by Lee Child
And found a Glock 17 nine-millimeter pistol in his pocket. It smelled like it had been recently fired and its magazine was one round short of full.
The cop arrested the pedestrian and drove him to the station. At the booking desk he was recognized as the bus driver. His hands and his clothing were swabbed for gunshot residue. The tests came up positive. Jay Knox had fired a gun at some point in the past few hours. His prints were all over the Glock. His rights had been read to him. He was in a holding cell. He hadn’t asked for a lawyer. But he wasn’t talking, either.
Holland left to take a look at Knox in his cell. It was an urge that Reacher had seen before. It was like going to the zoo. After a big capture people would show up just to stare at the guy. They would stand in front of the bars for a moment and take it all in. Afterward they would claim there was something in the guy’s face they always knew was wrong. If not, they would talk about the banality of evil. About how there were no reliable signs.
Peterson stayed in the squad room. He was tying up the loose ends in his head. Another urge Reacher had seen before. A dangerous urge. If you work backward, you see what you want to see.
Reacher asked, “How many rounds in the victim?”
“One,” Peterson said. “In the head.”
“Nine millimeter?”
“Almost certainly.”
“It’s a common round.”
“I know.”
“Does the geography work?”
“Knox was picked up about four miles from the scene.”
“On foot? That’s too far, surely.”
“There has to have been a vehicle involved.”
“Why?”
“Wait until you see the photographs.”
The photographs were delivered thirty minutes later. They were in the same kind of file folder Reacher had seen the night before in Holland’s office. They were the same kind of photographs. Glossy eight-by-tens, with printed labels pasted in their bottom corners. There were plenty of them. They were color prints, but they were mostly gray and white. Snow on the ground, snow in the air. The camera shutter had frozen the falling flakes in strange dark suspended shapes, like ash from a volcano, like specks and impurities.
The first picture was an establishing shot taken from a distance, looking west to east. It showed a snowbound road with two pairs of ruts clustered close to the crown of the camber. A lone car was sitting dead center in the westbound ruts. Its headlights were on. It hadn’t veered or swerved. It had just rolled to a halt, like a train on a track.
The second picture had been taken about a hundred feet closer. Three things were apparent. First, there was a figure in the driver’s seat. A man, held upright by a tight seat belt, his head lolling forward. Second, the glass in the rear passenger-side window was misted with a large pink stain. And third, there was absolutely nothing on the road itself except virgin snow and four wheel ruts. No other disturbance at all.
The third photograph confirmed that fact. For the third shot, the camera had ignored the car completely. The lens had been trained directly west to east along the road right above where the yellow line was buried under the snow. It was a featureless picture. Nothing to see. Passing tires had dug trenches, the base of the ruts had been crushed downward, small side walls had been thrown upward, tiny avalanches had fallen outward from the top of the side walls, and those small fallen fragments had been smoothed over by a crust of fresh snow.
Nothing else.
“Good pictures,” Reacher said.
“I did my best,” Peterson said.
“Fine work.”
“Thank you.”
“No footprints,” Reacher said.
“Agreed,” Peterson said.
The fourth photograph was a close-up of one of the eastbound ruts. Nothing to see there either, except broken and confused pieces of tread marks, the same small waffles and lattices Reacher had seen all over town. No way to reconstruct anything worth sending to a lab.
The fifth picture was a close-up of the car, taken from the front right side. It was a small neat sedan, a make Reacher didn’t recognize.
“Infiniti,” Peterson said. “It’s Japanese. Nissan’s luxury division. That model has a V-6 engine and full-time four-wheel-drive. There are snow tires on it, all around. It’s practical, and it’s about as showy as a South Dakota lawyer wants to get.”
It was painted a light silver color. It was basically clean, but grimed over by several recent winter trips. The way the light reflected off the snow and played over the paint made it look ghostly and insubstantial. The driver’s window was all the way open. The dead guy was pinned upright against the seat back by the belt. Some snow had blown in on him. His chin was on his chest. He could have been asleep, except for the hole in his head.
The hole was the subject of photograph number five. It was in the center of the guy’s forehead. Like a third eye. Clearly the guy had been looking out the window, halfway between sideways and straight ahead. He had been shot right down his line of sight. He had been looking at the gun. The exit wound had spattered stuff all over the window diagonally behind him. His head had then slumped down and rotated back to a central position.
The rest of the photographs were of the body and the interior of the vehicle from every conceivable angle. Take plenty of photographs, Reacher had said, and Peterson had complied to the letter. There was a pair of rubber overshoes neatly placed in the passenger foot well. There was a small multi-purpose chrome hammer mounted centrally on the dash. Reacher had seen them advertised in mail order brochures on airplanes. They could tap the windshield out if the doors were jammed after a wreck. They had a blade concealed in the handle to cut seat belts. Ideal accessories for cautious, meticulous, organized people interested in cars. But Reacher wondered whether one had actually ever been used in earnest in the whole history of automotive transport. He suspected not.
