The left-hand lane was moving a little faster. Reacher crept past cars on his right. Glanced ahead. There was a police cruiser three cars in front. In the right-hand lane. There was a green light in the distance. Traffic in the left-hand lane was approaching it slowly. Traffic in the right-hand lane was approaching it slower still. Each successive car reached the painted line and paused a moment and then jumped the gap. Nobody wanted to block the box. Now Reacher was two cars behind the cop. He hung back. The irritated guy behind him honked. Reacher inched forward. Now he was one car behind the cop.
The light went yellow.
The car in front of Reacher sprinted.
The light went red.
The cop stopped on the line and Reacher stopped directly alongside him.
He put his elbow on the console and cupped his head in his hand. Spread his fingers wide and covered as much of his face as he could. Stared straight head, up under the header rail, looking at the light, willing it to change.
Helen Rodin rode down two floors in the elevator and met Ann Yanni in the NBC reception area. NBC was paying for Franklin’s time, so it was only fair that Yanni should be at the conference. They rode down to the garage together and got into Helen’s Saturn. Came up the ramp and out into the sunshine. Helen glanced right and made a left. Didn’t register the gray Impala that moved off the curb twenty yards behind her.
The light stayed red an awful long time. Then it went green and the guy behind Reacher honked and the cop turned to look. Reacher took off through his field of vision and didn’t look back. He filtered into a left-turn lane and the cop car swept past on his right. Reacher watched it jam up again ahead. He didn’t want to go through the side-by-side thing again so he stuck with the left turn. Found himself back in the street with Martha’s grocery on it. It was clogged with slow traffic. He shifted on the seat and checked his pants pocket. Sifted through the coins by feel. Found a quarter. Debated with himself, twenty yards, thirty, forty.
Yes.
He pulled into Martha’s tiny lot. Left the engine running and slid out of the seat and danced around the hood to the pay phone on the wall. He put his quarter in the slot and took out Emerson’s torn card. Chose the station house number and dialed.
“Help you?” the desk guy said.
“Police?” Reacher asked.
“Go ahead, sir.”
Reacher kept his voice fast and light, rushed and low. “That guy on the Wanted poster? The thing you guys were passing around?”
“Yes, sir?”
“He’s right here, right now.”
“Where?”
“In my drive-through, the one on the four-lane north of town next to the tire store. He’s inside right now, at the counter, eating.”
“You sure it’s the guy?”
“Looks just like the picture.”
“Does he have a car?”
“Big red Dodge pickup.”
“Sir, what’s your name?”
“Tony Lazzeri,” Reacher said. Anthony Michael Lazzeri, batted .273 in 118 appearances at second base in 1935. Second-place finish. Reacher figured he would need to move around the diamond soon. The Yankees hadn’t had enough second basemen, or enough nonchampionship years.
“We’re on our way, sir,” the desk cop said.
Reacher hung up and slid back into the Mustang. Sat still until he heard the first sirens battling north.
Helen Rodin was halfway down Second Street when she caught a commotion in her mirror. A gray Impala sedan lurched out of the lane three cars behind her and pulled a crazy U-turn through the traffic and took off back the way it had come.
“Asshole,” she said.
Ann Yanni twisted in her seat.
“Cop car,” she said. “You can tell by the antennas.”
Reacher made it to Franklin’s place about ten minutes late. It was a two-story brick building. The lower floor looked like some kind of a light industrial unit, abandoned. It had steel shutters over its doors and windows. But the upstairs windows had venetian blinds with lights behind them. There was an outside staircase leading to an upper door. The door had a white plastic plate on it: Franklin Investigations. There was a parking apron at street level, just a patch of blacktop one- car deep and about six wide. Helen Rodin’s green Saturn was there, and a blue Honda Civic, and a black Chevy Suburban so long that it was overhanging the sidewalk by a foot. The Suburban was Franklin’s, Reacher guessed. The Honda was Rosemary Barr’s, maybe.
