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 to be. 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 / 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 he’s got is a highly subjective opinion here. He’s guessing, basically. And his guess is based on what, exactly? It’s based on an impression she chose to give him beforehand, that she couldn’t shoot, and we already know every other impression she chose to give him beforehand was total bullshit from beginning to end. But let’s say he’s right, just for the sake of argument. What does that give us?”
“What?”
“A conspiracy, is what. We know she tried to rope Reacher in. Now you’ve got her roping somebody else in. She gets ahold of somebody else, she tells them to come to the house, she tells them where and when, she tells them where her gun is concealed, they show up, get the gun, do the deed. If it happened that way, she’s instigated a conspiracy to commit murder for remuneration. Hired a killer, cold-blooded as hell. We go down that road, she’s headed for the lethal injection again. Because that looks a whole lot worse than a solo shot, believe me. In comparison, a solo shot looks almost benign. It looks like a crime of the moment, you know? We leave it exactly the way we got it, along with the guilty plea, I’m happy asking for a life sentence. But we start talking conspiracy, that’s real evil, and we’re back on track for death row.”
Alice said nothing.