Fundamentally?

That was the basic question.

The best crime scene I ever worked.

The best I’ve ever seen.

Why did he pay to park?

Will you keep an open mind?

Get Jack Reacher for me.

Jack Reacher stared at his hotel room ceiling. Five minutes. Ten. Twenty. Then he rolled over one way and pulled the cocktail napkin out of his back pocket. Rolled the other way and dialed the phone. Helen Rodin answered after eight rings. She sounded sleepy. He had woken her up.

“It’s Reacher,” he said.

“Are you in trouble?”

“No, but I’ve got some questions. Is Barr awake yet?”

“No, but he’s close. Rosemary went back to the hospital. She left me a message.”

“What was the weather like last Friday at five?”

“The weather? Friday? It was kind of dull. Cloudy.”

“Is that normal?”

“No, not really. It’s usually sunny. Or else raining. This time of year it’s usually one or the other. More likely sunny.”

“Was it warm or cold?”

“Not cold. But not hot. It was comfortable, I guess.”

“What did you wear to work?”

“What is this, a dirty phone call?”

“Just tell me.”

“Same as I wore today. Pantsuit.”

“No coat?”

“Didn’t need one.”

“Have you got a car?”

“A car? Yes, I’ve got a car. But I use the bus for work.”

“Use your car tomorrow. I’ll meet you at eight o’clock in your office.”

“What’s this about?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Eight o’clock. Go back to sleep now.”

He hung up. Rolled off the bed and checked his shirt. It was warm and wet. But it would be dry by morning. He hoped it wouldn’t shrink.

Reacher woke at six. Took a long cold shower, because the room was hot. But his shirt was dry. It was as stiff as a board, and still the right size. There was no room service. He went out for breakfast. The roads were full of trucks, hauling gravel, hauling fill, mixing concrete, feeding the work zones’ appetites. He dodged them and walked south toward the waterfront. Through the gentrification frontier. He found a workingman’s diner with a basic menu. He drank coffee and ate eggs. He sat at a window and watched the street for aimless doorway lurkers or men in parked cars. Because if he had been followed the night before it was logical to assume he would be followed again. So he kept his eyes open. But he saw nobody.

Then he walked the length of First Street, north. The sun was up on his right. He used store windows as mirrors and watched his back. Plenty of people were going his way, but none of them was following him. He guessed whoever it was would be waiting for him in the plaza, ready to confirm what he expected to see: The witness went to the lawyer’s office.

The fountain was still going. The pool was nearly half full. The tributes were still there, neatly lined up, another day older, a little more faded, a little more wilted. He figured they would be there for a week or so. Until after the last of the funerals. Then they would be removed, discreetly, maybe in the middle of the night, and the city would move on to the next thing.

He sat for a moment on the NBC monolith, with his back to the tower, like a guy wasting time because he was early. Which he was. It was only seven forty-five. There were other people in the same situation. They stood around, singly or in groups of two or three, smoking last cigarettes, reading the morning news, chilling before the daily grind. Reacher looked first at men on their own with newspapers. That was a pretty traditional surveillance cover. Although in his opinion it was due for replacement with a new exiled-smoker cover. Guys standing near doorways and smoking were the new invisibles. Or guys on cell phones. You could stand there with a Nokia up to your ear forever and nobody thought twice.

In the end he settled on a guy who was smoking and talking on a cell phone. He was a short man of about sixty. Maybe more. A damaged man. There was a permanent lopsided tension in the way he held himself. An old spinal injury, maybe. Or busted ribs that had been badly set, years ago. Whatever it was, it made him look uncomfortable and querulous. He wasn’t the type of guy who would happily converse at length. But there he was, on his phone, just talking, aimlessly. He had thin gray hair, recently barbered but not stylishly. He was in a double-breasted suit that had been expensively tailored, but not in the United States. It was square and boxy, too heavy for the weather. Polish, maybe. Or Hungarian. Eastern European, certainly. His face was pale and his eyes were dark. They didn’t glance Reacher’s way, even once.

Reacher checked his watch. Seven fifty-five. He slid off the shiny granite and walked into the tower’s lobby.

Grigor Linsky stopped pretending and dialed an actual number on his phone.

“He’s here,” he said. “He just went up.”

“Did he see you?” the Zec asked.

“Yes, I’m sure he did.”

“So make that the last time. Now you stay in the shadows.”

Reacher found Helen Rodin already at her desk. She looked settled in, like she had been there a long time already. She was in the same black suit, but her shirt was different. It was a simple scoop neck, not tight. It was china blue and matched her eyes exactly. Her hair was tied back in a long pony tail. Her desk was covered with legal books. Some were facedown, some were faceup. They were all open. She had about eight pages of notes going, on a yellow legal pad. References, case notes, decisions, precedents.

“James Barr is conscious,” she said. “Rosemary called me at five this morning.”

“Is he talking?”

“Only to the doctors. They won’t let anyone else near him yet. Not even Rosemary herself.”

“What about the cops?”

“They’re waiting. But I’ll need to be there first. I can’t let him talk to the cops without representation.”

“What is he saying to the doctors?”

“That he doesn’t know why he’s there. That he doesn’t remember anything about Friday. The doctors say that’s to be expected. Amnesia is predictable with head injuries, possibly covering several days before the trauma. Several weeks, sometimes.”

“Where does that leave you?”

“With two big problems. First, he might be faking the amnesia. And that’s actually very hard to test, either way. So now I’m going to have to find a specialist opinion on that, too. And if he isn’t faking, we’re in a real gray area. If he’s sane now, and he was sane before, but he’s missing a week, then how can he get a fair trial? He won’t be able to participate in his own defense. Not if he hasn’t got the slightest idea what anyone is talking about. And the state put him in that position. They let him get hurt. It was their jail. They can’t do that and then go ahead and try him.”

“What’s your father going to think?”

“He’s going to fight it tooth and nail. Obviously. No prosecutor can afford to admit the possibility that amnesia might screw up a trial. Otherwise everyone would jump right on it. Everyone would be looking to get beat up in pretrial detention. Suddenly nobody would be able to remember anything.”

“It must have happened before.”

Helen nodded. “It has.”

“So what do the law books say?”

“I’m reading them now. As you can see. Dusky versus the United States, Wilson versus the United States.”

“And?”

“There are lots of ifs and buts.”

Reacher said nothing. Helen looked straight at him.

“It’s spinning out of control,” she said. “Now there’ll be a trial about a trial. It’s something that might need to go all the way to the Supreme Court. I’m not equipped for that. And I don’t want that. I don’t want to be the lawyer who gets people off on weird technicalities. That’s not who I am and it’s a label I can’t afford right now.”