by Lee Child
“Sentencing phase only. Because he’ll have to plead guilty.”
“You happy to handle it?”
“Under the circumstances.”
“How many hours will it cost us?”
“Not many. There’s practically nothing we can do.”
“What grounds for mitigation?”
“He’s a Gulf War vet, I believe. So there’s probably chemical stuff going on. Or some kind of delayed post-traumatic thing. Maybe we could get Rodin to agree beforehand. We could get it done over lunch.”
The managing partner nodded. Turned to the tax guy. “Tell your secretary we’ll do everything in our power to help her brother in his hour of need.”
Barr was moved from the police station lockup to the county jail before either his sister or Chapman got a chance to see him. His blanket and pajamas were taken away and he was issued paper underwear, an orange jumpsuit, and a pair of rubber shower sandals. The county jail wasn’t a pleasant place to be. It smelled bad and it was noisy. It was radically overcrowded and the social and ethnic tensions that were kept in control on the street were left to rage unchecked inside. Men were stacked three to a cell and the guards were shorthanded. New guys were called fish, and fish were left to fend for themselves.
But Barr had been in the army, so the culture shock for him was a little less than it might have been. He survived as a fish for two hours, and then he was escorted to an interview room. He was told there was a lawyer waiting there for him. He found a table and two chairs bolted to the floor in a windowless cubicle. In one of the chairs was a guy he vaguely recognized from somewhere. On the table was a pocket tape recorder. Like a Walkman.
“My name is David Chapman,” the guy in the chair said. “I’m a criminal defense attorney. A lawyer. Your sister works at my firm. She asked us to help you out.”
Barr said nothing.
“So here I am,” Chapman said.
Barr said nothing.
“I’m recording this conversation,” Chapman said. “Putting it on tape. I take it that’s OK with you?”
Barr said nothing.
“I think we met once,” Chapman said. “Our Christmas party one year?”
Barr said nothing.
Chapman waited.
“Have the charges been explained to you?” he asked.
Barr said nothing.
“The charges are very serious,” Chapman said.
Barr stayed quiet.
“I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself,” Chapman said.
Barr just stared at him. Just sat still and quiet for several long minutes. Then he leaned forward toward the tape machine and spoke for the first time since the previous afternoon.
He said, “They got the wrong guy.”
“They got the wrong guy,” Barr said again.
“So tell me about the right guy,” Chapman said immediately. He was a good courtroom tactician. He knew how to get a rhythm going. Question, answer, question, answer. That was how to get a person to open up. They fell into the rhythm, and it all came out.
But Barr just retreated back into silence.
“Let’s be clear about this,” Chapman said.
Barr didn’t answer.
“Are you denying it?” Chapman asked him.
Barr said nothing.
“Are you?”
No response.
“The evidence is all there,” Chapman said. “It’s just about overwhelming, I’m afraid. You can’t play dumb now. We need to talk about why you did it. That’s what’s going to help us here.”
Barr said nothing.
“You want me to help you?” Chapman said. “Or not?”
Barr said nothing.
“Maybe it was your old wartime experience,” Chapman said. “Or post-traumatic stress. Or some kind of mental impairment. We need to focus on the reason.”
Barr said nothing.
“Denying it is not smart,” Chapman said. “The evidence is right there.”
Barr said nothing.
“Denying it is not an option,” Chapman said.
“Get Jack Reacher for me,” Barr said.
“Who?”
“Jack Reacher.”
“Who’s he? A friend?”
Barr said nothing.
“Someone you know?” Chapman said.
Barr said nothing.
“Someone you used to know?”
“Just get him for me.”
“Where is he? Who is he?”
Barr said nothing.
“Is Jack Reacher a doctor?” Chapman asked.
“A doctor?” Barr repeated.
“Is he a doctor?” Chapman asked.
But Barr didn’t speak again. He just got up from the table and walked to the cubicle’s door and pounded on it until the jailer opened it up and led him back to his overcrowded cell.
