Echo Burning (30 page)

“So relax,” Reacher said. “It'll be over tomorrow.”

“I hope so,” Walker said. “And it might be. Al Eugene's office is sending over some financial stuff. Al did all that kind of work for Sloop. So if there's no financial motive, and the medical reports are good, maybe I
can
relax.”

“She had no money at all,” Reacher said. “It was one of her big problems.”

Walker nodded. “Good,” he said. “Because
her
big problems solve
my
big problems.”

The office went quiet underneath the drone of the air conditioners. The back of Reacher's neck felt cold and wet.

“You should be more proactive,” he said. “With the election.”

“Yeah, how?”

“Do something popular.”

“Like what?”

“Like reopen something about the border patrol. People
would like that. I just met a family whose son was murdered by them.”

Walker went quiet again for a second, then just shook his head.

“Ancient history,” he said.

“Not to those families,” Reacher said. “There were twenty-some homicides in a year. Most of the survivors live around here, probably. And most of them will be voters by now.”

“The border patrol was investigated,” Walker said. “Before my time, but it was pretty damn thorough. I went through the files years ago.”

“You have the files?”

“Sure. Mostly happened down in Echo, and all that stuff comes here. It was clearly a bunch of rogue officers on a jag of their own, and the investigation most likely served to warn them off. They probably quit. Border patrol has a pretty good turnover of staff. The bad guys could be anywhere by now, literally. Probably left the state altogether. It's not just the immigrants who flow north.”

“It would make you look good.”

Walker shrugged. “I'm sure it would. A lot of things would make me look good. But I do have
some
standards, Reacher. It would be a total waste of public money. Grandstanding, pure and simple. It wouldn't get anywhere. Nowhere at all. They're long gone. It's ancient history.”

“Twelve years ago isn't ancient history.”

“It is around here. Things change fast. Right now I'm concentrating on what happened in Echo last night, not twelve years ago.”

“O.K.,” Reacher said. “Your decision.”

“I'll call Alice in the morning. When we get the material we need. Could be all over by lunchtime.”

“Let's hope so.”

“Yeah, let's,” Walker said.

 

Reacher went out
through the hot trapped air in the stairwell and stepped outside. It was hotter still on the sidewalk.
So hot, it was difficult to breathe properly. It felt like all the oxygen molecules had been burned out of the air. He made it across the street and down to the mission with sweat running into his eyes. He pushed in through the door and found Alice sitting alone at her desk.

“You back already?” he asked, surprised.

She just nodded.

“Did you see her?”

She nodded again.

“What did she say?”

“Nothing at all,” Alice said. “Except she doesn't want me to represent her.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said. Literally the only words I got out of her were, and I quote, ‘I refuse to be represented by you.'”

“Why?”

“She didn't say. She said nothing at all. I just told you that. Except she doesn't want me on the case.”

“Why the hell not?”

Alice just shrugged and said nothing.

“Has this kind of a thing ever happened before?”

Alice shook her head. “Not to me. Not to anybody within living memory in this place. Normally they can't make their minds up whether to bite your hand off or smother you with hugs and kisses.”

“So what the hell happened?”

“I don't know. She was fairly calm, fairly rational.”

“Did you try to persuade her?”

“Of course I did. To a point. But I wanted to get out of there before she lost it and started hollering. A witness hears her say it, I lose all standing. And then she's really in trouble. I plan to go back and try again later.”

“Did you tell her I sent you?”

“Sure I did. I used your name. Reacher this, Reacher that. Made no difference. All she said was she refused representation. Over and over again, three or four times. Then she gave me the silent treatment.”

“Can you think of a reason?”

Alice shrugged. “Not really, in the circumstances. I mean, I'm not exactly Perry Mason. Maybe I don't inspire much confidence. I go in there half-naked and sweating like a pig, and if this was Wall Street or somewhere I could understand somebody taking one look and thinking
wow, like, forget about it
. But this isn't Wall Street. This is Pecos County jail, and she's Hispanic, and I'm a lawyer with a pulse, so she should have been dancing with joy I came at all.”

“So why?”

“It's inexplicable.”

“What happens now?”

“Now it's a balancing act. I have to get her to accept representation before anybody hears her refuse it.”

“And if she still doesn't?”

“Then I go about my business and she's completely on her own. Until six months from now when the indictment's in and some crony of the judge's sends some useless jerk to see her.”

Reacher was quiet for a moment. “I'm sorry, Alice. I had no idea this would happen.”

“Not your fault.”

“Go back about seven, O.K.?” he said. “When the upstairs offices are empty and before the night shift woman comes on. She struck me as nosier than the day guy. He probably won't pay too much attention. So you can press her some. Let her holler if she wants to.”

“O.K.,” she said. “Seven o'clock it is. Hell of a day. Up and down, like a roller coaster.”

