FIFTEEN

REACHER RODE BACK TO THE STATION WITH HOLLAND. THE unmarked Crown Vic churned its way out of the side street and locked into the established ruts and headed home smooth and easy. Peterson was waiting in the squad room. He was smiling, too, just as widely and gratefully and happily as Holland was. Reacher wasn’t smiling. He had serious doubts. Based in bitter experience. A fast and easy resolution to a major problem was too good to be true. And things that were too good to be true usually weren’t. A basic law of nature.

He asked, ‘So who was the shooter?’

Peterson said, ‘Jay Knox. The bus driver.’

Reacher got the story secondhand by standing off to one side and listening as Peterson briefed Holland. Forty minutes earlier a cop in a patrol car had seen a pedestrian floundering through deep snow alongside a rural road a mile out of town. Peterson named the cop in the car and called him one of ours. An old hand, presumably. From the good half of the department. Maybe someone Holland actually knew. As instructed, the cop in the car was operating at a level of high alert, but even so he thought the guy on foot was more likely a stranded driver than a murderer. He stopped and offered the guy a ride. There was something off about the guy’s response. He was surly, and uncooperative, and evasive. The cop therefore cuffed him and searched him.

And found a Glock 17 nine-millimetre pistol in his pocket. It smelled like it had been recently fired and its magazine was one round short of full.

The cop arrested the pedestrian and drove him to the station. At the booking desk he was recognized as the bus driver. His hands and his clothing were swabbed for gunshot residue. The tests came up positive. Jay Knox had fired a gun at some point in the past few hours. His prints were all over the Glock. His rights had been read to him. He was in a holding cell. He hadn’t asked for a lawyer. But he wasn’t talking, either.

Holland left to take a look at Knox in his cell. It was an urge that Reacher had seen before. It was like going to the zoo. After a big capture people would show up just to stare at the guy. They would stand in front of the bars for a moment and take it all in. Afterwards they would claim there was something in the guy’s face they always knew was wrong. If not, they would talk about the banality of evil. About how there were no reliable signs.

Peterson stayed in the squad room. He was tying up the loose ends in his head. Another urge Reacher had seen before. A dangerous urge. If you work backwards, you see what you want to see.

Reacher asked, ‘How many rounds in the victim?’

‘One,’ Peterson said. ‘In the head.’

‘Nine millimetre?’

‘Almost certainly.’

‘It’s a common round.’

‘I know.’

‘Does the geography work?’

‘Knox was picked up about four miles from the scene.’

‘On foot? That’s too far, surely.’

‘There has to have been a vehicle involved.’

‘Why?’

‘Wait until you see the photographs.’

The photographs were delivered thirty minutes later. They were in the same kind of file folder Reacher had seen the night before in Holland’s office. They were the same kind of photographs. Glossy eight-by-tens, with printed labels pasted in their bottom corners. There were plenty of them. They were colour prints, but they were mostly grey and white. Snow on the ground, snow in the air. The camera shutter had frozen the falling flakes in strange dark suspended shapes, like ash from a volcano, like specks and impurities.

The first picture was an establishing shot taken from a distance, looking west to east. It showed a snowbound road with two pairs of ruts clustered close to the crown of the camber. A lone car was sitting dead centre in the westbound ruts. Its headlights were on. It hadn’t veered or swerved. It had just rolled to a halt, like a train on a track.

The second picture had been taken about a hundred feet closer. Three things were apparent. First, there was a figure in the driver’s seat. A man, held upright by a tight seat belt, his head lolling forward. Second, the glass in the rear passenger-side window was misted with a large pink stain. And third, there was absolutely nothing on the road itself except virgin snow and four wheel ruts. No other disturbance at all.

The third photograph confirmed that fact. For the third shot, the camera had ignored the car completely. The lens had been trained directly west to east along the road right above where the yellow line was buried under the snow. It was a featureless picture. Nothing to see. Passing tyres had dug trenches, the base of the ruts had been crushed downward, small side walls had been thrown upward, tiny avalanches had fallen outward from the top of the side walls, and those small fallen fragments had been smoothed over by a crust of fresh snow.

Nothing else.

‘Good pictures,’ Reacher said.

‘I did my best,’ Peterson said.

