Lee Child - One Shot

Reacher glanced at her. Then at Rosemary Barr.

“Let me guess,” he said. “The hospital diagnosed James Barr. Probably a mild case.”

“Early onset,” Rosemary said. “Whatever it is.”

“How did you know?” Helen asked.

“Intuition,” Reacher said.

“What is it?”

“Later,” Reacher said. “Let’s do this in order.” He turned to Franklin. “Tell me what you know about the victims.”

“Five random people,” Franklin said. “No connection between any of them. No real connection with anything at all. Certainly no connection to James Barr. I think you were absolutely right. He didn’t shoot them for any reason of his own.”

“No, I was absolutely wrong,” Reacher said. “Thing is, James Barr didn’t shoot them at all.”

Grigor Linsky stepped back into a shadowed doorway and dialed his phone.

“I followed a hunch,” he said.

“Which was?” the Zec asked.

“With the cops at the lawyer’s office, I figured the soldier wouldn’t be able to go see her. But obviously they still have business. So I thought maybe she would go to him. And she did. I followed her. They’re together in the private detective’s office right now. With the sister. And that woman from the television news.”

“Are the others with you?”

“We’ve got the whole block covered. East, west, north, and south.”

“Sit tight,” the Zec said. “I’ll get back to you.”

Helen Rodin said, “You want to explain that statement?”

“The evidence is rock solid,” Franklin said.

Ann Yanni smiled. A story .

Rosemary Barr just stared.

“You bought your brother a radio,” Reacher said to her. “A Bose. For the ballgames. He told me that. Did you ever buy him anything else?”

“Like what?”

“Like clothes.”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Pants?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“What size?”

“Size?” she repeated blankly.

“What size pants does your brother wear?”

“Thirty-four waist, thirty-four leg.”

“Exactly,” Reacher said. “He’s relatively tall.”

“How does this help us?” Helen asked.

“You know anything about numbers games?” Reacher asked her. “Old-fashioned illegal numbers, state lotteries, the Powerball, things like that?”

“What about them?”

“What’s the hardest part of them?”

“Winning,” Ann Yanni said.

Reacher smiled. “From the players’ point of view, sure. But the hardest part for the organizers is picking truly random numbers. True randomness is very hard for humans to achieve. In the old days numbers runners used the business pages in the newspapers. They would agree in advance, maybe the second page of the stock prices, maybe the second column, the last two figures in the first six prices quoted. Or the last six, or the middle six, or whatever. That came close to true randomness. Now the big lotteries use complicated machines. But you can find mathematicians who can prove the results aren’t truly random. Because humans built the machines.”

“How does this help us?” Helen said.

“Just a train of thought,” Reacher said. “I sat all afternoon in Ms. Yanni’s car, enjoying the sun, thinking about how hard it is to achieve true randomness.”

“Your train is on the wrong track,” Franklin said. “James Barr shot five people. The evidence is crushing.”

“You were a cop,” Reacher said. “You put yourself in danger. Stakeouts, takedowns, high-pressure situations, moments of extreme stress. What’s the first thing you did afterward?”

Franklin glanced at the women.

“Went to the bathroom,” he said.

“Correct,” Reacher said. “Me too. But James Barr didn’t. Bellantonio’s report from Barr’s house shows cement dust in the garage, the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, and the basement. But not in the bathroom. So he got home, but he didn’t take a leak until after he changed and showered? And how could he shower anyway without going into the bathroom?”

“Maybe he stopped on the way.”

“He was never there.”

“He was there , Reacher. What about the evidence?”

“There’s no evidence that says he was there.”

“Are you nuts?”

“There’s evidence that says his van was there, and his shoes, and his pants, and his coat, and his gun, and his ammo, and his quarter, but there’s nothing that says he was there.”

“Someone impersonated him?” Ann Yanni asked.

“Down to the last detail,” Reacher said. “Drove his car, wore his shoes and his clothes, used his gun.”

“This is fantasy,” Franklin said.

“It explains the raincoat,” Reacher said. “A big roomy garment that covered everything except the denim jeans? Why else wear a raincoat on a warm dry day?”

“Who?” Rosemary asked.

“Watch,” Reacher said.

He stood still, and then he took a single pace forward.

“My pants are thirty-seven-inch legs,” he said. “I crossed the new part of the garage in thirty-five strides. James Barr has a thirty-four-inch leg, which means he should have done it in about thirty-eight strides. But Bellantonio’s footprint count shows forty -eight strides.”

“A very short person,” Helen said.

“Charlie,” Rosemary said.

“I thought so, too,” Reacher said. “But then I went to Kentucky. Initially because I wanted to confirm something else. I got around to thinking that maybe James Barr just wasn’t good enough. I looked at the scene. It was tough shooting. And fourteen years ago he was good, but he wasn’t great. And when I saw him in the hospital the skin on his right shoulder was unmarked. And to shoot as well as he apparently did, a guy’s got to practice. And a guy who practices builds up bruising on his shoulder. Like a callus. He didn’t have it. So I figured a guy who started out average could only have gotten worse with time. Especially if he wasn’t practicing much. That’s logical, right? Maybe he’d gotten to the point where he couldn’t have done the thing on Friday. Through a simple lack of ability. That’s what I was thinking. So I went down to Kentucky to find out for sure how much worse he’d gotten.”

“And?” Helen asked.

“He’d gotten better ,” Reacher said. “ Way better. Not worse. Look at this.” He took the target out of his shirt pocket and unfolded it. “This is the latest of thirty-two sessions over the last three years. And this is much better than he was shooting when he was in the army fourteen years ago. Which is weird, right? He’s fired only three hundred twenty rounds in the last three years, and he’s great? Whereas he was firing two thousand a week back when he was only average?”

“So what does this mean?”

“He went down there with Charlie, every time. And the guy who runs the range is a Marine champion. And a real anal pack rat. He files all the used targets. Which means that Barr had at least two witnesses to what he was scoring, every time.”

“I’d want witnesses,” Franklin said. “If I was shooting like that.”

“It’s not possible to get better by not practicing,” Reacher said. “I think the truth is he had actually gotten really bad. And I think his ego couldn’t take it. Any shooter is competitive. He knew he was lousy now, and he couldn’t face it, and he wanted to cover it up. He wanted to show off.”

Franklin pointed at the target. “Doesn’t look lousy to me.”

“This is faked,” Reacher said. “You’re going to give this to Bellantonio and Bellantonio is going to prove it to you.”

“Faked how?”

“I’ll bet this was done with a handgun. Nine-millimeter, from point-blank range. If Bellantonio measures the holes, my guess is he’ll find they’re forty-six thousandths of an inch bigger than.308 holes. And if he tests the paper, he’ll find gunpowder residue on it. Because my guess is James Barr took a stroll down the range and made these holes from an inch away, not three hundred yards. Every time.”