by Lee Child
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.
“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.
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br /> “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?”
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“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 that 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.”