The Infiniti’s shifter was in Park. Its ignition key was turned to the run position. The tachometer showed an 800-rpm idle. The odometer showed fewer than ten thousand miles. Cabin temperature was set at sixty-nine degrees. The radio was tuned to a local AM station. The tick on the volume knob was all the way over at the eight o’clock position. Turned down low. The gas dial showed the tank to be close to full.
Reacher said, “Tell me the story.”
Peterson said, “OK, Knox is in a vehicle. He’s driving. He’s heading east. The lawyer is heading west. They’re both driving slow, because the road is bad. Knox sees the lawyer coming. He winds his window down. Puts his arm out and flags the lawyer down. The lawyer slows and stops. He winds his own window down. Maybe he thinks that Knox is going to warn him about a danger up ahead. Driver to driver, like people do in adverse conditions. Instead, Knox shoots him and drives on.”
“Who found the body?”
“Another guy heading east. Maybe five or ten minutes after it happened. He slowed, took a look, and called us from a gas station two miles farther on. No cell phone.”
“Is Knox right-handed?”
“I don’t know. But most people are.”
“Did you find a shell case?”
“No.”
“If Knox is right-handed, then he was shooting diagonally across his body. He would want reasonable arm extension. The muzzle was probably out the window, just a little. The ejection port on a Glock is on the right side of the gun. So he had to be very careful with his position. He had to keep the ejection port inside the car. Kind of cramped. No opportunity to aim down the barrel. Yet he hit the guy right between the eyes. Not easy. Is Knox that good a shot?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should try to find out.”
Peterson said, “I figure the shell case hit the door frame or the windshield, at an angle, and it bounced away inside Knox’s vehicle.”
“So tell me about Knox’s vehicle.”
“Prearranged. He got to town yesterday and met someone today. Maybe a biker. The biker handed over a vehicle, maybe a pick-up t
ruck. Knox did the deed and returned the vehicle and was walking home when we arrested him.”
Reacher said nothing.
Peterson said, “The people where we put him last night said he made a point of being out all day. They say he wasn’t very good company. Like he had things on his mind.”
“I met him this morning in the coffee shop.”
“How was he?”
“Not very good company. He said because he wasn’t getting paid as of yesterday. Maybe he was worried about losing his job.”
“He was nervous about his mission.”
“How did he know what the lawyer was driving?”
“Whoever delivered the car told him.”
“How did he know the lawyer was going to be on that road at that time?”
“Simple arithmetic. The decoy appointment was for noon. Easy enough to work backward in terms of the clock. Easy enough in terms of location, too, given that everyone knew the highway was closed.”
“I just don’t buy how he got here in the first place. It was way too complicated. And he said a car was heading straight at him. He couldn’t prearrange that. He couldn’t invent it, either. He had twenty-one potential witnesses on board.”
“None of them saw it.”
“He couldn’t know that in advance.”
Peterson said, “Maybe there really was a car coming at him. Maybe he made a split-second decision to exploit it, instead of faking a breakdown nearer the cloverleaf. Was there any delay before he reacted?”
Reacher said, “I don’t know. I was asleep.”
Peterson said nothing.
Reacher said, “I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”
“Not what cops like to hear.”
“I know. I was a cop. Doesn’t make it any less true.”
“He had a gun in his pocket and he fired it.”
Reacher asked, “Case closed?”
“That’s a big step.”
“But?”
“Right now, yes, I think it is.”
“So put your money where your mouth is. Pull those cops out of Janet Salter’s house.”
Peterson paused. “Not my decision.”
“What would you do if it was?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will Holland do it?”
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
Five minutes to three in the afternoon.
Thirty-seven hours to go.
Chapter 16
Holland didn’t do it. Not, he said, because he believed Knox to be innocent. But because the stakes were high enough for the bad guys to justify a second attempt, and a third, and if necessary a fourth and a fifth. Therefore Janet Salter’s protection would stay in place until the trial had run its course.
Then Jay Knox started talking, and things changed again.
Knox said he carried the gun for his own personal protection, and always had. He said he was down and depressed and frustrated about the incident with the bus, and annoyed that his employers were going to dock his pay. He didn’t like the creeps he had been billeted with. He had lingered over his breakfast in the coffee shop as long as he could, but Reacher had disturbed him, so he had set out on a long angry walk. He was trying to burn off his feelings. But he had arrived at a small trestle bridge over an icy stream and seen a road sign: Bridge Freezes Before Road. He had lost his temper and pulled out the Glock and shot the sign. For which he was prepared to apologize, but he added that pretty much every damn road sign he had seen in the area was pockmarked by bullet holes or shotgun pellets.
He remembered where the bridge was. He remembered where he had been standing. He was fairly exact about it. He could make a pretty good guess about where his spent shell case must have gone.
