Echo Burning by Lee Child

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

  “So?”

  “So if Carmen had two million bucks in the bank but traveled with a single dollar just in case she bumped into a guy as suspicious as me, then she is undoubtedly the number-one best-prepared con artist in the history of the world. And old Copernicus asks me, how likely is that? That I should by chance happen to bump into the best con artist in the history of the world? His answer is, not very likely, really. He says the likelihood is, if I bump into a con artist at all, it’ll be a very average and mediocre one.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying it didn’t tie up for me. So it got me thinking about the money. And then something else didn’t tie up.”

  “What?”

  “Al Eugene’s people messengered Sloop’s financial stuff over, right?”

  “This morning. Feels like a long time ago.”

  “Thing is, I saw Al’s office. When I went to the museum. It’s literally within sight of the courthouse. It’s a one-minute walk. So how likely is it they would messenger something over? Wouldn’t they just walk it over? For a friend of Al’s? Especially if it was urgent? It would take them ten times as long just to dial the phone for the courier service.”

  The candlelight danced and flickered. The red room glowed.

  “People messenger things all the time,” Walker said. “It’s routine. And it was too hot for walking.”

  Reacher nodded. “Maybe. It didn’t mean much at the time. But then something else didn’t tie up. The collarbone.”

  “What about it?”

  Reacher turned to face Alice. “When you fell off your inline skates, did you break your collarbone?”

  “No,” Alice said.

  “Any injuries at all?”

  “I tore up my hand. A lot of road rash.”

  “You put your hand out to break your fall?”

  “Reflex,” she said. “It’s impossible not to.”

  Reacher nodded. Turned back through the candlelit gloom to Walker.

  “I rode with Carmen on Saturday,” he said. “My first time ever. My ass got sore, but the thing I really remember is how high I was. It’s scary up there. So the thing is, if Carmen fell off, from that height, onto rocky dirt, hard enough to bust her collarbone, how is it that she didn’t get road rash, too? On her hand?”

  “Maybe she did.”

  “The hospital didn’t write it up.”

  “Maybe they forgot.”

  “It was a very detailed report. New staff, working hard. I noticed that, and Cowan Black did, too. He said they were very thorough. They wouldn’t have neglected lacerations to the palm.”

  “She must have worn riding gloves.”

  Reacher shook his head. “She told me nobody wears gloves down here. Too hot. And she definitely wouldn’t have said that if gloves had once saved her from serious road rash. She’d have been a big fan of gloves, in that case. She’d have certainly made me wear them, being new to it.”

  “So?”

  “So I started to wonder if the collarbone thing could have been from Sloop hitting her. I figured it was possible. Maybe she’s on her knees, a big clubbing fist from above, she moves her head. Only she also claimed he had broken her arm and her jaw and knocked her teeth loose, too, and there was no mention of all that stuff, so I stopped wondering. Especially when I found out the ring was real.”

  A candle on the left end of the table died. It burned out and smoke rose from it in a thin plume that ran absolutely straight for a second and then spiraled crazily.

  “She’s a liar,” Walker said. “That’s all.”

  “She sure is,” Bobby said.

  “Sloop never hit her,” Rusty said. “A son of mine would never hit a woman, whoever she was.”

  “One at a time, O.K.?” Reacher said, quietly.

  He could feel the impatience in the room. Elbows shifting on the table, feet moving on the floor. He turned to Bobby first.

  “You claim she’s a liar,” he said. “And I know why. It’s because you don’t like her, because you’re a racist piece of shit, and because she had an affair with the schoolteacher. So among other things you took it on yourself to try and turn me off of her. Some kind of loyalty to your brother.”

  Then he turned to Rusty. “We’ll get to what Sloop did and didn’t do real soon. But right now, you keep quiet, O.K.? Hack and I have business.”

  “What business?” Walker said.

  “This business,” Reacher said, and propped Alice’s gun on the tabletop, the butt resting on the wood and the muzzle pointing straight at Walker’s chest.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Walker said.

  Reacher clicked the safety off with his thumb. The snick sounded loud in the room. Candles flickered and the lantern hissed softly.

