"Tiny. Weird hair."
"Did they talk to you much?"
"Not really. They were just two guys down from Indiana, getting off on shooting guns. I get a lot of that here."
"Did you watch them shoot?"
Cash shook his head. "I learned never to watch anybody. People take it as a criticism. I let them come to me, but nobody ever does."
"Barr bought his ammo here, right?"
"Lake City. Expensive."
"His gun wasn't cheap, either."
"He was worth it."
"What gun did Charlie use?"
"The same thing. Like a matched pair. In his case it was a comedy. Like a fat guy who buys a carbon fiber racing bike."
"You got separate handgun ranges here?"
"One indoor. People use it if it rains. Otherwise I let them blast away outside, anywhere they want. I don't care much for handguns. No art to them."
Reacher nodded and Cash swept Charlie's targets into a pile, careful to keep them in correct date order. Then he stacked them together and put them back in the S drawer.
"Smith is a common name," Reacher said. "Actually I think it's the most common name in America."
"It was genuine," Cash said. "I see a driver's license before anyone gets membership."
"Where was he from originally?"
"Accent? Somewhere way north."
"Can I take one of James Barr's targets?"
"What the hell for?"
"For a souvenir," Reacher said.
Cash said nothing.
"It won't go anywhere," Reacher said. "I'm not going to sell it on the internet."
Cash said nothing.
"Barr's not coming back," Reacher said. "That's for damn sure. And if you really want to cover your ass you should dump them all anyway."
Cash shrugged and turned back to the file drawer.
"The most recent one," Reacher said. "That would be best."
Cash thumbed through the stack and pulled a sheet. Handed it across the counter. Reacher took it and folded it carefully and put it in his shirt pocket.
"Good luck with your buddy," Cash said.
"He's not my buddy," Reacher said. "But thanks for your help."
"You're welcome," Cash said. "Because I know who you are. I recognized you when you got behind the gun. I never forget the shape of a prone position. You won the Invitational ten years after I was in it. I was watching, from the crowd. Your real name is Reacher."
Reacher nodded.
"Polite of you," Cash said. "Not to mention it after I told you how I only came in third."
"You had tougher competition," Reacher said. "Ten years later it was all a bunch of deadbeats."
He stopped at the last gas station in Kentucky and filled Yanni's tank. Then he called Helen Rodin from a pay phone.
"Is the cop still there?" he asked.
"Two of them," she said. "One in the lobby, one at my door."
"Did Franklin start yet?"
"First thing this morning."
"Any progress?"
"Nothing. They were five very ordinary people."
"Where is Franklin's office?"
She gave him an address. Reacher checked his watch. "I'll meet you there at four o'clock."
"How was Kentucky?"
"Confusing," he said.
He recrossed the Ohio on the same trestle bridge with Sheryl Crow telling him all over again about how every day was a winding road. He cranked up the volume and turned left and headed west. Ann Yanni's maps showed a highway cloverleaf forty miles ahead. He could turn north there and a couple hours later he could scoot past the whole city, forty feet in the air. It seemed like a better idea than trying the surface streets. He figured Emerson would be getting seriously frustrated. And then seriously enraged, at some point during the day. Reacher would have been. Reacher had been Emerson for thirteen years, and in this kind of a situation he would have been kicking ass big time, blanketing the streets with uniforms, trying everything.
He found the cloverleaf and joined the highway going north. He killed the CD when it started over again and settled in for the cruise. The Mustang felt pretty good at seventy miles an hour. It rumbled along, lots of power, no finesse at all. Reacher figured if he could put that drivetrain in some battered old sedan body, then that would be his kind of car.
Bellantonio had been at work in his crime lab since seven o'clock in the morning. He had fingerprinted the cell phone found abandoned under the highway and come up with nothing worth a damn. Then he had copied the call log. The last number dialed was Helen Rodin's cell. Last-but-one was Emerson's cell. Clearly Reacher had made both of those calls. Then came a long string of calls to several different cell phones registered to Specialized Services of Indiana. Maybe Reacher had made those too, or maybe he hadn't. No way of knowing. Bellantonio wrote it all up, but he knew Emerson wouldn't do anything with it. The only viable pressure point was the call to Helen Rodin, and no way could Emerson start hassling a defense lawyer about a conversation with a witness, suspect or not. That would be a waste of breath.
So he moved on to the garage tapes. He had four days' worth, ninety-six hours, nearly three thousand separate vehicle movements. His staff had logged them all. Only three of them were Cadillacs. Indiana was the same as most heartland states. People bought pickup trucks as a first preference, then SUVs, then coupes, then convertibles. Regular sedans claimed a tiny market share, and most of them were Toyotas or Hondas or mid-sized domestics. Full-sized turnpike cruisers were very rare, and premium brands rarest of all.
The first Cadillac on tape was a bone-white Eldorado. A two-door coupe, several years old. It had parked before ten in the morning on the Wednesday and stayed parked for five hours. The second Cadillac on tape was a new STS, maybe red or gray, possibly light blue. Hard to be sure, with the murky monochrome picture. Whatever, it had parked soon after lunch on the Thursday and stayed there for two hours.
The third Cadillac was a black DeVille. It was caught on tape entering the garage just after six o'clock in the morning on the Friday. Black Friday, as Bellantonio was calling it. At six o'clock in the morning the garage would have been more or less completely empty. The tape showed the DeVille sweeping up the ramp, fast and confident. It showed it leaving again after just four minutes.
Long enough to place the cone.
The driver wasn't really visible in either sequence. There was just a gray blur behind the windshield. Maybe it was Barr, maybe it wasn't. Bellantonio wrote it all up for Emerson. He made a mental note to check through again to determine if four minutes was the shortest stay on the tapes. He suspected it was, easily.
Then he scanned the forensic sweep through Alexandra Dupree's garden apartment. He had assigned a junior guy to do it, because it wasn't the crime scene. There was nothing of interest there. Nothing at all. Except the fingerprint evidence. The apartment was a mess of prints, like all apartments are. Most of them were the girl's, but there were four other sets. Three of them were unidentifiable.
The fourth set of prints belonged to James Barr.
James Barr had been in Alexandra Dupree's apartment. In the living room, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. No doubt about it. Clear prints, perfect matches. Unmistakable.
Bellantonio wrote it up for Emerson.
Then he read a report just in from the medical examiner. Alexandra Dupree had been killed by a single massive blow to the right temple, delivered by a left-handed assailant. She had fallen onto a gravel surface that contained organic matter including grass and dirt. But she had been found in an alley paved with limestone. Therefore her body had been moved at least a short distance between death and discovery. Other physiological evidence confirmed it.