by Lee Child
“In the tub?” he repeated.
Lamarr nodded at the wheel. “In the tub.”
“All three of them?” he asked.
Lamarr nodded again. “All three of them.”
“Like a signature?”
“Right,” she said.
“How does he know they’ve all got tubs?”
“You live in a house, you’ve got a tub.”
“How does he know they all live in houses? He’s not selecting them on the basis of where they live. It’s random, right? They could live anyplace. Like I live in motels. And some of them just have showers.”
She glanced across at him. “You don’t live in motels. You live in a house in Garrison.”
He glanced down, like he had forgotten.
“Well, now I do, I guess,” he said. “But I was on the road, before. How does he know these women weren’t?”
“That’s a catch-22,” she said. “If they were homeless, they wouldn’t be on his list. I mean, to be on his list, they need to live somewhere, so he can find them.”
“But how does he know they all have tubs?”
She shrugged. “You live somewhere, you’ve got a tub. Takes a pretty small studio to have just a shower stall.”
Reacher nodded. This was not his area of expertise. Real estate was pretty much foreign terrain to him. “OK, they’re in the tub.”
“Naked. And their clothes are missing.”
She was clear of the crash site and was accelerating into the rain. She put the windshield wipers on high.
“He takes their clothes with him?” he asked. “Why?”
“Probably as a trophy. Taking trophies is a very common phenomenon in serial crimes like these. Maybe it’s symbolic. Maybe he thinks they should still be in uniform, so he robs them of their civilian gear. As well as their lives.”
“He take anything else?”
She shook her head. “Not as far as we can tell. There was nothing obviously removed. No big spaces anywhere. Cash and cards were all still where they should be.”
“So he takes their clothes and leaves nothing behind. ”
She was quiet for a beat.
“He does leave something behind,” she said. “He leaves paint.”
“Paint?”
“Army camouflage green. Gallons of it.”
“Where?”
“In the tub. He puts the body in there, naked, and then he fills the tub with paint.”
Reacher stared past the beating wipers into the rain. “He drowns them? In paint?”
She shook her head again. “He doesn’t drown them. They’re already dead. He just covers them with paint afterward.”
“How? Like he paints them all over?”
She was gunning it hard, making up for lost time. “No, he doesn’t paint them. He just fills the tub with the paint, right up to the rim. Obviously it covers the bodies.”
“So they’re floating in a tub full of green paint?”
She nodded. “That’s how they were all found.”
He fell silent. He turned away and stared through his window and stayed silent for a long time. To the west, the weather was clearer. It was brighter. The car was moving fast. Rain hissed under the tires and beat on the underbody. He stared blankly at the brightness in the west and watched the endless road reel in and realized he was happy. He was heading somewhere. He was on the move. His blood was stirring like an animal at the end of winter. The old hobo demon was talking to him, quietly, whispering in his head. You’re happy now, it was saying. You’re happy, aren’t you? You even forgot for a moment you’re stuck in Garrison, didn’t you?
“You OK?” Lamarr asked.
He turned toward her and tried to fill his mind with her face, the white pallor, the thin hair, the sneering teeth.
“Tell me about the paint,” he said quietly.
She looked at him, oddly.
“It’s Army camouflage basecoat,” she said. “Flat green. Manufactured in Illinois by the hundred thousand gallons. Produced sometime within the last eleven years, because it’s new process. Beyond that, we can’t trace it.”
He nodded, vaguely. He had never used it, but he had seen a million square yards of stuff daubed with it.
“It’s messy,” he said.
“But the crime scenes are immaculate. He doesn’t spill a drop anywhere.”
“The women were already dead,” he said. “Nobody was fighting. No reason to spill any. But it means he must carry it into the house. How much does it take to fill a tub?”
“Somewhere between twenty and thirty gallons.”
“That’s a lot of paint. It must mean a hell of a lot to him. You figured out any significance to it?”
She shrugged. “Not really, not beyond the obvious military significance. Maybe removing the civilian clothes and covering the body with Army paint is some kind of reclamation, you know, putting them back where he thinks they belong, in the military, where they should have stayed. It traps them, you see. Couple of hours, the surface is skinning over. It goes hard, and the stuff underneath jellifies. Leave it long enough, I guess the whole tub might dry solid, with them inside. Like people put their baby’s shoe in a Perspex cube?”
Reacher stared ahead through the windshield. The horizon was bright. They were leaving the weather behind. On his right, Pennsylvania looked green and sunny.
“The paint is a hell of a thing,” he said. “Twenty or thirty gallons? That’s a major load to haul around. It implies a big vehicle. A lot of exposure obtaining it. Exposure just carrying it into the house. Very visible. Nobody saw anything?”
“We canvassed, door to door. Nobody reported anything. ”
He nodded, slowly. “The paint is the key. Where’s he getting it from?”
“We have no idea. The Army is not being especially helpful.”
“I’m not surprised. The Army hates you. And it’s embarrassing. Makes it likely it’s a serving soldier. Who else could get that much camouflage paint?”