“Like life itself,” Reacher said.

She smiled, briefly. “Where will I find you?”

“I'm in the last motel before the highway.”

“You like traffic noise?”

“I like cheap. Room eleven, name of Millard Fillmore.”

“Why?”

“Habit,” he said. “I like aliases. I like anonymity.”

“So who is Millard Fillmore?”

“President, two before Abraham Lincoln. From New York.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Should I dress up like a lawyer for her? You think that might make a difference?”

Reacher shrugged. “I doubt it. Look at me. I look like a scarecrow, and she never said anything about it.”

Alice smiled again. “You do a little, you know. I saw you come in this morning and I thought
you
were the client. Some kind of homeless guy in trouble.”

“This is a new outfit,” Reacher said. “Fresh today.”

She looked him over again and said nothing. He left her with paperwork to do and walked as far as the pizza parlor south of the courthouse. It was nearly full with people and had a huge air conditioner over the door spilling a continuous stream of moisture on the sidewalk. Clearly it was the coldest place in town, and therefore right then the most popular. He went in and got the last table and drank ice water as fast as the busboy could refill his glass. Then he ordered an anchovy pizza, heavy on the fish. He figured his body needed to replace salt.

 

As he ate
it a new description was being passed by phone to the killing crew. The call was carefully rerouted through Dallas and Las Vegas to a motel room a hundred miles from Pecos. The call was made by a man, speaking quietly but clearly. It contained a detailed identification of a new target, a male, starting with his full name and his age, and accompanied by an exact rundown of his physical appearance and all of his likely destinations within the next forty-eight hours.

The information was taken by the woman, because she had sent her partners out to eat. She made no notes. She was naturally cautious about leaving written evidence, and she had an excellent memory. It had been honed by constant practice. She listened carefully until the caller stopped talking and then she decided the crew's price. She wasn't reluctant to speak on the phone. She was talking through an electronic device bought in the Valley that made her sound like a robot with a head cold. So she named the price and then listened to the silence on the other end. Listened to the guy deciding whether to negotiate the cost. But he didn't. Just said O.K. and hung up. The woman smiled.
Smart guy,
she thought. Her crew didn't work for cheapskates. A parsimonious
attitude about money betrayed all kinds of other negative possibilities.

 

Reacher had ice
cream after the pizza, and more water, and then coffee. He lingered over it as long as was reasonable and then he paid his check and walked back to his motel room. The heat felt worse than ever after being cold and dry for an hour. He took a long shower in tepid water and rinsed his clothes in the sink. Shook them hard to eliminate the wrinkles and arranged them on a chair to dry. Then he turned the room air to high and lay down on the bed to wait for Alice. Checked his watch. He figured if she got there anytime after eight o'clock it would be a good sign, because if Carmen decided to get serious they would need to talk for at least an hour. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

She got there
at seven-twenty. He woke from a feverish overheated doze and heard a tentative knock at his door. Rolled off the bed and wrapped a damp towel around his waist and padded barefoot across the dirty carpet and opened up. Alice was standing there. He looked at her. She just shook her head. He stared out at the dusk light for a second. Her yellow car was parked in the lot. He turned and stepped back into the room. She followed him inside.

“I tried everything,” she said.

She had changed back into her lawyer outfit. The black pants and the jacket. The pants had a very high waistband, so high it almost met the bottom edge of the sports bra. There was an inch of tanned midriff showing. Apart from that, she looked exactly like the real deal. And he couldn't see how an inch of skin would be significant to a woman in Carmen's position.

“I asked her, was it me?” Alice said. “Did she want somebody different? Older? A man? A Hispanic person?”

“What did she say?”

“She said she didn't want anybody at all.”

“That's crazy.”

“Yes, it is,” Alice said. “I described her predicament. You know, in case she wasn't seeing it clearly. It made no difference.”

“Tell me everything she said.”

“I already have.”

Reacher was uncomfortable in the towel. It was too small.

“Let me put my pants on,” he said.

He scooped them off the chair and ducked into the bathroom. The pants were wet and clammy. He pulled them on and zipped them up. Came back out. Alice had taken her jacket off and laid it on the chair, next to his wet shirt. She was sitting on the bed with her elbows on her knees.

“I tried everything,” she said again. “I said, show me your arm. She said, what for? I said, I want to see how good your veins are. Because that's where the lethal injection will go. I told her she'd be strapped down on the gurney, I described the drugs she'd get. I told her about the people behind the glass, there to watch her die.”

“And?”

“It made no difference at all. Like talking to the wall.”

“How hard did you push?”

“I shouted a little. But she waited me out and just repeated herself. She's refusing representation, Reacher. We better face it.”

“Is that kosher?”

“Of course it is. No law says you
have
to have counsel. Just that you have to be
offered
counsel.”

