Walker closed his eyes. Said nothing. He looked old and pale. The candlelight wasn't helping him.
"But you made mistakes, Hack," Reacher said. "People like you always make mistakes. The financial reports were clumsy. Lots of money, but hardly any expenditure? How likely is that? What is she, a miser, too? And the messenger thing was a bad slip. If they had been messengered, you'd have left them in the courier packet, like you did with the medical reports, to make them look even more official."
Walker opened his eyes, defiant.
"The medical reports," he repeated. "You saw them. They prove she was lying. You heard Cowan Black say it."
Reacher nodded. "Leaving them in the FedEx packet was neat. They looked real urgent, like they were hot off the truck. But you should have torn the label off the front. Because the thing is, FedEx charges by weight. And I weighed the packet on Alice's kitchen scales. One pound, one ounce. But the label said two pounds and nine ounces. So one of two things must have happened. Either FedEx ripped off the hospital by padding the charge, or you took out about sixty percent of the contents and trashed them. And you know what? I vote for you checking the contents before you sent them over to us. You've been a DA for a spell, you've tried a lot of cases, you know what convincing evidence looks like. So anything about the beatings went straight in the trash. All you left were the genuine accidents. But the road rash thing passed you by, so you left the collarbone in by mistake. Or maybe you felt you had to leave it in, because you know she's got a healed knot clearly visible and you figured I'd have noticed it."
Walker said nothing. The lantern hissed.
"The broken arm, the jaw, the teeth," Reacher said. "My guess is there are five or six more folders in a dumpster somewhere. Probably not behind the courthouse. Probably not in your backyard, either. I guess you're smarter than that. Maybe they're in a trashcan at the bus station. Some big public place."
Walker said nothing. The candle flames danced. Reacher smiled.
"But you were mostly pretty good," he said. "When I figured Carmen wasn't the shooter, you steered it straight back to a conspiracy involving Carmen. You didn't miss a beat. Even when I made the link to Eugene, you kept on track. You were very shocked. You went all gray and sweaty. Not because you were upset about Al. But because he'd been found so soon. You hadn't planned on that. But still, you thought for ten seconds and came up with the IRS motive. But you know what? You were so busy thinking, you forgot to be scared enough. About the two-for-three possibility. It was a plausible threat. You should have been much more worried. Anybody else would have been."
Walker said nothing.
"And you got Sloop out on a Sunday," Reacher said. "Not easy to do. But you didn't do it for him. You did it so he could be killed on a Sunday, so Carmen could be framed on a Sunday and spend the maximum time in jail before visitors could get near her the next Saturday. To give yourself five clear days to work on her."
Walker said nothing.
"Lots of mistakes, Hack," Reacher said. "Including sending people after me. Like old Copernicus says, what were the chances they'd be good enough?"
Walker said nothing. Bobby was leaning forward, staring sideways across his mother, looking straight at him. Catching on, slowly.
"You sent people to kill my brother?" he breathed.
"No," Walker said. "Reacher's wrong."
Bobby stared at him like he'd answered yes instead.
"But why would you!" he asked. "You were friends."
Then Walker looked up, straight at Reacher.
"Yes, why would I?" he said. "What possible motive could I have?"
"Something Benjamin Franklin once wrote," Reacher said.
"What the hell does that mean?"
"You wanted to be a judge. Not because you wanted to do good. That was all sanctimonious bullshit. It was because you wanted the trappings. You were born a poor boy and you were greedy for money and power. And it was right there in front of you. But first you had to get elected. And what sort of a thing stops a person getting elected?"
Walker just shrugged.