‘Fine work.’

‘Thank you.’

‘No footprints,’ Reacher said.

‘Agreed,’ Peterson said.

The fourth photograph was a close-up of one of the eastbound ruts. Nothing to see there either, except broken and confused pieces of tread marks, the same small waffles and lattices Reacher had seen all over town. No way to reconstruct anything worth sending to a lab.

The fifth picture was a close-up of the car, taken from the front right side. It was a small neat sedan, a make Reacher didn’t recognize.

‘Infiniti,’ Peterson said. ‘It’s Japanese. Nissan’s luxury division. That model has a V-6 engine and full-time four-wheel drive. There are snow tyres on it, all around. It’s practical, and it’s about as showy as a South Dakota lawyer wants to get.’

It was painted a light silver colour. It was basically clean, but grimed over by several recent winter trips. The way the light reflected off the snow and played over the paint made it look ghostly and insubstantial. The driver’s window was all the way open. The dead guy was pinned upright against the seat back by the belt. Some snow had blown in on him. His chin was on his chest. He could have been asleep, except for the hole in his head.

The hole was the subject of photograph number five. It was in the centre of the guy’s forehead. Like a third eye. Clearly the guy had been looking out the window, halfway between sideways and straight ahead. He had been shot right down his line of sight. He had been looking at the gun. The exit wound had spattered stuff all over the window diagonally behind him. His head had then slumped down and rotated back to a central position.

The rest of the photographs were of the body and the interior of the vehicle from every conceivable angle. Take plenty of photographs, Reacher had said, and Peterson had complied to the letter. There was a pair of rubber overshoes neatly placed in the passenger foot well. There was a small multi-purpose chrome hammer mounted centrally on the dash. Reacher had seen them advertised in mail order brochures on aeroplanes. They could tap the windshield out if the doors were jammed after a wreck. They had a blade concealed in the handle to cut seat belts. Ideal accessories for cautious, meticulous, organized people interested in cars. But Reacher wondered whether one had actually ever been used in earnest in the whole history of automotive transport. He suspected not.

The Infiniti’s shifter was in Park. Its ignition key was turned to the run position. The tachometer showed an 800-rpm idle. The odometer showed fewer than ten thousand miles. Cabin temperature was set at sixty-nine degrees. The radio was tuned to a local AM station. The tick on the volume knob was all the way over at the eight o’clock position. Turned down low. The gas dial showed the tank to be close to full.

Reacher said, ‘Tell me the story.’

Peterson said, ‘OK, Knox is in a vehicle. He’s driving. He’s heading east. The lawyer is heading west. They’re both driving slow, because the road is bad. Knox sees the lawyer coming. He winds his window down. Puts his arm out and flags the lawyer down. The lawyer slows and stops. He winds his own window down. Maybe he thinks that Knox is going to warn him about a danger up ahead. Driver to driver, like people do in adverse conditions. Instead, Knox shoots him and drives on.’

‘Who found the body?’

‘Another guy heading east. Maybe five or ten minutes after it happened. He slowed, took a look, and called us from a gas station two miles farther on. No cell phone.’

‘Is Knox right-handed?’

‘I don’t know. But most people are.’

‘Did you find a shell case?’

‘No.’

‘If Knox is right-handed, then he was shooting diagonally across his body. He would want reasonable arm extension. The muzzle was probably out the window, just a little. The ejection port on a Glock is on the right side of the gun. So he had to be very careful with his position. He had to keep the ejection port inside the car. Kind of cramped. No opportunity to aim down the barrel. Yet he hit the guy right between the eyes. Not easy. Is Knox that good a shot?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You should try to find out.’

Peterson said, ‘I figure the shell case hit the door frame or the windshield, at an angle, and bounced away inside Knox’s vehicle.’

‘So tell me about Knox’s vehicle.’

‘Prearranged. He got to town yesterday and met someone today. Maybe a biker. The biker handed over a vehicle, maybe a pick-up truck. Knox did the deed and returned the vehicle and was walking home when we arrested him.’

Reacher said nothing.

Peterson said, ‘The people where we put him last night said he made a point of being out all day. They say he wasn’t very good company. Like he had things on his mind.’

‘I met him this morning in the coffee shop.’

‘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.