by Lee Child
“Read them and weep,” Cash said.
Every single target showed an expert score.
Reacher stared at them, one after the other. Each inner ring was tightly packed with clean, crisp holes. Tight clusters, big and obvious. Thirty-two targets, ten rounds each, three hundred twenty rounds, all of them dead-on maximum scores.
“This is everything he did?” Reacher asked.
Cash nodded. “Like you said, I’m a record keeper.”
“What gun?”
“His own Super Match. Great rifle.”
“Did the cops call you?”
“Guy called Emerson. He was pretty decent about it. Because I’ve got to think about my own ass, because Barr trained here. I don’t want to damage my professional reputation. I’ve put in a lot of work here, and this place could get a bad name.”
Reacher scanned the targets, one more time. Remembered telling Helen Rodin: They don’t forget.
“What about his buddy Charlie?” he asked.
“Charlie was hopeless by comparison.”
Cash butted James Barr’s targets into a pile and put them back in the B slot. Then he opened another drawer and ran his fingers back to S and took out another sheaf of paper.
“Charlie Smith,” he said. “He was military too, by the look of him. But Uncle Sam’s money didn’t buy anything long-term there.”
He went through the same routine, laying out Charlie’s targets in two long rows. Thirty-two of them.
“They always showed up together?” Reacher asked.
“Like peanut butter and jelly,” Cash said.
“Separate ranges?”
“Separate planets,” Cash said.
Reacher nodded. In terms of numerical score Charlie’s targets were much worse than James Barr’s. Way worse. They were the product of a very poor shooter. One had just four hits, all of them outside the outer ring, one each in the quadrants in the corners. Across all thirty-two targets he had just eight hits inside the inner ring. One was a dead-on bull’s-eye. Dumb luck, maybe, or wind or drift or a random thermal. Seven were very close to clipping the black. Apart from that, Charlie was all over the place. Most of his rounds must have missed altogether. Percentage-wise most of his hits happened in the white between the two outer rings. Low, low scores. But his hits weren’t precisely random. There was a weird kind of consistency there. He was aiming, but he was missing. Maybe some kind of bad astigmatism in his eyes.
“What type of a guy was he?” Reacher asked.
“Charlie?” Cash said. “Charlie was a blank slate. Couldn’t read him at all. If he had been a better shot, he’d have come close to frightening me.”
“Small guy, right?”
“Tiny. Weird hair.”
“Did they talk to you much?”
“Not really. They were just two guys down from Indiana, getting off on shooting guns. I get a lot of that here.”
“Did you watch them shoot?”
Cash shook his head. “I learned never to watch anybody. People take it as a criticism. I let them come to me, but nobody ever does.”
“Barr bought his ammo here, right?”
“Lake City. Expensive.”
“His gun wasn’t cheap, either.”
“He was worth it.”
“What gun did Charlie use?”
“The same thing. Like a matched pair. In his case it was a comedy. Like a fat guy who buys a carbon fiber racing bike.”
“You got separate handgun ranges here?”
“One indoor. People use it if it rains. Otherwise I let them blast away outside, anywhere they want. I don’t care much for handguns. No art to them.”
Reacher nodded and Cash swept Charlie’s targets into a pile, careful to keep them in correct date order. Then he stacked them together and put them back in the S drawer.
“Smith is a common name,” Reacher said. “Actually I think it’s the most common name in America.”
“It was genuine,” Cash said. “I see a driver’s license before anyone gets membership.”
“Where was he from originally?”
“Accent? Somewhere way north.”
“Can I take one of James Barr’s targets?”
“What the hell for?”
“For a souvenir,” Reacher said.
Cash said nothing.
“It won’t go anywhere,” Reacher said. “I’m not going to sell it on the internet.”
Cash said nothing.
“Barr’s not coming back,” Reacher said. “That’s for damn sure. And if you really want to cover your ass you should dump them all anyway.”
Cash shrugged and turned back to the file drawer.
