One Shot

Time ticking away.

"Tell us about Ted Archer," Yanni said. "Please." A simple request, only six words, but her tone said: I think you two are the most interesting people in the world and I would love to be your friend. For a moment Reacher thought Yanni had missed her way. She would have been a great cop.

"Ted had business problems," the woman said.

"Is that why he disappeared?" Yanni asked.

The woman shrugged. "That was Oline’s initial assumption."

"But?"

"Ultimately she rejected that explanation. And I think she was right to. Ted wasn’t that kind of a man. And his problems weren’t those kind of problems. The fact is, he was getting screwed rotten and he was mad as hell about it and he was fighting. And people who fight don’t just walk away. I mean, do they?"

"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, inquiries, 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. She drove like a robot, competently, not fast, not slow, displaying a mechanical compliance with lane markers and stoplights 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 around 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 used 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 tire or hitched a ride. Archer would have walked right into it. Then the bad guys hid the body and Oliver hid the truck."