The Essential Jack Reacher 12-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

  “Five dead and no injured?”

  “Affirmative,” the Marine said again.

  Emerson said nothing. He had seen shootings in public places. He had seen dead people. But he had never seen only dead people. Public-place shootings always produced injured along with the dead. Usually in a one-to-one ratio, at least.

  “You sure about no injured?” he said.

  “That’s definitive, sir,” the Marine said.

  “Who are the DOAs?”

  “Civilians. Four males, one female.”

  “Shit.”

  “Roger that, sir,” the Marine said.

  “Where were you?”

  “In the recruiting office.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Incoming gunfire, six rounds.”

  “Handguns?”

  “Long gun, I think. Just one of them.”

  “A rifle?”

  “An autoloader, I think. It fired fast, but it wasn’t on full automatic. The KIAs are all hit in the head.”

  A sniper, Emerson thought. Shit. A crazy man with an assault weapon.

  “Has he gone now?” he said.

  “No further firing, sir.”

  “He might still be there.”

  “It’s a possibility, sir. People have taken cover. Most of them are in the library now.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Head-down behind the plaza wall, sir. I’ve got a few people with me.”

  “Where was he?”

  “Can’t say for sure. Maybe in the parking garage. The new part. People were pointing at it. There may have been some muzzle flash. And that’s the only major structure directly facing the KIAs.”

  A warren, Emerson thought. A damn rat’s nest.

  “The TV people are here,” the Marine said.

  Shit, Emerson thought.

  “Are you in uniform?” he asked.

  “Full dress, sir. For the recruiting office.”

  “OK, do your best to keep order until my guys get there.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  Then the line went dead and Emerson heard his dispatcher’s breathing again. TV people and a crazy man with a rifle, he thought. Shit, shit, shit. Pressure and scrutiny and second-guessing, like every other place that ever had TV people and a crazy man with a rifle. He hit the switch that gave him the all-cars radio net.

  “All units, listen up,” he said. “This was a lone nutcase with a long gun. Probably an automatic weapon. Indiscriminate firing in a public place. Possibly from the new part of the parking garage. So either he’s still in there, or he’s already in the wind. If he left, it was either on foot or in a vehicle. So all units that are more than ten blocks out, stop now and lock down a perimeter. Nobody enters or exits, OK? No vehicles, no pedestrians, nobody under any circumstances. All units that are closer than ten blocks, proceed inward with extreme caution. But do not let him get away. Do not miss him. This is a must-win, people. We need this guy today, before CNN climbs all over us.”

  The man in the minivan thumbed the button on the remote on the visor and the garage door rumbled upward. He drove inside and thumbed the button again and the door came down after him. He shut the engine off and sat still for a moment. Then he got out of the van and walked through the mud room and on into the kitchen. He patted the dog and turned on the television.

  Paramedics in full body armor went in through the back of the library. Two of them stayed inside to check for injuries among the sheltering crowd. Four of them came out the front and ran crouched through the plaza and ducked behind the wall. They crawled toward the bodies and confirmed they were all DOA. Then they stayed right there. Flat on the ground and immobile next to the corpses. No unnecessary exposure until the garage has been searched, Emerson had ordered.

  Emerson double-parked two blocks from the plaza and told a uniformed sergeant to direct the search of the parking garage, from the top down, from the southwest corner. The uniforms cleared the fourth level, and then the third. Then the second. Then the first. The old part was problematic. It was badly lit and full of parked cars, and every car represented a potential hiding place. A guy could be inside one, or under one, or behind one. But they didn’t find anybody. They had no real problem with the new construction. It wasn’t lit at all, but there were no parked cars in that part. The patrolmen simply came down the stairwell and swept each level in turn with flashlight beams.

  Nobody there.

  The sergeant relaxed and called it in.

  “Good work,” Emerson said.