  “I figured out the thing with the diamond,” he said. “Then everything else made sense. Especially with you giving us the badges and sending us down here to speak with Rusty.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was like a conjuring trick. The whole thing. You knew Carmen pretty well. So you knew what she must have told me. Which was the absolute truth, always. The truth about herself, and about what Sloop was doing to her. So you just exactly reversed everything. It was simple. A very neat and convincing trick. Like she told me she was from Napa, and you said, hey, I bet she told you she’s from Napa, but she isn’t, you know. Like she told me she’d called the IRS, and you said, hey, I bet she told you she called the IRS, but she didn’t, really. It was like you knew the real truth and were reluctantly exposing commonplace lies she had told before. But it was you who was lying. All along. It was very, very effective. Like a conjuring trick. And you dressed it all up behind pretending you wanted to save her. You fooled me for a long time.”

  “I did want to save her. I am saving her.”

  “Bullshit, Hack. Your only aim all along was to coerce a confession out of her for something she didn’t do. It was a straightforward plan. Your hired guns kidnapped Ellie today so you could force Carmen to confess. I was your only problem. I stuck around, I recruited Alice. We were in your face from Monday morning onward. So you misled us for twenty-seven straight hours. You let us down slowly and regretfully, point by point. It was beautifully done. Well, almost. To really make it work, you’d have to be the best con artist in the world. And like old Copernicus says, what are the odds that the best con artist in the world would happen to be up there in Pecos?”

  There was silence. Just sputtering wax, the hissing of the lantern, five people breathing. The old air conditioner wasn’t running. No power.

  “You’re crazy,” Walker said.

  “No, I’m not. You decoyed me by being all regretful about what a liar Carmen was and how desperate you were to save her. You were even smart enough to reveal a cynical reason for wanting to save her. About wanting to be a judge, so I wouldn’t think you were too good to be true. That was a great touch, Hack. But all the time you were talking to her on the phone, muffling your voice to get past the desk clerk, telling him you were her lawyer, telling her if she ever spoke to a real lawyer, you’d hurt Ellie. Which is why she refused to speak with Alice. Then you wrote out a bunch of phony financial statements on your own computer right there at your desk. One printout looks much the same as any other. And you drafted the phony trust deeds. And the phony Family Services papers. You knew what real ones looked like, I guess. Then as soon as you heard your people had picked up the kid you got back on the phone and coached Carmen through the phony confession, feeding back to her all the lies you’d told to me. Then you sent your assistant downstairs to listen to them.”

  “This is nonsense.”

  Reacher shrugged. “So let’s prove it. Let’s call the FBI and ask them how the hunt for Ellie is going.”

  “Phones are out,” Bobby said. “Electrical storm.”

  Reacher nodded. “O.K., no problem.”

  He kept the gun pointed at Walker’s chest and turned to face Rusty.

  �
�Tell me what the FBI agents asked you,” he said.

  Rusty looked blank. “What FBI agents?”

  “No FBI agents came here tonight?”

  She just shook her head. Reacher nodded.

  “You were playacting, Hack,” he said. “You told us you’d called the FBI and the state police, and there were roadblocks in place, and helicopters up, and more than a hundred fifty people on the ground. But you didn’t call anybody. Because if you had, the very first thing they would have done is come down here. They’d have talked to Rusty for hours. They’d have brought sketch artists and crime scene technicians. This is the scene of the crime, after all. And Rusty is the only witness.”

  “You’re wrong, Reacher,” Walker said.

  “There were FBI people here,” Bobby said. “I saw them in the yard.”

  Reacher shook his head.

  “There were people wearing FBI hats,” he said. “Two of them. But they aren’t wearing those hats anymore.”

  Walker said nothing.

  “Big mistake, Hack,” Reacher said. “Giving us those stupid badges and sending us down here. You’re in law enforcement. You knew Rusty was the vital witness. You also knew she wouldn’t cooperate fully with me. So it was an inexplicable decision for a DA to take, to send us down here. I couldn’t believe it. Then I saw why. You wanted us out of the way. And you wanted to know where we were, at all times. So you could send your people after us.”