"Old scandals," Reacher said. "Among other things. Old secrets, coming back at you from the past. Sloop and Al and you were a threesome, way back when. Did all kinds of stuff together. You three against the world. You told me that. So there's Sloop, in prison for cheating on his taxes. He can't stand it in there. So he thinks, how do I get out of here? Not by repaying my debts. By figuring, my old pal Hack is running for judge this year. Big prize, all that money and power. What's he prepared to do to get it? So he calls you up and says he could start some serious rumors about some old activities if you don't broker his way out of there. You think it over carefully. You figure Sloop wouldn't incriminate himself by talking about something you all did together, so at first you relax. Then you realize there's a large gap between the sort of facts that would convict you and the sort of rumors that would wreck your chances in the election. So you cave in. You take some of your campaign donations and arrange to pay off the IRS with it. Now Sloop's happy. But you're not. In your mind, the cat is out of the bag. Sloops threatened you once. What about the next time he wants something? And Al's involved, because he's Sloop's lawyer. So now it's all fresh in Al's mind too. Your chances of making judge are suddenly vulnerable."
Walker said nothing.
"You know what Ben Franklin once wrote?" Reacher asked.
"What?"
"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
Silence in the room. No movement, no breathing. Just the soft hiss of the lantern and the flickering of the tiny candle flames.
"What was the secret?" Alice whispered.
"Three boys in rural Texas," Reacher said. "Growing up together, playing ball, having fun. They get a little older, they turn their attention to what their dads are doing. The guns, the rifles, the hunting. Maybe they start with the armadillos. They shouldn't, really, because they're protected. By the tree-huggers. But the attitude is, they're on my land, they're mine to hunt. Bobby said that to me. An arrogant attitude. A superior attitude. I mean, hey, what's an armadillo worth? But armadillos are slow and boring prey. Too easy. The three boys are growing up. They're three young men now. High school seniors. They want a little more excitement. So they go looking for coyotes, maybe. Worthier opponents. They hunt at night. They use a truck. They range far and wide. And soon they find bigger game. Soon they find a real thrill."
"What?"
"Mexicans," Reacher said. "Poor anonymous no-account brown families stumbling north through the desert at night. And I mean, hey, what are they worth? Are they even human? But they make great prey. They run, and they squeal. Almost like hunting actual people, right, Hack?"
Silence in the room.
"Maybe they started with a girl," Reacher said. "Maybe they didn't mean to kill her. But they did anyway. Maybe they had to. Couple of days, they're nervous. They hold their breath. But there's no comeback. Nobody reacts. Nobody even cares. So hey, this is suddenly fun. Then they're out often. It becomes a sport. The ultimate kill. Better than armadillos. They take that old pick-up, one of them driving, two of them riding in the load bed, they hunt for hours. Bobby said Sloop invented that technique. Said he was real good at it. I expect he was. I expect they all were. They got plenty of practice. They did it twenty-five times in a year."
"That was the border patrol," Bobby said.
"No, it wasn't. The report wasn't a whitewash. It didn't read like one, and the inside word is it was kosher. Sergeant Rodriguez told me that. And people like Sergeant Rodriguez know things like that, believe me. The investigation got nowhere because it was looking in the wrong place. It wasn't a bunch of rogue officers. It was three local boys called Sloop Greer and Al Eugene and Hack Walker. Having fun in that old pick-up truck that's still parked in your barn. Boys will be boys, right?"
Silence in the room.
"The attacks were mostly in Echo County," Reacher said. "That struck me as odd. Why would the border patrol come so far north? Truth is, they didn't. Three Echo boys went a little ways south instead."
Silence.
"The attacks stopped in late August," Reacher said. "Why was that? Not because the investigation scared them off. They didn't know about the investigation. It was because college opens early September. They went off to be freshmen. The next summer it was too dangerous or they'd grown out of it, and they didn't ever do it again. The whole thing faded into history, until twelve years later Sloop was sitting in a cell somewhere and dragged it all up because he was so desperate to get out."
Everybody was staring straight at Walker. His eyes were closed tight and he was deathly pale.
"It seemed so unfair, right?" Reacher said to him. "All that was way in the past. Maybe you weren't even a willing participant in the first place. Maybe the others dragged you into it. And now it was all coming back at you. It was a nightmare. It was going to ruin your life. It was going to take away the big prize. So you made some calls. Made some decisions. Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
Another candle died. The wick hissed and smoke plumed.
"No," Walker said. "It wasn't like that."