Helen Rodin said nothing.

“He was coerced,” Reacher said. “Believe it. It’s the only logical explanation. He wasn’t a lone nutcase. That’s why he said, They’ve got the wrong guy. It was a message. He was hoping someone would pick up on it. He meant they should be looking for the other guy. The guy who made him do it. The guy he feels is more responsible.”

Helen Rodin said nothing.

“The puppet master,” Reacher said.

Reacher checked the plaza again, from the window. The ornamental pool was about two-thirds full. The fountain was splashing merrily. The sun was out. There were no loiterers visible.

Helen Rodin got up from her desk. Just stood there behind it.

“I should be turning cartwheels,” she said.

“He still killed five people.”

“But if the coercion was substantial, it’s going to help him.”

Reacher said nothing.

“What do you think it was? A double-dare? Some kind of thrill-seeking?”

“Maybe,” Reacher said. “But I doubt it. On the face of it, James Barr is twenty years too old for double-dares. That’s a kid thing. And they’d have done it from the highway anyway. They would have wanted to survive to do it again.”

“So what was it?”

“Something else entirely. Something real.”

“Should we take it to Emerson?”

“No,” Reacher said.

“I think we should.”

“There are reasons not to.”

“Like?”

“For one, Emerson’s got the best done deal he ever saw. He’s not going to pick at the seams now. No cop would.”

“So what should we do?”

“We should ask ourselves three basic questions,” Reacher said. “Like who, and how, and why. It was a transaction. We need to figure out who benefits. Because James Barr certainly didn’t.”

“The who was whoever set those guys on you last night. Because he liked the way the transaction was going and he didn’t want the boat rocked by some new guy showing up.”

“Correct,” Reacher said.

“So I need to look for that person.”

“You might not want to do that.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“It might get your client killed,” Reacher said.

“He’s in the hospital, guarded night and day.”

“Your client isn’t James Barr. It’s Rosemary Barr. You need to think about what kind of a threat can have made James Barr do what he did. He was looking at life without parole at best. Getting strapped to the gurney at worst. He knew that well in advance. He must have. So why would he go along? Why would he walk meekly into all that? It had to have been one hell of an effective threat, Helen. And what’s the only thing Barr’s got to lose? No wife, no kids, no family at all. Except a sister.”

Helen Rodin said nothing.

“He was told to keep quiet, to the end. Obviously. That’s why he asked for me. It was like a coded communication. Because the puppet can’t talk about the puppet master, not now, not ever, because the threat is still out there. I think he might be trading his life for his sister’s. Which gives you a big problem. If the puppet master sees you poking around, he’ll think the puppet talked. That’s why you can’t go to Emerson.”

“But the puppet didn’t talk. You figured it out.”

“We could put an announcement in the paper. Think anyone would believe it?”

“So what should I do?”

“Nothing,” Reacher said. “There’s nothing you can do. Because the more you try to help James Barr, the more likely you are to get Rosemary Barr killed for it.”

Helen Rodin was quiet for a long moment.

“Can we protect her?” she asked.

“No,” Reacher said. “We can’t. There’s only two of us. We’d need four guys minimum, and a safe house. That would cost a lot of money.”

Helen Rodin came out from behind her desk. Walked around and stood next to Reacher and gazed out of the window. She put her hands on the sill, lightly, like a pianist’s on a keyboard. Then she turned around and leaned against the glass. She was fragrant. Some clean scent a little like soap.

“You could look for him,” she said.

“Could I?” he answered, nothing in his voice.

She nodded. “He made a mistake. He gave you a reason that’s not connected to James Barr. Not directly. He set those boys on you. Therefore you’ve got a legitimate interest in finding their employer. An independent interest. You could go after him and he wouldn’t necessarily conclude that James Barr had talked.”

“I’m not here to help the defense.”

“Then look at it as helping the prosecution. If two people were involved, then two people deserve to go down. Why let the patsy take the fall on his own?”

Reacher said nothing.

“Just look at it as helping me,” Helen said.

Grigor Linsky dialed his cell phone.

“They’re back in her office,” he said. “I can see both of them in the window.”

Reacher rode the elevator to the top of the black glass tower and found a maintenance stairwell that led to the roof. He came out through a triangular metal hutch next to the water tank and the elevator winding gear. The roof was gray tar paper covered with gravel. It was fifteen stories up, which wasn’t much in comparison with some cities. But it felt like the highest point in Indiana. He could see the river to the south. South and west, he could see where the raised highway separated. He walked to the northwest corner, and wind whipped at him and flattened his shirt against his body and his pants against his legs. Directly below him the highway spur curled around behind the library and the tower and ran away due east. Far beyond it in the distance the northward spur carried on straight and met a cloverleaf about two miles away in the haze. A long straight road came off the cloverleaf and ran back toward him. He fixed its position in his mind, because that was the road he wanted.

He rode down to the lobby and set out walking. At street level the air was warm and still. He went north and west, which meant he missed the sports bar by a block. The road he wanted came in at a shallow angle south of it and diverted him away. It was straight and wide. Four lanes. Closest to downtown it had small run-down establishments. There was a gun store with heavy mesh on the windows. There was a barbershop with a sign: Any Style $7. There was an old-fashioned motor court on a lot that once must have stood on the edge of town. Then there was a raw cross street and beyond it the lots got bigger and the buildings got newer. Fresh commercial territory. No existing leases, nothing to tear down. Once-virgin land, now paved over.

He kept on walking and after a mile he passed a fast-food drive-through. Then a tire store. Four New Radials $99! Then a lube franchise and a dealership for small cars from Korea. America’s Best Warranty! He looked ahead, because he figured he was getting close.

Are you a hooker?

No way. I work at the auto parts store.

Not an auto parts store. The auto parts store. Maybe the only one, or at least the main one. The biggest one. Which in any city is always right there on the same strip as the tire stores and the auto dealers and the lube shops. Which in any city is always a wide new strip near a highway cloverleaf. Cities are all different, but they’re also all the same.

He spent ten minutes hiking past a Ford dealership with about a thousand new pickup trucks lined up shoulder to shoulder with their front wheels up on ramps. Behind them was a giant inflatable gorilla tied down with guy wires. The wires had tinsel bunting attached to them. Beyond the new trucks were old trucks. Trade-ins, Reacher guessed, looking for new homes. Beyond the used lot was a fire road.

And then an auto parts store.

It was a franchise operation, long and low, neat and clean. New blacktop in the lot, urgent messages in the windows. Cheap oil filters, cheap antifreeze, guaranteed brake parts, superduty truck batteries. The parking lot was about a quarter full. There were slammed Hondas with wide pipes and blue headlight bulbs and rubber-band tires on chrome wheels. There were listing pickup trucks with broken springs. There were tired sedans halfway through their third hundred thousand miles. There were two cars alone together in the end bays. The store staff’s cars, Reacher figured. They weren’t allowed to park in the prime front-and-center slots, but they wanted their rides where they could see them through the windows. One was a four-cylinder Chevy, and the other was a small Toyota SUV. The Chevy had chromed silhouettes of reclining women on the mud flaps, which made the Toyota the redhead’s car. That was Reacher’s conclusion.