by Lee Child
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. “No
t 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.”
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.”