reading

ONE

Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy. It was like trying to wrestle a king-size mattress off a waterbed. So they buried him close to the house. Which made sense anyway. The harvest was still a month away, and a disturbance in a field would show up from the air. And they would use the air, for a guy like Keever. They would use search planes, and helicopters, and maybe even drones.

They started at midnight, which they figured was safe enough. They were in the middle of ten thousand acres of nothingness, and the only man-made structure their side of any horizon was the railroad track to the east, but midnight was five hours after the evening train and seven hours before the morning train. Therefore, no prying eyes. Their backhoe had four spotlights on a bar above the cab, like kids had on their pick-up trucks, and together they made an aimed pool of halogen brightness. So visibility was not a problem either. They started the hole in the hog pen, which was a permanent disturbance all by itself. Each hog weighed two hundred pounds, and each hog had four feet. The dirt was always chewed up. Nothing to see from the air, not even with a thermal camera. The picture would white out instantly, from the steaming animals themselves, and their steaming piles and pools of waste.

Safe enough.

Hogs were rooting animals, so they made sure the hole was deep. Which was not a problem either. The backhoe’s arm was long, and it bit rhythmically, in fluent seven-foot scoops, the hydraulic rams glinting in the electric light, the engine straining and roaring and pausing, the cab falling and rising, as each bucket-load was dumped aside. When the hole was done they backed the machine up and turned it around and used the dozer blade to push Keever into his grave, scraping him, rolling him, covering his body in dirt, until finally it fell over the lip and thumped down into the electric shadows.

Only one thing went wrong, and it happened right then.

The evening train came through five hours late. The next morning they heard on the AM station that a broken locomotive had caused a jam a hundred miles south. But they didn’t know that at the time. All they heard was the mournful whistle at the distant crossing, and then the only thing they could do was turn and stare, at the long lit cars rumbling past in the middle distance, one after the other, like a vision in a dream, seemingly forever. But eventually the train was gone, and the rails sang for a minute more, and then the tail light was swallowed up by the midnight darkness, and they turned back to their task.

Twenty miles north the train slowed, and slowed, and then eased to a hissing stop, and the doors sucked open, and Jack Reacher stepped down to a concrete ramp in front of a grain elevator as big as an apartment house. To his left were four more elevators, all of them bigger than the first, and to his right was an enormous metal shed the size of an airplane hangar. There were vapour lights on poles, set at regular intervals, and they cut cones of yellow in the darkness. There was mist in the night-time air, like a note on a calendar. The end of summer was coming. Fall was on its way.

Reacher stood still and behind him the train moved away without him, straining, grinding, settling to a slow rat-a-tat rhythm, and then accelerating, its building slipstream pulling at his clothes. He was the only passenger who had gotten out. Which was not surprising. The place was no kind of a commuter hub. It was all agricultural. What token passenger facilities it had were wedged between the first elevator and the huge shed, and were limited to a compact building which seemed to have both a ticket window and benches for waiting. It was built in a traditional railroad style, and it looked like a kid’s toy, temporarily set down between two shiny oil drums.

But on a signboard running its whole length was written the reason Reacher was there: Mother’s Rest. Which he had seen on a map, and which he thought was a great name for a railroad stop. He figured the line must cross an ancient wagon train trail, right there, where something had happened long ago. Maybe a young pregnant woman went into labour. The jostling could not have helped. So maybe the wagon train stopped for a couple of weeks. Maybe someone remembered the place years later. A descendant, maybe. A family legend. Maybe there was a one-room museum.

Or perhaps there was a sadder interpretation. Maybe they had buried a woman there. Too old to make it. In which case there would be a commemorative stone.

Either way Reacher figured he might as well find out. He had no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, so detours cost him nothing. Which is why he got out of the train. To a sense of disappointment, initially. His expectations had been way off base. He had pictured a couple of dusty houses, and a lonely onehorse corral. And the one-room museum, maybe run part-time on a volunteer basis by an old guy from one of the houses, or the headstone, maybe marble, behind a square wrought-iron fence.

He had not expected the immense agricultural infrastructure. He should have, he supposed. Grain, meet the railroad. It had to be loaded somewhere. Billions of bushels and millions of tons each year. He stepped left and looked through the gap between the structures. The view was dark, but he could sense a rough semicircle of habitation. Houses, obviously, for the depot workers. He could see some lights, which he hoped were a motel, or a diner, or both.

He walked to the exit, skirting the pools of vapour light purely out of habit, but he saw that the last lamp was going to be unavoidable, because it was set directly above the exit gate, so he saved himself a further perimeter diversion by walking through the next-to-last pool too.

At which point a woman stepped out of the shadows.

She came towards him with a distinctive little burst of energy, two fast paces, like she was pleased to see him. Her body language was all about relief.

Then it wasn’t. Then it was all about disappointment. She stopped dead, and she said, ‘Oh.’