  And it was good work. The fact that they searched from the southwest corner outward left the northeast corner entirely untouched. Nothing was disturbed. So by good luck or good judgment the PD had turned in an immaculate performance in the first phase of what would eventually be seen as an immaculate investigation from beginning to end.

  By seven o’clock in the evening it was going dark and Ann Yanni had been on the air eleven times. Three of them network, eight of them local. Personally she was a little disappointed with that ratio. She was sensitive to a little skepticism coming her way from the network editorial offices. If it bleeds, it leads was any news organization’s credo, but this bleeding was way out there, far from New York or LA. It wasn’t happening in some manicured suburb outside of Washington D.C. It had a tinge of weirdo-from-the-heartland about it. There was no real possibility that anyone important would walk through this guy’s crosshairs. So it was not really prime-time stuff. And in truth Ann didn’t have much to offer. None of the victims was identified yet. None of the slain. The local PD was holding its cards close to its chest until families had been notified individually. So she had no heartwarming background stories to share. She wasn’t sure which of the male victims had been family men. Or churchgoers. She didn’t know if the woman had been a mother or a wife. She didn’t have much to offer in the way of visuals, either. Just a gathering crowd held five blocks back by police barricades, and a static long shot down the grayness of First Street, and occasional close-ups of the parking garage, which was where everyone seemed to assume the sniper had been.

  By eight o’clock Emerson had made a lot of progress. His guys had taken hundreds of statements. Marine Corps First Sergeant Kelly was still sure he had heard six shots. Emerson was inclined to believe him. Marines could be trusted on stuff like that, presumably. Then some other guy mentioned his cell phone must have been open the whole time, connected to another guy’s voice mail. The cellular company retrieved the recording and six gunshots were faintly audible on it. But the medical examiners had counted only five entry wounds in the five DOAs. Therefore, there was a bullet missing. Three other witnesses were vague, but they all reported seeing a small plume of water kick out of the ornamental pool.

  Emerson ordered the pool to be drained.

  The fire department handled it. They set up floodlights and switched off the fountain and used a pumping engine to dump the water into the city storm drains. They figured there were maybe eighty thousand gallons of water to move, and that the job would be complete in an hour.

  Meanwhile crime-scene technicians had used drinking straws and laser pointers to estimate the fatal trajectories. They figured the most reliable evidence would come from the first victim. Presumably he was walking purposefully right-to-left across the plaza when the first shot came in. After that, it was possible the subsequent victims were twisting or turning or moving in other unpredictable ways. So they based their conclusions solely on the first guy. His head was a mess, but it seemed pretty clear the bullet had traveled slightly high-to-low and left-to-right as it passed through. One tech stood upright on the spot and another held a drinking straw against the side of his head at the correct angle and held it steady. Then the first guy ducked out of the way and a third fired a laser pointer through the straw. It put a tiny red spot on the northeast corner of the parking garage extension, second level. Witnesses had claimed they had seen
muzzle flashes up there. Now science had confirmed their statements.

  Emerson sent his crime-scene people into the garage and told them they had all the time they needed. But he told them not to come back with nothing.

  Ann Yanni left the black glass tower at eight-thirty and took a camera crew down to the barricades five blocks away. She figured she might be able to identify some of the victims by process of elimination. People whose relatives hadn’t come home for dinner might be gathering there, desperate for information. She shot twenty minutes of tape. She got no specific information at all. Instead she got twenty minutes of crying and wailing and sheer stunned incredulity. The whole city was in pain and in shock. She started out secretly proud that she was in the middle of everything, and she ended up with tears in her eyes and sick to her stomach.

  The parking garage was where the case was broken. It was a bonanza. A treasure trove. A patrolman three blocks away had taken a witness statement from a regular user of the garage saying that the last slot on the second level had been blocked off with an orange traffic cone. Because of it, the witness had been forced to leave the garage and park elsewhere. He had been pissed about it. A guy from the city said the cone hadn’t been there officially. No way. Couldn’t have been. No reason for it. So the cone was bagged for evidence and taken away. Then the city guy said there were discreet security cameras at the entrance and the exit, wired to a video recorder in a maintenance closet. The tape was extracted and taken away. Then the city guy said the new extension was stalled for funding and hadn’t been worked on for two weeks. So anything in there less than two weeks old wasn’t anything to do with him.

