Reacher said nothing.

“I’m not happy about it, either,” Helen said. “But for me it’s just a PR problem. I can spin my way out of it. At least I hope I can. I can blame it all on the way the jail was run. I can claim that it wasn’t me who got him off.”

“But?” Reacher said.

“What are you going to do? You came here to bury him and he’s going to walk.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Reacher said. “What choices do I have?”

“Only two that I’m scared of. One, you could give up on helping me find the guy who’s pulling the strings. I can’t do it alone and Emerson won’t even be willing to try.”

“And two?”

“You could settle things with Barr yourself.”

“That’s for sure.”

“But you can’t do that. You’d go to prison for life if you were lucky.”

“If I got caught.”

“You would get caught. I would know you did it.”

Reacher smiled. “You’d rat me out?”

“I would have to,” Helen said.

“Not if you were my lawyer. You couldn’t say a word.”

“I’m not your lawyer.”

“I could hire you.”

“Rosemary Barr would know too, and she’d rat you out in a heartbeat. And Franklin. He heard you tell the story.”

Reacher nodded.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said again.

“How do we find this guy?”

“Like you said, why would I want to?”

“Because I don’t think you’re the type who settles for half a loaf.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I think you want the truth,” Helen said. “I don’t think you like it when the wool gets pulled over your eyes. You don’t like being played for a sucker.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Plus, this whole situation stinks,” Helen said. “There were six victims here. The five who died and Barr himself.”

“That expands the definition of victimhood a little too far for me.”

“Dr. Niebuhr expects we’ll find a preexisting relationship. Probably recent. Some new friend. We could go at it that way.”

“Barr told me he doesn’t have any new friends,” Reacher said. “Only has one or two old friends.”

“Was he telling the truth?”

“I think he was.”

“So is Niebuhr wrong?”

“Niebuhr’s guessing. He’s a shrink. All they do is guess.”

“I could ask Rosemary.”

“Would she know his friends?”

“Probably. They’re pretty close.”

“So get a list,” Reacher said.

“Is Dr. Mason guessing, too?”

“No question. But in her case I think she’s guessing right.”

“If Niebuhr’s wrong about the friend, what do we do?”

“We go proactive.”

“How?”

“There had to have been a guy following me last night and I know for sure there was one following me this morning. I saw him out there in the plaza. So the next time I see him I’ll have a word with him. He’ll tell me who he’s working for.”

“Just like that?”

“People usually tell me what I want to know.”

“Why?”

“Because I ask them nicely.”

“Don’t forget to ask Eileen Hutton nicely.”

“I’ll see you around,” Reacher said.

He walked south, beyond his hotel, and found a cheap place to eat dinner. Then he walked north, slowly, through the plaza, past the black glass tower, under the highway, all the way back to the sports bar. Altogether he was on the street the best part of an hour, and he saw nobody behind him. No damaged men in odd suits. Nobody at all.

The sports bar was half-empty and there was baseball on every screen. He found a corner table and watched the Cardinals play the Astros in Houston. It was a listless late-season game between two teams well out of contention. During the commercial breaks he watched the door. Saw nobody. Tuesday was even quieter than Monday, out there in the heartland.

Grigor Linsky dialed his cell.

“He’s back in the sports bar,” he said.

“Did he see you?” the Zec asked.

“No.”

“Why is he in the sports bar again?”

“No reason. He needed a destination, that’s all. He paraded around for nearly an hour, trying to make me show myself.”

Silence for a beat.

“Leave him there,” the Zec said. “Come in and we’ll talk.”

Alex Rodin called Emerson at home. Emerson was eating a late dinner with his wife and his two daughters, and he wasn’t thrilled about taking the call. But he did. He went out to the hallway and sat on the second-to-bottom stair, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, the phone trapped between his shoulder and his ear.

“We need to do something about this Jack Reacher guy,” Rodin said to him.

“I don’t see how he’s a huge problem,” Emerson said. “Maybe he wants to, but he can’t make the facts go away. We’ve got more than we need on Barr.”

“This is not about facts now,” Rodin said. “It’s about the amnesia. It’s about how hard the defense is going to push it.”

“That’s up to your daughter.”

“He’s a bad influence on her. I’ve been reading the case law. It’s a real gray area. The test isn’t really about whether Barr remembers the day in question. It’s about whether he understands the process, right now, today, and whether we’ve got enough other stuff on him to convict without his direct testimony.”

“I would say we do.”

“Me too. But Helen needs to swallow that. She needs to agree. But she’s got that guy standing over her all the time, turning her head. I know her. She’s not going to suck it up until he’s out of the picture.”

“I don’t see what I can do.”

“I want you to bring him in.”

“I can’t,” Emerson said. “Not without a complaint.”

Rodin went quiet.

“Well, keep an eye on him,” he said. “He spits on the sidewalk, I want you to bring him in and do something to him.”

“This isn’t the Wild West,” Emerson said. “I can’t run him out of town.”

“An arrest might be enough. We need something that breaks the spell. He’s pushing Helen where she doesn’t want to go. I know her. On her own she’ll give Barr up, no question.”

Linsky was in pain on the way back to his car. An hour on his feet was about all he could take. A long time ago the bones in his spine had been methodically cracked with an engineer’s ball-peen hammer, one after the other, starting with the coccyx and moving upward through all the lower vertebrae, and not in rapid sequence. Generally one bone had been allowed to heal before the next was broken. When the last had healed, they had started over again. Playing the xylophone, they had called it. Playing scales. Ultimately he had lost count of how many scales they had played on him.

But he never spoke of it. Worse had happened to the Zec.

The Cadillac had a soft seat and it was a relief to get in. It had a quiet motor and a gentle ride and a nice radio. Cadillacs were the kind of things that made America such a wonderful place, along with the trusting population and the hamstrung police departments. Linsky had spent time in several different countries and there was no question in his mind about which was the most satisfactory. Elsewhere he had walked or run or crawled through dirt or hauled carts and sleds by hand. Now he drove a Cadillac.

He drove it to the Zec’s house, which stood eight miles north and west of town, next to his stone-crushing plant. The plant was a forty-year-old industrial facility built on a rich limestone seam that had been discovered under farmland. The house was a big fancy palace built a hundred years ago, when the landscape was still unspoiled, for a rich dry-goods merchant. It was bourgeois and affected in every way, but it was a comfortable house in the same way that the Cadillac was a comfortable car. Best of all it stood alone in the center of many acres of flat land. Once there had been beautiful gardens, but the Zec had razed the trees and leveled the shrubberies to create a completely flat and open vista all around. There were no fences, because how could the Zec bear to live another day behind wire? For the same reason there were no extra locks, no bolts, no bars. The openness was the Zec’s gift to himself. But it was also excellent security in its own right. There were surveillance cameras. Nobody could approach the house undetected. By day visitors were clearly visible at least two hundred yards away, and after dark night-vision enhancement picked them up only a little closer.