She was about forty, Reacher guessed, with dark hair worn long, and she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt under a short coat. She had lace-up shoes on her feet. Five-nine, maybe, and a hundred and fifty pounds. She was no kind of a waif.

He said, ‘Good evening, ma’am.’

She was looking past his shoulder.

He said, ‘I’m the only passenger.’

She looked him in the eye.

He said, ‘No one else got out of the train. So I guess your friend isn’t coming.’

‘My friend?’ she said. A neutral kind of accent. The kind he heard everywhere.

He said, ‘Why else would a person be here, except to meet the train? No point in coming otherwise. I guess normally there would be nothing to see at midnight.’

She didn’t answer.

He said, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been waiting here since seven o’clock.’

‘I didn’t know the train was late,’ she said. ‘There’s no cell signal here. And no one from the railroad to tell you anything. And I guess the Pony Express is out sick today.’

‘He wasn’t in my car. Or the next two, either.’

‘Who wasn’t?’

‘Your friend.’

‘You don’t know what he looks like.’

‘He’s a big guy,’ Reacher said. ‘That’s why you jumped out when you saw me. You thought I was him. For a second, at least. And there were no big guys in my car. Or the next two.’

‘When is the next train?’

‘Seven in the morning.’

She said, ‘Who are you, and why have you come here?’

‘I’m just a guy passing through.’

‘The train passed through. Not you. You got out.’

‘You know anything about this place?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘Have you seen a museum or a gravestone?’

‘Why are you here?’

‘Who’s asking?’

She paused a beat, and said, ‘Nobody.’

Reacher said, ‘Is there a motel in town?’

‘I’m staying there.’

‘How is it?’

‘It’s a motel.’

‘Works for me,’ Reacher said. ‘Does it have vacancies?’

‘I’d be amazed if it didn’t.’

‘OK, you can show me the way. Don’t wait here all night. I’ll be up by first light. I’ll knock on your door as I leave. Hopefully your friend will be here in the morning.’

The woman said nothing. She just glanced at the silent rails one more time, and then turned around and led the way through the exit gate.

ONE

Friday. Five o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe the hardest time to move unobserved through a city. Or, maybe the easiest. Because at five o’clock on a Friday nobody pays attention to anything. Except the road ahead.

The man with the rifle drove north. Not fast, not slow. Not drawing attention. Not standing out. He was in a light-coloured minivan that had seen better days. He was alone behind the wheel. He was wearing a light-coloured raincoat and the kind of shapeless light-coloured beanie hat that old guys wear on the golf course when the sun is out or the rain is falling. The hat had a two-tone red band all round it. It was pulled down low. The coat was buttoned up high. The man was wearing sunglasses, even though the van had dark windows and the sky was cloudy. And he was wearing gloves, even though winter was three months away and the weather wasn’t cold.

Traffic slowed to a crawl where First Street started up a hill. Then it stopped completely where two lanes became one because the blacktop was torn up for construction. There was construction all over town. Driving had been a nightmare for a year. Holes in the road, gravel trucks, concrete trucks, blacktop spreaders. The man with the rifle lifted his hand off the wheel. Pulled back his cuff. Checked his watch.

Eleven minutes.

Be patient.

He took his foot off the brake and crawled ahead. Then he stopped again where the roadway narrowed and the sidewalks widened where the downtown shopping district started. There were big stores to the left and the right, each one set a little higher than the last, because of the hill. The wide sidewalks gave plenty of space for shoppers to stroll. There were cast-iron flag poles and cast-iron lamp posts all lined up like sentries between the people and the cars. The people had more space than the cars. Traffic was very slow. He checked his watch again.

Eight minutes.

Be patient.

A hundred yards later the prosperity faded a little. The congestion eased. First Street opened out and became slightly shabby again. There were bars and dollar stores. Then a parking garage on the left. Then yet more construction, where the parking garage was being extended. Then further ahead the street was blocked by a low wall. Behind it was a windy pedestrian plaza with an ornamental pool and a fountain. On the plaza’s left, the old city library. On its right, a new office building. Behind it, a black glass tower. First Street turned an abrupt right angle in front of the plaza’s boundary wall and ran away west, past untidy rear entrances and loading docks and then on under the raised state highway.

But the man in the minivan slowed before he hit the turn in front of the plaza and made a left and entered the parking garage. He drove straight up the ramp. There was no barrier, because each space had its own parking meter. Therefore there was no cashier, no witness, no ticket, no paper trail. The man in the minivan knew all that. He wound round the ramps to the second level and headed for the far back corner of the structure. Left the van idling in the aisle for a moment and slipped out of the seat and moved an orange traffic cone from the space he wanted. It was the last one in the old part of the building, right next to where the new part was being added on.

He drove the van into the space and shut it down. Sat still for a moment. The garage was quiet. It was completely full with silent cars. The space he had protected with the traffic cone had been the last one available. The garage was always packed. He knew that. That was why they were extending it. They were doubling its size. It was used by shoppers. That was why it was quiet. Nobody in their right mind would try to leave at five o’clock. Not into the rush hour traffic. Not with the construction delays. Either they would get out by four or wait until six.

