Echo Burning (34 page)

Reacher closed his eyes. Then he smiled. A big, broad grin.

“That's for sure,” he said. “They get the job done.”

There was a knock at the open door. A low sound, like soft knuckles against hard steel. Reacher opened his eyes again. Alice was standing there, shivering.

“What are you doing?” she called to him.

“What comes after quadruple-check?” he called back.

His breath hung in the air in front of him, like a shaped cloud.

“Quintuple-check,” she said. “Why?”

“And after that?”

“Sextuple,” she said. “Why?”

“Because we're going to be doing a whole lot of checking now.”

“Why?”

“Because there's something seriously wrong here, Alice. Come take a look.”

Alice walked slowly
across the tile.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“Tell me what you see,” Reacher said.

She dropped her eyes toward the corpse like it required a physical effort.

“Shot in the head,” she said. “Twice.”

“How far apart are the holes?”

“Maybe three inches.”

“What else do you see?”

“Nothing,” she said.

He nodded. “Exactly.”

“So?”

“Look closer. The holes are clean, right?”

She took a step nearer the drawer. Bent slightly from the waist.

“They look clean,” she said.

“That has implications,” he said. “It means they're not contact wounds. A contact wound is where you put the
muzzle of the gun directly against the forehead. You know what happens when you do that?”

She shook her head. Said nothing.

“First thing out of a gun barrel is an explosion of hot gas. If the muzzle was tight against the forehead, the gas punches in under the skin and then can't go anyplace, because of the bone. So it punches right back out again. It tears itself a big star-shaped hole. Looks like a starfish. Right, doc?”

The pathologist nodded.

“Star-burst splitting, we call it,” he said.

“That's absent here,” Reacher said. “So it wasn't a contact shot. Next thing out of the barrel is flame. If it was a real close shot, two or three inches, but not a contact shot, we'd see burning of the skin. In a small ring shape.”

“Burn rim,” the pathologist said.

“That's absent, too,” Reacher said. “Next thing out is soot. Soft, smudgy black stuff. So if it was a shot from six or eight inches, we'd see soot smudging on his forehead. Maybe a patch a couple inches wide. That's not here, either.”

“So?” Alice asked.

“Next thing out is gunpowder particles,” Reacher said. “Little bits of unburned carbon. No gunpowder is perfect. Some of it doesn't burn. It just blasts out, in a spray. It hammers in under the skin. Tiny black dots. Tattooing, it's called. If it was a shot from a foot away, maybe a foot and a half, we'd see it. You see it?”

“No,” Alice said.

“Right. All we see is the bullet holes. Nothing else. No evidence at all to suggest they were from close range. Depends on the exact powder in the shells, but they look to me like shots from three or four feet away, absolute minimum.”

“Eight feet six inches,” the pathologist said. “That's my estimation.”

Reacher glanced at him. “You tested the powder?”

The guy shook his head. “Crime scene diagrams. He was on the far side of the bed. The bed was near the window, gave him an alley two feet six inches wide on his side. He was
found near the bedside table, up near the head, against the window wall. We know she wasn't next to him there, or we'd have found all that close-range stuff you just mentioned. So the nearest she
could
have been was on the other side of the bed. At the foot end, probably. Firing across it, diagonally, according to the trajectories. He was probably retreating as far as he could get. It was a king-size bed, so my best guess is eight feet six inches, to allow for the diagonal.”

“Excellent,” Reacher said. “You prepared to say so on the stand?”

“Sure. And that's only the theoretical minimum. Could have been more.”

“But what does it mean?” Alice asked.

“Means Carmen didn't do it,” Reacher said.

“Why not?”

“How big is a man's forehead? Five inches across and two high?”

“So?”

“No way she could have hit a target that small from eight feet plus.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I saw her shoot, the day before. First time she pulled a trigger in her life. She was hopeless. Literally hopeless. She couldn't have hit the side of a barn from eight feet plus. I told her she'd have to jam the gun in his gut and empty the magazine.”

“You're digging her grave,” Alice said. “That sort of testimony shouldn't be volunteered.”

“She didn't do it, Alice. She couldn't have.”

“She could have gotten lucky.”