  The crime-scene technicians started at the yellow-and-black Caution Do Not Enter tape. The first thing they found was a scuff of blue cotton material on the rough concrete directly underneath it. Just a peach-fuzz of barely-visible fiber. Like a guy had dropped to one knee to squirm underneath and had left a little of his blue jeans behind. They photographed the scuff and then picked it up whole with an adhesive sheet of clear plastic. Then they brought in klieg lights and angled them low across the floor. Across the two-week-old cement dust. They saw perfect footprints. Really perfect footprints. The lead tech called Emerson on his Motorola.

  “He was wearing weird shoes,” he said.

  “What kind of weird shoes?”

  “You ever heard of crepe? It’s a kind of crude rubber. Almost raw. Very grippy. It picks everything up. If we find this guy, we’re going to find crepe-soled shoes with cement dust all over the soles. Also, we’re going to find a dog in his house.”

  “A dog?”

  “We’ve got dog hair here, picked up by the crepe rubber earlier. And then scraped off again where the concrete’s rough. And carpet fibers. Probably from his rugs at home and in his car.”

  “Keep going,” Emerson said.

  At ten to nine Emerson briefed his Chief of Police for a press conference. He held nothing back. It was the Chief’s decision what to talk about and what to conceal.

  “Six shots fired and five people dead,” Emerson said. “All head shots. I’m betting on a trained shooter. Probably ex-military.”

  “Or a hunter?” the Chief said.

  “Big difference between shooting deer and shooting people. The technique might be the same, but the emotion isn’t.”

  “Were we right to keep this away from the FBI?”

  “It wasn’t terrorism. It was a lone nut. We’ve seen them before.”

  “I want to be able to sound confident about bringing this one in.”

  “I know,” Emerson said.

  “So how confident can I sound?”

  “So far we’ve got good stuff, but not great stuff.”

  The Chief nodded and said nothing.

  At nine o’clock exactly, Emerson took a call from the pathologist. His staff had X-rayed all five heads. Massive tissue damage, entry and exit wounds, no lodged bullets.

  “Hollow points,” the pathologist said. “All of them through and through.”

  Emerson turned and looked at the ornamental pool. Six bullets in there, he thought. Five through-and-throughs, and one miss. The pool was finally empty by nine-fifteen. The fire department hoses started sucking air. All that was left was a quarter-inch of scummy grit, and a lot of trash. Emerson had the lights reangled and sent twelve recruits from the Academy over the walls, six from one end and six from the other.

  The crime-scene techs in the parking garage extension logged forty-eight footprints going and forty-four coming back. The perp had been confident but wary on the way in, and striding longer on the way out. In a hurry. The footprints were size eleven. They found fibers on the last pillar before the northeast corner. Mercerized cotton, at a guess, from a pale-colored raincoat, at shoulder-blade height, like the guy had pressed his back against the raw concrete and then slid around it for a look out into the plaza. They found major dust disturbance on the floor between the pillar and the perimeter wall. Plus more blue fibers and more raincoat fibers, and tiny crumbs of crepe rubber, pale in color and old.

  “He low-crawled,” the lead tech said. “Knees and elbows on the way there, and knees, toes, and elbows coming backward. We ever find his shoes, they’re going to be all scraped up at the front.”

  They found where he must have sat up and then knelt. Directly in front of that position, they saw varnish scrapings on the lip of the wall.

  “He rested his gun there,” the lead tech said. “Sawed it back and forth, to get it steady.”

  He lined himself up and aimed his gaze over the varnish scrapings, like he was aiming a rifle. What he saw in front of him was Emerson, pacing in front of the empty ornamental pool, less than thirty-five yards away.