She made no reply. She just drove, south. The rain was gone and the wipers were squealing over dry glass. She switched them off with a small definite movement of her wrist. He fell to thinking about a soldier somewhere, loading cans of paint. Ninety-one women on his list, some skewed mental process reserving twenty or thirty gallons for each one of them. A potential total of two, two and a half thousand gallons. Tons of it. Truckloads of it. Maybe he was a quartermaster.
“How is he killing them?” he asked.
She slid her hands to a firmer grip on the wheel. Swallowed hard and kept her eyes on the road.
“We don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know?” he repeated.
She shook her head. "They’re just dead. We can’t figure out how.”
8
THERE ARE NINETY-ONE altogether, and you need to do exactly six of them in total, which is three more, so what do you do now? You keep on thinking and planning, is what. Think, think, think, that’s what you do. Because it’s all based on thinking. You need to outwit them all. The victims, and the investigators. Layers and layers of investigators. More and more investigators all the time. Local cops, state cops, the FBI, the specialists the FBI brings in. New angles, new approaches. You know they’re there. They’re looking for you. They’ll find you if they can.
The investigators are tough, but the women are easy. Just about as easy as you expected them to be. There was no overconfidence there. None at all. The victims go down exactly as you imagined. You planned long and hard, and the planning was perfect. They answer the door, they let you in, they fall for it. They’re so damn keen to fall for it, their tongues are practically hanging out. They’re so stupid, they deserve it. And it’s not difficult. No, not difficult at all. It’s meticulous, is what it is. It’s like everything else. If you plan it properly, if you think it through, if you prepare correctly, if you rehearse, then it’s easy. It’s a technical process, just like you knew it would be. Like a science. It can’t be anything else. Yo
u do this, and then you do this, and then you do this, and then you’re done, home free. Three more. That’s all. That’ll do it. The hard part is over. But you keep on thinking. Think, think, think. It worked once, it worked twice, it worked three times, but you know there are no guarantees in life. You know that, better than anybody. So you keep on thinking, because the only thing that can get you now is your own complacency.
" YOU DON’T KNOW?” Reacher said again.
Lamarr was startled. She was staring straight ahead, tired, concentrating, gripping the wheel, driving like a machine.
“Know what?” she said.
“How they died.”
She sighed and shook her head. “No, not really.”
He glanced across at her. “You OK?”
“Don’t I look OK?”
“You look exhausted.”
She yawned. “I’m a little weary, I guess. It was a long night.”
“Well, take care.”
“You worrying about me now?”
He shook his head. “No, I’m worrying about myself. You could fall asleep, run us off the road.”
She yawned again. “Never happened before.”
He looked away. Found himself fingering the airbag lid in front of him.
“I’m OK,” she said again. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Why don’t you know how they died?”
She shrugged. “You were an investigator. You saw dead people.”
“So?”
“So what did you look for?”
“Wounds, injuries.”
“Right,” she said. “Somebody’s full of bullet holes, you conclude they’ve been shot to death. Somebody’s got their head smashed in, you call it trauma with a blunt object.”
“But?”
“These three were in bathtubs full of drying paint, right? The crime scene guys take the bodies out, and the pathologists clean them up, and they don’t find anything. ”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing obvious, not at first. So then naturally they look harder. They still don’t find anything. They know they didn’t drown. When they open them up, they find no water or paint in the lungs. So then they search for external injuries, microscopically. They can’t find anything. ”
“No hypodermic marks? Bruising?”
She shook her head. “Nothing at all. But remember, they’ve been coated in paint. And that military stuff wouldn’t pass too many HUD regulations. Full of all kinds of chemicals, and fairly corrosive. It damages the skin, postmortem. It’s conceivable the paint damage might be obscuring some tiny marks. But whatever killed them was very subtle. Nothing gross.”
“What about internal damage?”
She shook her head again. “Nothing. No subcutaneous bruising, no organ damage, no nothing.”
“Poison?”
“No. Stomach contents were OK. They hadn’t ingested the paint. Toxicology was completely clear.”
Reacher nodded, slowly. “No sexual interference either, I guess, because Blake was happy both Callan and Cooke would have slept with me if I’d wanted them to. Which means the perpetrator was feeling no sexual resentment, therefore no rape, or else you’d be looking for somebody who’d been rebuffed by them, one time or another.”
Lamarr nodded. “That’s our profile. Sexuality wasn’t an issue. The nakedness is about humiliation, we think. Punishment. The whole thing was about punishment. Retribution, or something.”
“Weird,” Reacher said. “That definitely makes the guy a soldier. But it’s a very unsoldierly way to kill somebody. Soldiers shoot or stab or hit or strangle. They don’t do subtle things.”
“We don’t know exactly what he did.”
“But there’s no anger there, right? If this guy is into some retribution thing, where’s the anger? It sounds too clinical.”
Lamarr yawned and nodded, all at once. “That troubles me too. But look at the victim category. What else can the motive be? And if we agree on the motive, what else can the perp be except an angry soldier?”
They lapsed into silence. The miles rolled by. Lamarr held the wheel, thin tendons in her wrists standing out like cords. Reacher watched the road reeling in, and tried not to feel happy about it. Then Lamarr yawned again, and she saw him glance sharply at her.
