One Shot (44 page)

Then he opened another drawer and ran his fingers
back to S and took out another sheaf of paper. 'Charlie
Smith,' he said. 'He was military too, by the look of him.

But Uncle Sam's money didn't buy anything long-term
there.'

He went through the same routine, laying out Charlie's
targets in two long rows. Thirty-two of them. 'They
always showed up together?' Reacher asked.

'Like peanut butter and jelly,' Cash said.

'Separate ranges?'

'Separate planets,' Cash said.

Reacher nodded. In terms of numerical score Charlie's
targets were much worse than James Barr's. Way
worse. They were the product of a very poor shooter.

One had just four hits, all of them outside the outer
ring, one each in the quadrants in the corners. Across
all thirty-two targets he had just eight hits inside the
inner ring. One was a dead-on bull's eye. Dumb luck,
maybe, or wind or drift or a random thermal. Seven were
very close to clipping the black.

Apart from that, Charlie was all over the place. Most of
his rounds must have missed altogether. Percentage-wise most of his hits happened in the white between the
two outer rings. Low, low scores. But his hits weren't
precisely random. There was a weird kind of
consistency there. He was aiming, but he was missing.

Maybe some kind of bad astigmatism in his eyes. What
type of a guy was he?' Reacher asked.

'Charlie?' Cash said. 'Charlie was a blank slate.

Couldn't read him at all. If he had been a better shot,
he'd have come close to frightening me.' 'Small guy,
right?'

'Tiny. Weird hair.'

'Did they talk to you much?'

'Not really. They were just two guys down from
Indiana, getting off on shooting guns. I get a lot of that
here.' 'Did you watch them shoot?'

Cash shook his head. 'I learned never to watch
anybody. People take it as a criticism. I let them come to
me, but nobody ever does.' 'Barr bought his ammo here,
right?'

'Lake City. Expensive.'

'His gun wasn't cheap, either.'

'He was worth it.'

What gun did Charlie use?'

'The same thing. Like a matched pair. In his case it was
a comedy. Like a fat guy who buys a carbon fibre racing
bike.' "You got separate handgun ranges here?'

'One indoor. People use it if it rains. Otherwise I let
them blast away outside, anywhere they want. I don't
care much for handguns. No art to them.'

Reacher nodded and Cash swept Charlie's targets into
a pile, careful to keep them in correct date order. Then
he stacked them together and put them back in the S

drawer. 'Smith is a common name,' Reacher said.

'Actually I think it's the most common name in
America.' 'It was genuine,'

Cash said. 'I see a driver's licence before anyone gets
membership.' Where was he from originally?'

'Accent? Somewhere way north.'

'Can I take one of James Barr's targets?'

What the hell for?'

'For a souvenir,' Reacher said.

Cash said nothing.

'It won't go anywhere,' Reacher said. 'I'm not going to
sell it on the Internet' Cash said nothing.

'Barr's not coming back,' Reacher said. 'That's for
damn sure. And if you really want to cover your ass you
should dump them all anyway.' Cash shrugged and
turned back to the file drawer.

'The most recent one,' Reacher said. 'That would be
best.'

Cash thumbed through the stack and pulled a sheet.

Handed it across the counter. Reacher took it and
folded it carefully and put it in his shirt pocket. 'Good
luck with your buddy,' Cash said.

'He's not my buddy,' Reacher said. 'But thanks for
your help.'

You're welcome,' Cash said. 'Because I know who you
are. I recognized you when you got behind the gun. I
never forget the shape of a prone position. You won the
Invitational ten years after I was in it. I was watching,
from the crowd.

Your real name is Reacher.' Reacher nodded.

'Polite of you,' Cash said. 'Not to mention it after I told
you how I only came in third.' "You had tougher
competition,' Reacher said. 'Ten years later it was all a
bunch of deadbeats.'

He stopped at the last gas station in Kentucky and
filled Yanni's tank. Then he called Helen Rodin from a
pay phone. 'Is the cop still there?' he asked.

'Two of them,' she said. 'One in the lobby, one at my
door.' 'Did Franklin start yet?' 'First thing this morning.'

'Any progress?'

'Nothing. They were five very ordinary people.' Where
is Franklin's office?'

She gave him an address. Reacher checked his watch.

'I'll meet you there at four o'clock.' 'How was Kentucky?'

'Confusing,' he said.

He recrossed the Ohio on the same trestle bridge with
Sheryl Crow telling him all over again about how every
day was a winding road. He cranked up the volume and
turned left and headed west. Ann Yanni's maps showed
a highway cloverleaf forty miles ahead. He could turn
north there and a couple of hours later he could scoot
past the whole city, forty feet in the air. It seemed like a
better idea than trying the surface streets. He figured
Emerson would be getting seriously frustrated. And
then seriously enraged, at some point during the day.

Reacher would have been. Reacher had been Emerson
for thirteen years, and in this kind of a situation he
would have been kicking ass big time, blanketing the
streets with uniforms, trying everything.

