He went quiet.
“You OK?” Reacher said.
“My head hurts real bad. I think I had an operation.”
Reacher said nothing.
“I don’t like baseball on the TV,” Barr said.
“I’m not here to discuss your media preferences.”
“Do you watch baseball on TV?”
“I don’t have a TV,” Reacher said.
“Really? You should get one. You can get them for a hundred bucks. Maybe less, for a small one. Look in the Yellow Pages.”
“I don’t have a phone. Or a house.”
“Why not? You’re not still in the army.”
“How would you know?”
“Nobody’s still in the army. Not from back then.”
“Some people are,” Reacher said, thinking about Eileen Hutton.
“Officers,” Barr said. “Nobody else.”
“I was an officer,” Reacher said. “You’re supposed to be able to remember stuff like that.”
“But you weren’t like the others. That’s what I meant.”
“How was I different?”
“You worked for a living.”
“Tell me about the ballgame.”
“Why don’t you have a house? Are you doing OK?”
“You worried about me now?”
“Don’t like it when folks aren’t doing so well.”
“I’m doing fine,” Reacher said. “Believe me. You’re the one with the problem.”
“Are you a cop now? Here? I never saw you around.”
Reacher shook his head. “I’m just a citizen.”
“From where?”
“From nowhere. Out in the world.”
“Why are you here?”
Reacher didn’t answer.
“Oh,” Barr said. “To nail me.”
“Tell me about the ballgame.”
“It was the Cubs at the Cardinals,” Barr said. “Close game. Cards won, bottom ninth, walk-off.”
“Home run?”
“No, an error. A walk, a steal, then a groundout to second put the runner on third, one out. Soft grounder to short, check the runner, throw to first, but the throw went in the dugout and the run scored on the error. The winning run, without a hit in the inning.”
“You remember it pretty well.”
“I follow the Cards. I always have.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t even know what day it is today.”
Reacher said nothing.
“I can’t believe that I did what they say,” Barr said. “Just can’t believe it.”
“Plenty of evidence,” Reacher said.
“For real?”
“No question.”
Barr closed his eyes.
“How many people?” he asked.
“Five.”
Barr’s chest started moving. Tears welled out of his closed eyes. His mouth opened in a ragged oval. He was crying, with his head in a vise.
“Why did I do it?” he said.
“Why did you do it the first time?” Reacher said.
“I was crazy then,” Barr said.
Reacher said nothing.
“No excuses,” Barr said. “I was a different person then. I thought I’d changed. I was sure I had. I was good afterward. I tried real hard. Fourteen years, reformed.”
Reacher said nothing.
“I would have killed myself,” Barr said. “You know, back then. Afterward. I came close, a couple of times. I was so ashamed. Except those four guys from KC turned out to be bad. That was my only consolation. I clung on to it, like redemption.”
“Why do you own all those guns?”
“Couldn’t give them up. They were reminders. And they keep me straight. Too hard to stay straight without them.”
“Do you ever use them?”
“Occasionally. Not often. Now and then.”
“How?”
“At a range.”
“Where? The cops checked.”
“Not here. I go across the line to Kentucky. There’s a range there, cheap.”
“You know the plaza downtown?”
“Sure. I live here.”
“Tell me how you did it.”
“I don’t remember doing it.”
“So tell me how you would do it. Theoretically. Like a recon briefing.”
“What would the targets be?”
“Pedestrians. Coming out of the DMV building.”
Barr closed his eyes again. “That’s who I shot?”
“Five of them,” Reacher said.
Barr started crying again. Reacher moved away and pulled a chair from against a wall. He turned it around and sat down on it, backward.
“When?” Barr said.
“Friday afternoon.”
Barr stayed quiet for a long time.
“How did they catch me?” he asked.
“You tell the story.”
“Was it a traffic stop?”
“Why would it be?”
“I would have waited until late. Maybe just after five. Plenty of people then. I would have stopped on the highway behind the library. Where it’s raised. Sun in the west, behind me, no reflection off the scope. I would have opened the passenger window and lined it all up and emptied the mag and hit the gas again. Only way to get caught would be if a state trooper pulled me over for speeding and saw the rifle. But I think I would have been aware of that. Wouldn’t I? I think I would have hidden the rifle and driven slow. Not fast. Why would I have risked standing out?”
Reacher said nothing.
“What?” Barr said. “Maybe a trooper stopped to help me right there. Was that it? While I was parked? Maybe he thought I had a flat. Or I was out of gas.”
“Do you own a traffic cone?” Reacher asked.
“A what?”
“A traffic cone.”
Barr started to say no, but then he stopped.
“I guess I’ve got one,” he said. “Not sure if I own it, exactly. I had my driveway blacktopped. They left a cone on the sidewalk to stop people driving on it. I had to leave it there three days. They never came back for it.”
“So what did you do with it?”
