"It's coming up," he said.
Alice slowed. The red-painted picket fence replaced the wire and the gate swam into view through the haze. Alice braked and turned in under it. The small car bounced uncomfortably across the yard. She stopped it close to the bottom of the familiar porch steps and turned off the motor. The whole place was silent. No activity. But people were home, because all the cars were lined up in the vehicle barn. The white Cadillac was there, and the Jeep Cherokee, and the new pick-up, and the old pick-up. They were all crouched there in the shadows.
They got out of the car and stood for a second behind the open doors, like they offered protection from something. The air was very still, and hotter than ever. Easily a hundred and ten degrees, maybe more. He led her up the porch steps into the shadow of the roof and knocked on the door. It opened almost immediately. Rusty Greer was standing there. She was holding a .22 rifle, one-handed. She stayed silent for a long moment, just looking him over. Then she spoke.
"It's you," she said. "I thought it might be Bobby."
"You lost him?" Reacher said.
Rusty shrugged. "He went out. He isn't back yet."
Reacher glanced back at the motor barn.
"All the cars are here," he said.
"Somebody picked him up," Rusty said. "I was upstairs. Didn't see them. Just heard them."
Reacher said nothing.
"Anyway," Rusty said. "I didn't expect to see you again, ever."
"This is Carmen's lawyer," Reacher said.
Rusty turned and glanced at Alice. "This is the best she could do?"
"We need to see Ellie."
"What for?"
"We're interviewing witnesses."
"A child can't be a witness."
"I'll decide that," Alice said.
Rusty just smiled at her.
"Ellie's not here," she said.
"Well, where is she?" Reacher said. "She's not in school."
Rusty said nothing.
"Mrs. Greer, we need to know where Ellie is," Alice said.
Rusty smiled again. "I don't know where she is, lawyer girl."
"Why not?" Alice asked.
"Because Family Services took her, that's why not."
"When?"
"This morning. They came for her."
"And you let them take her?" Reacher said.
"Why wouldn't I? I don't want her. Now that Sloop is gone."
Reacher stared at her. "But she's your granddaughter."
Rusty made a dismissive gesture. The rifle moved in her hand.
"That's a fact I was never thrilled about," she said.
"Where did they take her?"
"An orphanage, I guess," Rusty said. "And then she'll get adopted, if anybody wants her. Which they probably won't. I understand half-breeds are very difficult to place. Decent folk generally don't want beaner trash."
There was silence. Just the tiny sounds of dry earth baking in the heat.
"I hope you get a tumor," Reacher said.
He turned around and walked back to the car without waiting for Alice. Got in and slammed the door and sat staring forward with his face burning and his massive hands clenching and unclenching. She got in beside him and fired up the motor.
"Get me out of here," he said. She took off in a cloud of dust. Neither of them spoke a single word, all the way north to Pecos.
* * *
It was three in the afternoon when they got back, and the legal mission was half empty because of the heat. There was the usual thicket of messages on Alice's desk. Five of them were from Hack Walker. They made a neat little sequence, each of them more urgent than the last.
"Shall we go?" Alice asked.
"Don't tell him about the diamond," Reacher said.
"It's over now, don't you see?"
And it was. Reacher saw it right away in Walker's face. There was relaxation there. Some kind of finality. Closure. Some kind of peace. He was sitting behind his desk. His desk was all covered with papers. They were arranged in two piles. One was taller than the other.
"What?" Reacher asked.
Walker ignored him and handed a single sheet to Alice.
"Waiver of her Miranda rights," he said. "Read it carefully. She's declining legal representation, and she's declaring that it's entirely voluntary. And she adds that she refused your representation from the very start."
"I doubted her competence," Alice said.
Walker nodded. "I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. But there's no doubt now. So you're here purely as a courtesy, O.K.? Both of you."
