by Lee Child
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.
"Could be something," Reacher said.
The third report was dated six months later, at the end of the summer. It concerned severe bruising to Carmen's lower right leg. The same physician noted she reported falling from a horse while jumping and landing with her shin against the pole that constituted the obstacle the horse was attempting. There was a long technical description of the contusion, with measurements vertically and laterally. The affected area was a tilted oval, four inches wide and five long. X rays had been taken. The bone was not fractured. Painkillers had been prescribed and the first day's supply provided from the emergency room pharmacy.
The fourth report was dated two and a half years later, which was maybe nine months before Sloop went to prison. It showed a broken collarbone on the right side. All the names in the file were new. It seemed like the whole ER staff had turned over. There was a new name for the attending physician, and she made no comment about Carmen's claim to have fallen off her horse onto the rocks of the mesa. There were extensive detailed notes about the injury. They were very thorough. There was an X-ray film. It showed the curve of her neck and her shoulder. The collarbone was cleanly snapped in the middle.
Alice squared all four reports together, upside down on the desk.
"Well?" she said.
Reacher made no reply. Just shook his head.
"Well?" she said again.
"Maybe she sometimes went to another hospital," he said.
"No, we'd have picked it up. I told you, we ask at all of them. Matter of routine."
"Maybe they drove out of state."
"We checked," she said. "Domestic violence, we cover all neighboring states. I told you that, too. Routine guidelines."
"Maybe she used another name."
"They're logged by Social Security number."
He nodded. "This isn't enough, Alice. She told me about more than this. We've got the ribs and we've got the collarbone, but she claimed he broke her arm, too. Also her jaw. She said she'd had three teeth reimplanted."
Alice said nothing. He closed his eyes. Tried to think about it like he would have in the old days, an experienced investigator with a suspicious mind and thirteen years of hard time behind him.
"Two possibilities," he said. "One, the hospital records system screwed up."
Alice shook her head. "Very unlikely."
He nodded again. "Agreed. So two, she was lying."
Alice was quiet for a long moment.
"Exaggerating, maybe," she said. "You know, to lock you in. To make sure of your help."
He nodded again, vaguely. Checked his watch. It was twenty past nine. He leaned sideways and slipped the stacked reports back into the FedEx packet. "Let's go see what Hack thinks," he said.
* * *
Two thirds of the killing crew rolled south out of Pecos, uncharacteristically quiet. The third member waited in the motel room, pensive. They were taking risks now. Twelve years in the business, and they had never worked one area so long. It had always seemed too dangerous. In and out, quick and clean, had been their preferred method. Now they were departing from it. Radically. So there had been no conversation that morning. No jokes, no banter. No pre-mission excitement. Just a lot of nervous preoccupation with private thoughts.
But they had readied the car on schedule, and assembled the things they would need. Then they had half-eaten breakfast, and sat quiet, checking their watches.
"Nine-twenty," the woman said eventually. "It's time."
* * *
There was a visitor already seated in Walker's office. He was a man of maybe seventy, overweight and florid, and he was suffering badly in the heat. The air conditioners were going so hard that the rush of air was audible over the drone of the motors and papers were lifting off the desk. But the indoor temperature was still somewhere in the middle nineties. The visitor was mopping his brow with a large white handkerchief. Walker himself had his jacket off and was sitting absolutely still in his chair with his head in his hands. He had copies of the medical reports laid side by side on his desk and he was staring at them like they were written in a foreign language. He looked up blankly, and then he made a vague gesture toward the stranger.
"This is Cowan Black," he said. "Eminent professor of forensic medicine, lots of other things, too. The renowned defense expert. This is probably the first time he's ever been in a DA's office."
Alice stepped over and shook the guy's hand.
"I'm very pleased to meet you, sir," she said. "I've heard a lot about you."
Cowan Black said nothing. Alice introduced Reacher and they all shuffled their chairs into an approximate semicircle around the desk.
"The reports came in first thing this morning," Walker said. "Everything on file from Texas, which was one hospital only. There was nothing at all from New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Louisiana. I personally photocopied everything and immediately sent the originals over to you. Dr. Black arrived a half hour ago and has studied the copies. He wants to see the X rays. Those, I couldn't copy."
Reacher passed the FedEx packet to Black, who spilled the contents the same way Alice had and extracted the three X-ray films. The ribs, the leg, the collarbone. He held them up against the light from the window and studied them, one by one, for minutes each. Then he slipped them back in their appropriate folders, neatly, like he was a man accustomed to order and precision.
Walker sat forward. "So, Dr. Black, are you able to offer us a preliminary opinion?"
He sounded tense, and very formal, like he was already in court. Black picked up the first folder. The oldest, the palest, the one about Ellie's birth.
"This is nothing at all," he said. His voice was deep and dark and rotund, like a favorite uncle in an old movie. A perfect voice for the witness stand. "This is purely routine obstetrics. Interesting only in that a rural Texas hospital was operating at a level that would have been considered state-of-the-art a decade or so earlier."
