One Shot

window dressing. The job was already done by then.”
    “So, the second or the third. Or both of them.”
    Click, click-click.
    Reacher opened his eyes.
    “The third,” he said. “There’s a rhythm there. The first cold shot, then a lead-in, and then the money shot. The target. Then a break. His eye is lagging in the scope. He’s making sure the target is down. It is. So then the last three.”
    “Who was the third?” Helen asked.
    “The woman,” Franklin said.

    Linsky called Chenko, and then Vladimir, and then Sokolov. He explained the mission and pulled them all in tighter. Franklin’s office had no back entrance. There was just the exposed staircase. The target’s car was right there on the apron. Easy.

    Reacher said, “Tell me about the woman.”
    Franklin shuffled his notes. Put them in a new order of priority.
    “Her name was Oline Archer,” he said. “Caucasian female, married, no children, thirty-seven years old, lived west of here in the outer suburbs.”
    “Employed in the DMV building,” Reacher said. “If she was the specific target, Charlie had to know where she was and when she would be coming out.”
    Franklin nodded. “Employed by the DMV itself. Been there a year and a half.”
    “Doing what exactly?”
    “Clerical supervisor. Doing whatever they do in there.”
    “So was it work-related?” Ann Yanni asked.
    “Too long of a counter delay?” Franklin said. “A bad photo on a driver’s license? I doubt it. I checked the national databases. DMV clerks don’t get killed by customers. That just doesn’t happen.”
    “So what about her personal life?” Helen Rodin asked.
    “Nothing jumped out at me,” Franklin said. “She was just an ordinary woman. But I’ll keep digging. I’ll go down a few levels. Got to be something there.”
    “Do it fast,” Rosemary Barr said. “For my brother’s sake. We have to get him out.”
    “We need medical opinions for that,” Ann Yanni said. “Regular doctors now, not psychiatrists.”
    “Will NBC pay?” Helen Rodin asked.
    “If it’s likely to work.”
    “It should,” Rosemary said. “I mean, shouldn’t it? Parkinson’s is a real thing, isn’t it? Either he’s got it or he hasn’t.”
    “It might work at trial,” Reacher said. “A plausible reason why James Barr couldn’t have done it, plus a plausible narrative about someone else doing it? That’s usually how you create reasonable doubt.”
    “
Plausible
is a big word,” Franklin said. “And reasonable doubt is a risky concept. Better to get Alex Rodin to drop the charges altogether. Which means convincing Emerson first.”
    “I can’t talk to either one of them,” Reacher said.
    “I can,” Helen said.
    “I can,” Franklin said.
    “And I sure as hell can,” Ann Yanni said. “We all can, apart from you.”
    “But you might not want to,” Reacher said.
    “Why not?” Helen asked.
    “You’re not going to like this part very much.”
    “Why not?” Helen asked again.
    “Think,” Reacher said. “Work backward. The thing with Sandy being killed, and the thing in the sports bar Monday night, why did those two things happen?”
    “To tie you up. To prevent you hurting the case.”
    “Correct. Two attempts, same aim, same goal, same perpetrator.”
    “Obviously.”
    “And the thing Monday night started with me being followed from my hotel. Sandy and Jeb Oliver and his other pals were cruising around, standing by, waiting until someone called them and told them where I ended up. So really it started with me being followed
to
my hotel. Much earlier in the day.”
    “We’ve been through all of this.”
    “But how did the puppet master get my name? How did he even know I was in town? How did he know there was a guy here who was a potential problem?”
    “Someone told him.”
    “Who knew, early in the day on Monday?”
    Helen paused a beat.
    “My father,” she said. “Since early on Monday morning. And then Emerson, presumably. Shortly afterward. They’d have talked about the case. They’d have communicated immediately if there was a danger that the wheels were coming off.”
    “Correct,” Reacher said. “Then one of those two guys called the puppet master. Well before lunch on Monday.”
    Helen said nothing.
    “Unless one of those two guys
is
the puppet master,” Reacher said.
    “The Zec is the puppet master. You said so yourself.”
    “I said he’s Charlie’s boss. That’s all. We’ve got no way of knowing whether he’s