He found the cloverleaf and joined the highway going
north. He killed the CD when it started over again and
settled in for the cruise. The Mustang felt pretty good at
seventy miles an hour. It rumbled along, lots of power,
no finesse at all. Reacher figured if he could put that
drivetrain in some battered old sedan body, then that
would be his kind of car.

Bellantonio had been at work in his crime lab since
seven o'clock in the morning. He had fingerprinted the
cell phone found abandoned under the highway and
come up with nothing worth a damn. Then he had
copied the call log. The last number dialled was Helen
Rodin's cell. Last but one was Emerson's cell.

Clearly Reacher had made both of those calls. Then
came a long string of calls to several different cell
phones registered to Specialized Services of Indiana.

Maybe Reacher had made those too, or maybe he
hadn't. No way of knowing. Bellantonio wrote it all up,
but he knew Emerson wouldn't do anything with it. The
only viable pressure point was the call to Helen Rodin,
and no way could Emerson start hassling a defence
lawyer about a conversation with a witness, suspect or
not. That would be a waste of breath.

So he moved on to the garage tapes. He had four days'

worth, ninety-six hours, nearly three thousand separate
vehicle movements. His staff had logged them all. Only
three of them were Cadillacs. Indiana was the same as
most heartland states. People bought pickup trucks as
a first preference, then SUVs, then coupes, then
convertibles. Regular sedans claimed a tiny market
share, and most of them were Toyotas or Hondas or
mid-size domestics. Full-size turnpike cruisers were
very rare, and premium brands rarest of all.

The first Cadillac on tape was a bone-white Eldorado.

A two-door coupe, several years old. It had parked
before ten in the morning on the Wednesday and stayed
parked for five hours. The second Cadillac on tape was
a new STS, maybe red or grey, possibly light blue. Hard
to be sure, with the murky monochrome picture.

Whatever, it had parked soon after lunch on the
Thursday and stayed there for two hours.

The third Cadillac was a black Deville. It was caught on
tape entering the garage just after six o'clock in the
morning on the Friday. Black Friday, as Bellantonio was
calling it. At six o'clock in the morning the garage would
have been more or less completely empty. The tape
showed the Deville sweeping up the ramp, fast and
confident. It showed it leaving again after just four
minutes.

Long enough to place the cone.

The driver wasn't really visible in either sequence.

There was just a grey blur behind the windshield. Maybe
it was Barr, maybe it wasn't. Bellantonio wrote it all up
for Emerson. He made a mental note to check through
again to determine if four minutes was the shortest stay
on the tapes. He suspected it was, easily.

Then he scanned the forensic sweep through
Alexandra Dupree's garden apartment. He had assigned
a junior guy to do it, because it wasn't the crime scene.

There was nothing of interest there. Nothing at all.

Except the fingerprint evidence. The apartment was a
mess of prints, like all apartments are. Most of them
were the girl's, but there were four other sets. Three of
them were unidentifiable.

The fourth set of prints belonged to James Barr.

James Barr had been in Alexandra Dupree's
apartment. In the living room, in the kitchen, in the
bathroom. No doubt about it. Clear prints, perfect
matches. Unmistakable.

Bellantonio wrote it up for Emerson.

Then he read a report just in from the medical
examiner. Alexandra Dupree had been killed by a single
massive blow to the right temple, delivered by a left-handed assailant. She had fallen onto a gravel surface
that contained organic matter including grass and dirt.

But she had been found in an alley paved with
limestone. Therefore her body had been moved at least
a short distance between death and discovery. Other
physiological evidence confirmed it.

Bellantonio took a new sheet of memo paper and
addressed two questions to Emerson: Is Reacher left-handed? Did he have access to a vehicle?

The Zee spent the morning hours deciding what to do
with Raskin. Raskin had failed three separate times.

First, with the initial tail, then by getting attacked from
behind, and finally by letting his cell phone get stolen.

The Zee didn't like failure. He didn't like it at all. At first he
considered just pulling Raskin off the street and
restricting him to duty in the video room on the ground
floor of the house. But why would he want to depend on
a failure to monitor his security?

Then Linsky called. They had been searching fourteen
straight hours and had found no sign of the soldier.

We should go after the lawyer now,' Linsky said. 'After
all, nothing can happen without her. She's the focal
point. She's the one making the moves here.'

'That raises the stakes,' the Zee said.

'They're already pretty high.'

'Maybe the soldier's gone for good.'

'Maybe he is,' Linsky said. 'But what matters is what he
left behind. In the lawyer's head.'

'I'll think about it,' the Zee said. 'I'll get back to you.'

'Should we keep on looking?' 'Tired?'

Linsky was exhausted and his spine was killing him.

'No,' he lied. 'I'm not tired.'

'So keep on looking,' the Zee said. 'But send Raskin
back to me.'

Reacher slowed to fifty where the highway first rose
on its stilts. He stayed in the centre lane and let the spur
that ran behind the library pass by on his right. He kept
on north for two more miles, and came off at the
cloverleaf that met the four-lane with the auto dealers
and the parts store. He went east on the county road
and then turned north again, on Jeb Oliver's rural route.