Running Blind (24 page)

She's still holding the screwdriver. You tell her to get into the bath, slowly and carefully. She puts her right foot in. Then her left. She's standing in the paint, up to her calves. You tell her to sit down, slowly. She sits. The paint is up over her waist. Touching the underside of her breasts. You tell her to lie back, slowly and carefully. She slides down into the paint. The level rises, two inches below the lip of the tub. Now you smile. Just right.

You tell her what to do. She doesn't understand at first, because it's a very odd thing to be asked. You explain carefully. She nods. Her hair is thick with paint. She slides down. Now only her face is showing. She tilts her head back. Her hair floats. She uses her fingers to help her. They're slick and dripping with paint. She does exactly what she's been told. She gets it right first time. Her eyes jam open with panic, and then she dies.

You wait five minutes. Just leaning over the tub, not touching anything. Then you do the only thing she can't do for herself. It gets paint on your right glove. Then you press down on her forehead with a fingertip and she slips under the surface. You peel your right glove off inside out. Check the left one. It's OK. You put your right hand in your pocket for safety and you keep it there. This is the only time your prints are exposed.

Your carry the soiled glove in your left hand and walk downstairs in the silence. Slip the glove into the refuse sack with her clothes. Open the door. Listen and watch. Carry the sack outside. Turn around and close the door behind you. Walk down the driveway to the road. Pause behind the car and slip the clean glove in the sack, too. Pop the trunk lid and place the sack inside. Open the door and slide in behind the wheel. Take the keys from your pocket and start the engine. Buckle your belt and check the mirror. Drive away, not fast, not slow.

The Callan file started with a summary of her military career. The career was four years long and the summary ran to forty-eight lines of type. His own name was mentioned once, in connection with the debacle at the end. He found he remembered her pretty well. She had been a small, round woman, cheerful and happy. He guessed she had joined the Army with no very clear idea of why. There's a definite type of person who takes the same route. Maybe from a large family, comfortable with sharing, good at team sports in school, academically proficient without being a scholar, they just drift toward it. They see it as an extension of what they've already known. Probably they don't see themselves as fighters, but they know for every person who holds a gun the Army offers a hundred other niches where there are trades to be learned and qualifications to be earned.

Callan had passed out of basic training and gone straight to the ordnance storerooms. She was a sergeant within twenty months. She shuffled paper and sent consignments around the world pretty much like her contemporaries back home, except her consignments were guns and shells instead of tomatoes or shoes or automobiles. She worked at Fort Withe near Chicago in a warehouse full of the stink of gun oil and the noise of clattering forklifts. She had been content at first. Then the rough banter had gotten too much, and her captain and her major had started stepping over the line and talking dirty and acting physical. She was no shrinking violet, but the pawing and the leering eventually brought her to Reacher's office.

Then after she quit she went to Florida, to a beach town on the Atlantic forty miles north of where it stopped being too expensive. She got married there, got separated there, lived there a year, then died there. The file was full of notes and photographs about where and nothing much about how. Her house was a modern one-story crouching under an overhanging roof made of orange tile. The crime scene photographs showed no damage to any doors or windows, no disruption inside, a white-tiled bathroom with a tub full of green paint and a slick indeterminate shape floating in it.

The autopsy showed nothing at all. The paint was designed to be tough and weatherproof and it had a molecular structure designed to cling and penetrate anything it was slapped onto. It covered a hundred percent of the body's external area and it had seeped into the eyes and the nose and the mouth and the throat. Removing it removed the skin. There was no evidence of bruising or trauma. The toxicology was clear. No phenol injection to the heart. No air embolisms. There are many clever ways to kill a person, and the Florida pathologists knew all of them, and they couldn't find any evidence of any of them.

"Well?" Harper said.

Reacher shrugged. "She had freckles. I remember that. A year in the Florida sun, she must have looked pretty good."

"You liked her."

He nodded. "She was OK."

The final third of the file was some of the most exhaustive crime scene forensics he had ever heard of. The analysis was microscopic, literally. Every particle of dust or fiber in her house had been vacuumed up and analyzed. But there was no evidence of any intruder. Not the slightest sign.

"A very clever guy," Reacher said.

Harper said nothing in reply. He pushed Callan's folder to one side and opened Cooke's. It followed the same format in its condensed narrative structure. She was different from Callan in that she had obviously aimed for the Army right from the start. Her grandfather and her father had been Army men, which creates a kind of military aristocracy, the way certain families see it. She had recognized the clash between her gender and her career intention pretty early, and there were notes about her demands to join her high school ROTC. She had begun her battles early.

She had been an officer candidate, and had started out a second lieutenant. She had gone straight to War Plans, which is where the brainy people waste their time assuming that when push comes to shove your friends stay your friends and your enemies stay your enemies. She had been promoted first lieutenant and posted to NATO in Brussels and started a relationship with her colonel. When she didn't get promoted captain early enough, she complained about him.

Reacher remembered it well. There was no harassment involved, certainly not in the sense that Callan had endured. No strangers had pinched her or squeezed her or made lewd gestures at her with oily gun barrels. But the rules had changed, so that sleeping with somebody you commanded was no longer allowed, so Cooke's colonel went down, and then ate his pistol. She quit and flew home from Belgium to a lakeside cottage in New Hampshire, where she was eventually found dead in a tub full of setting paint.

