One Shot

with one aiming point and never has to vary it. His targets just walk into it, one after the other. Shooting from the side is much harder. The targets are passing right to left in front of him, relatively quickly, he’s got to figure in deflection compensation, he’s got to move the rifle after each shot.”
    “But he didn’t fire from here.”
    “That’s my point. He should have, but he didn’t.”
    “So?”
    “He had a minivan. He should have parked it right where we are now. On this exact spot. He should have climbed through into the back seat and opened the sliding door. He should have fired from inside the minivan, Helen. It had tinted windows. The few cars that passed him wouldn’t have seen a thing. He should have fired his six shots, with the much easier aim, and the six cartridge cases would have ejected inside the van, and then he should have shut the door and climbed back into the driver’s seat and driven away. It would have been a much better firing position and he would have left nothing at all behind. No physical evidence of any kind, because nothing would have touched anything except his tires would have touched the road.”
    “It’s farther away. It’s a longer distance to shoot.”
    “It’s about seventy yards. Barr was reliable at five times that distance. Any military sniper is. With an M1A Super Match, seventy yards is the same thing as point-blank range.”
    “Someone would have gotten his plate number. There’s always
some
traffic. They would have remembered him being here, afterward.”
    “His plates were covered with mud. Probably on purpose. It would have been a great getaway. In five minutes he would have been five miles away. Much better than threading through the traffic on the surface streets.”
    Helen Rodin said nothing.
    “And he was expecting it to be sunny,” Reacher said. “You told me it usually is. Five o’clock in the afternoon, the sun would have been in the west, behind him. He would have been firing out of the sun. That’s an absolutely basic preference for a sniper.”
    “Sometimes it rains.”
    “That would have been OK, too. It would have washed his tire tracks out of this grit. Either way around, he should have been up here in his van. Every reason in the world says he should have been up here in his van.”
    “But he wasn’t.”
    “Evidently.”
    “Why not?”
    “We should get back to your office. That’s where you need to be now. You’ve got a lot of strategizing to do.”

    Helen Rodin sat down at her desk. Reacher walked to her window and looked out into the plaza. Looked for the damaged man in the boxy suit. Didn’t see him.
    “What strategizing?” Helen asked. “Barr made a choice about where to shoot from, that’s all, and it wasn’t a great choice, according to you, according to some fourteen-year-old military theory that he probably forgot all about the day he quit the service.”
    “They don’t forget,” Reacher said.
    “I’m not convinced.”
    “That’s why he walked out on Chapman. Chapman wasn’t going to be convinced, either. That’s why he asked for me.”
    “And you
are
convinced?”
    “I’m looking at a situation where a trained sniper passed up an excellent location in favor of a much worse one.”
    “He used a parking garage in Kuwait City. You said so yourself.”
    “Because that
was
a good location. It was directly in line with the apartment building’s door. The four guys were walking directly toward him. They went down like dominoes.”
    “This is fourteen years later. He’s not as good as he was. That’s all.”
    “They don’t forget,” Reacher said again.
    “Whatever; how does it make him less guilty?”
    “Because if a person chooses a terrible
B
instead of a great
A,
there has to be a reason for it. And reasons have implications.”
    “What was his reason?”
    “It had to be a real good one, didn’t it? Because he trapped himself inside a building, down at street level, in a congested area, with a much harder shot, in a place whose very nature made it the best crime scene a twenty-year veteran like Emerson has ever seen.”
    “OK, tell me why he would do that.”
    “Because he was literally going out of his way to leave every last piece of evidence he could.”
    She stared at him. “That’s crazy.”
    “It was a great crime scene. Everyone was so happy with how great it was, they never stopped to realize it was way
too
great. Me included. It was like Crime Scene 101, Helen. It