Chapman arranged to meet Rosemary Barr and the firm’s investigator at his law offices. The investigator was a retired cop shared by most of the city’s law firms. They all had him on retainer. He was a private detective, with a license. His name was Franklin. He was nothing like a private eye in a TV show. He did all his work at a desk, with phone books and computer databases. He didn’t go out, didn’t wear a gun, didn’t own a hat. But he had no equal as a fact-checker or a skip tracer and he still had plenty of friends in the PD.
“The evidence is rock solid,” he said. “That’s what I’m hearing. Emerson was in charge and he’s pretty reliable. So is Rodin, really, but for a different reason. Emerson’s a stiff and Rodin is a coward. Neither one of them would be saying what they’re saying unless the evidence was there.”
“I just can’t believe he did it,” Rosemary Barr said.
“Well, certainly he seems to be denying it,” Chapman said. “As far as I can understand him. And he’s asking for someone called Jack Reacher. Someone he knows or used to know. You ever heard that name? You know who he is?”
Rosemary Barr just shook her head. Chapman wrote the name Jack Reacher on a sheet of paper and slid it across to Franklin. “My guess is he may be a psychiatrist. Mr. Barr brought the name up right after I told him how strong the evidence is. So maybe this Reacher guy is someone who can help us out with the mitigation. Maybe he treated Mr. Barr in the past.”
“My brother never saw a psychiatrist,” Rosemary Barr said.
“To your certain knowledge?”
“Never.”
“How long has he been in town?”
“Fourteen years. Since the army.”
“Were you close?”
“We lived in the same house.”
“His house?”
Rosemary Barr nodded.
“But you don’t live there anymore.”
Rosemary Barr looked away.
“No,” she said. “I moved out.”
“Might your brother have seen a shrink after you moved out?”
“He would have told me.”
“OK, what about before? In the service?”
Rosemary Barr said nothing. Chapman turned back to Franklin.
“So maybe Reacher was his army doctor,” he said. “Maybe he has information about an old trauma. He could be very helpful.”
Franklin accepted the sheet of paper.
“In which case I’ll find him,” he said.
“We shouldn’t be talking about mitigation anyway,” Rosemary Barr said. “We should be talking about reasonable doubt. About innocence.”
“The evidence is very strong,” Chapman said. “He used his own gun.”
Franklin spent three hours failing to find Jack Reacher. First he trawled through psychiatric associations. No hits. Then he searched the Internet for Gulf War support groups. No trace. He tried Lexis-Nexis and all the news organizations. Nothing. Then he started back at the beginning and accessed the National Personnel Record Center’s database. It listed all current and former military. He found Jack Reacher’s name in there easily enough. Reacher had entered the service in 1984 and received
an honorable discharge in 1997. James Barr himself had signed up in 1985 and mustered out in 1991. So there was a six-year overlap. But Reacher had been no kind of a doctor. No kind of a psychiatrist. He had been a military cop. An officer. A major. Maybe a high-level investigator. Barr had finished as a lowly Specialist E-4. Infantry, not military police. So what was the point of contact between a military police major and an infantry E-4? Something helpful, obviously, or Barr wouldn’t have mentioned the name. But what?
At the end of three hours Franklin figured he would never find out, because Reacher fell off the radar after 1997. Completely and totally. There was no trace of him anywhere. He was still alive, according to the Social Security Administration. He wasn’t in prison, according to the NCIC. But he had disappeared. He had no credit rating. He wasn’t listed as title holder to any real estate, or automobiles, or boats. He had no debts. No liens. No address. No phone number. No warrants outstanding, no judgments entered. He wasn’t a husband. Wasn’t a father. He was a ghost.
James Barr spent the same three hours in serious trouble. It started when he stepped out of his cell. He turned right to walk down to the pay phones. The corridor was narrow. He bumped into another guy, shoulder to shoulder. Then he made a bad mistake. He took his eyes off the floor and glanced at the other guy and apologized.