He drove past the place without slowing and circled the block. Saw nothing he didn’t want to see. So he slotted the Mustang next to the Saturn and got out and locked it. Ran up the staircase and went in the door without knocking. He found himself in a short hallway with a kitchenette to his right and what he guessed was a bathroom to his left. Up ahead he could hear voices in a large room. He went in and found Franklin at a desk, Helen Rodin and Rosemary Barr in two chairs huddled in conversation, and Ann Yanni looking out the window at her car. All four turned as he came in.
“Do you know any medical terminology?” Helen asked him.
“Like what?”
“PA,” she said. “A doctor wrote it. Some kind of an abbreviation.”
Reacher glanced at her. Then at Rosemary Barr.
“Let me guess,” he said. “The hospital diagnosed James Barr. Probably a mild case.”
“Early onset,” Rosemary said. “Whatever it is.”
“How did you know?” Helen asked.
“Intuition,” Reacher said.
“What is it?”
“Later,” Reacher said. “Let’s do this in order.” He turned to Franklin. “Tell me what you know about the victims.”
“Five random people,” Franklin said. “No connection between any of them. No real connection with anything at all. Certainly no connection to James Barr. I think you were absolutely right. He didn’t shoot them for any reason of his own.”
“No, I was absolutely wrong,” Reacher said. “Thing is, James Barr didn’t shoot them at all.”
Grigor Linsky stepped back into a shadowed doorway and dialed his phone.
“I followed a hunch,” he said.
“Which was?” the Zec asked.
“With the cops at the lawyer’s office, I figured the soldier wouldn’t be able to go see her. But obviously they still have business. So I thought maybe she would go to him. And she did. I followed her. They’re together in the private detective’s office right now. With the sister. And that woman from the television news.”
“Are the others with you?”
“We’ve got the whole block covered. East, west, north, and south.”
“Sit tight,” the Zec said. “I’ll get back to you.”
Helen Rodin said, “You want to explain that statement?”
“The evidence is rock solid,” Franklin said.
Ann Yanni smiled. A story.
Rosemary Barr just stared.
“You bought your brother a radio,” Reacher said to her. “A Bose. For the ballgames. He told me that. Did you ever buy him anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Like clothes.”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Pants?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“What size?”
“Size?” she repeated blankly.
“What size pants does your brother wear?”
“Thirty-four waist, thirty-four leg.”
“Exactly,” Reacher said. “He’s relatively tall.”
“How does this help us?” Helen asked.
“You know anything about numbers games?” Reacher asked her. “Old-fashioned illegal numbers, state lotteries, the Powerball, things like that?”
“What about them?”
“What’s the hardest part of them?”
“Winning,” Ann Yanni said.
Reacher smiled. “From the players’ point of view, sure. But the hardest part for the organizers is picking truly random numbers. True randomness is very hard
for humans to achieve. In the old days numbers runners used the business pages in the newspapers. They would agree in advance, maybe the second page of the stock prices, maybe the second column, the last two figures in the first six prices quoted. Or the last six, or the middle six, or whatever. That came close to true randomness. Now the big lotteries use complicated machines. But you can find mathematicians who can prove the results aren’t truly random. Because humans built the machines.”
“How does this help us?” Helen said.
“Just a train of thought,” Reacher said. “I sat all afternoon in Ms. Yanni’s car, enjoying the sun, thinking about how hard it is to achieve true randomness.”
“Your train is on the wrong track,” Franklin said. “James Barr shot five people. The evidence is crushing.”
“You were a cop,” Reacher said. “You put yourself in danger. Stakeouts, takedowns, high-pressure situations, moments of extreme stress. What’s the first thing you did afterward?”
Franklin glanced at the women.
“Went to the bathroom,” he said.
“Correct,” Reacher said. “Me too. But James Barr didn’t. Bellantonio’s report from Barr’s house shows cement dust in the garage, the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, and the basement. But not in the bathroom. So he got home, but he didn’t take a leak until after he changed and showered? And how could he shower anyway without going into the bathroom?”
“Maybe he stopped on the way.”
“He was never there.”
“He was there, Reacher. What about the evidence?”
“There’s no evidence that says he was there.”
“Are you nuts?”