Then he handed over the smaller pile of papers. Alice took them and fanned them out and Reacher leaned to his right to look at them. They were computer printouts. They were all covered in figures and dates. They were bank records. Balance statements and transaction listings. Credits and debits. There seemed to be five separate accounts. Two were regular checking accounts. Three were money-market deposits. They were titled Greer Non-Discretionary Trust, numbers one through five. The balances were healthy. Very healthy. There was a composite total somewhere near two million dollars.
"Al Eugene's people messengered them over," Walker said. "Now look at the bottom sheets."
Alice riffed through. The bottom sheets were paper-clipped together. Reacher read over her shoulder. There was a lot of legal text. It added up to the formal minutes of a trust agreement. There was a notarized deed attached. It stated in relatively straightforward language that for the time being a single trustee was in absolute sole control of all Sloop Greets funds. That single trustee was identified as Sloop Greer's legal wife, Carmen.
"She had two million bucks in the bank," Walker said. "All hers, effectively."
Reacher glanced at Alice. She nodded.
"He's right," she said.
"Now look at the last clause of the minutes," Walker said.
Alice turned the page. The last clause concerned reversion. The trusts would become discretionary once again and return the funds to Sloop's own control at a future date to be specified by him. Unless he first became irreversibly mentally incapacitated. Or died. Whereupon all existing balances would become Carmen's sole property, in the first instance as a matter of prior agreement, and in the second, as a matter of inheritance.
"Is all of that clear?" Walker asked.
Reacher said nothing, but Alice nodded.
Then Walker passed her the taller pile.
"Now read this," he said.
"What is it?" she asked.
"A transcript," Walker said. "Of her confession."
There was silence.
"She confessed?" Alice said.
"We videotaped it," Walker said.
"When?"
"Noon today. My assistant went to see her as soon as the financial stuff came in. We tried to find you first, but we couldn't. Then she told us she didn't want a lawyer anyway. So we had her sign the waiver. Then she spilled her guts. We brought her up here and videotaped the whole thing over again. It's not pretty."
Reacher was half-listening, half-reading. It wasn't pretty. That was for damn sure. It started out with all the usual assurances about free will and absolute absence of coercion. She stated her name. Went all the way back to her L.A. days. She had been an illegitimate child. She had been a hooker. Street stroller, she called it. Some odd barrio expression, Reacher assumed. Then she came off the streets and started stripping, and changed her title to sex worker. She had latched onto Sloop, just like Walker had claimed. My meal ticket, she called him. Then it became a story of impatience. She was bored witless in Texas. She wanted out, but she wanted money in her pocket. The more money the better. Sloop's IRS trouble was a godsend. The trusts were tempting. She tried to have him killed in prison, which she knew from her peers was possible, but she found out that a federal minimum-security facility wasn't that sort of a place. So she waited. As soon as she heard he was getting out, she bought the gun and went recruiting. She planned to leverage her marks with invented stories about domestic violence. Reacher's name was mentioned as the last pick. He had refused, so she did it herself. Having already fabricated the abuse claims, she intended to use them to get off with self-defense, or diminished responsibility, or whatever else she could manage. But then she realized her hospital records would come up blank, so she was confessing and throwing herself on the mercy of the prosecutor. Her signature was scrawled on the bottom of every page.
Alice was a slow reader. She came to the end a full minute after him.
"I'm sorry, Reacher," she said.
There was silence for a moment.
"What about the election?" Reacher asked. The last hope.
Walker shrugged. "Texas code says it's a capital crime. Murder for remuneration. We've got enough evidence to choke a pig. And I can't ignore a voluntary confession, can I? So, couple hours ago I was pretty down. But then I got to thinking about it. Fact is, a voluntary confession helps me out. A confession and a guilty plea, saves the taxpayer the cost of a trial. Justifies me asking for a life sentence instead. The way I see it, with a story like that, she's going to look very, very bad, whoever you are. So if I back off the death penalty, I'll look magnanimous in comparison. Generous, even. The whites will fret a little, but the Mexicans will eat it up with a spoon. See what I mean? The whole thing is reversed now. She was the good guy, I was the heavy hand. But now she's the heavy hand, and I'm the good guy. So I think I'm O.K."