an older building, in two lines of eight. Plus a long straight road. Maybe two miles of it.’
‘Does the older building look like a house?’
‘From above it looks exactly like a house.’
‘OK, but I need more than that.’
‘You want me to come all the way up to South Dakota and go out there and look at it with you?’
‘Since I’m stuck here in a snowstorm with nothing much else to do, that would be great. But a records check will do it. It’ll show up somewhere. I need to know its purpose, its scope, and its architecture.’
‘Call me back at close of business.’
Then there was a click, and the voice was gone. Five to ten in the morning.
Forty-two hours to go.
TWELVE
T HE LAWYER PARKED HIS CAR IN HIS OFFICE LOT AND PUT ON HIS overshoes. He took them off again inside his building’s lobby and placed them in a plastic grocery bag and carried the bag with his briefcase to the elevator. His secretary greeted him at her cubicle outside his door. He didn’t answer. He didn’t yet know whether it was or wasn’t a good morning. He just held out his hand for his message slips.
There were eight of them.
Three were trivial inter-office issues.
Four were legitimate legal matters.
The last was a request for a client conference at the prison, on an urgent matter relating to case number 517713, at noon.
Reacher sat alone for a spell and then wandered out and found Peterson in an empty office off the corridor near the entrance to the squad room. The office had four desks boxed together in the centre of the space. The walls had long horizontal pin boards extending waist-high to head-high. Peterson was tacking yesterday’s crime scene photographs to the boards. The dead guy, dressed in black. The establishing shot, the close-ups. Snow on the ground, blunt force trauma to the right temple. No blood.
Peterson said, ‘We just got the autopsy report. He was definitely moved.’
Reacher asked, ‘Were there other injuries?’
‘Some perimortem bruising.’
‘Are there bad parts of town?’
‘Some are worse than others.’
‘Have you checked the bars?’
‘For what?’
‘Newly cleaned floors, suspicious stains.’
‘You think this was a bar fight?’
‘Somewhere in the low rent district, but not in the war zone.’
‘Why?’
‘Tell me what the pathologist said about the weapon.’
‘It was round, fairly smooth, probably machined metal or wood, maybe a fence post or a rainwater pipe.’
‘Neither one of those,’ Reacher said. ‘A fence post or a rainwater pipe has a uniform diameter. Too wide to grip hard enough to swing hard enough. My guess is it was a baseball bat. And baseball bats are relatively hard to find in the winter. They’re in closets or garages or basements or attics. Except sometimes they’re under bars, where the bartender can grab them real quick. Not in the good part of town, of course, and in the war zone they’d probably want a shotgun.’
Peterson said nothing.
Reacher asked, ‘Where do the prison guards drink?’
‘You think it was one of them?’
‘It takes two to tango. Prison guards are used to the rough and tumble.’
Peterson was quiet for a beat. ‘Anything else?’
Reacher shook his head. ‘I’m going out. I’ll be back later.’
The snow was still heavy. Peterson’s car was already just a humped white shape in the lot. Reacher turned up the hood of his borrowed coat and walked straight past it. He made it out to the sidewalk and peered left, peered right. The snow swirled around him and blew in under his hood and clogged his hair and his eyelashes and drifted down his neck. Directly opposite him was some kind of a public square or town park and beyond that was an array of commercial establishments. The distance was too great and the snow was too thick to make out exactly what they were. But one of them had a plume of steam coming out of a vent on the roof, which made it likely that it was either a dry cleaner or a restaurant, which made it a
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