"Nothing untoward?"
"Nothing at all. One assumes the husband caused the pregnancy, but aside from that there's no evidence he did anything to her."
"The others?"
Black switched files, to the damaged ribs. Pulled the X-ray film out and held it ready.
"Ribs are there for a purpose," he said. "They form a hard, bony, protective cage to protect the vulnerable internal organs from damage. But not a rigid cage. That would be foolish, and evolution isn't a foolish process. No, the rib cage is a sophisticated structure. If it were rigid, the bones would shatter under any kind of severe blow. But there's complex ligament suspension involved at each of the bone terminations, so the cage's first response is to yield and distort, in order to spread the force of the impact."
He held up the X-ray film and pointed here and there on it. "And that's exactly what happened here," he said. "There is obvious stretching and tearing of the ligaments all over the place. This was a heavy diffuse blow with a broad, blunt instrument. The force was dissipated by the flexibility of the rib cage, but even so was sufficient to crack two of the bones."
"What kind of a blunt instrument?" Walker asked.
"Something long and hard and rounded, maybe five or six inches in diameter. Something exactly like a fencing rail, I would think."
"It couldn't have been a kick?"
Black shook his head.
"Emphatically, no," he said. "A kick transfers a lot of energy through a tiny contact area. The welt at the toe of a boot is what? Maybe an inch and a half by a quarter inch? That's essentially a sharp object, not a blunt object. It would be too sudden and too concentrated for the yielding effect to operate. We would see the cracked bones, for sure, but we wouldn't see the ligament stretching at all."
"What about a knee?"
"A knee in the ribs? That's similar to a punch. Blunt, but an essentially circular impact site. The ligament stretching would show a completely different pattern."
Walker drummed his fingers on his desk. He was starting to sweat. "Any way a person could have done it?" he asked.
Black shrugged. "If he were some kind of contortionist, maybe. If he could hold his whole leg completely rigid and somehow jump up and hit her in the side with it. Like it was a fence railing. I would say it was completely impossible."
Walker went quiet for a second. "What about the bruised shin?" he asked.
Black swapped the third file into his hand. Opened it and read through the description of the contusion again. Then he shook his head.
"The shape of the bruise is crucial," he said. "Again, it's what you'd get from the impact of a long hard rounded object. Like a fence rail again, or maybe a sewer pipe, striking against the front of the shin at an oblique angle."
"Could he have hit her with a length of pipe?"
Black shrugged again.
"Theoretically, I suppose," he said. "If he was standing almost behind her, and somehow could reach over her, and he swung a hard downward blow, and struck her almost but not quite parallel with her leg. He'd have to do it two-handed, because nobody can hold a six-inch diameter pipe one-handed. Probably he'd have to stand on a chair, and position her very carefully in front of it. It's not very likely, is it?"
"But is it possible?"
"No," Black said. "It isn't possible. I say that now, and I'd certainly have to say it under oath."
Walker was quiet again.
"What about the collarbone?" he asked.
Black picked up the last report.
"These are very detailed notes," he said. "Clearly an excellent physician."
"But what do they tell you?"
"It's a classic injury," Black said. "The collarbone is like a circuit breaker. A person falls, and they try to break their fall by throwing out their hand. Their whole body weight is turned into a severe physical impact which travels upward as a shock wave through their rigid arm, through their rigid shoulder joint, and onward. Now, if it wasn't for the collarbone, that force would travel into the neck, and probably break it, causing paralysis. Or into the brain pan, causing unconsciousness, maybe a chronic comatose state. But evolution is smart, and it chooses the least of all the evils. The collarbone snaps, thereby dissipating the force. Inconvenient and painful, to be sure, but not life-threatening. A mechanical circuit breaker, and generations of bicyclists and inline skaters and horseback riders have very good reason to be grateful for it."
"Falling can't be the only way," Walker said.
"It's the main way," Black said. "And almost always the only way. But occasionally I've seen it happen other ways, too. A downward blow with a baseball bat aimed at the head might miss and break the collarbone. Falling beams in a burning building might impact against the top of the shoulder. I've seen that with firefighters."
"Carmen Greer wasn't a firefighter," Walker said. "And there's no evidence a baseball bat was involved any other time."
Nobody spoke. The roar of the air conditioners filled the silence.
"O.K.," Walker said. "Let me put it this way. I need evidence that there was violent physical abuse against this woman. Is there any here?"
Black went quiet for a spell. Then he simply shook his head.
"No," he said. "Not within the bounds of reasonable likelihood."
"None at all? Not even a shred?"
"No, I'm afraid not."
"Stretching the bounds of reasonable likelihood?"
"There's nothing there."
"Stretching the bounds all the way until they break?"