“I put it in the garage.”
“Is it still there?”
“I think so. I’m pretty sure.”
“When was this driveway work done?”
“Start of spring, I think. Months ago.”
“You got receipts?”
Barr tried to shake his head. Winced at the pressure from the clamp.
“It was a gypsy crew,” he said. “I think they stole the blacktop from the city. Probably from where they were starting to fix First Street. I paid cash, quick and dirty.”
“You got any friends?”
“A few.”
“Who are they?”
“Just guys. One or two.”
“Any new friends?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Women?”
“They don’t like me.”
“Tell me about the ballgame.”
“I already did.”
“Where were you? In the car? At home?”
“Home,” Barr said. “I was eating.”
“You remember that?”
Barr blinked. “The shrink lady said I should try to remember the circumstances. It might bring more stuff back. I was in the kitchen, eating chicken, cold. With potato chips. I remember that. But that’s as far as I can get.”
“Drink? Beer, juice, coffee?”
“I don’t remember. I just remember listening to the game. I’ve got a Bose radio. It’s in the kitchen. There’s a TV in there too, but I always listen to the game, never watch. Like when I was a kid.”
“How did you feel?”
“Feel?”
“Happy? Sad? Normal?”
Barr went quiet again for a moment.
“The shrink lady asked the same question,” he said. “I told her normal, but actually I think I was feeling happy. Like s
omething good was on the horizon.”
Reacher said nothing.
“I really blew that call, didn’t I?” Barr said.
“Tell me about your sister,” Reacher said.
“She was just here. Before the lawyer came in.”
“How do you feel about her?”
“She’s all I’ve got.”
“How far would you go to protect her?”
“I would do anything,” Barr said.
“What kind of anything?”
“I’ll plead guilty if they let me. She’ll still have to move, maybe change her name. But I’ll spare her what I can. She bought me the radio. For the baseball. Birthday gift.”
Reacher said nothing.
“Why are you here?” Barr asked him.
“To bury you.”
“I deserve it.”
“You didn’t fire from the highway. You were in the new parking garage.”
“On First Street?”
“North end.”
“That’s nuts. Why would I fire from there?”
“You asked your first lawyer to find me. On Saturday.”
“Why would I do that? You ought to be the last person I wanted to see. You know about Kuwait City. Why would I want that brought up?”
“What was the Cards’ next game?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try to remember. I need to understand the circumstances here.”
“I can’t remember,” Barr said. “There’s nothing there. I remember that winning run, and that’s all. The announcers were going crazy. You know how they are. They were kind of incredulous. I mean, what a stupid way to lose a ballgame. But it’s the Cubs, right? They were saying they always find some way to lose.”
“What about before the game? Earlier that day?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What would you normally be doing?”
“Not much. I don’t do much.”
“What happened in the Cardinals’ previous game?”
“I don’t recall.”
“What’s the next to last thing you remember?”
“I’m not sure. The driveway?”
“That was months ago.”
“I remember going out somewhere,” Barr said.
“When?”
“Not sure. Recently.”
“Alone?”
“Maybe with people. I’m not sure. Not sure where, either.”
Reacher said nothing. Just leaned back in his chair and listened to the quiet beep from the heart machine. It was running pretty fast. Both handcuffs were rattling.
“What’s in the IVs?” Barr asked.
Reacher squinted against the daylight and read the writing on the bags.
“Antibiotics,” he said.
“Not painkillers?”
“No.”
“I guess they think I don’t deserve any.”
Reacher said nothing.
“We go way back, right?” Barr said. “You and me?”
“Not really,” Reacher said.
“Not like we were friends.”
“You got that right.”
“But we were connected.”
Reacher said nothing.
“Weren’t we?” Barr asked.
“In a way,” Reacher said.
“So would you do something for me?” Barr asked. “As a favor?”
“Like what?” Reacher said.
“Pull the IV needles out of my hand.”
“Why?”
“So I can get an infection and die.”
“No,” Reacher said.
“Why not?”
“Not time yet,” Reacher said.
He stood up and put his chair back against the wall and walked out of the room. He processed out at the security desk and passed through the airlock and rode the elevator down to the street. Helen Rodin’s car wasn’t in the lot. She was already gone. She hadn’t waited for him. So he set out walking, all the way from the edge of town.
He picked his way past ten blocks of construction and went to the library first. It was getting late in the afternoon, but the library was still open. The sad woman at the desk told him where the old newspapers were kept. He started with the previous week’s stack of the same Indianapolis paper he had read on the bus. He ignored Sunday, Saturday, and Friday. He started with Thursday, Wednesday, and Tuesday, and he got a hit with the second paper he looked at. The Chicago Cubs had played a three-game series in St. Louis starting Tuesday. It was the series opener that had ended the way Barr had described. Tie game in the bottom of the ninth, a walk, a steal, a groundout, an error. The details were right there in Wednesday morning’s paper. A walk-off winning run without a hit in the inning. About ten in the evening, Tuesday. Barr had heard the announcers’ frenzied screams just sixty-seven hours before he opened fire.
