Part 15 (1/2)

'How was he?'

'Not very good company. He said because he wasn't getting paid as of yesterday. Maybe he was worried about losing his job.'

'He was nervous about his mission.'

'How did he know what the lawyer was driving?'

'Whoever delivered the car told him.'

'How did he know the lawyer was going to be on that road at that time?'

'Simple arithmetic. The decoy appointment was for noon. Easy enough to work backwards in terms of the clock. Easy enough in terms of location, too, given that everyone knew the highway was closed.'

'I just don't buy how he got here in the first place. It was way too complicated. And he said a car was heading straight at him. He couldn't prearrange that. He couldn't invent it, either. He had twenty-one potential witnesses on board.'

'None of them saw it.'

'He couldn't know that in advance.'

Peterson said, 'Maybe there really was a car coming at him. Maybe he made a split second decision to exploit it, instead of faking a breakdown nearer the cloverleaf. Was there any delay before he reacted?'

Reacher said, 'I don't know. I was asleep.'

Peterson said nothing.

Reacher said, 'I think you've got the wrong guy.'

'Not what cops like to hear.'

'I know. I was a cop. Doesn't make it any less true.'

'He had a gun in his pocket and he fired it.'

Reacher asked, 'Case closed?'

'That's a big step.'

'But?'

'Right now, yes, I think it is.'

'So put your money where your mouth is. Pull those cops out of Janet Salter's house.'

Peterson paused. 'Not my decision.'

'What would you do if it was?'

'I don't know.'

'Will Holland do it?'

'We'll have to wait and see.'

Five minutes to three in the afternoon.

Thirty-seven hours to go.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

HOLLAND DIDN'T DO IT. NOT, HE SAID, BECAUSE HE BELIEVED Knox to be innocent. But because the stakes were high enough for the bad guys to justify a second attempt, and a third, and if necessary a fourth and a fifth. Therefore Janet Salter's protection would stay in place until the trial had run its course. Knox to be innocent. But because the stakes were high enough for the bad guys to justify a second attempt, and a third, and if necessary a fourth and a fifth. Therefore Janet Salter's protection would stay in place until the trial had run its course.

Then Jay Knox started talking, and things changed again.

Knox said he carried the gun for his own personal protection, and always had. He said he was down and depressed and frustrated about the incident with the bus, and annoyed that his employers were going to dock his pay. He didn't like the creeps he had been billeted with. He had lingered over his breakfast in the coffee shop as long as he could, but Reacher had disturbed him, so he had set out on a long angry walk. He was trying to burn off his feelings. But he had arrived at a small trestle bridge over an icy stream and seen a road sign: Bridge Freezes Before Road Bridge Freezes Before Road. He had lost his temper and pulled out the Glock and shot the sign. For which he was prepared to apologize, but he added that pretty much every d.a.m.n road sign he had seen in the area was pockmarked by bullet holes or shotgun pellets.

He remembered where the bridge was. He remembered where he had been standing. He was fairly exact about it. He could make a pretty good guess about where his spent sh.e.l.l case must have gone.

Peterson knew where the trestle bridge was, obviously. Its location made geographic sense, given the site of Knox's arrest. He figured that if Knox had really been out there, then his footprints might still be vaguely visible as smooth dents under the new acc.u.mulation. Certainly n.o.body else would have been walking there. Locals had more sense. He sent a patrol car to check. It had a metal detector in the trunk. Standard equipment, in jurisdictions that had gun crime and snow.

Ten minutes later the cop from the patrol car called in from the trestle bridge. He had found footprints. And he had found the sh.e.l.l case. It was buried in the snow at the end of a short furrow the length of a finger. It had hissed and burned its way in there. The furrow had been lightly covered by new fall, but was still visible, if you knew what you were looking for. And the cop confirmed that there was a new bullet hole in the warning sign, raw and bright, almost certainly a nine millimetre, in the s.p.a.ce between the F F of of Freezes Freezes and the and the R R of of Road Road.

Peterson conferred with Holland and they agreed the man they were looking for was both still unidentified and already located in the vicinity.

And only halfway through his business.

Jay Knox was a free man five minutes later. But he was told his Glock would stay in the police station, just in case, until he was ready to leave town. It was a deal Knox agreed to readily enough. Reacher saw him walk out of the lobby into the snow, reprieved but still defeated, relieved but still frustrated. Peterson and Holland conferred again and put the department on emergency alert. Even Kapler and Lowell were sent back to active duty.

The entire force was ordered into cars and told to cruise the streets and look for odd faces, odd vehicles, odd behaviour, a mobile expression of any police department's primal fear: there's someone out there there's someone out there.

Peterson pinned the new crime scene photographs to the boards in the small office off the corridor outside the squad room. He put them on the wall opposite the pictures of the black-clad guy lying dead in the snow. Reacher found him in there. Peterson said, 'We just made fools of ourselves and wasted a lot of time.'

Reacher said, 'Not really a lot of time.'

'What would your elite unit do next?'

'We'd speculate about automobile transmissions and cautious people.'

'What does that mean?'

'Apart from Knox not being the guy, I think you were exactly right about how it went down. The absence of footprints in the snow pretty much proves it. Two cars stopped cheek to cheek, just shy of exactly level. The bad guy waved the lawyer down. The lawyer stopped. The question is, why did he stop?'

'It's the obvious thing to do.'

Reacher nodded. 'I agree, on a road like that. In summer, at normal speeds, it wouldn't happen. But in the snow, sure. You're crawling along, you figure the other guy either needs your help or has some necessary information for you. So you stop. But if you're the kind of guy who's cautious enough to fuss with overshoes and mount an emergency hammer on your dash and listen to AM radio for the weather report and keep your gas tank full at all times, then you're probably a little wary about that whole kind of thing. You'd keep the transmission in gear and your foot on the brake. So you can take off again right away, if necessary. Maybe you would open your window just a crack. But your lawyer didn't do that. He put his s.h.i.+ft lever in Park and opened his window all the way.'