One Shot (54 page)

'How was he getting screwed?'

The woman glanced at her husband. He leaned
forward. Boy stuff. 'His principal customer stopped
buying from him. Which happens. Power in the
marketplace ebbs and flows. So Ted offered to
renegotiate. Offered to drop his price. No dice.

So he offered to drop it more. He told me he got to the
point where he was giving it away. Still no dice. They
just wouldn't buy.'

'What do you think was happening?' Yanni asked.

Keep talking, sir.

'Corruption,'

the

guy

said.

'Under-the-table

inducements. It was completely obvious. One of Ted's
competitors was offering kickbacks. No way for an
honest man to compete with that.'

When did this start?'

'About two years ago. It was a major problem for them.

Financially they went downhill very fast. No cash flow.

Ted sold his car. Oline had to go out to work. The DMV

thing was all she could find. They made her supervisor
after about a month.' He smiled a thin smile, proud of his
class. 'Another year, she'd have been running the place.

She'd have been Commissioner.'

'What was Ted doing about it? How was he fighting?'

'He was trying to find out which competitor it was.'

'Did he find out?'

'We don't know. He was trying for a long time, and then
he went missing.'

'Didn't Oline include this in her report?'

The guy sat back and his wife leaned forward again.

Shook her head. 'Oline didn't want to. Not back then. It
was all unproven. All speculation. She didn't want to
throw accusations around. And it wasn't definitely
connected. I guess the way we're telling it now it
sounds more obvious than it was at the time. I mean,
Ted wasn't Sherlock Holmes or anything. He wasn't on
the case twenty-four/seven. He was still doing normal
stuff. He was just talking to people when he could, you
know, asking questions, comparing notes, comparing
prices, trying to put it all together. It was a two-year
period.

Occasional

conversations,

phone

calls,

enquiries, things like that. It didn't seem dangerous,
certainly.' 'Did Oline ever go to anyone with this? Later,
maybe?'

The woman nodded. 'She stewed for two months after
he disappeared. We talked.

She was up and down with it. Eventually she decided
there had to be a connection. I agreed with her. She
didn't know what to do. I told her she should call the
police.' 'And did she?'

'She didn't call. She went personally. She felt they
would take her more seriously face to face. Not that they
did, apparently. Nothing happened. It was like dropping
a stone down a well and never hearing the splash.'

'When did she go?'

'A week before the thing in the plaza last Friday.'

Nobody spoke. Then, kindly, gently, Ann Yanni asked
the obvious question: 'You didn't suspect a
connection?'

The woman shook her head. 'Why would we? It
seemed to be a total coincidence.

The shootings were random, weren't they? You said
so yourself. On the television news. We heard you say it.

Five random victims, in the wrong place at the wrong
time.' Nobody spoke.

Reacher turned away from the window.

'What business was Ted Archer in?' he asked.

'I'm sorry, I assumed you knew,' the husband said. 'He
owns a quarry. Huge place about forty miles north of
here. Cement, concrete, crushed stone.

Vertically integrated, very efficient.' 'And who was the
customer who backed off?'

'The city,' the guy said.

'Big customer.'

'As big as they come. All this construction going on
right now is manna from heaven for people in that
business. The city sold ninety million in tax-free
municipals just to cover the first year. Add in the
inevitable overruns and it's a nine-figure bonanza for
somebody.' "What car did Ted sell?'

'A Mercedes Benz.'

'Then what did he drive?'

'He used a truck from work.'

'Did you see it?'

'Every day for two years.'

What was it?'

'A pickup. A Chevy, I think.'

'An old brown Silverado? Plain steel wheels?'

The guy stared. 'How did you know that?'

'One more question,' Reacher said. 'For your wife.'

She looked at him.

'After Oline went to the cops, did she tell you who it
was she talked to? Was it a detective called Emerson?'

The woman was already shaking her head. 'I told Oline if
she didn't want to call she should go to the station
house, but she said it was too far, because she never
got that long of a lunch hour. She said she'd go to the
DA instead. His office is much closer to the DMV. And
Oline was like that anyway. She preferred to go straight
to the top. So she took it to Alex Rodin himself.'

Helen Rodin was completely silent on the drive back to
town. So silent she quivered and vibrated and shook
with it. Her lips were clamped and her cheeks were
sucked in and her eyes were wide open. Her silence
made it impossible for Reacher or Yanni to speak. It was
like all the air had been sucked out of the car and all that
was left was a black hole of silence so loud it hurt.

She drove like a robot, competently, not fast, not slow,
displaying a mechanical compliance with lane markers
and stop lights and yield signs. She parked on the
apron below Franklin's office and left the motor running
and said, 'You two go on ahead. I just can't do this.'

Ann Yanni got out and walked over to the staircase.

