Echo burning. A Jack Reacher Novel. Lee Child

Two thirds of the killing crew rolled south out of Pecos, uncharacteristically quiet. The third member waited in the motel room, pensive. They were taking risks now. Twelve years in the business, and they had never worked one area so long. It had always seemed too dangerous. In and out, quick and clean, had been their preferred method. Now they were departing from it. Radically. So there had been no conversation that morning. No jokes, no banter. No pre-mission excitement. Just a lot of nervous preoccupation with private thoughts.

But they had readied the car on schedule, and assembled the things they would need. Then they had half-eaten breakfast, and sat quiet, checking their watches.

“Nine-twenty,” the woman said eventually. “It’s time.”

There was a visitor already seated in Walker’s office. He was a man of maybe seventy, overweight and florid, and he was suffering badly in the heat. The air conditioners were going so hard that the rush of air was audible over the drone of the motors and papers were lifting off the desk. But the indoor temperature was still somewhere in the middle nineties. The visitor was mopping his brow with a large white handkerchief. Walker himself had his jacket off and was sitting absolutely still in his chair with his head in his hands. He had copies of the medical reports laid side by side on his desk and he was staring at them like they were written in a foreign language. He looked up blankly, and then he made a vague gesture toward the stranger.

“This is Cowan Black,” he said. “Eminent professor of forensic medicine, lots of other things, too. The renowned defense expert. This is probably the first time he’s ever been in a DA’s office.”

Alice stepped over and shook the guy’s hand.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, sir,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Cowan Black said nothing. Alice introduced Reacher and they all shuffled their chairs into an approximate semicircle around the desk.

“The reports came in first thing this morning,” Walker said. “Everything on file from Texas, which was one hospital only. There was nothing at all from New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Louisiana. I personally photocopied everything and immediately sent the originals over to you. Dr. Black arrived a half hour ago and has studied the copies. He wants to see the X rays. Those, I couldn’t copy.”

Reacher passed the FedEx packet to Black, who spilled the contents the same way Alice had and extracted the three X-ray films. The ribs, the leg, the collarbone. He held them up against the light from the window and studied them, one by one, for minutes each. Then he slipped them back in their appropriate folders, neatly, like he was a man accustomed to order and precision.

Walker sat forward. “So, Dr. Black, are you able to offer us a preliminary opinion?”

He sounded tense, and very formal, like he was already in court. Black picked up the first folder. The oldest, the palest, the one about Ellie’s birth.

“This is nothing at all,” he said. His voice was deep and dark and rotund, like a favorite uncle in an old movie. A perfect voice for the witness stand. “This is purely routine obstetrics. Interesting only in that a rural Texas hospital was operating at a level that would have been considered state-of-the-art a decade or so earlier.”

“Nothing untoward?”

“Nothing at all. One assumes the husband caused the pregnancy, but aside from that there’s no evidence he did anything to her.”

“The others?”

Black switched files, to the damaged ribs. Pulled the X-ray film out and held it ready.

“Ribs are there for a purpose,” he said. “They form a hard, bony, protective cage to protect the vulnerable internal organs from damage. But not a rigid cage. That would be foolish, and evolution isn’t a foolish process. No, the rib cage is a sophisticated structure. If it were rigid, the bones would shatter under any kind of severe blow. But there’s complex ligament suspension involved at each of the bone terminations, so the cage’s first response is to yield and distort, in order to spread the force of the impact.”

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