“Isn't it evidence of insanity or something?”

She shook her head.

“Not in itself,” she said. “Otherwise every murderer would just refuse to have a lawyer and automatically get off with an incapacity defense.”

“She's not a murderer.”

“She doesn't seem very anxious to prove it.”

“Did anybody hear her?”

“Not yet. But I'm worried. Logically her next move is to put it in writing. Then I can't even get in the door. Nor can anybody else.”

“So what do we do?”

“We have to finesse her. That's all we
can
do. We just have to ignore her completely and keep on dealing with Walker behind her back. On her behalf. If we can get him to drop the charges, then we've set her free whether she wants us to or not.”

He shrugged. “Then that's what we'll do. But it's completely bizarre, isn't it?”

“It sure is,” Alice said. “I never heard of such a thing before.”

 

A hundred miles
away, the two male members of the killing crew returned to their motel after eating dinner. They had chosen pizza, too, but with pitchers of cold beer instead of water and coffee. They found their woman partner waiting for them inside their room. She was alert and pacing, which they recognized as a sign of news.

“What?” the tall man asked.

“A supplementary job,” she said.

“Where?”

“Pecos.”

“Is that smart?”

She nodded. “Pecos is still safe enough.”

“You think?” the dark man asked.

“Wait until you hear what he's paying.”

“When?”

“Depends on the prior commitment.”

“O.K.,” the tall man said. “Who's the target?”

“Just some guy,” the woman said. “I'll give you the details when we've done the other thing.”

She walked to the door.

“Stay inside now,” she said. “Get to bed, get some sleep. We've got a very busy day coming up.”

 

“This is a
crummy room,” Alice said.

Reacher glanced around. “You think?”

“It's awful.”

“I've had worse.”

She paused a beat. “You want dinner?”

He was full of pizza and ice cream, but the inch of midriff was attractive. So was the corresponding inch of her back. There was a deep cleft there. The waistband of the pants spanned it like a tiny bridge.

“Sure,” he said. “Where?”

She paused again.

“My place?” she said. “It's difficult for me to eat out around here. I'm a vegetarian. So usually I cook for myself.”

“A vegetarian in Texas,” he said. “You're a long way from home.”

“Sure feels like it,” she said. “So how about it? And I've got better air conditioning than this.”

He smiled. “Woman-cooked food
and
better air? Sounds good to me.”

“You eat vegetarian?”

“I eat anything.”

“So let's go.”

He shrugged his damp shirt on. She picked up her jacket. He found his shoes. Locked up the room and followed her over to the car.

 

She drove a
couple of miles west to a low-rise residential complex built on a square of scrubby land trapped between two four-lane roads. The buildings had stucco walls painted the color of sand with dark-stained wooden beams stuck all over the place for accents. There were maybe forty rental units and they all looked halfhearted and beaten down by the heat. Hers was right in the center, like a small city town house sandwiched between two others. She parked outside her door on a fractured concrete pad. There were parched desert weeds wilting in the cracks.

But it was gloriously cool inside the house. There was central air running hard. He could feel the pressure it was creating. There was a narrow living room with a kitchen area in back. A staircase on the left. Cheap rented furniture and a lot of books. No television.

“I'm going to shower,” she said. “Make yourself at home.”

She disappeared up the stairs. He took a look around. The
books were mostly law texts. The civil and criminal codes of Texas. Some constitutional commentaries. There was a phone on a side table with four speed dials programmed. Top slot was labeled
Work
. Second was
J Home
. Third was
J Work.
Fourth was
M & D
. On one of the bookshelves there was a photograph in a silver frame, showing a handsome couple who could have been in their middle fifties. It was a casual outdoors shot, in a city, probably New York. The man had gray hair and a long patrician face. The woman looked a little like an older version of Alice herself. Same hair, minus the color and the youthful bounce. The Park Avenue parents, no doubt. Mom and Dad, M & D. They looked O.K. He figured
J
was probably a boyfriend. He checked, but there was no photograph of him. Maybe his picture was upstairs, next to her bed.

He sat in a chair and she came back down within ten minutes. Her hair was wet and combed, and she was wearing shorts again with a T-shirt that probably said
Harvard Soccer
except it had been washed so many times the writing was nearly illegible. The shorts were short and the T-shirt was thin and tight. She had dispensed with the sports bra. That was clear. She was barefoot and looked altogether sensational.

“You played soccer?” he asked.

“My partner did,” she said.

He smiled at the warning. “Does he still?”

“He's a she. Judith. I'm gay. And yes, she still plays.”

“She any good?”

“As a partner?”

“As a soccer player.”

“She's pretty good. Does it bother you?”

“That she's pretty good at soccer?”

“No, that I'm gay.”

“Why would it?”

