Echo Burning

powder?”
    The guy shook his head. “Crime scene diagrams. He was on the far side of the bed. The bed was near the window, gave him an alley two feet six inches wide on his side. He wasfound near the bedside table, up near the head, against the window wall. We know she wasn’t next to him there, or we’d have found all that close-range stuff you just mentioned. So the nearest she could have been was on the other side of the bed. At the foot end, probably. Firing across it, diagonally, according to the trajectories. He was probably retreating as far as he could get. It was a king-size bed, so my best guess is eight feet six inches, to allow for the diagonal.”
    “Excellent,” Reacher said. “You prepared to say so on the stand?”
    “Sure. And that’s only the theoretical minimum. Could have been more.”
    “But what does it mean?” Alice asked.
    “Means Carmen didn’t do it,” Reacher said.
    “Why not?”
    “How big is a man’s forehead? Five inches across and two high?”
    “So?”
    “No way she could have hit a target that small from eight feet plus.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I saw her shoot, the day before. First time she pulled a trigger in her life. She was hopeless. Literally hopeless. She couldn’t have hit the side of a barn from eight feet plus. I told her she’d have to jam the gun in his gut and empty the magazine.”
    “You’re digging her grave,” Alice said. “That sort of testimony shouldn’t be volunteered.”
    “She didn’t do it, Alice. She couldn’t have.”
    “She could have gotten lucky.”
    “Sure, once. But not twice. Twice means they were aimed shots. And they’re close together, horizontally. He’d have started falling after the first one. Which means it was a fast double-tap. Bang bang, like that, no hesitation. That’s skillful shooting.”
    Alice was quiet for a second.
    “She could have been faking,” she said. “You know, before. About needing to learn. She lied about everything else. Maybe she was really an expert shot, but she claimed not tobe. Because she wanted you to do it for her. For other reasons.”
    Reacher shook his head.
    “She wasn’t faking,” he said. “All my life I’ve seen people shoot. Either you can or you can’t. And if you can, it shows. You can’t hide it. You can’t unlearn it.”
    Alice said nothing.
    “It wasn’t Carmen,” Reacher said. “Even I couldn’t have done it. Not with that piece of junk she bought. Not from that distance. A fast double-tap to the head? Whoever did this is a better shooter than me.”
    Alice smiled, faintly. “And that’s rare?”
    “Very,” he said, unselfconsciously.
    “But she confessed to it. Why would she do that?”
    “I have no idea.”

    Ellie wasn’t sure she understood completely. She had hidden on the stairs above the foyer when her grandmother talked to the strangers. She had heard the words new family . She understood what they meant. And she already knew she needed a new family. The Greers had told her that her daddy had died and her mommy had gone far away and wasn’t ever coming back. And they had told her they didn’t want to keep her with them. Which was O.K. with her. She didn’t want to stay with them, either. They were mean. They had already sold her pony, and all the other horses, too. A big truck had come for them, very early that morning. She didn’t cry. She just somehow knew it all went together. No more Daddy, no more Mommy, no more pony, no more horses. Everything had changed. So she went with the strangers, because she didn’t know what else to do.
    Then the strangers had let her talk to her mommy on the phone. Her mommy had cried, and at the end she said be happy with your new family . But the thing was, she wasn’t sure if these strangers were her new family, or if they were just taking her to her new family. And she was afraid to ask. So she just kept quiet. The back of her hand was sore, where she put it in her mouth.

    * * *

    “It’s a can of worms,” Hack Walker said. “You know what I mean? Best not to open it at all. Things could get out of hand, real quick.”
    They were back in Walker’s office. It was easily fifty degrees hotter than the interior of the morgue building. They were both sweating heavily.
    “You understand?” Walker asked. “It makes things worse again.”
    “You think?” Alice said.
    Walker nodded. “It muddies the waters. Let’s say Reacher is right, which is a stretch, frankly, because all