“I’m OK,” she said.
He looked at her, long and hard.
“I’m OK,” she said again.
“I’m going to sleep for an hour,” he said. “Try not to kill me.”
WHEN HE WOKE up, they were still in New Jersey. The car was quiet and comfortable. The motor was a faraway hum and there was a faint tenor rumble from the tires. A faint rustle of wind. The weather was gray. Lamarr was rigid with exhaustion, gripping the wheel, staring down the road with red unblinking eyes.
“We should stop for lunch,” he said.
“Too early.”
He checked his watch. It was one o’clock. “Don’t be such a damn hero. You should get a pint of coffee inside you.”
She hesitated, ready to argue. Then she gave it up. Her body suddenly went slack and she yawned again.
“OK,” she said. “So let’s stop.”
She drove on for a mile and coasted into a rest area in a clearing in the trees behind the shoulder. She put the car in a slot and turned the motor off and they sat in the sudden silence. The place was the same as a hundred others Reacher had seen, low-profile Federal architecture of the fifties colonized by fast-food operations that lodged behind discreet counters and spread their messages outward with gaudy advertisements.
He got out first and stretched his cramped frame in the cold, damp air. The highway traffic was roaring behind him. Lamarr was inert in the car, so he strolled away to the bathroom. Then she was nowhere to be seen, so he walked inside the building and lined up for a sandwich. She joined him within a minute.
“You’re not supposed to do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Stray out of my sight.”
“Why not?”
“Because we have rules for people like you.”
She said it without any trace of softness or humor. He shrugged. “OK, next time I go to the bathroom I’ll invite you right inside with me.”
She didn’t smile. “Just tell me, and I’ll wait at the door.”
The line shuffled forward and he changed his selection from cheese to crabmeat, because he figured it was more expensive and he assumed she was paying. He added a twenty-ounce cup of black coffee and a plain doughnut. He found a table while she fiddled with her purse. Then she joined him and he raised his coffee in an ironic toast.
“Here’s to a few fun days together,” he said.
“It’ll be more than a few days,” she said. “It’ll be as long as it takes.”
He sipped his coffee and thought about time.
“What’s the significance of the three-week cycle?” he asked.
She had chosen cheese on whole-wheat and was pecking a crumb from the corner of her mouth with her little finger.
“We’re not entirely sure,” she said. “Three weeks is an odd interval. It’s not lunar. There’s no calendar significance to three weeks.”
He did the math in his head. “Ninety-one targets, one every three weeks, it would take him five and a quarter years to get through. That’s a hell of a long project.”
She nodded. “We think that proves the cycle is imposed by something external. Presumably he’d work faster if he could. So we think he’s on a three-week work pattern. Maybe he works two weeks on, one week off. He spends the week off staking them out, organizing it, and then doing it.”
Reacher saw his chance. Nodded.
“Possible,” he said.
“So what kind of soldier works that kind of pattern?”
“That regular? Maybe a rapid-response guy, two weeks on readiness, one week stood down.”
“Who’s on rapid response?”
“Marines, some infantry,” he said.
Then he
swallowed. “And some Special Forces.”
Then he waited to see if she’d take the bait.
She nodded. “Special Forces would know subtle ways to kill, right?”
He started on the sandwich. The crabmeat could have been tuna fish. “Silent ways, unarmed ways, improvised ways, I guess. But I don’t know about subtle ways. This is about concealment, right? Special Forces are interested in getting people dead, for sure, but they don’t care about leaving anybody puzzled afterward about how they did it.”
“So what are you saying?”
He put his sandwich down. “I’m saying I don’t have a clue about who’s doing what, or why, or how. And I don’t see how I should. You’re the big expert here. You’re the one studied landscape gardening in school.”
She paused, with her sandwich in midair. “We need more from you than this, Reacher. And you know what we’ll do if we don’t get it.”
“I know what you say you’ll do.”
“You going to take the chance we won’t?”
“She gets hurt, you know what I’ll do to you, right?”
She smiled. “Threatening me, Reacher? Threatening a federal agent? You just broke the law again. Title 18, paragraph A-3, section 4702. Now you’re really stacking up the charges against yourself, that’s for sure.”
He looked away and made no reply.
“Stay on the ball, and everything will be OK,” she said.
He drained his cup, and looked at her over the rim. A steady, neutral gaze. “The ethics bothering you here?” she asked.
“Are there ethics involved?” he asked back.
Then her face changed. A hint of embarrassment crept into it. A hint of softening. She nodded. “I know, it used to bother me too. I couldn’t believe it, when I got out of the Academy. But the Bureau knows what it’s doing. I learned that, pretty quick. It’s a practical thing. It’s about the greatest good for the greatest number. We need cooperation, we ask for it first, but you better believe we make damn sure we get it.”
Reacher said nothing.
“It’s a policy I believe in, now,” Lamarr said. “But I want you to know using your girlfriend as a threat wasn’t my idea.”
Reacher said nothing.
“That was Blake,” she said. “I’m not about to criticize him for it, but I wouldn’t have gone down that road myself.”