“The most recent one,” Reacher said. “That would be best.”
Cash thumbed through the stack and pulled a sheet. Handed it across the counter. Reacher took it and folded it carefully and put it in his shirt pocket.
“Good luck with your buddy,” Cash said.
“He’s not my buddy,” Reacher said. “But thanks for your help.”
“You’re welcome,” Cash said. “Because I know who you are. I recognized you when you got behind the gun. I never forget the shape of a prone position. You won the Invitational ten years after I was in it. I was watching, from the crowd. Your real name is Reacher.”
Reacher nodded.
“Polite of you,” Cash said. “Not to mention it after I told you how I only came in third.”
“You had tougher competition,” Reacher said. “Ten years later it was all a bunch of deadbeats.”
He stopped at the last gas station in Kentucky and filled Yanni’s tank. Then he called Helen Rodin from a pay phone.
“Is the cop still there?” he asked.
“Two of them,” she said. “One in the lobby, one at my door.”
“Did Franklin start yet?”
“First thing this morning.”
“Any progress?”
“Nothing. They were five very ordinary people.”
“Where is Franklin’s office?”
She gave him an address. Reacher checked his watch. “I’ll meet you there at four o’clock.”
“How was Kentucky?”
“Confusing,” he said.
He recrossed the Ohio on the same trestle bridge with Sheryl Crow telling him all over again about how every day was a winding road. He cranked up the volume and turned left and headed west. Ann Yanni’s maps showed a highway cloverleaf forty miles ahead. He could turn north there and a couple hours later he could scoot past the whole city, forty feet in the air. It seemed like a better idea than trying the surface streets. He figured Emerson would be getting seriously frustrated. And then seriously enraged, at some point during the day. Reacher would have been. Reacher had been Emerson for thirteen years, and in this kind of a situation he would have been kicking ass big time, blanketing the streets with uniforms, trying everything.
He found the cloverleaf and joined the highway going north. He killed the CD when it started over again and settled in for the cruise. The Mustang felt pretty good at seventy miles an hour. It rumbled along, lots of power, no finesse at all. Reacher figured if he could put that drivetrain in some battered old sedan body, then that would be his kind of car.
Bellantonio had been at work in his crime lab since seven o’clock in the morning. He had fingerprinted the cell phone found abandoned under the highway and come up with nothing worth a damn. Then he had copied the call log. The last number dialed was Helen Rodin’s cell. Last-but-one was Emerson’s cell. Clearly Reacher had made both of those calls. Then came a long string of calls to several different cell phones registered to Specialized Services of Indiana. Maybe Reacher had made those too, or maybe he hadn’t. No way of knowing. Bellantonio wrote it all up, but he knew Emerson wouldn’t do anything with it. The only viable pressure point was the call to Helen Rodin, and no way could Emerson start hassling a defense lawyer about a conversation with a witness, suspect or not. That would be a waste of breath.
So he moved
on to the garage tapes. He had four days’ worth, ninety-six hours, nearly three thousand separate vehicle movements. His staff had logged them all. Only three of them were Cadillacs. Indiana was the same as most heartland states. People bought pickup trucks as a first preference, then SUVs, then coupes, then convertibles. Regular sedans claimed a tiny market share, and most of them were Toyotas or Hondas or mid-sized domestics. Full-sized turnpike cruisers were very rare, and premium brands rarest of all.
The first Cadillac on tape was a bone-white Eldorado. A two-door coupe, several years old. It had parked before ten in the morning on the Wednesday and stayed parked for five hours. The second Cadillac on tape was a new STS, maybe red or gray, possibly light blue. Hard to be sure, with the murky monochrome picture. Whatever, it had parked soon after lunch on the Thursday and stayed there for two hours.
The third Cadillac was a black DeVille. It was caught on tape entering the garage just after six o’clock in the morning on the Friday. Black Friday, as Bellantonio was calling it. At six o’clock in the morning the garage would have been more or less completely empty. The tape showed the DeVille sweeping up the ramp, fast and confident. It showed it leaving again after just four minutes.