The man in the minivan checked his watch.

Four minutes.

Easy.

He opened the driver’s door and slid out. Took a quarter from his pocket and put it in the meter. Twisted the handle hard and heard the coin fall and saw the clockwork give him an hour in exchange. There was no other sound. Nothing in the air except the smell of parked automobiles. Gasoline, rubber, cold exhaust.

He stood still next to the van. On his feet he had a pair of old desert boots. Khaki suede, single eyelets, white crepe soles, made by Clarks of England, much favoured by Special Forces soldiers. An iconic design, unchanged in maybe sixty years.

He glanced back at the parking meter. Fifty-nine minutes. He wouldn’t need fifty-nine minutes. He opened the minivan’s sliding rear door and leaned inside and unfolded a blanket and revealed the rifle. It was a Springfield M1A Super Match autoloader, American walnut stock, heavy premium barrel, ten shot box magazine, chambered for the .308. It was the exact commercial equivalent of the M14 self-loading sniper rifle that the American military had used during his long-ago years in the service. It was a fine weapon. Maybe not quite as accurate with the first cold shot as a top-of-the-line bolt gun, but it would do. It would do just fine. He wasn’t going to be looking at extraordinary distances. It was loaded with Lake City M852s. His favourite custom cartridges. Special Lake City Match brass, Federal powder, Sierra Matchking 168-grain hollow point boat tail bullets. The load was better than the gun, probably. A slight mismatch.

He listened to the silence and lifted the rifle off the rear bench. Carried it away with him to where the old part of the garage finished and the new part began. There was a half-inch trench between the old concrete and the new. Like a demarcation line. He guessed it was an expansion joint. For the summer heat. He guessed they were going to fill it with soft tar. Directly above it there was yellow and black Caution Do Not Enter tape strung between two pillars. He dropped to one knee and slid under it. Stood up again and walked on into the raw new construction.

Parts of the new concrete floor were trowelled smooth and parts were rough, still waiting for a final surface. There were wooden planks laid here and there as walkways. There were haphazard piles of paper cement sacks, some full, some empty. There were more open expansion joints. There were strings of bare light bulbs, turned off. Empty wheelbarrows, crushed soda cans, spools of cable, unexplained lengths of lumber, piles of crushed stone, silent concrete mixers. There was grey cement dust everywhere, as fine as talc, and the smell of damp lime.

The man with the rifle walked on in the darkness until he came close to the new northeast corner. Then he stopped and put his back tight against a raw concrete pillar and stood still. Inched to his right with his head turned until he could see where he was. He was about eight feet from the garage’s new perimeter wall. Looking due north. The wall was about waist-high. It was unfinished. It had bolts cast into it to take lengths of metal barrier to stop cars hitting the concrete. There were receptacles cast into the floor to take the new parking meter posts.

The man with the rifle inched forward and turned a little until he felt the corner of the pillar between his shoulder blades. He turned his head again. Now he was looking north and east. Directly into the public plaza. The ornamental pool was a long narrow rectangle running away from him. It was maybe eighty feet by twenty. It was like a large tank of water, just sitting there. Like a big above-ground lap pool. It was bounded by four waist-high brick walls. The water lapped against their inner faces. His line of sight ran on an exact diagonal from its near front corner to its far back corner. The water looked to be about three feet deep. The fountain splashed right in the centre of the pool. He could hear it, and he could hear slow traffic on the street, and the shuffle of feet below him. The front wall of the pool was about three feet behind the wall that separated the plaza from First Street. The two low walls ran close together and parallel for twenty feet, east to west, with just the width of a narrow walkway between them.

He was on the garage’s second level but the way First Street ran uphill meant the plaza was much less than one storey below him. There was a definite downward angle, but it was shallow. On the right of the plaza he could see the new office building’s door. It was a shabby place. It had been built and it hadn’t rented. He knew that. So to preserve some kind of credibility for the new downtown the state had filled it with government offices. The Department of Motor Vehicles was in there, and a joint Army–Navy–Air Force–Marine Corps recruiting office. Maybe Social Security was in there. Maybe the Internal Revenue Service. The man with the rifle wasn’t really sure. And he didn’t really care.

He dropped to his knees and then to his stomach. The low crawl was a sniper’s principal mode of movement. In his years in the service he had low crawled a million miles. Knees and elbows and belly. Standard tactical doctrine was for the sniper and his spotter to detach from the company a thousand yards out and crawl into position. In training he had sometimes taken many hours to do it, to avoid the observer’s binoculars. But this time he had only eight feet to cover. And as far as he knew there were no binoculars on him.