Peterson knew where the trestle bridge was, obviously. Its location made geographic sense, given the site of Knox’s arrest. He figured that if Knox had really been out there, then his footprints might still be vaguely visible as smooth dents under the new accumulation. Certainly nobody else would have been walking there. Locals had more sense. He sent a patrol car to check. It had a metal detector in the trunk. Standard equipment, in jurisdictions that had gun crime and snow.
Ten minutes later the cop from the patrol car called in from the trestle bridge. He had found footprints. And he had found the shell case. It was buried in the snow at the end of a short furrow the length of a finger. It had hissed and burned its way in there. The furrow had been lightly covered by new fall, but was still visible, if you knew what you were looking for. And the cop confirmed that there was a new bullet hole in the warning sign, raw and bright, almost certainly a nine millimeter, in the space between the e of Bridge and the F of Freezes.
Peterson conferred with Holland and they agreed the man they were looking for was both still unidentified and already located in the vicinity.
And only halfway through his business.
Jay Knox was a free man five minutes later. But he was told his Glock would stay in the police station, just in case, until he was ready to leave town. It was a deal Knox agreed to readily enough. Reacher saw him walk out of the lobby into the snow, reprieved but still defeated, relieved but still frustrated. Peterson and Holland conferred again and put the department on emergency alert. Even Kapler and Lowell were sent back to active duty. The entire force was ordered into cars and told to cruise the streets and look for odd faces, odd vehicles, odd behavior, a mobile expression of any police department’s primal fear: There’s someone out there.
Peterson pinned the new crime scene photographs to the boards in the small office off the corridor outside the squad room. He put them on the wall opposite the pictures of the black-clad guy lying dead in the snow. He said, “We just made fools of ourselves and wasted a lot of time.”
Reacher said, “Not really a lot of time.”
“What would your elite unit do next?”
“We’d speculate about automobile transmissions and cautious people.”
“What does that mean?”
“Apart from Knox not being the guy, I think you were exactly right about how it went down. The absence of footprints in the snow pretty much proves it. Two cars stopped cheek to cheek, just shy of exactly level. The bad guy waved the lawyer down. The lawyer stopped. The question is, why did he stop?”
“It’s the obvious thing to do.”
Reacher nodded. “I agree, on a road like that. In summer, at normal speeds, it wouldn’t happen. But in the snow, sure. You’re crawling along, you figure the other guy either needs your help or has some necessary information for you. So you stop. But if you’re the kind of guy who’s cautious enough to fuss with overshoes and mount an emergency hammer on your dash and listen to AM radio for the weather report and keep your gas tank full at all times, then you’re probably a little wary about that whole kind of thing. You’d keep the transmission in gear and your foot on the brake. So you can take off again right away, if necessary. Maybe you would open your window just a crack. But your lawyer didn’t do that. He put his shift lever in Park and opened his window all the way.”
“Which means what?”
“Which means he was ready for a full-blown transaction. A conversation, a discussion, the whole nine yards. He turned his radio down, ready for it. Which means maybe he knew the guy who stopped him. Which is possibly plausible, given the kind of people he seems to have been mixing with.”
“So what would you do now?”
“We’d already be tearing his life apart.”
“Difficult for us to do. He lived in the next county. Outside of our jurisdiction.”
“You need to get on the phone and cooperate.”
“Like you used to with the feds?”
“Not exactly,” Reacher said.
Plato finished his afternoon walk with a visit to his prisoner. The guy was chained in the open, by his ankle, to a steel post anchored deep in the earth. He was a thief. He had gotten greedy. Plato’s operations were cash businesses, obviously, and vast quantities o
f bills had to be stored for long periods, in the ground, in cellars, hidden here and there, to the point where damp and rodent damage claimed a ballpark figure of ten percent of incoming assets. A hundred grand out of every million just fell apart and rotted away. Except this guy’s division was claiming wastage closer to twelve percent. Which was an anomaly. Which on examination turned out to be caused by the guy skimming, a quarter-million here, a half-million there. To some extent Plato was tolerant of mistakes, but not of disloyalty.
Hence the guy, chained to the post by the ankle.
Winter weather a hundred miles from Mexico City was not fiercely hot. There were no biting insects in the air or in the ground, and the snakes were asleep, and the small night mammals were generally timid. So the guy would die either of thirst or starvation, depending on the rains.
Unless he chose not to.
There was a hatchet within easy reach. The blade was keen, and the guy’s shin bone was right there. He hadn’t used it yet. But Plato thought he would. It was usually about fifty-fifty. Proof of that proposition was all over the area, some widows, equal numbers of broken men hopping around on crutches.
In the South Dakota squad room the clock ticked around to five to four in the afternoon. Thirty-six hours to go. Peterson said, “Five to four here is five to five in the East. Close of business. Time to call your old unit back. We still need that information.”
Reacher wandered over to the desk in the corner of the squad room. He sat down. Didn’t dial the phone. Close of business in Virginia was five o’clock, not five to. Precision was important. It had mattered to him, and he had no doubt it mattered to his current successor.
Peterson asked, “What did you think of Mrs. Salter?”
“She’s probably very well read.”
“As a witness?”