“Sure, once. But not twice. Twice means they were aimed shots. And they're close together, horizontally. He'd have started falling after the first one. Which means it was a fast double-tap.
Bang bang,
like that, no hesitation. That's skillful shooting.”

Alice was quiet for a second.

“She could have been faking,” she said. “You know, before. About needing to learn. She lied about everything else. Maybe she was really an expert shot, but she claimed not to
be. Because she wanted you to do it for her. For other reasons.”

Reacher shook his head.

“She wasn't faking,” he said. “All my life I've seen people shoot. Either you can or you can't. And if you can, it shows. You can't hide it. You can't unlearn it.”

Alice said nothing.

“It wasn't Carmen,” Reacher said. “Even
I
couldn't have done it. Not with that piece of junk she bought. Not from that distance. A fast double-tap to the head? Whoever did this is a better shooter than me.”

Alice smiled, faintly. “And that's rare?”

“Very,” he said, unselfconsciously.

“But she confessed to it. Why would she do that?”

“I have no idea.”

 

Ellie wasn't sure
she understood completely. She had hidden on the stairs above the foyer when her grandmother talked to the strangers. She had heard the words
new family
. She understood what they meant. And she already knew she
needed
a new family. The Greers had told her that her daddy had died and her mommy had gone far away and wasn't ever coming back. And they had told her they didn't want to keep her with them. Which was O.K. with her. She didn't want to stay with them, either. They were mean. They had already sold her pony, and all the other horses, too. A big truck had come for them, very early that morning. She didn't cry. She just somehow knew it all went together. No more Daddy, no more Mommy, no more pony, no more horses. Everything had changed. So she went with the strangers, because she didn't know what else to do.

Then the strangers had let her talk to her mommy on the phone. Her mommy had cried, and at the end she said
be happy with your new family
. But the thing was, she wasn't sure if these strangers
were
her new family, or if they were just
taking
her to her new family. And she was afraid to ask. So she just kept quiet. The back of her hand was sore, where she put it in her mouth.

 

“It's a can
of worms,” Hack Walker said. “You know what I mean? Best not to open it at all. Things could get out of hand, real quick.”

They were back in Walker's office. It was easily fifty degrees hotter than the interior of the morgue building. They were both sweating heavily.

“You understand?” Walker asked. “It makes things worse again.”

“You think?” Alice said.

Walker nodded. “It muddies the waters. Let's say Reacher is right, which is a stretch, frankly, because all he's got is a highly subjective opinion here. He's guessing, basically. And his guess is based on what, exactly? It's based on an impression she chose to give him beforehand, that she couldn't shoot, and we already know every
other
impression she chose to give him beforehand was total bullshit from beginning to end. But let's say he's right, just for the sake of argument. What does that give us?”

“What?”

“A conspiracy, is what. We know she tried to rope Reacher in. Now you've got her roping somebody else in. She gets ahold of somebody else, she tells them to come to the house, she tells them where and when, she tells them where her gun is concealed, they show up, get the gun, do the deed. If it happened that way, she's instigated a conspiracy to commit murder for remuneration. Hired a killer, cold-blooded as hell. We go down that road, she's headed for the lethal injection again. Because
that
looks a whole lot worse than a solo shot, believe me. In comparison, a solo shot looks almost benign. It looks like a crime of the moment, you know? We leave it exactly the way we got it, along with the guilty plea, I'm happy asking for a life sentence. But we start talking conspiracy, that's real evil, and we're back on track for death row.”

Alice said nothing.

“So you see what I mean?” Walker said. “There's no net benefit. Absolutely the opposite effect. It makes things much worse for her. Plus, she already said she did it herself. Which
I think is true. But if it isn't, then her confession was a calculated lie, designed to cover her ass, because she knew a conspiracy would look worse. And we'd have to react to that. We couldn't let that go. It would make us look like fools.”

Alice said nothing. Reacher just shrugged.

“So leave it alone,” Walker said. “That's my suggestion. If it would help her, I'd look at it. But it won't. So we should leave it alone. For her sake.”

“And for your judgeship's sake,” Reacher said.

Walker nodded. “I'm not hiding that from you.”