  “What people?”

  “The hired guns, Hack. The people in the FBI hats. The people you sent to kill Al Eugene. The people you sent to kill Sloop. They were pretty good. Very professional. But the thing with professionals is, they need to be able to work again in the future. Al Eugene was no problem. Could have been anybody, out there in the middle of nowhere. But Sloop was harder. He was just home from prison, wasn’t going anyplace for a spell. So it had to be done right here, which was risky. They made you agree to cover their asses by framing Carmen. Then you made them agree to help you do it by moonlighting as the kidnap team.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Walker said.

  “You knew Carmen had bought a gun,” Reacher said. “You told me, the paperwork comes through your office. And you knew why she bought it. You knew all about Sloop and what he did to her. You knew their bedroom was a torture chamber. So she wants to hide a gun in there, where does she put it? Three choices, really. Top shelf of her closet, in her bedside table, or in her underwear drawer. Common sense. Same for any woman in any bedroom. I know it, and your people knew it. They probably watched through the window until she went to shower, they slipped some gloves on, a minute later they’re in the room, they cover Sloop with their own guns until they find Carmen’s, and they shoot him with it. They’re outside again thirty seconds later. A quick sprint back to where they left their car on the road, and they’re gone. This house is a warren. But you know it well. You’re a friend of the family. You assured them they could be in and out without being seen. You probably drew them a floor plan.”

  Walker closed his eyes. Said nothing. He looked old and pale. The candlelight wasn’t helping him.

  “But you made mistakes, Hack,” Reacher said. “People like you always make mistakes. The financial reports were clumsy. Lots of money, but hardly any expenditure? How likely is that? What is she, a miser, too? And the messenger thing was a bad slip. If they had been messengered, you’d have left them in the courier packet, like you did with the medical reports, to make them look even more official.”

  Walker opened his eyes, defiant.

  “The medical reports,” he repeated. “You saw them. They prove she was lying. You heard Cowan Black say it.”

  Reacher nodded. “Leaving them in the FedEx packet was neat. They looked real urgent, like they were hot off the truck. But you should have torn the label off the front. Because the thing is, FedEx charges by weight. And I weighed the packet on Alice’s kitchen scales. One pound, one ounce. But the label said two pounds and nine ounces. So one of two things must have happened. Either FedEx ripped off the hospital by padding the charge, or you took out about sixty percent of the contents and trashed them. And you know what? I vote for you checking the contents before you sent them over to us. You’ve been a DA for a spell, you’ve tried a lot of cases, you know what convincing evidence looks like. So anything about the beatings went straight in the trash. All you left were the genuine accidents. But the road rash thing passed you by, so you left the collarbone in by mistake. Or maybe you felt you had to leave it in, because you know she’s got a healed knot clearly visible and you figured I’d have noticed it.”

  Walker said nothing. The lantern hissed.

  “The broken arm, the jaw, the teeth,” Reacher said. “My guess is there are five or six more folders in a Dumpster somewhere. Probably not behind the courthouse. Probably not in your backyard, either. I guess you’re smarter than that. Maybe they’re in a trashcan at the bus station. Some big public place.”

  Walker said nothing. The candle flames danced. Reacher smiled.

  “But you were mostly pretty good,” he said. “When I figured Carmen wasn’t the shooter, you steered it straight back to a conspiracy involving Carmen. You didn’t miss a beat. Even when I made the link to Eugene, you kept on track. You were very shocked. You went all gray and sweaty. Not because you were upset about Al. But because he’d been found so soon. You hadn’t planned on that. But still, you thought for ten seconds and came up with the IRS motive. But you know what? You were so busy thinking, you forgot to be scared enough. About the two-for-three possibility. It was a plausible threat. You should have been much more worried. Anybody else would have been.”

  Walker said nothing.

  “And you got Sloop out on a Sunday,” Reacher said. “Not easy to do. But you didn’t do it for him. You did it so he could be killed on a Sunday, so Carmen could be framed on a Sunday and spend the maximum time in jail before visitors could get near her the next Saturday. To give yourself five clear days to work on her.”