Then Reacher backtracked all the way to the police station. Four blocks west, one block south. He wasn’t worried about its opening hours. It had looked like a 24/7 kind of a place to him. He went straight to the reception desk and claimed defense counsel’s right to another look at the evidence. The desk guy made a call to Emerson and then pointed Reacher straight to Bellantonio’s garage bay.
Bellantonio met him there and unlocked the door. Not much had changed, but Reacher noticed a couple of new additions. New sheets of paper, behind plastic, pinned above and below the original pages on the cork boards, like footnotes or addenda or appendices.
“Updates?” he asked.
“Always,” Bellantonio said. “We never sleep.”
“So what’s new?”
“Animal DNA,” Bellantonio said. “Exact match of Barr’s dog’s hair to the scene.”
“Where is the dog now?”
“Put to sleep.”
“That’s cold.”
“That’s cold?”
“The damn dog didn’t do anything wrong.”
Bellantonio said nothing.
“What else?” Reacher asked.
“More tests on the fibers, and more ballistics. We’re beyond definite on everything. The Lake City ammo is relatively rare, and we’ve confirmed a purchase by Barr less than a year ago. In Kentucky.”
“He used a range down there.”
Bellantonio nodded. “We found that out, too.”
“Anything else?”
“The traffic cone came from the city’s construction department. We don’t know how or when.”
“Anything else?”
“I think that’s about it.”
“What about the negatives?”
“The negatives?”
“You’re giving me all the good news. What about the questions that didn’t get answered?”
“I don’t think there were any.”
“You sure about that?”
“I’m sure.”
Reacher glanced around the square of cork boards, one more time, and carefully.
“You play poker?” he asked.
“No.”
“Good decision. You’re a terrible liar.”
Bellantonio said nothing.
“You should start worrying,” Reacher said. “He slides, he’s going to sue your ass for the dog.”
“He won’t slide,” Bellantonio said.
“No,” Reacher said. “I don’t suppose he will.”
Emerson was waiting outside Bellantonio’s door. Jacket on, tie off. Frustration in his eyes, the way cops get when they’re snagged up in lawyer stuff.
“Did you see him?” he asked. “At the hospital?”
“He’s blank from Tuesday night onward,” Reacher said. “You’ve got a battle on your hands.”
“Terrific.”
“You should run safer jails.”
“Rodin will bring experts in.”
“His daughter already did.”
“There are legal precedents.”
“They go both ways, apparently.”
“You want to see that piece of shit back on the street?”
“
Your screwup,” Reacher said. “Not mine.”
“As long as you’re happy.”
“Nobody’s happy,” Reacher said. “Not yet.”
He left the police station and walked all the way back to the black glass tower. Helen Rodin was at her desk, studying a sheet of paper. Danuta and Mason and Niebuhr had left. She was alone.
“Rosemary asked her brother about Kuwait City,” she said. “She told me so, when she came out of his room at the hospital.”
“And?” Reacher said.
“He told her it was all true.”
“Not a fun conversation, probably.”
Helen Rodin shook her head. “Rosemary is pretty devastated. She says James is, too. He can’t believe he did it again. Can’t believe he threw fourteen years away.”
Reacher said nothing. Silence in the office. Then Helen showed Reacher the sheet of paper she was reading.
“Eileen Hutton is a Brigadier General,” she said.
“Then she’s done well,” Reacher said. “She was a major when I knew her.”
“What were you?”
“A captain.”
“Wasn’t that illegal?”
“Technically. For her.”
“She was in the JAG Corps.”
“Lawyers can break the law, same as anyone else.”
“She’s still in the JAG Corps.”
“Obviously. They don’t retrain them.”
“Based in the Pentagon.”
“That’s where they keep the smart people.”
“She’ll be here tomorrow.”
Reacher said nothing.
“For her deposition,” Helen said.
Reacher said nothing.
“It’s scheduled for four o’clock in the afternoon. Chances are she’ll fly down in the morning and check in somewhere. Because she’ll have to stay the night in town. Too late for a flight back.”
“You going to ask me to take her out for dinner?”
“No,” Helen said. “I’m not. I’m going to ask you to take her out for lunch. Before she meets with my father. I need to know in advance what she’s here for.”
“They put Barr’s dog to sleep,” Reacher said.
“It was old.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“Should it?”
“The dog didn’t do anything to anyone.”
Helen said nothing.
“Which hotel will Hutton use?” Reacher asked.
“I have no idea. You’ll have to catch her at the airport.”
“What flight?”
“I don’t know that, either. But there’s nothing direct from D.C. So I expect she’ll change planes in Indianapolis. She won’t get here before eleven in the morning.”
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