One Shot

clearly seen. Her eyes looked kind and welcoming, and reassuring. How much of that was bedside manner and how much was for real, Reacher didn’t know.
    “How do you do this?” he asked her.
    “The assessment?” she said. “I start out assuming it’s more likely to be real than fake. A brain injury bad enough for a two-day coma almost always produces amnesia. Those data were settled long ago. Then I just watch the patient. True amnesiacs are very unsettled by their condition. They’re disoriented and frightened. You can see them really trying to remember. They want to remember. Fakers show up different. You can see them avoiding the days in question. They look away from them mentally. Sometimes even physically. There’s often some distinctive body language.”
    “Kind of subjective,” Reacher said.
    Mason nodded. “It is basically subjective. It’s very hard to prove a negative. You can use brain scans to show differing brain activity, but what the scans actually
mean
is still subjective. Hypnotism is sometimes useful, but courts are scared of hypnotism, generally. So yes, I’m in the opinion business, nothing more.”
    “Who does the prosecution hire?”
    “Someone exactly like me. I’ve worked both sides of the fence.”
    “So it’s he said, she said?”
    Mason nodded again. “It’s usually about which of us has more letters after her name. That’s what juries respond to.”
    “You’ve got a lot of letters.”
    “More than most people,” Mason said.
    “How much will he have forgotten?”
    “Several days, minimum. If the trauma happened Saturday, I’d be very surprised if he remembers anything after Wednesday. Before that there’ll be a shadowy period just about as long where he remembers some things and not others. But that’s the minimum. I’ve seen cases where months are missing, sometimes after concussions, not even comas.”
    “Will anything come back?”
    “From the initial shadowy period, possibly. He might be able to work backward from the last thing he remembers, through the preceding few days. He might be able to pick out a few previous incidents. Working forward, he’ll be much more limited. If he remembers his last lunch, he might eventually get as far as dinner. If he remembers being out at a movie, he might eventually recall driving home. But there’ll be a hard boundary somewhere. Typically it would be when he went to sleep on the last day he’s aware of.”
    “Will he remember fourteen years ago?”
    Mason nodded. “His long-term memory should be unimpaired. Different people seem to have different internal definitions of long- term, because there seems to be a literal chemical migration from one part of the brain to another, and no two brains are identical. The physical biology isn’t well understood. People like to use computer metaphors now, but that’s all wrong. It’s not about hard drives and random access memory. The brain is entirely organic. It’s like throwing a bag of apples down the stairs. Some bruise, some don’t. But I would say fourteen years counts as long-term for just about anybody.”
    The waiting area went quiet. Reacher listened to the distant electronic pulse. It was a sinus rhythm, he guessed, from a machine that was either monitoring a heartbeat or causing one. It was running at about seventy beats a minute. It was a restful sound. He liked it. Then a door opened halfway down a corridor and Rosemary Barr stepped out of a room. She was showered and her hair was brushed but she looked thin and exhausted and sleepless and ten years older than the day before. She stood still for a moment and then looked right, looked left, and walked slowly toward the waiting area. Helen Rodin got up and went to meet her halfway. They stood together, talking low. Reacher couldn’t hear what they were saying. A two-way progress report, he guessed, first medical, then legal. Then Helen took Rosemary’s arm and led her onward to the group. Rosemary looked at the two psychiatrists, at Alan Danuta, at Reacher. She said nothing. Then she walked on alone toward the security desk. Didn’t look back.
    “Avoidance,” Niebuhr said. “We’re all here to poke and prod at her brother, physically, mentally, legally, metaphorically. That’s invasive and unattractive. And to acknowledge us means to acknowledge her brother’s jeopardy.”
    “Maybe she’s just tired,” Reacher said.
    “I’m going in to see him now,” Helen said.
    She walked back up the