Long enough to place the cone.
The driver wasn’t really visible in either sequence. There was just a gray blur behind the windshield. Maybe it was Barr, maybe it wasn’t. Bellantonio wrote it all up for Emerson. He made a mental note to check through again to determine if four minutes was the shortest stay on the tapes. He suspected it was, easily.
Then he scanned the forensic sweep through Alexandra Dupree’s garden apartment. He had assigned a junior guy to do it, because it wasn’t the crime scene. There was nothing of interest there. Nothing at all. Except the fingerprint evidence. The apartment was a mess of prints, like all apartments are. Most of them were the girl’s, but there were four other sets. Three of them were unidentifiable.
The fourth set of prints belonged to James Barr.
James Barr had been in Alexandra Dupree’s apartment. In the living room, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. No doubt about it. Clear prints, perfect matches. Unmistakable.
Bellantonio wrote it up for Emerson.
Then he read a report just in from the medical examiner. Alexandra Dupree had been killed by a single massive blow to the right temple, delivered by a left-handed assailant. She had fallen onto a gravel surface that contained organic matter including grass and dirt. But she had been found in an alley paved with limestone. Therefore her body had been moved at least a short distance between death and discovery. Other physiological evidence confirmed it.
Bellantonio took a new sheet of memo paper and addressed two questions to Emerson: Is Reacher left-handed? Did he have access to a vehicle?
The Zec spent the morning hours deciding what to do with Raskin. Raskin had failed three separate times. First with the initial tail, then by getting attacked from behind, and finally by letting his cell phone get stolen. The Zec didn’t like failure. He didn’t like it at all. At first he considered just pulling Raskin off the street and restricting him to duty in the video room on the ground floor of the house. But why would he want to depend on a failure to monitor his security?
Then Linsky called. They had been searching fourteen straight hours and had found no sign of the soldier.
“We should go after the lawyer now,” Linsky said. “After all, nothing can happen without her. She’s the focal point. She’s the one making the moves here.”
“That raises the stakes,” the Zec said.
“They’re already pretty high.”
“Maybe the soldier’s gone for good.”
“Maybe he is,” Linsky said. “But what matters is what he left behind. In the lawyer’s head.”
“I’ll think about it,” the Zec said. “I’ll get back to you.”
“Should we keep on looking?”
“Tired?”
Linsky was exhausted and his spine was killing him.
“No,” he lied. “I’m not tired.”
“So keep on looking,” the Zec said. “But send Raskin back to me.”
Reacher slowed to fifty where the highway first rose on its stilts. He stayed in the center lane and let the spur that ran behind the library pass by on his right. He kept on north for two more miles and came off at the cloverleaf that met the four-lane with the auto dealers and the parts store. He went east on the county road and then turned north again, on Jeb Oliver’s rural route. After a minute he was deep in the silent countryside. The irrigation booms were turning slowly and the sun was making rainbows in the droplets.
The heartland. Where the secrets are.
He coasted to a stop next to the Olivers’ mailbox. No way was the Mustang going to make it down the driveway. The center hump would have ripped all the parts off the bottom. The suspension, the exhaust system, the axle, the diff, whatever else was down there. Ann Yanni wouldn’t have been pleased at all. So he slid out and left the car where it was, low and crouched and winking blue in the sun. He picked his way down the track, feeling every rock and stone through his thin soles. Jeb Oliver’s red Dodge hadn’t been moved. It was sitting right there, lightly dusted with brown dirt and streaked with dried dew. The old farmhouse was quiet. The barn was closed and locked.
Reacher ignored the front door. He walked around the side of the house to the back porch. Jeb’s mother was right there on her glider. She was dressed the same but this time she had no bottle. Just a manic stare out of eyes as big as saucers. She had one foot hooked up under her and was using the other to scoot the chair about twice as fast as she had before.
“Hello,” she said.
