One Shot

Reacher recognized him from his TV spot on Saturday morning. Same guy, pale, quiet, competent, not big, not small. In person he looked like he had been a cop since birth. Since the moment of conception, maybe. It was in his pores. In his DNA. He was wearing gray flannel pants and a white short-sleeve shirt. Open neck. No tie. There was a tweed jacket on the back of his chair. His face and his body were a little shapeless, like he had been molded by constant pressures.
    “Welcome to Indiana,” he said.
    Reacher said nothing.
    “I mean it,” Emerson said. “Really. We love it when old friends of the accused show up to tear our work to shreds.”
    “I’m here for his lawyer,” Reacher said. “Not as a friend.”
    Emerson nodded.
    “I’ll give you the background myself,” he said. “Then my crime-scene guy will walk you through the particulars. You can see absolutely anything you want and you can ask absolutely anything you want.”
    Reacher smiled. He had been a cop of sorts himself for thirteen long years, on a tough beat, and he knew the language and all its dialects. He knew the tone and he understood the nuances. And the way Emerson spoke told him things. It told him that despite the initial hostility, this was a guy secretly happy to meet with a critic. Because he knew for sure he had a solid-gold slam-dunk case.
    “You knew James Barr pretty well, am I right?” Emerson asked.
    “Did you?” Reacher asked back.
    Emerson shook his head. “Never met him. There were no warning signs.”
    “Was his rifle legal?”
    Emerson nodded. “It was registered and unmodified. As were all his other guns.”
    “Did he hunt?”
    Emerson shook his head again. “He wasn’t an NRA member and he didn’t belong to a gun club. We never saw him out in the hills. He was never in trouble. He was just a low-profile citizen. A
no
-profile citizen, really. No warning signs at all.”
    “You seen this kind of thing before?”
    “Too many times. If you include the District of Columbia, then Indiana is tied for sixteenth place out of fifty-one in terms of homicide deaths per capita. Worse than New York, worse than California. This town isn’t the worst in the state, but it’s not the best, either. So we’ve seen it all before, and sometimes there are signs, and sometimes there aren’t, but either way around we know what we’re doing.”
    “I spoke with Alex Rodin,” Reacher said. “He’s impressed.”
    “He should be. We performed well. Your old buddy was toast six hours after the first shot. It was a textbook case, beginning to end.”
    “No doubts at all?”
    “Put it this way. I wrote it up Saturday morning and I haven’t given it a whole lot of thought since then. It’s a done deal. About the best done deal I ever saw, and I’ve seen a lot.”
    “So is there any point in me walking through it?”
    “Sure there is. I’ve got a crime-scene guy desperate to show off. He’s a good man, and he deserves his moment in the sun.”

    Emerson walked Reacher to the lab and introduced him as a lawyer’s scout, not as James Barr’s friend. Which helped a little with the atmosphere. Then he left him there. The crime-scene guy was a serious forty-year-old called Bellantonio. His name was more exuberant than he was. He was tall, dark, thin, and stooped. He could have been a mortician. And he suspected James Barr was going to plead guilty. He thought he wasn’t going to get his day in court. That was clear. He had laid out the evidence chain in a logical sequence on long tables in a sealed police garage bay, just so that he could give visitors the performance he would never give a jury.
    The tables were white canteen-style trestles and they ran all the way around the perimeter of the bay. Above them was a horizontal line of cork boards with hundreds of printed sheets of paper pinned to them. The sheets were encased in plastic page protectors and they related to the specific items found directly below. Trapped tight in the square made by the tables was James Barr’s beige Dodge Caravan. The bay was clean and brightly lit with harsh fluorescent tubes and the minivan looked huge and alien in there. It was old and dirty and smelled of gasoline and oil and rubber. The sliding rear door was open and Bellantonio had rigged a light to shine in on the carpet.
    “This all looks good,” Reacher said.
    “Best crime scene I ever worked,” Bellantonio said.
    “So walk me through it.”
    Bellantonio started with the