Alice shrugged. “It bothers some people.”

“Not this one.”

“I'm Jewish, too.”

Reacher smiled. “Did your folks buy you the handgun?”

She glanced at him. “You found that?”

“Sure,” he said. “Nice piece.”

She nodded. “A gay Jewish vegetarian woman from New York, they figured I should have it.”

Reacher smiled again. “I'm surprised they didn't get you a machine gun or a grenade launcher.”

She smiled back. “I'm sure they thought about it.”

“You obviously take your atoning seriously. You must feel like I did walking around in the Lebanon.”

She laughed. “Actually, it's not so bad here. Texas is a pretty nice place, overall. Some great people, really.”

“What does Judith do?”

“She's a lawyer, too. She's in Mississippi right now.”

“Same reasons?”

Alice nodded. “A five-year plan.”

“There's hope for the legal profession yet.”

“So it doesn't bother you?” she said. “That it's just a meal with a new friend and then back to the motel on your own?”

“I never thought it would be anything else,” he lied.

 

The meal was
excellent. It had to be, because he wasn't hungry. It was some kind of a homemade dark chewy confection made out of crushed nuts bound together with cheese and onions. Probably full of protein. Maybe some vitamins, too. They drank a little wine and a lot of water with it. He helped her clear up and then they talked until eleven.

“I'll drive you back,” she said.

But she was barefoot and comfortable, so he shook his head.

“I'll walk,” he said. “Couple of miles will do me good.”

“It's still hot,” she said.

“Don't worry. I'll be O.K.”

She didn't put up much of a protest. He arranged to meet her at the mission in the morning and said goodnight. The outside air was as thick as soup. The walk took forty minutes and his shirt was soaked again when he got back to the motel.

 

He woke early
in the morning and rinsed his clothes and put them on wet. They were dry by the time he reached the law offices. The humidity had gone and the hot desert air sucked the moisture right out of them and left them as stiff as new canvas. The sky was blue and completely empty.

Alice was already at her usual desk in a black A-line dress with no sleeves. A Mexican guy was occupying one of her client chairs. He was talking quietly to her. She was writing on a yellow pad. The young intern from Hack Walker's office was waiting patiently behind the Mexican guy's shoulder. He was holding a thin orange and purple FedEx packet in his hand. Reacher took a place right behind him. Alice was suddenly aware of the gathering crowd and looked up. Sketched a surprised
just a minute
gesture in the air and turned back to her client. Eventually put her pencil down and spoke quietly in Spanish. The guy responded with stoic blank-faced patience and stood up and shuffled away. The intern moved forward and laid the FedEx packet on the desk.

“Carmen Greer's medical reports,” he said. “These are the originals. Mr. Walker took copies. He wants a conference at nine-thirty.”

“We'll be there,” Alice said.

She pulled the packet slowly toward her. The intern followed the Mexican guy out. Reacher sat down in the client chair. Alice glanced at him, her fingers resting on the packet, a puzzled expression on her face. He shrugged. The packet was a lot thinner than he had expected, too.

She unfolded the flap and pressed the edges of the packet inward so it opened like a mouth. Held it up and spilled the contents on the desk. There were four separate reports packed loose in individual green covers. Each cover was marked with Carmen's name and her Social Security number and a patient reference. There were dates on all of them. The dates ranged back more than six years. The older the date, the paler the cover, like the green color had faded out with age. Reacher slid his chair around the desk and put it next to Alice's. She stacked the four reports in date order, with the oldest at the top of the pile. She opened it up and nudged it left, so it was exactly between them. Then she moved her chair a fraction, so her shoulder was touching his.

“O.K.,” she said. “So let's see.”

The first report was about Ellie's birth. The whole thing was timed in hours and minutes. There was a lot of gynecological stuff about dilation and contractions. Fetal monitors
had been attached. An epidural anesthetic had been administered at thirteen minutes past four in the morning. It had been judged fully effective by four-twenty. There had been a delivery-room shift change at six. Labor had continued until the following lunchtime. Accelerants had been used. An episiotomy had been performed at one o'clock. Ellie had been born at twenty-five minutes past. No complications. Normal delivery of the placenta. The episiotomy had been stitched immediately. The baby was pronounced viable in every respect.

There was no mention of facial bruising, or a split lip, or loosened teeth.

The second report concerned two cracked ribs. It was dated in the spring, fifteen months after childbirth. There was an X-ray film attached. It showed the whole left side of her upper torso. The ribs were bright white. Two of them had tiny gray cracks. Her left breast was a neat dark shape. The attending physician had noted that the patient reported being thrown from a horse and landing hard against the top rail of a section of ranch fencing. As was usual with rib injuries, there was nothing much to be done except bind them tight and recommend plenty of physical rest.

“What do you think?” Alice asked.