by Lee Child
“What?” he said.
“You were thinking hard. Going all misty on me.”
“Was I?”
“So what were you thinking about?”
He shrugged. “Rocks and hard places.”
She stared at him. “Well, that’s not going to get us anywhere. So think about something else, OK?”
“OK,” he said.
He looked away and tried to put Jodie out of his mind. Tried to think about something else.
“Surveillance,” he said suddenly.
“What about surveillance?”
“We’re assuming the guy watches the houses first, aren’t we? At least a full day? He might have already been hiding out somewhere, right when we were there.”
She shivered. “Creepy. But so what?”
“So you should check motel registers, canvass the neighborhood. Follow up. That’s how you’re going to do this, by working. Not by trying to do magic five floors underground in Virginia.”
“There was no neighborhood. You saw the place. We’ve got nothing to work on. I keep on telling you that.”
“And I keep on telling you there’s always something to work on.”
“Yeah, yeah, he’s very smart, the paint, the geography, the quiet scenes.”
“Exactly. I’m not kidding. Those four things will lead you to him, sure as anything. Did Blake go to Spokane?”
She nodded. “We’re meeting him at the scene.”
“So he’s going to have to do what I tell him, or I’m not sticking around.”
“Don’t push it, Reacher. You’re Army liaison, not an investigator. And he’s pretty desperate. He can make you stick around.”
“He’s fresh out of threats.”
She made a face. “Don’t count on it. Deerfield and Cozo are working on getting those Chinese boys to implicate you. They’ll ask INS to check for illegals, whereupon they’ll find about a thousand in the restaurant kitchens alone. Whereupon they’ll start talking about deportations, but they’ll also mention that a little cooperation could make the problem go away, whereupon the big guys in the tongs will tell those kids to spill whatever beans we want them to spill. Greatest good for the greatest number, right?”
Reacher made no reply.
“Bureau always gets what it wants,” Harper said.
BUT THE PROBLEM with sitting there rerunning it like a video over and over again is that little doubts start to creep in. You go over it and over it and you can’t remember if you really did all the things you should have done. You sit there all alone, thinking, thinking, thinking, and it all goes a little blurry and the more you question it, the less sure you get. One tiny little detail. Did you do it? Did you say it? You know you did at the Callan house. You know that for sure. And at Caroline Cooke’s place. Yes, definitely. You know that for sure, too. And at Lorraine Stanley’s place in San Diego. But what about Alison Lamarr’s place? Did you do it? Or did you make her do it? Did you say it? Did you?
You’re completely sure you did, but maybe that’s just in the rerun. Maybe that’s the pattern kicking in and making you assume something happened because it always happened before. Maybe this time you forgot. You become terribly afraid about it. You become sure you forgot. You think hard. And the more you think about it, the more you’re sure you didn’t do it yourself. Not this time. That’s OK, as long as you told her to do it for you. But did you? Did you tell her? Did you say the words? Maybe you didn’t. What then?
You shake yourself and tell yourself to calm down. A person of your superhuman talent, unsure and confused? Ridiculous. Absurd! So you put it out of your mind. But it won’t go away. It nags at you. It gets bigger and bigger, louder and louder. You end up sitting all alone, cold and sweating, absolutely sure you’ve made your first small mistake.
THE BUREAU’S OWN Learjet had ferried Blake and his team from Andrews direct to Spokane and he had sent it over to Sea-Tac to collect Harper and Reacher. It was waiting on the apron right next to the Continental gates, and the same guy as before had been hauled out of the Seattle Field Office to meet them at the head of the jetway and point them down the external stairs and outside. It was raining lightly, and cold, so they ran for the Lear’s steps and hustled straight inside. Four minutes later, they were back in the air.
Sea-Tac to Spokane was a lot faster in the Lear than it had been in the Cessna. The same local guy in the same car was waiting for them. He still had Alison Lamarr’s address written on the pad attached to his windshield. He drove them the ten miles east toward Idaho and then turned north onto the narrow road into the hills. Fifty yards in, there was a roadblock with two parked cars and yellow tape stretched between trees. Above the trees in the far distance were the mountains. It was raining and gray on the western peaks, and in the east the sun was slanting down through the edge of the clouds and gleaming off the tiny threads of snow in the high gullies.