The New Hampshire pathologists and forensic scientists told the same story their Florida counterparts had, which was absolutely no story at all. The notes and the photographs were the same but different. A gray cedar house crowded by trees, an undamaged door, an undisturbed interior, folksy bathroom decor dominated by the dense green contents of the tub. Reacher skimmed through and closed the folder.

"What do you think?" Harper asked.

"I think the paint is weird," Reacher said.

"Why?"

He shrugged. "It's so circular, isn't it? It eliminates evidence on the bodies, which reduces risk, but getting it and transporting it creates risk."

"And it's like a deliberate clue," Harper said. "It underlines the motive. It's definite confirmation it's an Army guy. It's like a taunt."

"Lamarr says it has psychological significance. She says he's reclaiming them for the military."

Harper nodded. "By taking their clothes, too."

"But if he hates them enough to kill them, why would he want to reclaim them?"

"I don't know. A guy like this, who knows how he thinks?"

"Lamarr thinks she knows how he thinks," Reacher said.

Lorraine Stanley's file was the last of the three. Her history was similar to Callan's, but more recent. She was younger. She had been a sergeant, bottom of the totem pole in a giant quartermaster facility in Utah, the only woman in the place. She had been pestered since day one. Her competence had been questioned. One night her barrack was broken into and all her uniform trousers were stolen. She reported for duty the next morning wearing her regulation skirt. The next night, all her underwear was stolen. The next morning she was wearing the skirt and nothing underneath. Her lieutenant called her into his office. Made her stand easy in the middle of the room, one foot either side of a large mirror laid on the floor, while he yelled at her for a paperwork snafu. The whole of the personnel roster filed in and out of the office throughout, getting a good look at the reflection in the mirror. The lieutenant ended up in prison and Stanley ended up serving out another year and then living alone and dying alone in San Diego, in the little bungalow shown in the crime scene photographs, in which the California pathologists and forensics people had found absolutely nothing at all.

"How old are you?" Reacher asked.

"Me?" Harper said. "Twenty-nine. I told you that. It's an FAQ."

"From Colorado, right?"

"Aspen."

"Family?"

"Two sisters, one brother."

"Older or younger?"

"All older. I'm the baby."

"Parents?"

"Dad's a pharmacist, Mom helps him out."

"You take vacations when you were kids?"

She nodded. "Sure. Grand Canyon, Painted Desert, all over. One year we camped in Yellowstone."

"You drove there, right?"

She nodded again. "Sure. Big station wagon full of kids, happy family sort of thing. What's this about?"

"What do you remember about the drives?"

She made a face. "They were endless."

"Exactly."

"Exactly what?"

"This is a real big country."

"So?"

"Caroline Cooke was killed in New Hampshire and Lorraine Stanley was killed three weeks later in San Diego. That's about as far apart as you can get, right? Maybe thirty-five hundred miles by road. Maybe more."

"Is he traveling by road?"

Reacher nodded. "He's got hundreds of gallons of paint to haul around."

"Maybe he's got a stockpile stashed away someplace."

"That just makes it worse. Unless his stash just happened to be on a direct line between where he's based now and New Hampshire and southern California, he'd have to detour to get it. It would add distance, maybe a lot of distance."

"So?"

"So he's got a three-, four-thousand-mile road trip, plus surveillance time on Lorraine Stanley. Could he do that in a week?"

Harper made a face. "Call it seventy hours at fifty-five miles an hour."

"Which he couldn't average. He'd pass through towns and road construction. And he wouldn't break the speed limit. A guy this meticulous isn't going to risk some trooper sniffing around his vehicle. Hundreds of gallons of camouflage basecoat is going to arouse some suspicions these days, right?"

"So call it a hundred hours on the road."

"At least. Plus a day or two surveillance when he gets there. That's more than a week, in practical terms. It's ten or eleven days. Maybe twelve."

"So?"

"You tell me."

"This is not some guy working two weeks on, one week off."

Reacher nodded. "No, it's not."

They walked outside and around toward the block with the cafeteria in it. The weather had settled to what fall should be. The air was ten degrees warmer, but still crisp. The lawns were green and the sky was a shattering blue. The dampness had blown away and the leaves on the surrounding trees looked dry and two shades lighter.

"I feel like staying outside," Reacher said.

"You need to work," Harper said.

"I read the damn files. Reading them over again isn't going to help me any. I need to do some thinking."

"You think better outside?"

"Generally."

"OK, come to the range. I need to qualify on handguns."

"You're not qualified already?"

She smiled. "Of course I am. We have to requalify every month. Regulations."

They took sandwiches from the cafeteria and ate as they walked. The out door pistol range was Sunday-quiet, a large space the size of a hockey rink, bermed on three sides with high earth walls. There were six separate firing lanes made out of shoulder-high concrete walls running all the way down to six separate targets. The targets were heavy paper, clipped into steel frames. Each paper was printed with a picture of a crouching felon, with target rings radiating out from his heart. Harper signed in with the rangemaster and handed him her gun. He reloaded it with six shells and handed it back, together with two sets of ear defenders.