Echo Burning by Lee Child

by Echo Burning (com v2. 0) (lit)

  “I’m sorry, Reacher,” she said.

  There was silence for a moment.

  “What about the election?” Reacher asked. The last hope.

  Walker shrugged. “Texas code says it’s a capital crime. Murder for remuneration. We’ve got enough evidence to choke a pig. And I can’t ignore a voluntary confession, can I? So, couple hours ago I was pretty down. But then I got to thinking about it. Fact is, a voluntary confession helps me out. A confession and a guilty plea, saves the taxpayer the cost of a trial. Justifies me asking for a life sentence instead. The way I see it, with a story like that, she’s going to look very, very bad, whoever you are. So if I back off the death penalty, I’ll look magnanimous in comparison. Generous, even. The whites will fret a little, but the Mexicans will eat it up with a spoon. See what I mean? The whole thing is reversed now. She was the good guy, I was the heavy hand. But now she’s the heavy hand, and I’m the good guy. So I think I’m O.K.”

  Nobody spoke for another minute. There was just the omnipresent roar of the air conditioners.

  “I’ve got her property,” Alice said. “A belt and a ring.”

  “Take them to storage,” Walker said. “We’ll be moving her, later.”

  “Where?”

  “The penitentiary. We can’t keep her here anymore.”

  “No, where’s storage?”

  “Same building as the morgue. Make sure you get a receipt.”

  Reacher walked with her over to the morgue. He wasn’t aware of taking a single step. Wasn’t aware of the heat, or the dust, or the noise, or the traffic, or the smells of the street. He felt like he was floating an inch above the sidewalk, insulated inside some kind of sensory-deprivation suit. Alice was talking to him, time to time, but he was hearing nothing that she said. All he could hear was a small voice inside his head that was saying you were wrong. Completely wrong. It was a voice he had heard before, but that didn’t make it any easier to hear again, because he had built his whole career on hearing it fewer times than the next guy. It was like a box score in his mind, and his average had just taken some serious damage. Which upset him. Not because of vanity. It upset him because he was a professional who was supposed to get things right.

  “Reacher?” Alice was saying. “You’re not listening, are you?”

  “What?” he said.

  “I asked you, do you want to get a meal?”

  “No,” he said. “I want to get a ride.”

  She stopped walking. “What now? Quadruple-check?”

  “No, I mean out of here. I want to go somewhere else. A long way away. I hear Antarctica is nice, this time of year.”

  “The bus depot is on the way back to the office.”

  “Good. I’ll take a bus. Because I’m all done hitchhiking. You never know who’s going to pick you up.”

  The morgue was a low industrial shed in a paved yard behind the street. It could have been a brake shop or a tire depot. It had metal siding and a roll-up vehicle door. There was a personnel entrance at the far end of the building. It had two steps up to it, framed by handrails fabricated from steel pipe. Inside, it was very cold. There were industrial-strength air conditioners running full blast. It felt like a meat store. Which it was, in a way. To the left of the foyer was a double door that gave directly onto the morgue operation. It was standing open, and Reacher could see the autopsy tables. There was plenty of stainless steel and white tile and fluorescent light in there.

  Alice put the lizard skin belt on the reception counter and dug in her pocketbook for the ring. She told the attendant they were for Texas vs. Carmen Greer. He went away and came back with the evidence box.

  “No, it’s personal property,” she said. “Not evidence. I’m sorry.”

  The guy gave her a why didn’t you say so look and turned around.

  “Wait,” Reacher called. “Let me see that.”

  The guy paused, and then he turned back and slid the box across the counter. It had no lid, so it was really just a cardboard tray maybe three inches deep. Somebody had written Greer on the front edge with a marker pen. The Lorcin was in a plastic bag with an evidence number. Two brass shell cases were in a separate bag. Two tiny .22 bullets were in a bag each. They were gray and very slightly distorted. One bag was marked Intercranial #1 and the other was marked Intercranial #2. They had reference numbers, and signatures.

  “Is the pathologist here?” Reacher asked.

  “Sure,” the counter guy said. “He’s always here.”

  “I need to see him,” Reacher said. “Right now.”

  He was expecting objections, but the guy just pointed to the double doors.

  “In there,” he said.

  Alice hung back, but Reacher went through. At first he thought the room was empty, but then he saw a glass door in the far corner. Behind it was an office, with a man in green scrubs at a desk. He was doing paperwork. Reacher knocked on the glass. The man looked up. Mouthed come in. Reacher went in.

  “Help you?” the guy said.

  “Only two bullets in Sloop Greer?” Reacher said.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m with the perp’s lawyer,” Reacher said. “She’s outside.”

  “The perp?”

  “No, the lawyer.”

  “O.K.,” the guy said. “What about the bullets?”

  “How many were there?”

  “Two,” the guy said. “Hell of a time getting them out.”

  “Can I see the body?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m worried about a miscarriage of justice.”

  It’s a line that usually works with pathologists. They figure there’s going to be a trial, they figure they’ll be called on for evidence, the last thing they want is to be humiliated by the defense on cross-examination. It’s bad for their scientific image. And their egos. So they prefer to get any doubts squared away beforehand.

  “O.K.,” he said. “It’s in the freezer.”

  He had another door in back of his office which led to a dim corridor. At the end of the corridor was an insulated steel door, like a meat locker.

  “Cold in there,” he said.

  Reacher nodded. “I’m glad somewhere is.”

  The guy operated the handle and they went inside. The light was bright. There were fluorescent tubes all over the ceiling. There was a bank of twenty-seven stainless steel drawers on the far wall, nine across, three high. Eight of them were occupied. They had tags slipped into little receptacles on the front, the sort of thing you see on office filing cabinets. The air in the room was frosty. Reacher’s breath clouded in front of him. The pathologist checked the tags and slid a drawer. It came out easily, on cantilevered runners.

  “Had to take the back of his head off,” he said. “Practically had to scoop his brains out with a soup ladle, before I found them.”

  Sloop Greer was on his back and naked. He looked small and collapsed in death. His skin was gray, like unfired clay. It was hard with cold. His eyes were open, blank and staring. He had two bullet holes in his forehead, about three inches apart. They were neat holes, blue and ridged at the edges, like they had been carefully drilled there by a craftsman.

  “Classic .22 gunshot wounds,” the pathologist said. “The bullets go in O.K., but they don’t come out again. Too slow. Not enough power. They just rattle around in there. But they get the job done.”

  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.”

  14

  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, the
y 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.”