‘But this is not west Texas,’ Janet Salter said. ‘This is South Dakota. My point is, you can’t make bricks without straw. If they’re shipping out vast quantities of finished product, they must be shipping in vast quantities of raw materials. Which must be visible. There must be truckloads involved. Why can’t Chief Holland get at them that way, without involving me?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I think Chief Holland has gotten lazy.’
‘Peterson claimed they gave you the option of backing out.’
‘But don’t you see? That’s no option at all. I couldn’t live with myself. It’s a matter of principle.’
‘Peterson claims you were offered federal protection.’
‘And perhaps I should have accepted it. But I much preferred to stay in my own home. The justice system is supposed to penalize perpetrators, not witnesses. That’s a matter of principle, too.’
Reacher glanced at the kitchen door. A cop in the hallway, a cop at the rear window, two more sleeping upstairs ready for the night watch, a car outside, another car one block over, a third at the end of the street. Plus alert townsfolk, and a paranoid police HQ. Plus snow all over the place.
All good, unless the siren sounded.
Reacher asked, ‘Are you a grandmother?’
Janet Salter shook her head. ‘We didn’t have children. We waited, and then my husband died. He was English, and much older than me. Why do you ask?’
‘Peterson was talking about your credibility on the stand. He said you look like a storybook grandma.’
‘Do I?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I didn’t have those storybooks.’
‘Where were you raised?’
‘On Marine Corps bases.’
‘Which ones?’
‘It felt like all of them.’
‘I was raised here in South Dakota. My father was the last in a long line of robber barons. We traded, we bought land from the native inhabitants at twelve cents an acre, we bought thousands of government stakes through surrogates, we mined gold, we invested in the railroad. At insider rates, of course.’
Reacher said, ‘Hence this house.’
Janet Salter smiled. ‘No, this is where we came when we hit hard times.’
Out in the hallway the bell chimed once, quiet and civilized. Reacher stood up and stepped to the door and watched. The policewoman on duty was sitting on the bottom stair. She got up and crossed the dim space and opened the front door. Chief Holland came in, with a soft flurry of snow and a cloud of cold air. He stamped his feet on the mat and shivered as the warmth hit him. He took off his parka. The policewoman hung it up for him, right on top of Reacher’s borrowed coat.
Holland crossed the hallway and nodded to Reacher and pushed past him to the kitchen door. He told Janet Salter that he had no significant news for her, and that he was dropping by merely to pay his respects. She asked him to wait in the library. She said she would make coffee and bring it in. Reacher watched her fill an old percolator made of thick dull aluminum. It had a cord insulated with fabric. It was practically an antique. It could have been melted down from a surplus B-24 Liberator after World War Two. Reacher stood ready to help, but she waved him away and said, ‘Go and wait with the chief in the library.’ So Reacher joined Holland in the book-lined room and asked, ‘How are things?’
Holland said, ‘What things?’
‘The car out on the eastern town limit. With the dead guy in it.’
‘We’re not sure if our initial assumption was correct. About breaking the chain, I mean. It could have been a simple robbery gone wrong.’
‘How so?’
‘The guy was a lawyer, but there was no briefcase in the car. You ever heard of that? A lawyer without a briefcase? Maybe someone took it.’
‘Was there a wallet in his pocket?’
‘Yes.’
‘A watch on his wrist?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was he expected up at the jail?’
‘Not according to the visitor lists. His client made no request. But his office claims he got a call.’
‘Then it wasn’t a simple robbery. He was decoyed out there. He had no briefcase because he wasn’t planning on writing anything down. Not in his current line of work.’
‘Maybe. We’ll keep the line of inquiry open.’
‘Who made the call to his office?’
‘A male voice. Same as the first five times. From a cell phone we can’t trace.’
‘Who was the client he saw at the jail?’
‘Some deadbeat simpleton we’ll never get anything out of. We arrested him eight weeks ago for setting fire to a house. We’re still waiting for a psychological evaluation. Because he won’t speak to anyone he doesn’t want to. Not a word.’
‘Sounds like your biker friend chose well.’
The percolator started burping and gulping out in the kitchen. It was loud. Reacher could hear it quite clearly. The smell of brewing coffee drifted in and filled the air. Colombian, Reacher figured, ground coarse, reasonably fresh. He said, ‘Mrs Salter and I were talking about raw material supply to the lab you figure they’ve got out there.’
