The Visitor, page 17
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 per cent 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 fibre in her house had been vacuumed up and analysed. 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 soon, 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 to 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 grey 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 on 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 barracks 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 the glasshouse 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 travelling 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 frowned. ‘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 outdoor pistol range was Sunday-quiet, a large space the size of a hockey rink, bermed at 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.
‘Take lane three,’ he said.
Lane three was in the centre. There was a black line painted on the concrete floor.
‘Seventy-five feet,’ Harper said.
She stood square on and slipped the ear-defenders into position. Raised the gun two-handed. Her legs were apart and her knees slightly bent. Her hips were forward and her shoulders back. She loosed off the six shots in a stream, half a second between them. Reacher watched the tendons in her hand. They were tight, rocking the muzzle up and down a fraction each time she pulled.
‘Clear,’ she said.
He looked at her.
‘That means you go get the target,’ she said.
He expected to see the hits arranged on a vertical line maybe a foot long, and when he got down to the other end of the lane, that was exactly what he found. There were two holes in the heart, two in the next ring, and two in the ring connecting the throat with the stomach. He unclipped the paper and carried it back.
‘Two fives, two fours, two threes,’ she said. ‘Twenty-four points. I pass, just.’
‘You should use your left arm more,’ he said.
‘How?’
‘Take all the weight with your left, and just use your right for pulling the trigger.’
She paused.
‘Show me,’ she said.
He stepped close behind her and stretched around with his left arm. She raised the gun in her right and he cupped her hand in his.
‘Relax the arm,’ he said. ‘Let me take the weight.’
His arms were long, but hers were, too. She shuffled backward and pressed hard against him. He leaned forward. Rested his chin on the side of her head. Her hair smelled good.
‘OK, let it float,’ he said.
She clicked the trigger on the empty chamber a couple of times. The muzzle was rock-steady.
‘Feels good,’ she said.
‘Go get some more shells.’
She peeled away from in front of him and walked back to the rangemaster’s cubicle and got another clip, part-loaded with six. He moved into the next lane, where there was a new target. She met him there and nestled back against him and raised her gun hand. He reached around her and cupped it and took the weight. She leaned back against him. Fired twice. He saw the holes appear in the target, maybe an inch apart in the centre ring.
‘See?’ he said. ‘Let the left do the work.’
‘Sounds like a political statement.’
She stayed where she was, leaning back against him. He could feel the rise and fall of her breathing. He stepped away from behind her and she tried again, by herself. Two shots, fast. The shell cases rang on the concrete. Two more holes appeared in the heart ring. There was a tight cluster of four, in a diamond shape a business card would have covered.
She nodded. ‘You want the last two?’
She stepped close and handed him the pistol, butt first. It was a SIG-Sauer, identical to the one Lamarr had held next to his head throughout the car ride into Manhattan. He stood with his back to the target and weighed the gun in his hand. Then he spun abruptly and fired the two bullets, one into each of the target’s eyes.
‘That’s how I’d do it,’ he said. ‘If I was real mad with somebody, that’s what I’d do. I wouldn’t mess around with a damn tub and twenty gallons of paint.’
They met Blake on the way back to the library room. He looked aimless and agitated all at the same time. There was worry in his face. He had a new problem.
‘Lamarr’s father died,’ he said.
‘Stepfather,’ Reacher said.
‘Whatever. He died, early this morning. The hospital in Spokane called for her. Now I’ve got to call her at home.’
‘Give her our condolences,’ Harper said.
Blake nodded vaguely and walked away.
‘He should take her off the case,’ Reacher said.
Harper nodded. ‘Maybe he should, but he won’t. And she wouldn’t agree, anyway. Her job is all she’s got.’
Reacher said nothing. Harper pulled the door and ushered him back into the room with the oak tables and the leather chairs and the files. Reacher sat down and checked his watch. Three twenty. Maybe two more hours of daydreaming and then he could eat and escape to the solitude of his room.
It was three hours, in the end. And it wasn’t daydreaming. He sat and stared into space and thought hard. Harper watched him, anxious. He took the file folders and arranged them on the table, Callan’s at the bottom right, Stanley’s at the bottom left, Cooke’s at the top right, and stared at them, musing about the geography again. He leaned back and closed his eyes.