“There’s evidence that says his van was there, and his shoes, and his pants, and his coat, and his gun, and his ammo, and his quarter, but there’s nothing that says he was there.”
“Someone impersonated him?” Ann Yanni asked.
“Down to the last detail,” Reacher said. “Drove his car, wore his shoes and his clothes, used his gun.”
“This is fantasy,” Franklin said.
“It explains the raincoat,” Reacher said. “A big roomy garment that covered everything except the denim jeans? Why else wear a raincoat on a warm dry day?”
“Who?” Rosemary asked.
“Watch,” Reacher said.
He stood still, and then he took a single pace forward.
“My pants are thirty-seven-inch legs,” he said. “I crossed the new part of the garage in thirty-five strides. James Barr has a thirty-four-inch leg, which means he should have done it in about thirty-eight strides. But Bellantonio’s footprint count shows forty-eight strides.”
“A very short person,” Helen said.
“Charlie,” Rosemary said.
“I thought so, too,” Reacher said. “But then I went to Kentucky. Initially because I wanted to confirm something else. I got around to thinking that maybe James Barr just wasn’t good enough. I looked at the scene. It was tough shooting. And fourteen years ago he was good, but he wasn’t great. And when I saw him in the hospital the skin on his right shoulder was unmarked. And to shoot as well as he apparently did, a guy’s got to practice. And a guy who practices builds up bruising on his shoulder. Like a callus. He didn’t have it. So I figured a guy who started out average could only have gotten worse with time. Especially if he wasn’t practicing much. That’s logical, right? Maybe he’d gotten to the point where he couldn’t have done the thing on Friday. Through a simple lack of ability. That’s what I was thinking. So I went down to Kentucky to find out for sure how much worse he’d gotten.”
“And?” Helen asked.
“He’d gotten better,” Reacher said. “Way better. Not worse. Look at this.” He took the target out of his shirt pocket and unfolded it. “This is the latest of thirty-two sessions over the last three years. And this is much better than he was shooting when he was in the army fourteen years ago. Which is weird, right? He’s fired only three hundred twenty rounds in the last three years, and he’s great? Whereas he was firing two thousand a week back when he was only average?”
“So what does this mean?”
“He went down there with Charlie, every time. And the guy who runs the range is a Marine champion. And a real anal pack rat. He files all the used targets. Which means that Barr had at least two witnesses to what he was scoring, every time.”
“I’d want witnesses,” Franklin said. “If I was shooting like that.”
“It’s not possible to get better by not practicing,” Reacher said. “I think the truth is he had actually gotten really bad. And I think his ego couldn’t take it. Any shooter is competitive. He knew he was lousy now, and he couldn’t face it, and he wanted to cover it up. He wanted to show off.”
Franklin pointed at the target. “Doesn’t look lousy to me.”
“This is faked,” Reacher said. “You’re going to give this to Bellantonio and Bellantonio is going to prove it to you.”
“Faked how?”
“I’ll bet this was done with a handgun. Nine-millimeter, from point-blank range. If Bellantonio measures the holes, my guess is he’ll find they’re forty-six thousandths of an inch bigger than .308 holes. And if he tests the paper, he’ll find gunpowder residue on it. Because my guess is James Barr took a stroll down the range and made these holes from an inch away, not three hundred yards. Every time.”
“That’s a stretch.”
“It’s simple metaphysics. Barr was never this good. And it’s fair to assume he must have gotten worse. If he’d gotten a little worse, he’d have owned up to it. But he didn’t own up to it, so we can assume he’d gotten a lot worse. Bad enough to be seriously embarrassed about it. Maybe bad enough that he couldn’t hit the paper at all.”
Nobody spoke.
“It’s a theory that proves itself,” Reacher said. “To fake the score because of embarrassment proves he couldn’t shoot well anymore. If he couldn’t shoot well anymore, he didn’t do the thing on Friday.”
“You’re just guessing,” Franklin said.
Reacher nodded. “I was. But I’m not now. Now I know for sure. I fired a round down in Kentucky. The guy made me, like a rite of passage. I was full of caffeine. I was twitching like crazy. Now I know James Barr will have been way worse.”
