Echo Burning

facto siesta on the whole town. Nobody was out and about who didn’t desperately need to be. The mission was largely deserted. Just Alice and Reacher and one other lawyer twenty feet away. The inside temperature was easily over a hundred and ten degrees. The humidity was rising. The ancient air conditioner above the door was making no difference at all. Alice had changed into shorts again. She was leaning back in her chair, arms above her head, her back arched off the sticky vinyl. She was slick with sweat from head to foot. Over the tan it made her skinlook oiled. Reacher’s shirt was soaked. He was reconsidering its projected three-day life span.
    “It’s a catch-22,” Alice said. “Abuse you know about isn’t covert. Really covert abuse, you might assume it isn’t happening. Like, I assume my dad isn’t beating my mom. But maybe he is. Who would know? What about yours?”
    Reacher smiled. “I doubt it. He was a U.S. Marine. Big guy, not especially genteel. But then, you should have seen my mother. Maybe she was beating him.”
    “So yes or no about Carmen and Sloop?”
    “She convinced me,” Reacher said. “No doubt about it.”
    “Despite everything?”
    “She convinced me,” he said again. “Maybe she’s all kinds of a liar about other things, but he was beating her. That’s my belief.”
    Alice looked at him, a lawyer’s question in her eyes.
    “No doubt at all?” she asked.
    “No doubt at all,” he said.
    “O.K., but a difficult case just got a lot harder. And I hate it when that happens.”
    “Me too,” he said. “But hard is not the same thing as impossible.”
    “You understand the exact legalities here?”
    He nodded. “It’s not rocket science. She’s in deep shit, whichever way you cut it. If there was abuse, she’s blown it anyway by being so premeditated. If there wasn’t, then it’s murder one, pure and simple. And whatever, she has zero credibility because she lies and exaggerates. Ballgame over, if Walker didn’t want to be judge so bad.”
    “Exactly,” Alice said.
    “You happy about riding that kind of luck?”
    “No.”
    “Neither am I.”
    “Not morally, not practically,” Alice said. “Anything could happen here. Maybe Hack’s got a love child somewhere, and it’ll come out and he’ll have to withdraw anyway. Maybe he likes to have sex with armadillos. It’s a long time until November. Counting on him to stay electable no matter what would be foolish. So his tactical problem with Carmen coulddisappear at any time. So she needs a properly structured defense.”
    Reacher smiled again. “You’re even smarter than I figured.”
    “I thought you were going to say than I looked.”
    “I think more lawyers should dress that way.”
    “You need to stay off the stand,” she said. “Much safer for her. No deposition, either. Without you, the gun is the only thing that suggests premeditation. And we should be able to argue that buying the gun and actually using it weren’t necessarily closely connected. Maybe she bought it for another reason.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “They’re testing it now,” she said. “Over at the lab. Ballistics and fingerprints. Two sets of prints, they say. Hers, I guess, maybe his, too. Maybe they struggled over it. Maybe the whole thing was an accident.”
    Reacher shook his head. “The second set must be mine. She asked me to teach her how to shoot. We went up on the mesa and practiced.”
    “When?”
    “Saturday. The day before he got home.”
    She stared at him.
    “Christ, Reacher,” she said. “You definitely stay off the stand, O.K.?”
    “I plan to.”
    “What about if things change and they subpoena you?”
    “Then I’ll lie, I guess.”
    “Can you?”
    “I was a cop of sorts for thirteen years. It wouldn’t be a totally radical concept.”
    “What would you say about your prints on the gun?”
    “I’d say I found it dumped somewhere. Innocently gave it back to her. Make it look like she had reconsidered after buying it.”
    “You comfortable with saying stuff like that?”
    “If the ends justify the means, I am. And I think they do here. She’s given herself a problem proving it, is all. You?”
    She nodded. “A case like this, I guess so. I don’t care aboutthe lies about her background. People do stuff like that, all the time, all kinds of reasons. So all that’s left is the premeditation thing. And most other states, premeditation wouldn’t be an issue. They recognize the reality. A