Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  Reacher said nothing.

  “I apologize,” Helen said. “For telling Danuta we didn’t have any evidence for the puppet master. I didn’t mean it to sound dismissive.”

  “You were right,” Reacher said. “We didn’t have any evidence. At the time.”

  She looked at him. “But?”

  “We do now.”

  “What?”

  “They’ve been gilding the lily over at the police station. They’ve got fibers, ballistics, dog DNA, a receipt for the ammunition all the way from someplace in Kentucky. The traced the traffic cone to the city. They’ve got all kinds of stuff.”

  “But?” Helen said again.

  “But they haven’t got James Barr on tape driving in to place the cone in the garage beforehand.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Reacher nodded. “They must have looked at the tapes a dozen times by now. If they had found him, they’d have printed the stills and pinned them up for the world to see. But they’re not there, which means they didn’t find them. Which means James Barr didn’t drive in and leave the cone beforehand.”

  “Which means someone else did.”

  “The puppet master,” Reacher said. “Or another of his puppets. Sometime after Tuesday night. Barr thinks the cone was still in his garage Tuesday.”

  Helen looked at him again. “Whoever it was must be on the tapes.”

  “Correct,” Reacher said.

  “But there’ll be hundreds of cars.”

  “You can narrow it down some. You’re looking for a sedan. Something too low-slung to get itself down a farm track.”

  “The puppet master really exists, doesn’t he?”

  “No other explanation for how it went down.”

  “Alan Danuta is probably right, you know,” Helen said. “My father will trade Barr for the puppet master. He’d be a fool not to.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “Which means Barr is going to walk,” Helen said. “You understand that, right? There’s no alternative. The prosecution’s legal problems are overwhelming.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “I’m not happy about it, either,” Helen said. “But for me it’s just a PR problem. I can spin my way out of it. At least I hope I can. I can blame it all on the way the jail was run. I can claim that it wasn’t me who got him off.”

  “But?” Reacher said.

  “What are you going to do? You came here to bury him and he’s going to walk.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Reacher said. “What choices do I have?”

  “Only two that I’m scared of. One, you could give up on helping me find the guy who’s pulling the strings. I can’t do it alone and Emerson won’t even be willing to try.”

  “And two?”

  “You could settle things with Barr yourself.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “But you can’t do that. You’d go to prison for life if you were lucky.”

  “If I got caught.”

  “You would get caught. I would know you did it.”

  Reacher smiled. “You’d rat me out?”

  “I would have to,” Helen said.

  “Not if you were my lawyer. You couldn’t say a word.”

  “I’m not your lawyer.”

  “I could hire you.”

  “Rosemary Barr would know too, and she’d rat you out in a heartbeat. And Franklin. He heard you tell the story.”

  Reacher nodded.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said again.

  “How do we find this guy?”

  “Like you said, why would I want to?”

  “Because I don’t think you’re the type who settles for half a loaf.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “I think you want the truth,” Helen said. “I don’t think you like it when the wool gets pulled over your eyes. You don’t like being played for a sucker.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “Plus, this whole situation stinks,” Helen said. “There were six victims here. The five who died and Barr himself.”

  “That expands the definition of victimhood a little too far for me.”

  “Dr. Niebuhr expects we’ll find a preexisting relationship. Probably recent. Some new friend. We could go at it that way.”

  “Barr told me he doesn’t have any new friends,” Reacher said. “Only has one or two old friends.”

  “Was he telling the truth?”

  “I think he was.”

  “So is Niebuhr wrong?”

  “Niebuhr’s guessing. He’s a shrink. All they do is guess.”

  “I could ask Rosemary.”

  “Would she know his friends?”

  “Probably. They’re pretty close.”

  “So get a list,” Reacher said.

  “Is Dr. Mason guessing, too?”

  “No question. But in her case I think she’s guessing right.”

  “If Niebuhr’s wrong about the friend, what do we do?”

  “We go proactive.”

  “How?”