He reached the base of the wall and lay flat on the ground, pressed up tight against the raw concrete. Then he squirmed up into a sitting position. Then he knelt. He folded his right leg tight underneath him. He planted his left foot flat and his left shin vertical. He propped his left elbow on his left knee. Raised the rifle. Rested the end of the forestock on the top of the low concrete wall. Sawed it gently back and forth until it felt good and solid. Supported kneeling, the training manual called it. It was a good position. Second only to lying prone with a bipod, in his experience. He breathed in, breathed out. One shot, one kill. That was the sniper’s credo. To succeed required control and stillness and calm. He breathed in, breathed out. Felt himself relax. Felt himself come home.

Ready.

Infiltration successful.

Now wait until the time is right.

He waited about seven minutes, keeping still, breathing low, clearing his mind. He looked at the library on his left. Above it and behind it a spur of the raised highway curled in on stilts, like it was embracing the big old limestone building, cradling it, protecting it from harm. Then it straightened a little and passed behind the black glass tower. It was about level with the fourth storey back there. The tower itself had the NBC peacock on a monolith near its main entrance, but the man with the rifle was sure that a small network affiliate didn’t occupy the whole building. Probably not more than a single floor. The rest of the space was probably one-man law firms or CPAs or real estate offices or insurance brokers or investment managers. Or empty.

People were coming out of the new building on the right. People who had been getting new licences or turning in old plates or joining the army or hassling with federal bureaucracy. There were a lot of people. The government offices were closing. Five o’clock, on a Friday. The people came out the doors and walked right to left directly in front of him, funnelling into single file as they entered the narrow space and passed the short end of the ornamental pool between the two low walls. Like ducks in a shooting gallery. One after the other. A target-rich environment. The range was about a hundred feet. Approximately. Certainly less than thirty-five yards. Very close.

He waited.

Some of the people trailed their fingers in the water as they walked. The walls were just the right height for that. The man with the rifle could see bright copper pennies on the black tile under the water. They swam and rippled where the fountain disturbed the surface.

He watched. He waited.

The stream of people thickened up. Now there were so many of them coming all at once that they had to pause and group and shuffle and wait to get into single file to pass between the two low walls. Just like the traffic had snarled at the bottom of First Street. A bottleneck. After you. No, after you. It made the people slow. Now they were slow ducks in a shooting gallery.

The man with the rifle breathed in, and breathed out, and waited.

Then he stopped waiting.

He pulled the trigger, and kept on pulling.

His first shot hit a man in the head and killed him instantly. The gunshot was loud and there was a supersonic crack from the bullet and a puff of pink mist from the head and the guy went straight down like a puppet with the strings cut.

A kill with the first cold shot.

Excellent.

He worked fast, left to right. The second shot hit the next man in the head. Same result as the first, exactly. The third shot hit a woman in the head. Same result. Three shots in maybe two seconds. Three targets down. Absolute surprise. No reaction for a split second. Then chaos broke out. Pandemonium. Panic. There were twelve people caught in the narrow space between the plaza wall and the pool wall. Three were already down. The remaining nine ran. Four ran forward and five spun away from the corpses and ran back. Those five collided with the press of people still moving their way. There were sudden loud screams. There was a solid stalled mass of panicked humanity, right in front of the man with the rifle. Range, less than thirty-five yards. Very close.

His fourth head shot killed a man in a suit. His fifth missed completely. The Sierra Matchking passed close to a woman’s shoulder and hissed straight into the ornamental pool and disappeared. He ignored it and moved the Springfield’s muzzle a fraction and his sixth shot caught a guy on the bridge of his nose and blew his head apart.

The man with the rifle stopped firing.

He ducked low behind the garage wall and crawled backwards three feet. He could smell burnt powder and over the ringing in his ears he could hear women screaming and feet pounding and the crunch of panicked fender benders on the street below. Don’t worry, little people, he thought. It’s over now. I’m out of here. He lay on his front and swept his spent shell cases into a pile. The bright Lake City brass shone right there in front of him. He scooped five of them into his gloved hands but the sixth rolled away and fell into an unfinished expansion joint. Just dropped right down into the tiny nine-inch-deep, half-inch-wide trench. He heard a quiet metallic sound as it hit bottom.

Decisio?

Leave it, surely.

No time.

He jammed the five cases he had in his raincoat pocket and crawled backwards on his toes and his fingers and his belly. He lay still for a moment and listened to the screaming. Then he came to his knees and stood up. Turned round and walked back the same way he had come, fast but in control, over the rough concrete, along the walkway planks, through the dark and the dust, under the yellow and black tape. Back to his minivan.

The rear door was still open. He rewrapped the warm rifle in its blanket and slid the door shut on it. Got in the front and started the engine. Glanced through the windshield at the parking meter. He had forty-four minutes left on it. He backed out and headed for the exit ramp. Drove down it and out the unmanned exit and made a right and another right into the tangle of streets behind the department stores. He had passed under the raised highway before he heard the first sirens. He breathed out. The sirens were heading east, and he was heading west.

Good work, he thought. Covert infiltration, six shots fired, five targets down, successful exfiltration, as cool as the other side of the pillow.