A bad mistake, because a fish can’t make eye contact with another prisoner. Not without implying disrespect. It was a prison thing. He didn’t understand.
The guy he made eye contact with was a Mexican. He had gang tattoos, but Barr didn’t recognize them. Another bad mistake. He should have put his gaze back on the floor and moved on and hoped for the best. But he didn’t.
Instead, he said, “Excuse me.”
Then he raised his eyebrows and half-smiled in a self-deprecating way, like he was saying, This is some place, right?
Bad mistake. Familiarity, and a presumption of intimacy.
“What are you looking at?” the Mexican said.
At that point, James Barr understood completely. What are you looking at? That was pretty much a standard opener. Barrack rooms, barrooms, street corners, dark alleys, it was not a phrase you wanted to hear.
“Nothing,” he said, and realized he had made the situation much worse.
“You calling me nothing?”
Barr put his eyes back on the floor and moved on, but it was way too late. He felt the Mexican’s stare on his back and gave up on the pay phone idea. The phones were in a dead-end lobby and he didn’t want to feel trapped. So he walked a long counterclockwise circuit and headed back to his cell. He got there OK. Didn’t look at anyone, didn’t speak. He lay down on his bunk. About two hours later, he felt OK. He guessed he could handle a little macho bluster. And he was bigger than the Mexican. He was bigger than two Mexicans.
He wanted to call his sister. He wanted to know she was OK.
He set off for the pay phones again.
He got there unmolested. It was a small space. There were four phones on the wall, four men talking, four lines of other men waiting behind them. Noise, shuffling feet, crazed laughter, impatience, frustration, sour air, the smell of sweat and dirty hair and stale urine. Just a normal prison scene, according to James Barr’s preconceptions.
Then it wasn’t a normal scene.
The men in front of him vanished. Just disappeared. They just melted out of sight. Those on the phone hung up mid-sentence and ducked back past him. Those waiting in line peeled away. In half a second the lobby went from being full and noisy to being deserted and silent.
James Barr turned around.
He saw the Mexican with the tattoos. The Mexican had a knife in his hand and twelve friends behind him. The knife was a plastic toothbrush handle wrapped with tape and sharpened to a point, like a stiletto. The friends were all stocky little guys, all with the same tattoos. They all had cropped hair with intricate patterns shaved across their skulls.
“Wait,” Barr said.
But the Mexicans didn’t wait, and eight minutes later Barr was in a coma. He was found sometime after that, on the floor, beaten pulpy, with multiple stab wounds and a cracked skull and severe subdural bleeding. Afterward, jail talk said he had had it coming. He had disrespected the Latinos. But jail talk said he hadn’t gone quietly. There was a hint of admiration. The Mexicans had suffered a little. But not nearly as much as James Barr. He was medevaced to the city hospital and sewn up and operated on to relieve pressure from a swollen brain. Then he was dumped in a secure intensive care unit, comatose. The doctors weren’t sure when he would wake up again. Maybe in a day. Maybe in a week. Maybe in a month. Maybe never. The doctors didn’t really know, and they didn’t really care. They were all local people.
The warden at the jail called late at night and told Emerson. Then Emerson called and told Rodin. Then Rodin called and told Chapman. Then Chapman called and told Franklin.
“So what happens now?” Franklin asked him.
“Nothing,” Chapman said. “It’s on ice. You can’t try a guy in a coma.”
“What about when he wakes up?”
“If he’s OK, then they’ll go ahead, I guess.”
“What if he isn’t?”
“Then they won’t. Can’t try a vegetable.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Nothing,” Chapman said. “We weren’t taking it very seriously anyhow. Barr’s guilty all to hell and gone, and there’s nothing much anyone can do for him.”
Franklin called and told Rosemary Barr, because he wasn’t sure if anyone else would have taken the trouble. He found out that nobody else had. So he broke the news himself. Rosemary Barr didn’t have much of an outward reaction. She just went very quiet. It was like she was on emotional overload.