“Jeb not back yet?” Reacher said.
She just shook her head. Reacher heard all the sounds he had heard before. The irrigation hiss, the squeak of the glider, the creak of the porch board.
“Got a gun?” he asked.
“I don’t hold with them,” she said.
“Got a phone?” he asked.
“Disconnected,” she said. “I owe them money. But I don’t need them. Jeb lets me use his cell if I need it.”
“Good,” Reacher said.
“How the hell is that good? Jeb’s not here.”
“That’s exactly what’s good about it. I’m going to break into your barn and I don’t want you calling the cops while I’m doing it. Or shooting me.”
“That’s Jeb’s barn. You can’t go in there.”
“I don’t see how you can stop me.”
He turned his back on her and continued down the track. It curved a little and led directly to the barn’s double doors. The doors, like the barn itself, were built of old planks alternately baked and rotted by a hundred summers and a hundred winters. Reacher touched them with his knuckles and felt a dry hollowness. The lock was brand new. It was a U-shaped bicycle lock like the ones city messengers used. One leg of the U ran through two black steel hasps that were bolted through the planks of the doors. Reacher touched the lock. Shook it. Heavy steel, warm from the sun. It was a pretty solid arrangement. No way of cutting it, no way of breaking it.
But a lock was only as strong as what it was fixed to.
Reacher grabbed the straight end of the lock at the bottom of the U. Pulled on it gently, and then harder. The doors sagged toward him and stopped. He put the flat of his palm against the wood and pushed them back. Held them closed with a straight left arm and yanked on the lock with his right. The bolts gave a little, but not much. Reacher figured that Jeb must have used washers on the back, under the nuts. Maybe big wide ones. They were spreading the load.
He thought: OK, more load.
He held the straight part of the lock with both hands and leaned back like a water-skier. Pulled hard and smashed his heel into the wood under the hasps. His legs were longer than his arms, so he was cramped and the kick didn’t carry much power. But it carried enough. The old wood splintered a little and something gave half an inch. He regrouped and tried it again. Something
gave a little more. Then a plank in the left-hand door split completely and two bolts pulled out. Reacher put his left hand flat on the door and got his right-hand fingers hooked in the gap with a backhand grip. He took a breath and counted to three and jerked hard. The last bolt fell out and the whole lock assembly hit the ground and the doors sagged all the way open. Reacher stepped away and folded the doors back flush with the walls and let the sunlight in.
He guessed he was expecting to see a meth lab, maybe with workbenches and beakers and scales and propane burners and piles of new Baggies ready to receive the product. Or else a big stash, ready for onward distribution.
He saw none of that.
Bright light leaked in through long vertical gaps between warped planks. The barn was maybe forty feet by twenty inside. It had a bare earth floor, swept and compacted. It was completely empty except for a well-used pickup truck parked in the exact center of the space.
The truck was a Chevy Silverado, several years old. It was light brown, like fired clay. It was a working vehicle. It had been built down to a plain specification. A base model. Vinyl seats, steel wheels, undramatic tires. The load bed was clean but scratched and dented. It had no license plates. The doors were locked and there was no sign of a key anywhere.
“What’s that?”
Reacher turned and saw Jeb Oliver’s mother behind him. She had her hand tight on the doorjamb, like she was unwilling to cross the threshold.
“It’s a truck,” Reacher said.
“I can see that.”
“Is it Jeb’s?”
“I never saw it before.”
“What did he drive before that big red thing?”
“Not this.”
Reacher stepped closer to the truck and peered in through the driver’s-side window. Manual shift. Dirt and grime. High mileage. But no trash. The truck had been someone’s faithful servant, used but not abused.
“I never saw it before,” the woman said again.
It looked like it had been there for a long time. It was settled on soft tires. It didn’t smell of oil or gasoline. It was cold, inert, filmed with dust. Reacher got on his knees and checked underneath. Nothing to see. Just a frame, caked with old dirt, clipped by rocks and gravel.