  “There had to have been a guy following me last night and I know for sure there was one following me this morning. I saw him out there in the plaza. So the next time I see him I’ll have a word with him. He’ll tell me who he’s working for.”

  “Just like that?”

  “People usually tell me what I want to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I ask them nicely.”

  “Don’t forget to ask Eileen Hutton nicely.”

  “I’ll see you around,” Reacher said.

  He walked south, beyond his hotel, and found a cheap place to eat dinner. Then he walked north, slowly, through the plaza, past the black glass tower, under the highway, all the way back to the sports bar. Altogether he was on the street the best part of an hour, and he saw nobody behind him. No damaged men in odd suits. Nobody at all.

  The sports bar was half-empty and there was baseball on every screen. He found a corner table and watched the Cardinals play the Astros in Houston. It was a listless late-season game between two teams well out of contention. During the commercial breaks he watched the door. Saw nobody. Tuesday was even quieter than Monday, out there in the heartland.

  Grigor Linsky dialed his cell.

  “He’s back in the sports bar,” he said.

  “Did he see you?” the Zec asked.

  “No.”

  “Why is he in the sports bar again?”

  “No reason. He needed a destination, that’s all. He paraded around for nearly an hour, trying to make me show myself.”

  Silence for a beat.

  “Leave him there,” the Zec said. “Come in and we’ll talk.”

  Alex Rodin called Emerson at home. Emerson was eating a late dinner with his wife and his two daughters, and he wasn’t thrilled about taking the call. But he did. He went out to the hallway and sat on the second-to-bottom stair, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, the phone trapped between his shoulder and his ear.

  “We need to do something about this Jack Reacher guy,” Rodin said to him.

  “I don’t see how he’s a huge problem,” Emerson said. “Maybe he wants to, but he can’t make the facts go away. We’ve got more than we need on Barr.”

  “This is not about facts now,” Rodin said. “It’s about the amnesia. It’s about how hard the defense is going to push it.”

  “That’s up to your daughter.”

  “He’s a bad influence on her. I’ve been reading the case law. It’s a real gray area. The test isn’t really about whether Barr remembers the day in question. It’s about whether he understands the process, right now, today, and whether we’ve got enough other stuff on him to convict without his direct testimony.”

  “I would say we do.”

  “Me too. But Helen needs to swallow that. She needs to agree. But she’s got that guy standing over her all the time, turning her head. I know her. She’s not going to suck it up until he’s out of th
e picture.”

  “I don’t see what I can do.”

  “I want you to bring him in.”

  “I can’t,” Emerson said. “Not without a complaint.”

  Rodin went quiet.

  “Well, keep an eye on him,” he said. “He spits on the sidewalk, I want you to bring him in and do something to him.”

  “This isn’t the Wild West,” Emerson said. “I can’t run him out of town.”

  “An arrest might be enough. We need something that breaks the spell. He’s pushing Helen where she doesn’t want to go. I know her. On her own she’ll give Barr up, no question.”

  Linsky was in pain on the way back to his car. An hour on his feet was about all he could take. A long time ago the bones in his spine had been methodically cracked with an engineer’s ball-peen hammer, one after the other, starting with the coccyx and moving upward through all the lower vertebrae, and not in rapid sequence. Generally one bone had been allowed to heal before the next was broken. When the last had healed, they had started over again. Playing the xylophone, they had called it. Playing scales. Ultimately he had lost count of how many scales they had played on him.

  But he never spoke of it. Worse had happened to the Zec.

  The Cadillac had a soft seat and it was a relief to get in. It had a quiet motor and a gentle ride and a nice radio. Cadillacs were the kind of things that made America such a wonderful place, along with the trusting population and the hamstrung police departments. Linsky had spent time in several different countries and there was no question in his mind about which was the most satisfactory. Elsewhere he had walked or run or crawled through dirt or hauled carts and sleds by hand. Now he drove a Cadillac.