Then he smiled suddenly. Long-term military records show that a modern army scores one enemy fatality for every fifteen thousand combat rounds expended by its infantry. But for its specialist snipers, the result is better. Way better. Twelve and a half thousand times better, as a matter of fact. A modern army scores one enemy fatality for every one-point-two combat rounds expended by a sniper. And one for one-point-two happened to be the same batting average as five for six. Exactly the same average. Simple arithmetic. So even after all those years a trained military sniper had scored exactly what his old instructors would have expected. They would have been very pleased about that.

But his old instructors had trained snipers for the battlefield, not for urban crime. With urban crime, factors unknown on the battlefield kick in fast. Those factors tend to modify the definition of successful exfiltration. In this particular case, the media reacted fastest. Not surprisingly, since the shootings took place right in front of the local NBC affiliate’s window. Two things happened even before a dozen panicked bystanders all hit 911 on their cell phones simultaneously. First, every minicam in the NBC office starting rolling. The cameras were grabbed up and switched on and pointed at the windows. Second, a local news anchor called Ann Yanni started rehearsing what she knew would be her very first network breaking-news report. She was sick and scared and badly shaken, but she knew an opportunity when she saw it. So she started drafting, in her head. She knew that words set agendas, and the words that came to her first were sniper and senseless and slaying. The alliteration was purely instinctive. So was the banality. But slaying was how she saw it. And slaying was a great word. It communicated the randomness, the wantonness, the savagery, the ferocity. It was a motiveless and impersonal word. It was exactly the right word for the story. At the same time she knew it wouldn’t work for the caption below the pictures. Massacre would be better there. Friday Night Massacre? Rush Hour Massacre? She ran for the door and hoped her graphics guy would come up with something along those lines unbidden.

Also not present on the battlefield is urban law enforcement. The dozen simultaneous 911 cell phone calls lit up the emergency switchboard like a Christmas tree and the local police and fire departments were rolling within forty seconds. Everything was despatched, all of them with lights popping and sirens blaring. Every black-and-white, every available detective, every crime scene technician, every fire engine, every paramedic, every ambulance. Initially there was complete mayhem. The 911 calls had been panicked and incoherent. But crimes were plainly involved, and they were clearly serious, so the Serious Crimes Squad’s lead detective was given temporary command. He was a high-quality twenty-year PD veteran who had come all the way up from patrolman. His name was Emerson. He was blasting through slow traffic, dodging construction, hopelessly, desperately, with no way of knowing what had happened. Robbery, drugs, gang fight, terrorism, he had no hard information. None at all. But he was calm. Comparatively. His heart rate was holding below a hundred and fifty. He had an open channel with the 911 despatcher, desperate to hear more as he drove.

‘New guy on a cell phone now,’ the despatcher screamed.

‘Who?’ Emerson screamed back.

‘Marine Corps, from the recruiting office.’

‘Was he a witness?’

‘No, he was inside. But he’s outside now.’

Emerson clamped his teeth. He knew he wasn’t going to be first-on-scene. Not even close. He knew he was leading from the rear. So he needed eyes. Now. A Marine? He’ll do.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Patch the Marine through.’

There were loud clicks and electronic sounds and then Emerson heard a new acoustic. Outdoors, distant screaming, the splash of water. The fountain, he thought.

‘Who is this?’ he asked.

A voice came back, calm but rushed, loud and breathy, pressed close to a cell phone mouthpiece.

‘This is Kelly,’ it said. ‘First Sergeant, United States Marine Corps. Who am I speaking with?’

‘Emerson, PD. I’m in traffic, about ten minutes out. What have we got?’

‘Five KIA,’ the Marine said.

‘Five dead?’

‘Affirmative.’

Shit. ‘Injured?’

‘None that I can see.’

‘Five dead and no injured?’

‘Affirmative,’ the Marine said again.

Emerson said nothing. He had seen shootings in public places. He had seen dead people. But he had never seen only dead people. Public-place shootings always produced injured along with the dead. Usually in a one-to-one ratio, at least.

‘You sure about no injured?’ he said.

‘That’s definitive, sir,’ the Marine said.

‘Who are the DOAs?’

‘Civilians. Four males, one female.’

‘Shit.’

‘Roger that, sir,’ the Marine said.

‘Where were you?’

‘In the recruiting office.’

‘What did you see?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘Incoming gunfire, six rounds.’

‘Handguns?’

‘Long gun, I think. Just one of them.’

‘A rifle?’

‘An autoloader, I think. It fired fast, but it wasn’t on full automatic. The KIAs are all hit in the head.’

A sniper, Emerson thought. Shit. A crazy man with an assault weapon.

‘Has he gone now?’ he said.

‘No further firing, sir.’

‘He might still be there.’

‘It’s a possibility, sir. People have taken cover. Most of them are in the library now.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Head down behind the plaza wall, sir. I’ve got a few people with me.’

‘Where was he?’

