Lee Child - One Shot

“Family?”

“All of them are back East. Where she came from.”

“Friends?”

“Two, basically. A co-worker and a neighbor. Neither of them is interesting. Neither of them is a Russian, for instance.”

Yanni turned back to Reacher. “So maybe you’re wrong. Maybe the third shot wasn’t the money shot.”

“It must have been,” Reacher said. “Or why would he pause after it? He was double-checking he had a hit.”

“He paused after the sixth, too. For good.”

“He wouldn’t wait that long. It could have gone completely out of control by then. People could have been jumping all over each other.”

“But they weren’t.”

“He couldn’t have predicted that.”

“I agree,” Franklin said. “A thing like that, you don’t do it with your first or your last shot.”

Then his eyes lost focus. He stared at the wall, like he wasn’t seeing it.

“Wait,” he said.

He glanced at his screen.

“Something I forgot,” he said.

“What?” Reacher asked.

“What you said about Rosemary Barr. Missing persons.”

He turned back to his mouse and his keyboard and started clicking and typing. Then he hit his enter key and sat forward intently, like proximity would speed the process.

“Last chance,” he said.

Reacher knew from television commercials that computers operated at all kinds of gigahertz, which he assumed was pretty fast. But even so, Franklin’s screen stayed blank for a long, long time. There was a little graphic in the corner. It was rotating slowly. It implied a thorough and patient search through an infinite amount of data. It spun for minutes. Then it stopped. There was an electrostatic crackle from the monitor and the screen wiped down and redrew into a densely-printed document. Plain computer font. Reacher couldn’t read it from where he was.

The office went quiet.

Franklin looked up.

“OK,” he said. “There you go. At last. Finally something that isn’t ordinary. Finally we catch a break.”

“What?” Yanni said.

“Oline Archer reported her husband missing two months ago.”

Franklin pushed his chair back to make space and the others all crowded around the screen together. Reacher and Helen Rodin ended up shoulder to shoulder. No more animosity. Just the thrill of pursuit.

Most of the document was taken up with coded headers and source information. Letters, numbers, times, origins. The substantive message was short. Two months previously, Mrs. Oline Anne Archer had made a missing persons report concerning her husband. His name was Edward Stratton Archer. He had left the marital home for work early on a routine Monday and had not returned by end-of-business on Wednesday, which was when the report was made.

“Is he still missing?” Helen asked.

“Yes,” Franklin said. He pointed to a letter A buried in the code at the top of the screen. “It’s still active.”

“So let’s go talk to Oline’s friends,” Reacher said. “We need some background here.”

“Now?” Franklin said.

“We’ve only got twelve hours,” Reacher said. “No time to waste.”

Franklin wrote down names and addresses for Oline Archer’s co-worker and neighbor. He handed the paper to Ann Yanni, because she was paying his bill.

“I’ll stay here,” he said. “I’ll see if the husband shows up in the databases. This could be a coincidence. Maybe he’s got a wife in every state. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Reacher said. “So don’t waste your time. Find a phone number for me instead. A guy called Cash. Former Marine. He owns the range where James Barr went to shoot. Down in Kentucky. Call him for me.”

“Message?”

“Give him my name. Tell him to get his ass in his Humvee. Tell him to drive up here tonight. Tell him there’s a whole new Invitational going on.”

“Invitational?”

“He’ll understand. Tell him to bring his M24. With a night scope. And whatever else he’s got lying around.”

Reacher followed Ann Yanni and Helen Rodin down the stairs. They got into Helen’s Saturn, the women in the front and Reacher in the back. Reacher figured they would all have preferred the Mustang, but it only had two seats.

“Where first?” Helen asked.

“Which is closer?” Reacher asked back.

“The co-worker.”

“OK, her first.”

Traffic was slow. Roads were torn up and construction traffic was lumbering in and out of work zones. Reacher glanced between his watch and the windows. Daylight was fading. Evening was coming. Time ticking away .

The co-worker lived in a plain heartland suburb east of town. It was filled with a grid of straight residential streets. The streets were lined on both sides by modest ranch houses. The houses had small lots, flags on poles, hoops over the garage doors, satellite dishes on brick chimneys. Some of the sidewalk trees had faded yellow ribbons tied around them. Reacher guessed they symbolized solidarity with troops serving overseas. Which conflict, he wasn’t sure. What the point was, he had no idea. He had served overseas for most of thirteen years and had never met anyone who cared what was tied to trees back home. As long as someone sent paychecks and food and water and bullets, and wives stayed faithful, most guys were happy enough.

The sun was going down behind them and Helen was driving slowly with her head ducked forward so she could see the house numbers early. She spotted the one she wanted and pulled into a driveway and parked behind a small sedan. It was new. Reacher recognized the brand name from his walk up the four-lane: America’s Best Warranty !

The co-worker herself was a tired and harassed woman of about thirty-five. She opened her door and stepped out to the stoop and pulled the door shut behind her to block out the noise from what sounded like a dozen kids running riot inside. She recognized Ann Yanni immediately. Even glanced beyond her, looking for a camera crew.

“Yes?” she said.

“We need to talk about Oline Archer,” Helen Rodin said.

The woman said nothing. She looked conflicted, like she knew she was supposed to think it was tasteless to talk about victims of tragedy to journalists. But apparently Ann Yanni’s celebrity status overcame her reluctance.

“OK,” she said. “What do you want to know? Oline was a lovely person and all of us at the office miss her terribly.”

The nature of randomness , Reacher thought. Random slayings always involved people described as lovely afterward. Nobody ever said She was a rat-faced fink and I’m glad she’s dead. Whoever it was did us all a favor . That never happened.

“We need to know something about her husband,” Helen said.

“I never met her husband,” the woman said.

“Did Oline talk about him?”

“A little, I guess. Now and then. His name is Ted, I think.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s in business. I’m not sure what kind of business.”

“Did Oline say anything about him being missing?”

“Missing?”

“Oline reported him missing two months ago.”

“I know she seemed terribly worried. I think he was having problems with his business. In fact I think he’d been having problems for a year or two. That’s why Oline went back to work.”

“She didn’t always work?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. I think she did way back, and then she gave it up. But she had to come back. Because of circumstances. Whatever the opposite of rags to riches is.”

“Riches to rags,” Reacher said.

“Yes, like that,” the woman said. “She needed her job, financially. I think she was embarrassed about it.”