Probably recent. Some new friend. We could go at it that way.”

“Barr told me he doesn’t have any new friends,” Reacher said. “Only has one or two old friends.”

“Was he telling the truth?”

“I think he was.”

“So is Niebuhr wrong?”

“Niebuhr’s guessing. He’s a shrink. All they do is guess.”

“I could ask Rosemary.”

“Would she know his friends?”

“Probably. They’re pretty close.”

“So get a list,” Reacher said.

“Is Dr. Mason guessing, too?”

“No question. But in her case I think she’s guessing right.”

“If Niebuhr’s wrong about the friend, what do we do?”

“We go proactive.”

“How?”

“There had to have been a guy following me last night and I know for sure there was one following me this morning. I saw him out there in the plaza. So the next time I see him I’ll have a word with him. He’ll tell me who he’s working for.”

“Just like that?”

“People usually tell me what I want to know.”

“Why?”

“Because I ask them nicely.”

“Don’t forget to ask Eileen Hutton nicely.”

“I’ll see you around,” Reacher said.

He walked south, beyond his hotel, and found a cheap place to eat dinner. Then he walked north, slowly, through the plaza, past the black glass tower, under the highway, all the way back to the sports bar. Altogether he was on the street the best part of an hour, and he saw nobody behind him. No damaged men in odd suits. Nobody at all.

The sports bar was half-empty and there was baseball on every screen. He found a corner table and watched the Cardinals play the Astros in Houston. It was a listless late-season game between two teams well out of contention. During the commercial breaks he watched the door. Saw nobody. Tuesday was even quieter than Monday, out there in the heartland.

Grigor Linsky dialed his cell.

“He’s back in the sports bar,” he said.

“Did he see you?” the Zec asked.

“No.”

“Why is he in the sports bar again?”

“No reason. He needed a destination, that’s all. He paraded around for nearly an hour, trying to make me show myself.”

Silence for a beat.

“Leave him there,” the Zec said. “Come in and we’ll talk.”

Alex Rodin called Emerson at home. Emerson was eating a late dinner with his wife and his two daughters, and he wasn’t thrilled about taking the call. But he did. He went out to the hallway and sat on the second-to-bottom stair, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, the phone trapped between his shoulder and his ear.

“We need to do something about this Jack Reacher guy,” Rodin said to him.

“I don’t see how he’s a huge problem,” Emerson said. “Maybe he wants to, but he can’t make the facts go away. We’ve got more than we need on Barr.”

“This is not about facts now,” Rodin said. “It’s about the amnesia. It’s about how hard the defense is going to push it.”

“That’s up to your daughter.”

“He’s a bad influence on her. I’ve been reading the case law. It’s a real gray area. The test isn’t really about whether Barr remembers the day in question. It’s about whether he understands the process, right now, today, and whether we’ve got enough other stuff on him to convict without his direct testimony.”