‘Making any progress?’ Harper asked.
‘I need a list of the ninety-one women,’ he said.
‘OK,’ she said.
He waited with his eyes closed and heard her leave the room. Enjoyed the warmth and the silence for a long moment and then she was back. He opened his eyes and saw her leaning over near him and handing him another thick blue file.
‘Pencil,’ he said.
She backed away to a drawer and found a pencil. Rolled it across the table to him. He opened the new file and started reading. First item was a Defense Department printout, four pages stapled together, ninety-one names in alphabetical order. He recognized some of them. Rita Scimeca was there, the woman he’d mentioned to Blake. She was next to Lorraine Stanley. Then there was a matching list with addresses, most of them obtained through the VA’s medical insurance operation or mail-forwarding instructions. Scimeca lived in Oregon. Then there was a thick sheaf of background information, Army post-discharge intelligence reports, extensive for some of the women, sketchy for others, but altogether enough for a basic conclusion. Reacher flipped back and forth between pages and went to work with the pencil and twenty minutes later counted up the marks he’d made.
‘It was eleven women,’ he said. ‘Not ninety-one.’
‘It was?’ Harper said.
He nodded.
‘Eleven,’ he said again. ‘Eight left, not eighty-eight.’
‘Why?’
‘Lots of reasons. Ninety-one was always absurd. Who would seriously target ninety-one women? Five and a quarter years? It’s not credible. A guy this smart would break it down into something manageable, like eleven.’
‘But how?’
‘By limiting himself to what’s feasible. A subcategory. What else did Callan and Cooke and Stanley have in common?’
‘What?’
‘They were alone. Positively and unequivocally alone. Unmarried or separated, single-family houses in the suburbs or the countryside.’
‘And that’s crucial?’
‘Of course it is. Think about the MO. He needs somewhere quiet and lonely and isolated. No interruptions. And no witnesses nearby. He has to get all that paint into the house. So look at this list. There are married women, women with new babies, women living with family, parents, women in apartment houses and condos, farms, communes even, women gone back to college. But he wants women who live alone, in houses.’
Harper shook her head. ‘There are more than eleven of those. We did the research. I think it’s more than thirty. About a third.’
‘But you had to check. I’m talking about women who are obviously living alone and isolated. At first glance. Because we have to assume the guy hasn’t got anybody doing research for him. He’s working alone, in secret. All he’s got is this list to study.’
‘But that’s our list.’
‘Not exclusively. It’s his, too. All this information came straight from the military, right? He had this list before you did.’
Forty-three miles away, slightly east of north, the exact same list was lying open on a polished desk in a small windowless office in the darkness of the Pentagon’s interior. It was two Xerox generations newer than Reacher’s version, but it was otherwise identical. All the same pages were there. And they had eleven marks on them, against eleven names. Not hasty checkmarks in pencil, like Reacher had scrawled, but neat underlinings done with a fountain pen and a bevelled ruler held away from the paper so the ink wouldn’t smudge.
Three of the eleven names had second lines struck through them.
The list was framed on the desk by the uniformed forearms of the office’s occupant. They were flat on the wood, and the wrists were cocked upward to keep the hands clear of the surface. The left hand held a ruler. The right hand held a pen. The left hand moved and placed the ruler exactly horizontal along the inked line under a fourth name. Then it slid upward a fraction and rested across the name itself. The right hand moved and the pen scored a thick line straight through it. Then the pen lifted off the page.
‘So what do we do about it?’ Harper asked.
Reacher leaned back and closed his eyes again.
‘I think you should gamble,’ he said. ‘I think you should stake out the surviving eight around the clock and I think the guy will walk into your arms within sixteen days.’
She sounded uncertain.
‘Hell of a gamble,’ she said. ‘It’s very tenuous. You’re guessing about what he’s guessing about when he looks at the list.’
‘I’m supposed to be representative of the guy. So what I guess should be what he guesses, right?’
‘Suppose you’re wrong?’
‘As opposed to what? The progress you’re making?’