Reacher stayed in the car and leaned forward over the
seat.

'It'll be OK,' he said.

'It won't'

'Helen, pull the keys and get your ass upstairs. You're
an officer of the court and you've got a client in trouble.'

Then he opened his door and climbed out of the car and
by the time he had walked round the trunk she was
waiting for him at the foot of the stairs.

Franklin was in front of his computer, as always. He
told Reacher that Cash was on his way up from
Kentucky, no questions asked. Told him that Ted Archer
hadn't shown up anywhere else in the databases. Then
he noticed the silence and the tension.

'What's up?' he asked.

'We're one step away,' Reacher said. 'Ted Archer was
in the concrete business and he was frozen out of all
these new city construction contracts by a competitor
who was offering bribes. He tried to prove it and must
have been getting very close to succeeding because
the competitor offed him.'

'Can you prove that?'

'Only by inference. We'll never find his body without
digging up First Street again. But I know where his truck
is. It's in Jeb Oliver's barn.'

'Why there?'

'They use Oliver for things they can't do themselves.

For when they don't want to show their faces, or for
when they can't. Presumably Archer knew them and
wouldn't have gone near them. But Oliver was just a
local kid. Maybe he staged a flat tyre or hitched a ride.

Archer would have walked right into it. Then the bad
guys hid the body and Oliver hid the truck.'

'Oline Archer didn't suspect anything?'

'She did eventually,' Reacher said. 'She sat on it two
months and then presumably she pieced together
enough to make some kind of sense out of it.

Then she started to go public with it and all kinds of
private alarm bells must have gone off because a week
later she was dead. Staged the way it was because to
have a missing husband and then a murdered wife two
months later would have raised too many flags. But as
long as it looked random it was going to be seen as
coincidental.' 'Who had Oline taken it to? Emerson?'

Reacher said nothing.

'She took it to my father,' Helen Rodin said.

There was silence for a long moment.

'So what now?' Franklin said.

'You need to hit that keyboard again,' Reacher said.

"Whoever got the city contracts has pretty much
defined himself as the bad guy here. So we need to
know who he is. And where he's based.' 'Public record,'

Franklin said.

'So check it.'

Franklin turned away in the silence and started his
fingers pattering over the keys. He pointed and clicked
for a minute. Then he came up with the answer.

'Specialized Services of Indiana,' he said. 'They own
all the current city contracts for cement, concrete, and
crushed stone. Many, many millions of dollars.' 'Where
are they?'

'That was the good news.'

'What's the bad?'

'There's no paperwork. They're a trust registered in
Bermuda. They don't have to file anything.' 'What kind
of a system is that?'

Franklin didn't answer.

'A Bermuda trust needs a local lawyer,' Helen said. Her
voice was low, quiet, resigned. Reacher recalled the
plate outside A. A. Rodin's office: the name, followed by
the letters that denoted the law degree.

Franklin clicked his way through two more screens.

'There's a phone number,' he said. 'That's all we've
got.'

What is it?' Helen asked.

Franklin read it out.

'That's not my father's number,' Helen said.

Franklin clicked his way into a reverse directory. Typed
in the number and the screen changed and gave him a
name and a business address. 'John Mistrov,' he said.

'Russian name,' Reacher said.

'I guess so.'

'Do you know him?' "Vaguely. He's a wills and trusts
guy. One-man band. I've never worked for him.'

Reacher checked his watch. 'Can you find a home
address?'

Franklin went into a regular directory. Typed in the
name and came up with a domestic listing.

'Should I call him?' he said.

Reacher shook his head. 'We'll pay him a visit. Face to
face works better, when time is short.'

Vladimir made his way down to the ground-floor
surveillance room. Sokolov was in a rolling chair in front
of the long table that carried the four television
monitors. From left to right they were labelled North,
East, South, and West, which made sense if a person
viewed the world from a clockwise perspective.

Sokolov was scooting his chair slowly down the line,
examining each picture, moving on, returning from West
to North with a powerful push off the wall. All four
screens were misty and green, because it was dark
outside and the thermal imaging had kicked in.

Occasionally a bright dot could be seen moving fast in
the distance. An animal. Nocturnal. Fox, skunk, raccoon,
or a pet cat or a lost dog far from home. The North
monitor showed a glow from the crushing plant. It
would fade, as the idle machines cooled. Apart from that
all the backgrounds were a deep olive colour, because
there was nothing out there except for miles of fields
constantly misted with cold water from the always-turning irrigation booms. Vladimir pulled up a second
wheeled chair and sat down on Sokolov's left. He would
watch north and east. Sokolov would concentrate on
the south and west. That way they each had
responsibility for one likely direction and one unlikely. It
was a fair distribution of labour.