‘Can’t say for sure. Maybe in the parking garage. The new part. People were pointing at it. There may have been some muzzle flash. And that’s the only major structure directly facing the KIAs.’

A warren, Emerson thought. A damn rat’s nest.

‘The TV people are here,’ the Marine said.

Shit, Emerson thought.

‘Are you in uniform?’ he asked.

‘Full dress, sir. For the recruiting office.’

‘OK, do your best to keep order until my guys get there.’

‘Roger that, sir.’

Then the line went dead and Emerson heard his despatcher’s breathing again. TV people and a crazy man with a rifle, he thought. Shit, shit, shit. Pressure and scrutiny and second-guessing, like every other place that ever had TV people and a crazy man with a rifle. He hit the switch that gave him the all-cars radio net.

‘All units, listen up,’ he said. ‘This was a lone nutcase with a long gun. Probably an automatic weapon. Indiscriminate firing in a public place. Possibly from the new part of the parking garage. So either he’s still in there, or he’s already in the wind. If he left, it was either on foot or in a vehicle. So all units that are more than ten blocks out, stop now and lock down a perimeter. Nobody enters or exits, OK? No vehicles, no pedestrians, nobody under any circumstances. All units that are closer than ten blocks, proceed inward with extreme caution. But do not let him get away. Do not miss him. This is a must-win, people. We need this guy today, before CNN gets all over us.’

The man in the minivan thumbed the button on the remote on the visor and the garage door rumbled upward. He drove inside and thumbed the button again and the door came down after him. He shut the engine off and sat still for a moment. Then he got out of the van and walked through the mud room and on into the kitchen. He patted the dog and turned on the television.

Paramedics in full body armour went in through the back of the library. Two of them stayed inside to check for injuries among the sheltering crowd. Four of them came out the front and ran crouched through the plaza and ducked behind the wall. They crawled towards the bodies and confirmed they were all DOA. Then they stayed right there. Flat on the ground and immobile next to the corpses. No unnecessary exposure until the garage has been searched, Emerson had said.

Emerson double-parked two blocks from the plaza and told a uniformed sergeant to direct the search of the parking garage, from the top down, from the southwest corner. The uniforms cleared the fourth level, and then the third. Then the second. Then the first. The old part was problematical. It was badly lit and full of parked cars, and every car represented a potential hiding place. A guy could be inside one, or under one, or behind one. But they didn’t find anybody. They had no real problem with the new construction. It wasn’t lit at all, but there were no parked cars in that part. The patrolmen simply came down the stairwell and swept each level in turn with flashlight beams.

Nobody there.

The sergeant relaxed and called it in.

‘Good work,’ Emerson said.

And it was good work. The fact that they searched from the southwest corner outward left the northeast corner entirely untouched. Nothing was disturbed. So by good luck or good judgement the PD had turned in an immaculate performance in the first phase of what would eventually be seen as an immaculate investigation from beginning to end.

By seven o’clock in the evening it was going dark and Ann Yanni had been on the air eleven times. Three of them network, eight of them local. Personally she was a little disappointed with that ratio. She was sensitive to a little scepticism coming her way from the network editorial offices. If it bleeds, it leads, was any news organization’s credo, but this bleeding was way out there, far from New York or LA. It wasn’t happening in some manicured suburb of Washington D.C. It had a tinge of weirdo-from-the-heartland about it. There was no real possibility that anyone important would walk through this guy’s cross hairs. So it was not really prime time stuff. And in truth Ann didn’t have much to offer. None of the victims was identified yet. None of the slain. The local PD was holding its cards close to its chest until families had been notified individually. So she had no heartwarming background stories to share. She wasn’t sure which of the male victims had been family men. Or churchgoers. She didn’t know if the woman had been a mother or a wife. She didn’t have much to offer in the way of visuals, either. Just a gathering crowd held five blocks back by police barricades, and a static long shot down the greyness of First Street, and occasional close-ups of the parking garage, which was where everyone seemed to assume the sniper had been.

By eight o’clock Emerson had made a lot of progress. His guys had taken hundreds of statements. Marine Corps First Sergeant Kelly was still sure he had heard six shots. Emerson was inclined to believe him. Marines could be trusted on stuff like that, presumably. Then some other guy mentioned his cell phone must have been open the whole time, connected to another guy’s voice mail. The cellular company retrieved the recording and six gunshots were faintly audible on it. But the medical examiners had counted only five entry wounds in the five DOAs. Therefore there was a bullet missing. Three other witnesses were vague, but they all reported seeing a small plume of water kick out of the ornamental pool.

Emerson ordered the pool to be drained.

The fire department handled it. They set up floodlights and switched off the fountain and used a pumping engine to dump the water into the city storm drains. They figured there were maybe eighty thousand gallons of water to move, and that the job would be complete in an hour.