“Why?” Rosemary asked.
“Because he has Parkinson’s disease,” Reacher said to her. “PA means paralysis agitans, and paralysis agitans is what doctors call Parkinson’s disease. Your brother is getting sick, I’m afraid. Shaking and twitching. And no way on earth can you fire a rifle accurately with Parkinson’s disease. My opinion, not only didn’t he do the thing on Friday, he couldn’t possibly have done it.”
Rosemary went quiet. Good news and bad news. She glanced at the window. Looked at the floor. She was dressed like a widow. Black silk blouse, black pencil skirt, black nylons, black patent leather shoes with a low heel.
“Maybe that’s why he was so angry all the time,” she said. “Maybe he felt it coming on. Felt helpless and out of control. His body started to let him down. He would have hated that. Anyone would.”
Then she looked straight at Reacher.
“I told you he was innocent,” she said.
“Ma’am, I apologize unreservedly,” Reacher said. “You were right. He reformed. He kept to his bargain. He deserves credit. And I’m sorry he’s sick.”
“Now you’ve got to help him. You promised.”
“I am helping him. Since Monday night I haven’t done anything else.”
“This is crazy,” Franklin said.
“No, it’s exactly the same as it always was,” Reacher said. “It’s someone setting James Barr up for the fall. But instead of actually making him do it, they just made it look like he did it. That’s the only practical difference here.”
“But is it possible?” Ann Yanni asked.
“Why not? Think it through. Walk it through.”
Ann Yanni walked it through. She rehearsed little movements, s
lowly, thoughtfully, like an actress. “He dresses in Barr’s clothes, and shoes, and maybe finds a quarter in a jar. Or in a pocket somewhere. He wears gloves, so as not to mess up Barr’s fingerprints. He’s already taken the traffic cone from Barr’s garage, maybe the day before. He gets the rifle from the basement. It’s already been loaded, by Barr himself, previously. He drives to town in Barr’s minivan. He leaves all the clues. Covers himself in cement dust. Comes back to the house and puts everything away and leaves. Fast, not even taking the time to use the bathroom. Then James Barr comes home sometime later and walks into a trap he doesn’t even know is there.”
“That’s exactly how I see it,” Reacher said.
“But where was Barr at the time?” Helen said.
“Out,” Reacher said.
“That’s a nice coincidence,” Franklin said.
“I don’t think it was,” Reacher said. “I think they arranged something to get him out of the way. He remembers going out somewhere, previously. Then being optimistic, like something good was about to happen. I think they set him up with someone. I think they engineered a chance meeting that led somewhere. I think he had a date on Friday.”
“With who?”
“Sandy, maybe. They turned her loose on me. Maybe they turned her loose on him, too. He dressed well on Friday. The report shows his wallet was in a decent pair of pants.”
“So who really did it?” Helen asked.
“Someone cold as ice,” Reacher said. “Someone who didn’t even need to use the bathroom afterward.”
“Charlie,” Rosemary said. “Got to be. Has to be. He’s small. He’s weird. He knew the house. He knew where everything was. The dog knew him.”
“He was a terrible shooter too,” Reacher said. “That’s the other reason why I went to Kentucky. I wanted to test that theory.”
“So who was it?”
“Charlie,” Reacher said. “His evidence was faked, too. But in a different way. The holes in his targets were all over the place. Except they weren’t really all over the place. The distribution wasn’t entirely random. He was trying to disguise how good he actually was. He was aiming at arbitrary points on the paper, and he was hitting those points, every time, dead-on, believe me. Once in a while he would get bored, and he’d put one through the inner ring. Or he’d pick on a quadrant outside the outer ring and put a round straight through it. One time he drilled all four corners. The point is, it doesn’t really matter what you aim at, as long as you hit it. It’s only convention that makes us aim at the ten-ring. It’s just as good practice to aim at some other spot. Even a spot off the paper, like a tree. That’s what Charlie was doing. He was a tremendous shot, training hard, but trying to look like he was missing all the time. But like I said, true randomness is impossible for a human to achieve. There are always patterns.”
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