  The Academy recruits spent thirty minutes in the empty pool and came out with a lot of miscellaneous junk, nearly eight dollars in pennies, and six bullets. Five of them were just misshapen blobs of lead, but one of them looked absolutely brand new. It was a boat tail hollow point, beautifully cast, almost certainly a .308. Emerson called his lead crime-scene tech up in the garage.

  “I need you down here,” he said.

  “No, I need you up here,” the tech replied.

  Emerson got up to the second level and found all the techs crouched in a low huddle with their flashlight beams pointing down into a narrow crack in the concrete.

  “Expansion joint,” the lead tech said. “And look what fell in it.”

  Emerson shouldered his way in and looked down and saw the gleam of brass.

  “A cartridge case,” he said.

  “The guy took the others with him. But this one got away.”

  “Fingerprints?” Emerson asked.

  “We can hope,” the tech said. “Not too many people wear gloves when they load their magazines.”

  “How do we get it out of there?”

  The tech stood up and used his flashlight beam to locate an electrical box on the ceiling. There was one close by, new, with unconnected cables spooling out like fronds. He looked on the floor directly underneath and found a rat’s nest of discarded trimmings. He chose an eighteen-inch length of ground wire. He cleaned it and bent it into an L-shape. It was stiff and heavy. Probably overspecified for the kind of fluorescent ceiling fixtures he guessed the garage was going to use. Maybe that was why the project was stalled for funding. Maybe the city was spending money in all the wrong places.

  He jiggled the wire down into the open joint and slid it along until the end went neatly into the empty cartridge case. Then he lifted it out very carefully, so as not to scratch it. He dropped it straight into a plastic evidence bag.

  “Meet at the station,” Emerson said. “In one hour. I’ll scare up a DA.”

  He walked away, on a route exactly parallel to the trail of footprints. Then he stopped next to the empty parking bay.

  “Empty the meter,” he called. “Print all the quarters.”

  “Why?” the tech called back. “You think the guy paid?”

  “I want to cover
all the bases.”

  “You’d have to be crazy to pay for parking just before you blow five people away.”

  “You don’t blow five people away unless you’re crazy.”

  The tech shrugged. Empty the meter? But he guessed it was the kind of insight detectives were paid for, so he just dialed his cell phone and asked the city liaison guy to come on back again.

  Someone from the District Attorney’s office always got involved at this point because the responsibility for prosecution rested squarely on the DA’s shoulders. It wasn’t the PD that won or lost in court. It was the DA. So the DA’s office made its own evaluation of the evidence. Did they have a case? Was the case weak or strong? It was like an audition. Like a trial before a trial. This time, because of the magnitude, Emerson was performing in front of the DA himself. The big cheese, the actual guy who had to run for election. And reelection.

  They made it a three-man conference in Emerson’s office. Emerson, and the lead crime-scene tech, and the DA. The DA was called Rodin, which was a contraction of a Russian name that had been a whole lot longer before his great-grandparents came to America. He was fifty years old, lean and fit, and very cautious. His office had an outstanding victory percentage, but that was mostly due to the fact that he wouldn’t prosecute anything less than a total certainty. Anything less than a total certainty, and Rodin gave up early and blamed the cops. At least that was how it seemed to Emerson.

  “I need seriously good news,” Rodin said. “The whole city is freaking out.”

  “We know exactly how it went down,” Emerson told him. “We can trace it every step of the way.”

  “You know who it was?” Rodin asked.

  “Not yet. Right now he’s still John Doe.”

  “So walk me through it.”

  “We’ve got monochrome security videotape of a light-colored minivan entering the garage eleven minutes before the event. Can’t see the plates for mud and dirt, and the camera angle isn’t great. But it’s probably a Dodge Caravan, not new, with aftermarket tinted windows. And we’re also looking through old tapes right now because it’s clear he entered the garage at some previous time and illegally blocked off a particular space with a traffic cone stolen earlier from a city construction site.”