Meanwhile crime scene technicians had used drinking straws and laser pointers to estimate the fatal trajectories. They figured the most reliable evidence would come from the first victim. Presumably he was walking purposefully right to left across the plaza when the first shot came in. After that, it was possible the subsequent victims were twisting or turning or moving in other unpredictable ways. So they based their conclusions solely on the first guy. His head was a mess, but it seemed pretty clear the bullet had travelled slightly high to low and left to right as it passed through. One tech stood upright on the spot and another held a drinking straw against the side of his head at the correct angle and held it steady. Then the first guy ducked out of the way and a third fired a laser pointer through the straw. It put a tiny red spot on the northeast corner of the parking garage extension, second level. Witnesses had claimed they had seen muzzle flashes up there. Now science had confirmed their statements.

Emerson sent his crime scene people into the garage and told them they had all the time they needed. But he told them not to come back with nothing.

Ann Yanni left the black glass tower at eight thirty and took a camera crew down to the barricades five blocks away. She figured she might be able to identify some of the victims by a process of elimination. People whose relatives hadn’t come home for dinner might be gathering there, desperate for information. She shot twenty minutes of tape. She got no specific information at all. Instead she got twenty minutes of crying and wailing and sheer stunned incredulity. The whole city was in pain and in shock. She started out secretly proud that she was in the middle of everything, and she ended up with tears in her eyes and sick to her stomach.

The parking garage was where the case was broken. It was a bonanza. A treasure trove. A patrolman three blocks away had taken a witness statement from a regular user of the garage saying that the last space on the second level had been blocked off with an orange traffic cone. Because of it, the witness had been forced to leave the garage and park elsewhere. He had been pissed about it. A guy from the city said the cone hadn’t been there officially. No way. Couldn’t have been. No reason for it. So the cone was bagged for evidence and taken away. Then the city guy said there were discreet security cameras at the entrance and the exit, wired to a video recorder in a maintenance closet. The tape was extracted and taken away. Then the city guy said the new extension was stalled for funding and hadn’t been worked on for two weeks. So anything in there less than two weeks old wasn’t anything to do with him.

The crime scene technicians started at the yellow and black Caution Do Not Enter tape. The first thing they found was a scuff of blue cotton material on the rough concrete directly underneath it. Just a peach-fuzz of barely visible fibre. Like a guy had dropped to one knee to squirm underneath, and had left a little of his blue jeans behind. They photographed the scuff and then picked it up whole with an adhesive sheet of clear plastic. Then they brought in klieg lights and angled them low across the floor. Across the two-week-old cement dust. They saw perfect footprints. Really perfect footprints. The lead tech called Emerson on his Motorola.

‘He was wearing weird shoes,’ he said.

‘What kind of weird shoes?’

‘You ever heard of crêpe? It’s a kind of crude rubber. Almost raw. Very grippy. It picks everything up. If we find this guy, we’re going to find crêpe-soled shoes with cement dust all over the soles. Also, we’re going to find a dog in his house.’

‘A dog?’

‘We’ve got dog hair here, picked up by the crêpe rubber, earlier. And then scraped off again where the concrete’s rough. And carpet fibres. Probably from his rugs at home and in his car.’

‘Keep going,’ Emerson said.

At ten to nine Emerson briefed his Chief of Police for a press conference. He held nothing back. It was the Chief’s decision what to talk about and what to conceal.

‘Six shots fired and five people dead,’ Emerson said. ‘All head shots. I’m betting on a trained shooter. Probably ex-military.’

‘Or a hunter?’ the Chief said.

‘Big difference between shooting deer and shooting people. The technique might be the same, but the emotion isn’t.’

‘Were we right to keep this away from the FBI?’

‘It wasn’t terrorism. It was a lone nut. We’ve seen them before.’

‘I want to be able to sound confident about bringing this one in.’

‘I know,’ Emerson said.

‘So how confident can I sound?’

‘So far we’ve got good stuff, but not great stuff.’

The Chief nodded, and said nothing.

At nine o’clock exactly Emerson took a call from the pathologist. His staff had X-rayed all five heads. Massive tissue damage, entry and exit wounds, no lodged bullets.

‘Hollow points,’ the pathologist said. ‘All of them through and through.’

Emerson turned and looked at the ornamental pool. Six bullets in there, he thought. Five through-and-throughs, and one miss. The pool was finally empty by nine fifteen. The fire department hoses started sucking air. All that was left was a quarter-inch of scummy grit, and a lot of trash. Emerson had the lights re-angled and sent twelve recruits from the Academy over the walls, six from one end and six from the other.

The crime scene techs in the parking garage extension logged forty-eight footprints going and forty-four coming back. The perp had been confident but wary on the way in, and striding longer on the way out. In a hurry. The footprints were size eleven. They found fibres on the last pillar before the northeast corner. Mercerized cotton, at a guess, from a pale-coloured raincoat, at shoulder-blade height, like the guy had pressed his back against the raw concrete and then slid round it for a look out into the plaza. They found major dust disturbance on the floor between the pillar and the perimeter wall. Plus more blue fibres and more raincoat fibres, and tiny crumbs of crêpe rubber, pale in colour, and old.