“You happy to leave it alone?” Alice asked. “As a prosecutor? Somebody could be getting clean away with something.”

Walker shook his head.
“If
it happened the way Reacher thinks. If, if, if.
If
is a very big word. I got to say I think it's highly unlikely. Believe me, I'm a real enthusiastic prosecutor, but I wouldn't build a case and waste a jury's time on one person's purely subjective opinion about how well another person could shoot. Especially when that other person is as accomplished a liar as Carmen is. All we know, she's been shooting every day since she was a kid. A rough kid from some barrio in L.A., certainly a rural Texas jury wouldn't see any problem in swallowing that.”

Reacher said nothing. Alice nodded again.

“O.K.,” she said. “I'm not her lawyer, anyway.”

“What would you do if you were?”

She shrugged. “I'd leave it, probably. Like you say, blundering into a conspiracy rap wouldn't help her any.”

She stood up, slowly, like it was an effort in the heat. She tapped Reacher on the shoulder. Gave him a
what can we do?
look and headed for the door. He stood up and followed her. Walker said nothing. Just watched them partway out of the room and then dropped his eyes to the old photograph of the three boys leaning on the pick-up's fender.

 

They crossed the
street together and walked as far as the bus depot. It was fifty yards from the courthouse, fifty yards from the legal mission. It was a small, sleepy depot. No buses in it. Just an expanse of diesel-stained blacktop ringed with
benches shaded from the afternoon sun by small white fiberglass roofs. There was a tiny office hut papered on the outside with schedules. It had a through-the-wall air conditioner running hard. There was a woman in it, sitting on a high stool, reading a magazine.

“Walker's right, you know,” Alice said. “He's doing her a favor. It's a lost cause.”

Reacher said nothing.

“So where will you head?” she asked.

“First bus out,” he said. “That's my rule.”

They stood together and read the schedules. Next departure was to Topeka, Kansas, via Oklahoma City. It was due in from Phoenix, Arizona, in a half hour. It was making a long slow counterclockwise loop.

“Been to Topeka before?” Alice asked.

“I've been to Leavenworth,” he said. “It's not far.”

He tapped on the glass and the woman sold him a one-way ticket. He put it in his pocket.

“Good luck, Alice,” he said. “Four and a half years from now, I'll look for you in the Yellow Pages.”

She smiled.

“Take care, Reacher,” she said.

She stood still for a second, like she was debating whether to hug him or kiss him on the cheek, or just walk away. Then she smiled again, and just walked away. He watched her go until she was lost to sight. Then he found the shadiest bench and sat down to wait.

 

She still wasn't
sure. They had taken her to a very nice place, like a house, with beds and everything. So maybe this
was
her new family. But they didn't
look
like a family. They were very busy. She thought they looked a bit like doctors. They were kind to her, but busy too, with stuff she didn't understand. Like at the doctor's office. Maybe they were doctors. Maybe they knew she was upset, and they were going to make her better. She thought about it for a long time, and then she asked.

“Are you doctors?” she said.

“No,” they answered.

“Are you my new family?”

“No,” they said. “You'll go to your new family soon.”

“When?”

“A few days, O.K.? But right now you stay with us.”

She thought they all looked very busy.

 

The bus rolled
in more or less on time. It was a big Greyhound, dirty from the road, wrapped in a diesel cloud, with heat shimmering visibly from its air conditioner grilles. It stopped twenty feet from him and the driver held the engine at a loud shuddering idle. The door opened and three people got off. Reacher stood up and walked over and got on. He was the only departing passenger. The driver took his ticket.

“Two minutes, O.K.?” the guy said. “I need a comfort stop.”

Reacher nodded and said nothing. Just shuffled down the aisle and found a double seat empty. It was on the left, which would face the evening sun all the way after they turned north at Abilene. But the windows were tinted dark blue and the air was cold, so he figured he'd be O.K. He sat down sideways. Stretched out and rested his head against the glass. The eight spent shells in his pocket were uncomfortable against the muscle of his thigh. He hitched up and moved them through the cotton. Then he took them out and held them in his palm. Rolled them together like dice. They were warm, and they made dull metallic sounds.