Echo Burning

there,” he said.
    Reacher nodded. “I’m glad somewhere is.”
    The guy operated the handle and they went inside. The light was bright. There were fluorescent tubes all over the ceiling. There was a bank of twenty-seven stainless steel drawers on the far wall, nine across, three high. Eight of them were occupied. They had tags slipped into little receptacles on the front, the sort of thing you see on office filing cabinets. The air in the room was frosty. Reacher’s breath clouded in front of him. The pathologist checked the tags and slid a drawer. It came out easily, on cantilevered runners.
    “Had to take the back of his head off,” he said. “Practically had to scoop his brains out with a soup ladle, before I found them.”
    Sloop Greer was on his back and naked. He looked small and collapsed in death. His skin was gray, like unfired clay. It was hard with cold. His eyes were open, blank and staring. He had two bullet holes in his forehead, about three inches apart. They were neat holes, blue and ridged at the edges, like they had been carefully drilled there by a craftsman.
    “Classic .22 gunshot wounds,” the pathologist said. “Thebullets go in O.K., but they don’t come out again. Too slow. Not enough power. They just rattle around in there. But they get the job done.”
    Reacher closed his eyes. Then he smiled. A big, broad grin.
    “That’s for sure,” he said. “They get the job done.”
    There was a knock at the open door. A low sound, like soft knuckles against hard steel. Reacher opened his eyes again. Alice was standing there, shivering.
    “What are you doing?” she called to him.
    “What comes after quadruple-check?” he called back.
    His breath hung in the air in front of him, like a shaped cloud.
    “Quintuple-check,” she said. “Why?”
    “And after that?”
    “Sextuple,” she said. “Why?”
    “Because we’re going to be doing a whole lot of checking now.”
    “Why?”
    “Because there’s something seriously wrong here, Alice. Come take a look.”

14
    Alice walked slowly across the tile.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked.
    “Tell me what you see,” Reacher said.
    She dropped her eyes toward the corpse like it required a physical effort.
    “Shot in the head,” she said. “Twice.”
    “How far apart are the holes?”
    “Maybe three inches.”
    “What else do you see?”
    “Nothing,” she said.
    He nodded. “Exactly.”
    “So?”
    “Look closer. The holes are clean, right?”
    She took a step nearer the drawer. Bent slightly from the waist.
    “They look clean,” she said.
    “That has implications,” he said. “It means they’re not contact wounds. A contact wound is where you put themuzzle of the gun directly against the forehead. You know what happens when you do that?”
    She shook her head. Said nothing.
    “First thing out of a gun barrel is an explosion of hot gas. If the muzzle was tight against the forehead, the gas punches in under the skin and then can’t go anyplace, because of the bone. So it punches right back out again. It tears itself a big star-shaped hole. Looks like a starfish. Right, doc?”
    The pathologist nodded.
    “Star-burst splitting, we call it,” he said.
    “That’s absent here,” Reacher said. “So it wasn’t a contact shot. Next thing out of the barrel is flame. If it was a real close shot, two or three inches, but not a contact shot, we’d see burning of the skin. In a small ring shape.”
    “Burn rim,” the pathologist said.
    “That’s absent, too,” Reacher said. “Next thing out is soot. Soft, smudgy black stuff. So if it was a shot from six or eight inches, we’d see soot smudging on his forehead. Maybe a patch a couple inches wide. That’s not here, either.”
    “So?” Alice asked.
    “Next thing out is gunpowder particles,” Reacher said. “Little bits of unburned carbon. No gunpowder is perfect. Some of it doesn’t burn. It just blasts out, in a spray. It hammers in under the skin. Tiny black dots. Tattooing, it’s called. If it was a shot from a foot away, maybe a foot and a half, we’d see it. You see it?”
    “No,” Alice said.
    “Right. All we see is the bullet holes. Nothing else. No evidence at all to suggest they were from close range. Depends on the exact powder in the shells, but they look to me like shots from three or four feet away, absolute minimum.”
    “Eight feet six inches,” the pathologist said. “That’s my estimation.”
    Reacher glanced at him. “You tested the