Echo Burning

family I’m telling you about, the border patrol killed their eldest son.”
    “They did?”
    She nodded. “Twelve years ago. They were illegals. Paid their life savings to some guide to get them here, and he just abandoned them in the desert. No food, no water, they’re holing up in the daytime and walking north at night, and a patrol chases them in the dark with rifles and kills their eldest boy. They bury him and walk on.”
    “Anything get done about it?”
    “Are you kidding? They were illegals. They couldn’t do anything. It happened all the time. Everybody’s got a story like that. And now they’re settled and been through the immigration amnesty, we try to get them to trust the law, and then something like this happens. I feel like such a fool.”
    “Not your fault.”
    “It is my fault. I should know better. Trust us, I tell them.”
    She went quiet and Reacher watched her try to recover.
    “Anyway,” she said, and then nothing more. She looked away. She was a good-looking woman. It was very hot. There was a single air conditioner stuck in the fanlight over the door, a big old thing, a long way away. It was doing its best.
    “Anyway,” she said again. Looked at him. “How can I help you?”
    “Not me,” Reacher said. “A woman I know.”
    “She needs a lawyer?”
    “She shot her husband. He was abusing her.”
    “When?”
    “Last night. She’s across the street, in jail.”
    “Is he dead?”
    Reacher nodded. “As a doornail.”
    Her shoulders sagged. She opened a drawer and took out a yellow pad.
    “What’s your name?” she asked.
    “My name?”
    “You’re the one talking to me.”
    “Reacher,” he said. “What’s your name?”
    She wrote “Reacher” on the pad, first line.
    “Alice,” she said. “Alice Amanda Aaron.”
    “You should go into private practice. You’d be first in the Yellow Pages.”
    She smiled, just a little.
    “One day, I will,” she said. “This is a five-year bargain with my conscience.”
    “Paying your dues?”
    “Atoning,” she said. “For my good fortune. For going to Harvard Law. For coming from a family where twenty thousand dollars is a month’s common charge on the Park Avenue co-op instead of life or death during the winter in Texas.”
    “Good for you, Alice,” he said.
    “So tell me about your woman friend.”
    “She’s of Mexican heritage and her husband was white. Her name is Carmen Greer and her husband was Sloop Greer.”
    “Sloop?”
    “Like a boat.”
    “O.K.,” Alice said, and wrote it all down.
    “The abuse stopped for the last year and a half because he was in prison for tax evasion. He got out yesterday and started it up again and she shot him.”
    “O.K.”
    “Evidence and witnesses are going to be hard to find. The abuse was covert.”
    “Injuries?”
    “Fairly severe. But she always passed them off as accidental, to do with horses.”
    “Horses?”
    “Like she fell off of them.”
    “Why?”
    Reacher shrugged. “I don’t know. Family dynamic, coercion, shame, fear, embarrassment, maybe.”
    “But there’s no doubt the abuse happened?”
    “Not in my mind.”
    Alice stopped writing. Stared down at the yellow paper.
    “Well, it’s not going to be easy,” she said. “Texas law isn’t too far behind the times on spousal abuse, but I’d prefer lots of clear evidence. But his spell in prison helps us. Not a model citizen, is he? We could plead it down to involuntary manslaughter. Maybe settle for time served, with probation. If we work hard, we stand a chance.”
    “It was justifiable homicide, not manslaughter.”
    “I’m sure it was, but it’s a question of what will work, and what won’t.”
    “And she needs bail,” Reacher said. “Today.”
    Alice looked up from the paper and stared at him.
    “Bail?” she repeated, like it was a foreign word. “Today? Forget about it.”
    “She’s got a kid. A little girl, six and a half.”
    She wrote it down.
    “Doesn’t help,” she said. “Everybody’s got kids.”
    She ran her fingers up and down the tall stacks of files.
    “They’ve all got kids,” she said again. “Six and a half, one and a half, two kids, six, seven, ten.”
    “She’s called Ellie,” Reacher said. “She needs her mother.”
    Alice wrote “Ellie” on the pad, and connected it with an arrow to “Carmen Greer.”
    “Only two ways to get bail in a case like this,” she said. “First way is we stage essentially the whole trial at the bail hearing. And