  He drove it to the Zec’s house, which stood eight miles north and west of town, next to his stone-crushing plant. The plant was a forty-year-old industrial facility built on a rich limestone seam that had been discovered under farmland. The house was a big fancy palace built a hundred years ago, when the landscape was still unspoiled, for a rich dry-goods merchant. It was bourgeois and affected in every way, but it was a comfortable house in the same way that the Cadillac was a comfortable car. Best of all it stood alone in the center of many acres of flat land. Once there had been beautiful gardens, but the Zec had razed the trees and leveled the shrubberies to create a completely flat and open vista all around. There were no fences, because how could the Zec bear to live another day behind wire? For the same reason there were no extra locks, no bolts, no bars. The openness was the Zec’s gift to himself. But it was also excellent security in its own right. There were surveillance cameras. Nobody could approach the house undetected. By day visitors were clearly visible at least two hundred yards away, and after dark night-vision enhancement picked them up only a little closer.

  Linsky parked and eased himself out of the car. The night was quiet. The stone-crushing plant shut down at seven every evening and sat brooding and silent until dawn. Linsky glanced in its direction and walked toward the house. The front door opened before he got near it. Warm light spilled out and he saw that Vladimir himself had come down to welcome him, which meant that Chenko had to be there too, upstairs, which meant that the Zec had assembled all his top boys, which meant that the Zec was worried.

  Linsky took a breath, but he walked inside without a moment’s hesitation. After all, what could be done to him that hadn’t been done to him before? It was different for Vladimir and Chenko, but for men with Linsky’s age and experience nothing was entirely unimaginable anymore.

  Vladimir said nothing. Just closed the door again and followed Linsky upstairs. It was a three-story house. The first floor was used for nothing at all, except surveillance. All the rooms were completely empty, except one that had four TV screens on a long table, showing wide-angle views north, east, south, and west. Sokolov would be in there, watching them. Or Raskin. They alternated twelve-hour shifts. The second floor of the house had a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and an office. The third floor had bedrooms and bathrooms. The second floor was where all the business was done.

  Linsky could hear the Zec’s voice from the living room, calling him. He went straight in without knocking. The Zec was in an armchair with a glass of tea clamped between his palms. Chenko was sprawled on a sofa. Vladimir pushed in behind Linsky and sat down next to Chenko. Linsky stood still and waited.

  “Sit, Grigor,” the Zec said. “Nobody’s upset at you. It was the boy’s failure.”

  Linsky nodded and sat down in an armchair, a little closer to the Zec than Chenko was. That maintained the hierarchy in the proper order. The Zec was eighty, and Linsky himself was more than sixty. Chenko and Vladimir were both in their forties, important men for sure, but comparative youngsters. They didn’t have the history that the Zec and Linsky shared. Not even close.

  “Tea?” the Zec asked in Russian.

  “Please,” Linsky said.

  “Chenko,” the Zec said. “Bring Grigor a glass of tea.”

  Linsky smiled inside. Chenko being made to serve him tea was a statement of the greatest importance. And he noted that Chenko did it with no unwillingness. He just got up out of his slouch and went out to the kitchen and came back in with a glass of tea on a small silver tray. Chenko was a very small man, short, wiry, no bulk at all. He had coarse black hair that stuck up in all directions even though he kept it cropped short. Vladimir was different. Vladimir was very tall and heavy and blond. Unbelievably strong. It was entirely possible that Vladimir had German genes somewhere in his background. Perhaps his grandmother had picked them up back in 1941, like germs.

  “We’ve been talking,” the Zec said.

  “And?” Linsky said.

  “We have to confront the fact that we made a mistake. Just one, but it could prove irksome.”

  “The cone,” Linsky said.

  “Obviously Barr isn’t on tape placing it,” the Zec said.

  “Obviously.”

  “But will it be a problem?”

  “Your opinion?” Linsky asked politely.

  “Significance is in the eye of the beholder,” the Zec said. “The detective Emerson and the DA Rodin won’t care about it. It’s a minor detail, one they won’t feel inclined to pursue. Why would they? They’re not looking to trip themselves up. And no case is ever a hundred percent perfect. They know that. So they’ll write it off as an inexplicable loose end. They might even convince themselves that Barr used a different vehicle.”

