One Shot

was what they must have given Bellantonio on his first day in college. It was too good to be true, therefore it
wasn’t
true. Everything was wrong with it. Like, why would he wear a raincoat? It was warm and it wasn’t raining and he was in a car and he was never outside. He wore it so he could scrape unique fibers off it onto the pillar. Why would he wear those stupid shoes? You look at a pair of shoes like that and you just
know
they track every last piece of crap around. Why did he shoot out of the dark? So that people would see his muzzle flash and pinpoint the location so they could go up there afterward and find all the other clues. Why would he scrape his rifle on the wall? That’s a twenty-five-hundred-dollar purchase. Why didn’t he take the traffic cone away with him? It would have been easier just to throw it in the back of his van than leave it there.”
    “This is crazy,” Helen said.
    “Two clinchers,” Reacher said. “Why did he pay to park? That bothered me from the start. I mean, who
does
that? But he did. And he did it just so he could leave one little extra clue. Nothing else makes any sense. He wanted to leave a quarter in the meter with his prints on it. Just to tie it all in a nice little bow. To connect it with the shell case, which he probably also left there on purpose.”
    “It fell in a trench.”
    “He could have gotten it out. There was plenty of wire lying around, according to Bellantonio’s report. It would have taken a second and a half.”
    Helen Rodin paused. “What’s the other clincher?”
    “That’s easy, once you start looking through the right end of the telescope. He wanted to be looking at the pool from the south, not the west. That was crucial. He wanted to be looking at it lengthwise, not sideways.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he didn’t miss, Helen. He fired into the pool deliberately. He wanted to put a bullet in the water, down the long diagonal axis, from a low angle, just like a ballistics tank, just so it could be found later, undamaged. Just so it could tie his barrel to the crime. Sideways wouldn’t have worked for him. Not enough travel distance through the water. The bullet would have hit the wall too hard. It would have gotten damaged.”
    “But why the hell would he do all that?”
    Reacher didn’t answer.
    “Remorse? For fourteen years ago? So he could be found and punished?”
    Reacher shook his head. “He would have confessed as soon as they found him. A remorseful person would have been
wanting
to confess.”
    “So why did he do all that?”
    “Because he was made to, Helen. Simple as that.”
    She stared at him.
    “Someone forced him to do it,” Reacher said. “He was forced to do it and he was forced to take the blame for it. He was told to go home afterward and wait for the arrest. That’s why he took the sleeping pill. He was probably going crazy, sitting there waiting for the shoe to fall.”
    Helen Rodin said nothing.
    “He was coerced,” Reacher said. “Believe it. It’s the only logical explanation. He wasn’t a lone nutcase. That’s why he said,
They’ve got the wrong guy.
It was a message. He was hoping someone would pick up on it. He meant they should be looking for the other guy. The guy who made him do it. The guy he feels is more responsible.”
    Helen Rodin said nothing.
    “The puppet master,” Reacher said.

    Reacher checked the plaza again, from the window. The ornamental pool was about two-thirds full. The fountain was splashing merrily. The sun was out. There were no loiterers visible.
    Helen Rodin got up from her desk. Just stood there behind it.
    “I should be turning cartwheels,” she said.
    “He still killed five people.”
    “But if the coercion was substantial, it’s going to help him.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “What do you think it was? A double-dare? Some kind of thrill-seeking?”
    “Maybe,” Reacher said. “But I doubt it. On the face of it, James Barr is twenty years too old for double-dares. That’s a kid thing. And they’d have done it from the highway anyway. They would have wanted to survive to do it again.”
    “So what was it?”
    “Something else entirely. Something real.”
    “Should we take it to Emerson?”
    “No,” Reacher said.
    “I think we should.”
    “There are reasons not to.”
    “Like?”
    “For one, Emerson’s got the best done deal he ever saw. He’s not going to pick at the seams now. No cop would.”
    “So what should we do?”
    “We should ask