‘He low-crawled,’ the lead tech said. ‘Knees and elbows on the way there, and knees, toes and elbows coming backwards. We ever find his shoes, they’re going to be all scraped up at the front.’

They found where he must have sat up and then knelt. Directly in front of that position, they saw varnish scrapings on the lip of the wall.

‘He rested his gun there,’ the lead tech said. ‘Sawed it back and forth, to get it steady.’

He lined himself up and aimed his gaze over the varnish scrapings, like he was aiming a rifle. What he saw in front of him was Emerson, pacing in front of the empty ornamental pool, less than thirty-five yards away.

The Academy recruits spent thirty minutes in the empty pool and came out with a lot of miscellaneous junk, nearly eight dollars in pennies, and six bullets. Five of them were just misshapen blobs of lead, but one of them looked absolutely brand new. It was a boat tail hollow point, beautifully cast, almost certainly a .308. Emerson called his lead crime scene tech up in the garage.

‘I need you down here,’ he said.

‘No, I need you up here,’ the tech replied.

Emerson got up to the second level and found all the techs crouched in a low huddle with their flashlight beams pointing down into a narrow crack in the concrete.

‘Expansion joint,’ the lead tech said. ‘And look what fell in it.’

Emerson shouldered his way in and looked down and saw the gleam of brass.

‘A cartridge case,’ he said.

‘The guy took the others with him. But this one got away.’

‘Fingerprints?’ Emerson asked.

‘We can hope,’ the tech said. ‘Not too many people wear gloves when they load their magazines.’

‘How do we get it out of there?’

The tech stood up and used his flashlight beam to locate an electrical box on the ceiling. There was one close by, new, with unconnected cables spooling out like fronds. He looked on the floor directly underneath and found a rat’s nest of discarded trimmings. He chose an eighteen-inch length of ground wire. He cleaned it and bent it into an L-shape. It was stiff and heavy. Probably over specified for the kind of fluorescent ceiling fixtures he guessed the garage was going to use. Maybe that was why the project was stalled for funding. Maybe the city was spending money in all the wrong places.

He jiggled the wire down into the open joint and slid it along until the end went neatly into the empty cartridge case. Then he lifted it out very carefully, so as not to scratch it. He dropped it straight into a plastic evidence bag.

‘Meet at the station,’ Emerson said. ‘In one hour. I’ll scare up a DA.’

He walked away, on a route exactly parallel to the trail of footprints. Then he stopped, next to the empty parking bay.

‘Empty the meter,’ he called. ‘Print all the quarters.’

‘Why?’ the tech called back. ‘You think the guy paid?’

‘I want to cover all the bases.’

‘You’d have to be crazy to pay for parking just before you blow five people away.’

‘You don’t blow five people away unless you’re crazy.’

The tech shrugged. Empty the meter? But he guessed it was the kind of insight detectives were paid for, so he just dialled his cell phone and asked the city liaison guy to come on back again.

Someone from the District Attorney’s office always got involved at this point because the responsibility for prosecution rested squarely on the DA’s shoulders. It wasn’t the PD that won or lost in court. It was the DA. So the DA’s office made its own evaluation of the evidence. Did they have a case? Was the case weak or strong? It was like an audition. Like a trial before a trial. This time, because of the magnitude, Emerson was performing in front of the DA himself. The big cheese, the actual guy who had to run for election. And re-election.

They made it a three-man conference in Emerson’s office. Emerson, and the lead crime scene tech, and the DA. The DA was called Rodin, which was a contraction of a Russian name that had been a whole lot longer before his great-grandparents came to America. He was fifty years old, lean and fit, and very cautious. His office had an outstanding victory percentage, but that was mostly due to the fact that he wouldn’t prosecute anything less than a total certainty. Anything less than a total certainty, and he gave up early and blamed the cops. At least that was how it seemed to Emerson.

‘I need seriously good news,’ Rodin said. ‘The whole city is freaking out.’

‘We know exactly how it went down,’ Emerson told him. ‘We can trace it every step of the way.’

‘You know who it was?’ Rodin asked.

‘Not yet. Right now he’s still John Doe.’

‘So walk me through it.’

‘We’ve got monochrome security videotape of a light-coloured minivan entering the garage eleven minutes before the event. Can’t see the plates for mud and dirt, and the camera angle isn’t great. But it’s probably a Dodge Caravan, not new, with aftermarket tinted windows. And we’re also looking through old tapes right now because it’s clear he entered the garage at some previous time and illegally blocked off a particular space with a traffic cone stolen earlier from a city construction site.’

‘Can we prove stolen?’

‘OK, obtained,’ Emerson said.

‘Maybe he works for the city construction department.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You think the cone came from the work on First Street?’

‘There’s construction all over town.’

‘First Street would be closest.’

‘I don’t really care where the cone came from.’

Rodin nodded. ‘So, he reserved himself a parking space?’