  Walker said nothing.

  “Lots of mistakes, Hack,” Reacher said. “Including sending people after me. Like old Copernicus says, what were the chances they’d be good enough?”

  Walker said nothing. Bobby was leaning forward, staring sideways across his mother, looking straight at him. Catching on, slowly.

  “You sent people to kill my brother?” he breathed.

  “No,” Walker said. “Reacher’s wrong.”

  Bobby stared at him like he’d answered yes instead.

  “But why would you?” he asked. “You were friends.”

  Then Walker looked up, straight at Reacher.

  “Yes, why would I?” he said. “What possible motive could I have?”

  “Something Benjamin Franklin once wrote,” Reacher said.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “You wanted to be a judge. Not because you wanted to do good. That was all sanctimonious bullshit. It was because you wanted the trappings. You were born a poor boy and you were greedy for money and power. And it was right there in front of you. But first you had to get elected. And what sort of a thing stops a person getting elected?”

  Walker just shrugged.

  “Old scandals,” Reacher said. “Among other things. Old secrets, coming back at you from the past. Sloop and Al and you were a threesome, way back when. Did all kinds of stuff together. You three against the world. You told me that. So there’s Sloop, in prison for cheating on his taxes. He can’t stand it in there. So he thinks, how do I get out of here? Not by repaying my debts. By figuring, my old pal Hack is running for judge this year. Big prize, all that money and power. What’s he prepared to do to get it? So he calls you up and says he could start some serious rumors about some old activities if you don’t broker his way out of there. You think it over carefully. You figure Sloop wouldn’t incriminate himself by talking about something you all did together, so at first you relax. Then you realize there’s a large gap between the sort of facts that wo
uld convict you and the sort of rumors that would wreck your chances in the election. So you cave in. You take some of your campaign donations and arrange to pay off the IRS with it. Now Sloop’s happy. But you’re not. In your mind, the cat is out of the bag. Sloop’s threatened you once. What about the next time he wants something? And Al’s involved, because he’s Sloop’s lawyer. So now it’s all fresh in Al’s mind too. Your chances of making judge are suddenly vulnerable.”

  Walker said nothing.

  “You know what Ben Franklin once wrote?” Reacher asked.

  “What?”

  “ ‘Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.’”

  Silence in the room. No movement, no breathing. Just the soft hiss of the lantern and the flickering of the tiny candle flames.

  “What was the secret?” Alice whispered.

  “Three boys in rural Texas,” Reacher said. “Growing up together, playing ball, having fun. They get a little older, they turn their attention to what their dads are doing. The guns, the rifles, the hunting. Maybe they start with the armadillos. They shouldn’t, really, because they’re protected. By the tree-huggers. But the attitude is, they’re on my land, they’re mine to hunt. Bobby said that to me. An arrogant attitude. A superior attitude. I mean, hey, what’s an armadillo worth? But armadillos are slow and boring prey. Too easy. The three boys are growing up. They’re three young men now. High school seniors. They want a little more excitement. So they go looking for coyotes, maybe. Worthier opponents. They hunt at night. They use a truck. They range far and wide. And soon they find bigger game. Soon they find a real thrill.”

  “What?”

  “Mexicans,” Reacher said. “Poor anonymous no-account brown families stumbling north through the desert at night. And I mean, hey, what are they worth? Are they even human? But they make great prey. They run, and they squeal. Almost like hunting actual people, right, Hack?”

  Silence in the room.

  “Maybe they started with a girl,” Reacher said. “Maybe they didn’t mean to kill her. But they did anyway. Maybe they had to. Couple of days, they’re nervous. They hold their breath. But there’s no comeback. Nobody reacts. Nobody even cares. So hey, this is suddenly fun. Then they’re out often. It becomes a sport. The ultimate kill. Better than armadillos. They take that old pick-up, one of them driving, two of them riding in the load bed, they hunt for hours. Bobby said Sloop invented that technique. Said he was real good at it. I expect he was. I expect they all were. They got plenty of practice. They did it twenty-five times in a year.”