“I don’t know,” Reacher said.
“I don’t, either. But maybe it won’t have to go all the way to trial. If the medical evidence is a little flexible, and we take a deposition from Carmen, and one from you, then maybe dropping the charges altogether would be justified.”
“Lying in a deposition would be just as bad.”
“Think about Ellie.”
“And your judgeship.”
Walker nodded. “I’m not hiding that from you. I want to get elected, no doubt about it. But it’s for an honest reason. I want to make things better, Reacher. It’s always been my ambition. Work my way up, improve things from the inside. It’s the only way. For a person like me, anyway. I’ve got no influence as a lobbyist. I’m not a politician, really. I find all that stuff embarrassing. I don’t have the skills.”
Reacher said nothing.
“Let me think it over,” Walker said. “A day or two. I’ll take it from there.”
“You sure?”
Walker sighed again. “No, of course I’m not sure. I hate this whole thing. But what the hell, Sloop’s dead. Nothing’s going to change that. Nothing’s going to bring him back. It’ll trash his memory, of course. But it would save Carmen. And he loved her, Reacher. In a way nobody else could ever understand. The disapproval he brought down on himself was unbelievable. From his family, from
polite society. He’d be happy to exchange his reputation for her life, I think. His life for her life, effectively. He’d exchange mine, or Al’s, or anybody’s, probably. He loved her.”
There was silence again.
“She needs bail,” Reacher said.
“Please,” Walker said. “It’s out of the question.”
“Ellie needs her.”
“That’s a bigger issue than bail,” Walker said. “Ellie can stand a couple of days with her grandmother. It’s the rest of her life we need to worry about. Give me time to work this out.”
Reacher shrugged and stood up.
“This is all in strict confidence, right?” Walker said. “I guess I should have made that clear right from the start.”
Reacher nodded.
“Get back to me,” he said.
Then he stood up and walked out the room.
Chapter 12
“One simple question,” Alice said. “Is it plausible that domestic abuse could be so covert that close friends are totally unaware of it?”
“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “I don’t have much experience.”
“Neither do I.”
They were on opposite sides of Alice’s desk in the back of the legal mission. It was the middle of the day, and the heat was so brutal it was enforcing a de facto siesta on the whole town. Nobody was out and about who didn’t desperately need to be. The mission was largely deserted. Just Alice and Reacher and one other lawyer twenty feet away. The inside temperature was easily over a hundred and ten degrees. The humidity was rising. The ancient air conditioner above the door was making no difference at all. Alice had changed into shorts again. She was leaning back in her chair, arms above her head, her back arched off the sticky vinyl. She was slick with sweat from head to foot. Over the tan it made her skin look oiled. Reacher’s shirt was soaked. He was reconsidering its projected three-day life span.
“It’s a catch-22,” Alice said. “Abuse you know about isn’t covert. Really covert abuse, you might assume it isn’t happening. Like, I assume my dad isn’t beating my mom. But maybe he is. Who would know? What about yours?”
Reacher smiled. “I doubt it. He was a U.S. Marine. Big guy, not especially genteel. But then, you should have seen my mother. Maybe she was beating him.”
“So yes or no about Carmen and Sloop?”
“She convinced me,” Reacher said. “No doubt about it.”
“Despite everything?”
“She convinced me,” he said again. “Maybe she’s all kinds of a liar about other things, but he was beating her. That’s my belief.”
Alice looked at him, a lawyer’s question in her eyes.
“No doubt at all?” she asked.
“No doubt at all,” he said.
“O.K., but a difficult case just got a lot harder. And I hate it when that happens.”
“Me too,” he said. “But hard is not the same thing as impossible.”