  “But?”

  “But it’s still a loose end. If the soldier tugs on it, something might unravel.”

  “The evidence against Barr is indisputable.”

  The Zec nodded. “That’s true.”

  “So won’t that be enough for them?”

  “Certainly it would have been. But it’s possible that Barr no longer exists. Not in the sense that he’s a legal entity accessible to their jurisprudence. He has permanent retrograde amnesia. It’s possible that Rodin won’t be able to put him on trial. If so, Rodin will be extremely frustrated about that. He’ll be expected to seek a consolation prize. And if the consolation prize were eventually to assume a higher profile than Barr himself, how could Rodin turn it down?”

  Linsky sipped his tea. It was hot and sweet.

  “All this from a videotape?” he said.

  “It depends entirely on the soldier,” the Zec said. “It depends on his tenacity and his imagination.”

  “He was a military cop,” Chenko said in English. “Did you know that?”

  Linsky glanced at Chenko. Chenko rarely spoke English in the house. He had a perfect American accent, and sometimes Linsky thought he was ashamed of it.

  “That doesn’t necessarily impress me,” Linsky said in Russian.

  “Or me,” the Zec said. “But it’s a factor we must weigh in the balance.”

  “Silencing him now would draw attention,” Linsky said. “Wouldn’t it?”

  “It would depend on how it was done.”

  “How many ways are there?”
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  “We could use the redheaded girl again,” the Zec said.

  “She would be no use against the soldier. He’s a giant, and almost certainly extensively trained in self-defense.”

  “But he already has an established issue with her. Several people know she tried to set him up for a beating. Perhaps she could be found severely injured. If she was, the soldier would be the obvious prime suspect. We could let the police department silence him for us.”

  “She would know who attacked her,” Vladimir said. “She would know it wasn’t the soldier.”

  The Zec nodded appreciatively. Linsky watched him. He was accustomed to the Zec’s methods. The Zec liked to tease solutions out of people, like Socrates of old.

  “Then perhaps she should be left unable to tell anyone anything,” the Zec said.

  “Dead?”

  “We’ve always found that the safest way, haven’t we?”

  “But it’s possible she has many enemies,” Vladimir said. “Not just him. Maybe she’s a big-time prick-teaser.”

  “Then we should firm up the link. Possibly she should be found somewhere suggestive. Maybe he invited her out to renew their acquaintance.”

  “In his hotel?”

  “No, outside his hotel, I think. But close by. Where she can be discovered by someone other than the soldier himself. Someone who can call the police while the soldier is still asleep. That way he’s a sitting duck.”

  “Why would her body be outside his hotel?”

  “Evidently he hit her and she staggered away and collapsed before she got very far.”

  “The Metropole Palace,” Linsky said. “That’s where he is.”

  “When?” Chenko asked.

  “Whenever you like,” the Zec said.

  The Astros beat the Cardinals 10–7 after a limp defensive performance by both franchises. Plenty of cheap hits, plenty of errors. A bad way to win, and a worse way to lose. Reacher had stopped paying attention halfway through. He had started thinking about Eileen Hutton instead. She was part of his mosaic. He had seen her once in the States before the Gulf War, just briefly across a crowded courtroom, just long enough to register her head-turning quality, and he had assumed he would never see her again, which he figured was a pity. But then she had showed up in Saudi as part of the long, ponderous Desert Shield buildup. Reacher had been there pretty much from the start, as a recently demoted captain. The first stage of any clean-sheet foreign deployment always resembled gang warfare between the MPs and the troops they were sent out with, but after six weeks or so the situation usually settled down some, and Desert Shield wasn’t any different. After six weeks there was a structure in place, and in terms of military law enforcement, a structure demanded in-country personnel all the way up from jailers to judges, and Hutton had shown up as one of the prosecutors they shipped in. Reacher had assumed it was volunteer duty for her, which he was happy about, because that made it likely she was unmarried.