“I’m Rosemary Barr,” she said. “I’m so glad you found us. It feels providential. Now I really feel we’re getting somewhere.”

Reacher said nothing at all.

The law offices of Helen Rodin didn’t run to a conference room. Reacher figured that would come later. Maybe. If she prospered. So all four people crowded into the inner office. Helen sat at her desk. Franklin perched on a corner of it. Reacher leaned on the windowsill. Rosemary Barr paced, nervously. If there had been a rug, she would have worn holes in it.

“OK,” Helen said. “Defense strategy. At the minimum we want to pursue a medical plea. But we’ll aim higher than that. How high we eventually get will depend on a number of factors. In which connection, first, I’m sure we all want to hear what Mr. Reacher has to say.”

“I don’t think you do,” Reacher said.

“Do what?”

“Want to hear what I’ve got to say.”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

“Because you jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

“Which is?”

“Why do you think I went to see your father first?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because I didn’t come here to help James Barr.”

Nobody spoke.

“I came here to bury him,” Reacher said.

They all stared.

“But why?” Rosemary Barr asked.

“Because he’s done this before. And once was enough.”

Reacher moved and propped his back against the window reveal and turned sideways so that he could see the plaza. And so that he couldn’t see his audience.

“Is this a privileged conversation?” he asked.

“Yes,” Helen Rodin said. “It is. It’s a client conference. It’s automatically protected. Nothing we say here can be repeated.”

“Is it ethical for you to hear bad news, legally?”

There was a long silence.

“Are you going to give evidence for the prosecution?” Helen Rodin asked.

“I don’t think I’ll have to, under the circumstances. But I will if necessary.”

“Then we would hear the bad news anyway. We would take a deposition from you before the trial. To guarantee no more surprises.”

More silence.

“James Barr was a sniper,” Reacher said. “Not the best the army ever had, and not the worst. Just a good, competent rifleman. Average in almost every way.”

Then he paused and turned his head and looked down to his left. At the cheap new building with the recruitment office in it. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps.

“Four types of people join the military,” he said. “First, for people like me, it’s a family trade. Second, there are patriots, eager to serve their country. Third, there are people who just need a job. And fourth, there are people who want to kill other people. The military is the only place where it’s legal to do that. James Barr was the fourth type. Deep down he thought it would be fun to kill.”

Rosemary Barr looked away. Nobody spoke.

“But he never got the chance,” Reacher said. “I was a very thorough investigator when I was an MP, and I learned all about him. I studied him. He trained for five years. I went through his logbooks. Some weeks he fired two thousand rounds. All of them at paper targets or silhouettes. I counted a career total of nearly a quarter-million rounds fired, and not one of them at the enemy. He didn’t go to Panama in 1989. We had a very big army back then, and we required only a very small force, so most guys missed out. It burned him up. Then Desert Shield happened in 1990. He went to Saudi. But he wasn’t in Desert Storm in 1991. They made it a mostly armored campaign. James Barr sat it out in Saudi, cleaning sand out of his rifle, firing two thousand training rounds a week. Then after Desert Storm was over, they sent him to Kuwait City for the cleanup.”

“What happened there?” Rosemary Barr asked.

“He snapped,” Reacher said. “That’s what happened there. The Soviets had collapsed. Iraq was back in its box. He looked ahead and saw that war was over. He had trained nearly six years and had never fired his gun in anger and was never going to. A lot of his training had been about visualization. About seeing himself putting the reticle on the medulla oblongata, where the spinal cord broadens at the base of the brain. About breathing slow and squeezing the trigger. About the split-second pause while the bullet flies. About seeing the puff of pink mist from the back of the head. He had visualized all of that. Many times. But he had never seen it. Not once. He had never seen the pink mist. And he really wanted to.”

Silence in the room.

“So he went out one day, alone,” Reacher said. “In Kuwait City. He set up and waited. Then he shot and killed four people coming out of an apartment building.”

Helen Rodin was staring at him.

“He fired from a parking garage,” Reacher said. “Second level. It was directly opposite the apartment building’s door. The victims were American noncoms, as it happened. They had weekend passes, and they were in street clothes.”

Rosemary Barr was shaking her head.

“This can’t be true,” she said. “It just can’t be. He wouldn’t do it. And if he did, he’d have gone to prison. But he got an honorable discharge instead. Right after the Gulf. And a campaign medal. So it can’t have happened. It can’t possibly be true.”

“That’s exactly why I’m here,” Reacher said. “There was a serious problem. Remember the sequence of events. We had four dead guys, and we worked from there. In the end I followed the trail all the way to your brother. But it was a very tough trail. We took all kinds of wrong turns. And along one of them we found stuff out about the four dead guys. Stuff we really didn’t want to know. Because they had been doing things they shouldn’t have been doing.”

“What things?” Helen Rodin asked.

“Kuwait City was a hell of a place. Full of rich Arabs. Even the poor ones had Rolexes and Rolls-Royces and marble bathrooms with solid gold faucets. A lot of them had fled temporarily, for the duration. But they had left all their stuff behind. And some of them had left their families behind. Their wives and daughters.”

“And?”

“Our four dead noncoms had been doing the conquering army thing, just like the Iraqis before them. That’s how they saw it, I guess. We saw it as rape and armed robbery. As it happened they had left quite a trail that day, inside that building. And other buildings, on other days. We found enough loot in their footlockers to start another branch of Tiffany’s. Watches, diamonds, all kinds of portable stuff. And underwear. We figured they used the underwear to keep count of the wives and daughters.”

“So what happened?”

“It got political, inevitably. It went up the chain of command. The Gulf was supposed to be a big shiny success for us. It was supposed to be a hundred percent wonderful and a hundred percent squeaky clean. And the Kuwaitis were our allies, and so on and so forth. So ultimately we were told to cover for the four guys. We were told to bury the story. Which we did. Which also meant letting James Barr walk. Because whispers had gotten out and we knew his lawyer would have used them. We were afraid of blackmail. If we took Barr to trial, his lawyer would have countered with a justifiable homicide claim. He would have said Barr had been standing up for the honor of the army, in a rough-and-ready sort of a way. All the beans would have spilled in the process. We were told not to risk that. So our hands were tied. It was a stalemate.”

“Maybe it was justifiable homicide,” Rosemary Barr said. “Maybe James really did know all along.”

“Ma’am, he didn’t know. I’m very sorry, but he didn’t. He was never near any of those guys before. Didn’t know them from Adam. Didn’t say anything to me about them when I caught up to him. He hadn’t been in KC long. Not long enough to know anything. He was just killing people. For fun. He confessed to that, to me personally, before any of the other stuff ever came to light.”