“So plead him guilty and the hell with it.”

“When you called me last night I thought you were going to walk in here this morning and tell me he’s innocent.”

“Dream on,” Reacher said.

She looked away.

“But,” he said.

She looked back. “There’s a but?”

He nodded. “Unfortunately.”

“What’s the but?”

“He’s not quite as guilty as I thought he was.”

“How?”

“Get your car and I’ll show you.”

They rode down together to a tenants-only underground parking garage. There were NBC broadcast trucks in there and cars and pickups and SUVs of various makes and vintages. There was a new blue Mustang convertible with an NBC sticker in the windshield. Ann Yanni’s, probably, Reacher thought. It was right for her. She would drive top-down on her days off and top-up during the workweek, to keep her hair OK for the cameras. Or maybe she used a lot of spray.

Helen Rodin’s ride was a small dark-green sedan so anonymous Reacher didn’t know what it was. A Saturn, maybe. It was unwashed and not new. It was a graduate student’s car, the sort of thing a person uses until a first salary kicks in and lease payments become affordable. Reacher knew all about lease payments. Baseball on the TV carried a lot of commercials. Every half-inning, and every call to the bullpen.

“Where are we going?” Helen asked.

“South,” Reacher said.

He racked his seat back and crunched a whole lot of stuff in the footwell behind him. She had her seat close to the wheel, even though she wasn’t a short woman. He ended up looking at her more or less from behind.

“What do you know?” she asked.

“It’s not what I know,” he said. “It’s what James Barr knows.”

“About what?”

“About me.”

She came up out of the garage and started south down a street parallel with First. Eight o’clock in the morning, the rush hour traffic was still heavy. Going the opposite way from the afternoon rush, he guessed.

“What does James Barr know about you?” she asked.

“Something that made him want me here,” he said.

“He ought to hate you.”

“I’m sure he does. But he still wanted me here.”

She crawled south, toward the river.

“He never met me before,” Reacher said. “Never saw me again afterward. We knew each other for three weeks, more than fourteen years ago.”

“He knew you as an investigator. Someone who broke a tough case.”

“A case he thought couldn’t be broken. He watched me do it every step of the way. He had a front row seat. He thought I was an investigative genius.”

“That’s why he wanted you here?”

Reacher nodded. “I spent last night trying to live up to his opinion.”

They crossed the river on a long iron trestle. The sun was on their left. The wharf was on their right. The slow gray water moved listlessly past it.

“Go west now,” Reacher said.

She made a right and took a two-lane county road. There were bait stores on the riverbank and shacks selling barbecue and beer and crushed ice.

“But this case was already broken,” she said. “He knew that.”

“This case was only halfway broken,” Reacher said. “That’s what he knew.”

“Halfway?”

Reacher nodded, even though he was behind her.

“There’s more to this case than Emerson saw,” he said. “Barr wanted someone else to understand that. But his first lawyer was lazy. He wasn’t very interested. That’s why Barr got so frustrated.”

“What more is there?”

“I’ll show you.”

“A lot?”

“I think so.”

“So why didn’t he just lay out the facts, whatever they are?”

“Because he couldn’t. And because nobody would have believed him anyway.”

“Why? What the hell happened here?”

There was a highway cloverleaf ahead, just like he had hoped.

“I’ll show you,” he said again. “Take the highway north.”

She powered the little car through the ramp and merged with the traffic. There was a mixed stream flowing north. Eighteen-wheelers, panel trucks, pickups, cars. The road recrossed the river on a concrete bridge. The wharf was visible to the east, in the distance. The city center was ahead, on the right. The highway rose gently on its stilts. Helen drove onward, with the roofs of low edge-of-town buildings flashing past on the left and the right.

“Be ready to take the spur that runs behind the library,” Reacher said.

It was going to be a right exit. It was announced well in advance with a sign. The broken line separating the right lane from the center lane became a solid line. Then the solid line became a narrow wedge. The through traffic was forced away to the left. The exit lane angled slightly right. They stayed in it. The wedge grew wider and was filled in with bold cross-hatched lines. Up ahead were yellow drums. They passed them by, onto the spur that would lead behind the library. Reacher twisted in his seat and checked the rear window. Nobody behind them.

“Go slow,” he said.

Two hundred yards ahead the spur started to curve, behind the library, behind the black glass tower. The roadbed was wide enough for two lanes. But the radius was too tight to make it safe for two lanes to run side by side at high speed into the corner. Traffic engineers had thought better of it. They had advised a gentler trajectory. They had marked out a single lane through the curve. It was a little wider than a normal lane, to allow for misjudgments. It started way on the left and then swung sharply to the right and cut across the apex of the curve at a more shallow angle.

“Go real slow now,” Reacher said.

The car slowed. Way up ahead of them on the left was a crescent-moon shape of white cross-hatching. Beginning right next to them on the right was a long thin triangle of white cross-hatching. Just lines of paint on the blacktop, but they shepherded people along and kept them safe.

“Pull over,” Reacher said. “Here, on the right.”

“Can’t stop here,” Helen said.

“Like you had a flat. Just pull over. Right here.”

She braked hard and turned the wheel and steered onto the cross-hatched no-man’s-land on their right. They felt the thick painted lines thumping under the tires. A juddery little rhythm. It slowed as she slowed.

She stopped.

“Back up a little,” Reacher said.

She backed up, like she was parallel parking against the concrete parapet.

“Now forward a yard,” Reacher said.

She drove forward a yard.

“OK,” he said.

He wound his window down. The traffic lane on their left was clear and smooth, but the cross-hatched no-man’s-land they were stopped on was covered with grit and trash and debris blown across it by years of passing vehicles. There were cans and bottles and detached mud flaps and tiny cubes of broken headlight glass and plastic splinters from old fender benders. Far away to the left the through traffic rumbled north on a separate bridge. There was a constant stream over there. But they sat for a whole minute before anyone else came the way they had taken. A lone pickup passed close on their left and rocked them with its slipstream. Then the spur went quiet again.

“Not busy,” Reacher said.

“It never is,” Helen said. “This doesn’t really go anywhere people need to get. It was a total waste of money. But I guess they’ve always got to be building something.”

“Look down,” Reacher said.

The highway was raised up on tall stilts. The roadbed was maybe forty feet above ground level. The parapet wall was three feet high. Beyond it, ahead and to their right, was the upper story of the library building. It had an intricate cornice, carved from limestone, and a slate roof. It felt close enough to touch.

“What?” Helen asked.

Reacher pointed with his thumb and then leaned way back so she could see across him. Directly to their right was an unobstructed view down into the plaza, with a perfectly straight line of sight along the narrow bottleneck between the end of the ornamental pool and the plaza wall. And beyond it, dead ahead, perfectly aligned, was the door of the DMV office.