"Still nothing. She had a normal pregnancy and she was an unlucky horseback rider. That's all I see here."
"No reasonable doubt?" Walker said. "That's all I need. Just a shred will do."
"It's not there."
Walker paused a beat. "Doctor, please let me say this with the greatest possible respect, O.K.? From a DA's point of view, you've been a pain in the rear end many more times than I can remember, to me and my colleagues throughout the state. There have been times when we're not sure what you've been smoking. You've always been capable of coming up with the most bizarre explanations for almost anything. So I'm asking you. Please. Is there any way at all you could interpret this stuff differently?"
Black didn't answer.
"I'm sorry," Walker said. "I offended you."
"Not in the way you think you did," Black said. "The fact is, I've never offered a bizarre explanation of anything. If I see possible exoneration, I speak up in court, sure. But what you clearly fail to understand is if I don't see possible exoneration, then I don't speak up at all. What your colleagues and I have clashed over in the past is merely the tip of the iceberg. Cases that have no merit don't get to trial, because I advise the defense to plead them out and hope for mercy. And I see many, many cases that have no merit."
"Cases like this one?"
Black nodded. "I'm afraid so. If I had been retained by Ms. Aaron directly, I would tell her that her client's word is not to be trusted. And you're right, I say that very reluctantly, with a long and honorable record of preferring to take the defense's side. Which is a record I have always maintained, despite the attendant risk of annoying our districts' attorneys. And which is a record I always aim to continue, for as long as I am spared. Which might not be much longer, if this damn heat keeps up."
He paused a second and looked around.
"For which reason I must take my leave of you now," he said. "I'm very sorry I was unable to help you, Mr. Walker. Really. It would have been enormously satisfying."
He squared the reports together and slipped them back into the FedEx packet. Handed it to Reacher, who was nearest. Then he stood up and headed for the door.
"But there has to be something," Walker said. "I don't believe this. The one time in my life I want Cowan Black to come up with something, and he can't."
Black shook his head. "I learned a long time ago, sometimes they're just guilty."
He sketched a brief gesture that was half-wave, half-salute, and walked slowly out of the office. The breeze from the air conditioners caught the door and crashed it shut behind him. Alice and Reacher said nothing. Just watched Walker at his desk. Walker dropped his head into his hands and closed his eyes.
"Go away," he said. "Just get the hell out of here and leave me alone."
* * *
The air in the stairwell was hot, and it was worse still out on the sidewalk. Reacher swapped the FedEx packet into his left hand and caught Alice's arm with his right. Stopped her at the curb.
"Is there a good jeweler in town?" he asked.
"I guess," she said. "Why?"
"I want you to sign out her personal property. You're still her lawyer, as far as anybody knows. We'll get her ring appraised. Then we'll find out if she's telling the truth about anything."
"You still got doubts?"
"I'm from the army. First we check, then we double-check."
"O.K.," she said. "If you want."
They turned around and walked down the alley and she took possession of Carmen's lizard skin belt and her ring by signing a form that specified both items as material evidence. Then they went looking for a jeweler. They walked away from the cheap streets and found one ten minutes later in a row of upmarket boutiques. The window display was too crowded to be called elegant, but judging by the price tags the owner had a feel for quality. Or for blind optimism.
"So how do we do this?"
Alice asked.
"Make out it's an estate sale," Reacher said. "Maybe it belonged to your grandmother."
The guy in the store was old and stooped. He might have looked pretty sharp forty years ago. But he still acted sharp. Reacher saw a flash in his eyes. Cops? Then he saw him answer his own question in the negative. Alice didn't look like a cop. Neither did Reacher, which was a mistaken impression he'd traded on for years. Then the guy went into an assessment of how smart these new customers might be. It was transparent, at least to Reacher. He was accustomed to watching people make furtive calculations. He saw him decide to proceed with caution. Alice produced the ring and told him she'd inherited it from family. Told him she was thinking of selling it, if the price was right.
The guy held it under a desk lamp and put a loupe in his eye.
"Color, clarity, cut and carat," he said. "The four Cs. That's what we look for."
He turned the stone left and right. It flashed in the light. He picked up a slip of stiff card that had circular holes punched through it. They started small and got bigger. He fitted the stone in the holes until he found one that fit exactly.
"Two and a quarter carats," he said. "Cut is real handsome. Color is good, maybe just on the yellow side of truly excellent. Clarity isn't flawless, but it's not very far off. This stone ain't bad. Not bad at all. How much do you want for it?"
"Whatever it's worth," Alice said.
"I could give you twenty," the guy said.
"Twenty what?"
"Thousand dollars," the guy said.
"Twenty thousand dollars?"
The guy put up his hands, palms out, defensively.
"I know, I know," he said. "Someone probably told you it's worth more. And maybe it is, retail, some big fancy store, Dallas or somewhere. But this is Pecos, and you're selling, not buying. And I have to make my profit."
