61 Hours

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 shell 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 space between the
F
of
Freezes
and the
R
of
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
.
    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 shift lever in Park and opened his window all the way.’
    ‘Which means what?’
    ‘Which means he was ready for a full-blown transaction. A conversation, a discussion, the whole nine yards. He turned hisradio down, ready for it. Which means maybe he knew the guy who stopped him. Which is possibly plausible, given the kind of people he seems to have been mixing with.’
    ‘So what would you do now?’
    ‘We’d already be tearing his life apart.’
    ‘Difficult for us to do. He lived in the next county. Outside of our jurisdiction.’
    ‘You need to get on the phone and cooperate.’
    ‘Like you used to with the feds?’
    ‘Not exactly,’ Reacher said.
    Plato finished his afternoon walk with a visit to his prisoner. The guy was chained in the open, by his ankle, to a steel post anchored deep in the earth. He was a thief. He had gotten greedy. Plato’s operations were cash businesses, obviously, and vast quantities of bills had to be stored for long periods, in the ground, in cellars, hidden here and there, to the point where damp and rodent damage claimed a ballpark figure of ten per cent of incoming assets. A hundred grand out of every million just fell apart and rotted away. Except this guy’s division was claiming wastage closer to twelve per cent. Which was an anomaly. Which on examination turned out to be caused by the guy skimming, a quarter-million here, a