“I guess I should go to the hospital,” she said.
“If you want,” Franklin said.
“He’s innocent, you know. This is so unfair.”
“Did you see him yesterday?”
“You mean, can I alibi him?”
“Can you?”
“No,” Rosemary Barr said. “I can’t. I don’t know where he was yesterday. Or what he was doing.”
“Are there places he goes regularly? Movies, bars, anything like that?”
“Not really.”
“Friends he hangs with?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Girlfriends?”
“Not for a long time.”
“Other family he visits?”
“There’s just the two of us. Him and me.”
Franklin said nothing. There was a long, distracted pause.
“What happens now?” Rosemary Barr asked.
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Did you find that person he mentioned?”
“Jack Reacher? No, I’m afraid not. No trace.”
“Will you keep on looking?”
“There’s really nothing more I can do.”
“OK,” Rosemary Barr said. “Then we’ll have to manage without him.”
But even as they spoke, on the phone late at night on Saturday, Jack Reacher was on his way to them.
CHAPTER 2
Reacher was on his way to them because of a woman. He had spent Friday night in South Beach, Miami, in a salsa club, with a dancer from a cruise ship. The boat was Norwegian, and so was the girl. Reacher guessed she was too tall for ballet, but she was the right size for everything else. They met on the beach in the afternoon. Reacher was working on his tan. He felt better brown. He didn’t know what she was working on. But he felt her shadow fall across his face and opened his eyes to find her staring at him. Or maybe at his scars. The browner he got, the more they stood out, white and wicked and obvious. She was pale, in a black bikini. A small black bikini. He pegged her for a dancer long before she told him. It was in the way she held herself.
They ended up having a late dinner together and then going out to the club. South Beach salsa wouldn’t have been Reacher’s first choice, but her company made it worthw
hile. She was fun to be with. And she was a great dancer, obviously. Full of energy. She wore him out. At four in the morning she took him back to her hotel, eager to wear him out some more. Her hotel was a small Art Deco place near the ocean. Clearly the cruise line treated its people well. Certainly it was a much more romantic destination than Reacher’s own motel. And much closer.
And it had cable television, which Reacher’s place didn’t. He woke at eight on Saturday morning when he heard the dancer in the shower. He turned on the TV and went looking for ESPN. He wanted Friday night’s American League highlights. He never found them. He clicked his way through successive channels and then stopped dead on CNN because he heard the chief of an Indiana police department say a name he knew: James Barr. The picture was of a press conference. Small room, harsh light. Top of the screen was a caption that said: Courtesy NBC. There was a banner across the bottom that said: Friday Night Massacre. The police chief said the name again, James Barr, and then he introduced a homicide detective called Emerson. Emerson looked tired. Emerson said the name for a third time: James Barr. Then, like he anticipated the exact question in Reacher’s mind, he ran through a brief biography: Forty-one years old, local Indiana resident, U.S. Army infantry specialist from 1985 to 1991, Gulf War veteran, never married, currently unemployed.
Reacher watched the screen. Emerson seemed like a concise type of a guy. He was brief. No bullshit. He finished his statement and in response to a reporter’s question declined to specify what if anything James Barr had said during interrogation. Then he introduced a District Attorney. This guy’s name was Rodin, and he wasn’t concise. Wasn’t brief. He used plenty of bullshit. He spent ten minutes claiming Emerson’s credit for himself. Reacher knew how that worked. He had been a cop of sorts for thirteen years. Cops bust their tails, and prosecutors bask in the glory. Rodin said James Barr a few more times and then said the state was maybe looking to fry him.
For what?
Reacher waited.
A local anchor called Ann Yanni came on. She recapped the events of the night before. Sniper slaying. Senseless slaughter. An automatic weapon. A parking garage. A public plaza. Commuters on their way home after a long workweek. Five dead. A suspect in custody, but a city still grieving.