Echo Burning

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