‘You think we’re negligent? You think we’re putting her at risk when we have a viable alternative?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘We’ve tried, believe me. Nothing comes through Bolton. We’re damn sure of that. Therefore they’re being supplied from the west. The Highway Patrol is responsible for the highway. We have no jurisdiction there. All we control is the county two-lane that runs north to the camp. We put cars there on a random basis. Literally random. I roll actual dice on my desk.’
Reacher said, ‘I saw them there.’
Holland nodded. ‘I do it like that because we can’t afford for the pattern to be predictable in any way at all. But so far we haven’t been lucky. They watch us pretty carefully, I suppose.’
‘OK.’
‘The trial will do it for us. Or the plea bargain the night before. It won’t come any earlier than that. One more month, that’s all.’
‘Peterson told me there’s no way to fudge the crisis plan.’
‘He’s right. We objected, of course, but the deal was done by the mayor. Lots of money, lots of strings attached. We’d have Justice Department monitors all over us for ever.’
‘A gift horse.’
‘More trouble than it’s worth,’ Holland said. ‘But then, I don’t own a motel.’
Plato’s walled compound extended across a hundred acres. His walking path through the scrub was more than three miles long. He got his next idea at the furthest point from the house. It was characteristically bold. The DEA was going to bust the Russian. That was a given. Plato wasn’t going to stand in their way. The agents had to see the guy take possession. But possession of what, exactly? Enough to make the charges stick, for sure. But not necessarily everything the guy was about to pay for. That would be excessively generous, under the circumstances. A small margin could be retained. A large margin, in fact. Possibly most of the agreed amount. Because what the hell could the Russian guy do? Rant and rave in a supermax cell somewhere, about the unfairness of life? He would be doing that anyway. So Plato could take the guy’s money, and then sell the stuff all over again to someone else. Like selling a house, except this time you take the stove and the light bulbs and the glass from the windows.
The scheme would more than double his transportation problem, but he could deal with that. He was sure a solution would present itself. The details would fall into place.
Because he was Plato, and they weren’t.
Janet Salter brought the coffee to the library on a silver tray. A china pot, some cream, some sugar, three tiny cups, three saucers, three spoons. Clearly the on-duty policewomen were not included. Probably there had been prior discussion about separation of professional and social obligations. Probably the policewomen were happy with the final outcome. Reacher had been in their situation many times. Always better to compartmentalize and focus.
Janet Salter poured the coffee. The cup was far too small for Reacher’s hand, but the coffee was good. He sniffed the steam and took a sip. Then Chief Holland’s cell phone rang. Holland balanced his cup and dragged the phone from his pocket and checked the window. He opened the phone one-handed and answered. He listened to the caller for eight seconds. Then he hung up and smiled, widely and gratefully and happily.
He said, ‘We just caught the guy who shot the lawyer.’
Five minutes to two in the afternoon.
Thirty-eight hours to go.
FIFTEEN
REACHER RODE BACK TO THE STATION WITH HOLLAND. THE unmarked Crown Vic churned its way out of the side street and locked into the established ruts and headed home smooth and easy. Peterson was waiting in the squad room. He was smiling, too, just as widely and gratefully and happily as Holland was. Reacher wasn’t smiling. He had serious doubts. Based in bitter experience. A fast and easy resolution to a major problem was too good to be true. And things that were too good to be true usually weren’t. A basic law of nature.
He asked, ‘So who was the shooter?’
Peterson said, ‘Jay Knox. The bus driver.’
Reacher got the story secondhand by standing off to one side and listening as Peterson briefed Holland. Forty minutes earlier a cop in a patrol car had seen a pedestrian floundering through deep snow alongside a rural road a mile out of town. Peterson named the cop in the car and called him one of ours. An old hand, presumably. From the good half of the department. Maybe someone Holland actually knew. As instructed, the cop in the car was operating at a level of high alert, but even so he thought the guy on foot was more likely a stranded driver than a murderer. He stopped and offered the guy a ride. There was something off about the guy’s response. He was surly, and uncooperative, and evasive. The cop therefore cuffed him and searched him.
And found a Glock 17 nine-millimetre pistol in his pocket. It smelled like it had been recently fired and its magazine was one round short of full.
The cop arrested the pedestrian and drove him to the station. At the booking desk he was recognized as the bus driver. His hands and his clothing were swabbed for gunshot residue. The tests came up positive. Jay Knox had fired a gun at some point in the past few hours. His prints were all over the Glock. His rights had been read to him. He was in a holding cell. He hadn’t asked for a