The guy at the roadblock looped the tape off the trees and the car crawled through. It climbed onward, past the isolated houses every mile or so, all the way to the bend before the Lamarr place, where it stopped.
“You need to walk from here,” the driver said.
He stayed in the car, and Harper and Reacher stepped out and started walking. The air was damp, full of a kind of suspended drizzle that wasn’t really rain but wasn’t dry weather either. They rounded the curve and saw the house on the left, crouching low behind its fence and its wind-battered trees, with the road snaking by on the right. The road was blocked by a gaggle of cars. There was a local police black-and-white with its roof lights flashing aimlessly. A pair of plain dark sedans and a black Suburban with black glass. A coroner’s wagon, standing with all its doors open. The vehicles were all beaded with raindrops.
They walked closer and the front passenger door on the Suburban opened up and Nelson Blake slid out to meet them. He was in a dark suit with the coat collar turned up against the damp. His face was nearer gray than red, like shock had knocked his blood pressure down. He was all business. No greeting. No apologies, no pleasantries. No I-was-wrong-and-you-were-right.
“Not much more than an hour of daylight left, up here,” he said. “I want you to walk me through what you did the day before yesterday, tell me what’s different. ”
Reacher nodded. He suddenly wanted to find something. Something important. Something crucial. Not for Blake. For Alison. He stood and gazed at the fence and the trees and the lawn. They were cared for. They were just trivial rearrangements of an insignificant portion of the planet’s surface, but they were motivated by the honest tastes and enthusiasms of a woman now dead. Achieved by her own labors.
“Who’s been in there already?” he asked.
“Just the local uniformed guy,” Blake said. “The one that found her.”
“Nobody else?”
“Nobody.”
“Not even you guys or the coroner?”
Blake shook his head. “I wanted your input first.”
“So she’s still in there?”
“Yes, I’m afraid she is.”
The road was quiet. Just a hiss of breeze in the power lines. The red and blue light from the police cruiser’s light bar washed over the suit on Blake’s back, rhythmically and uselessly.
“OK,” Reacher said. “The uniformed guy mess with anything?”
Blake shook his head again. “Opened the door, walked around downstairs, went upstairs, found his way to the bathroom, came right out again and called it in. His dispatcher had the good sense to keep him from going back inside.”
“Front door was unlocked?”
“Closed, but unlocked.”
“Did he knock?”
“I guess.”
“So his prints will be on the knocker, too. And the inside door handles.”
Blake shrugged. “Won’t matter. Won’t have smudged our guy’s prints, because our guy doesn’t leave prints.”
Reacher nodded. “OK.”
He walked past the parked vehicles and on past the mouth of the driveway
. He walked twenty yards up the road.
“Where does this go?” he called.
Blake was ten yards behind him. “Back of beyond, probably.”
“It’s narrow, isn’t it?”
“I’ve seen wider,” Blake allowed.
Reacher strolled back to join him. “So you should check the mud on the shoulders, maybe up around the next bend.”
“What for?”
“Our guy came in from the Spokane road, most likely. Cruised the house, kept on going, turned around, came back. He’d want his car facing the right direction, before he went in and got to work. A guy like this, he’ll have been thinking about the getaway.”
Blake nodded. “OK. I’ll put somebody on it. Meantime, take me through the house.”
He called instructions to his team and Reacher joined Harper in the mouth of the driveway. They stood and waited for Blake to catch up with them.
“So walk me through it,” he said.
“We paused here for a second,” Harper said. “It was awful quiet. Then we walked up to the door, used the knocker.”
“Was the weather wet or dry?” Blake asked her.
She glanced at Reacher. “Dry, I guess. A little sunny. Not hot. But not raining.”
“The driveway was dry,” Reacher said. “Not dusty dry, but the shale had drained.”
“So you wouldn’t have picked up grit on your shoes?”
“I doubt it.”
“OK.”
They were at the door.
“Put these on your feet,” Blake said. He pulled a roll of large-sized food bags from his coat pocket. They put a bag over each shoe and tucked the plastic edges down inside the leather.
“She opened up, second knock,” Harper said. “I showed her my badge in the spyhole.”
“She was pretty uptight,” Reacher said. “Told us Julia had been warning her.”
Blake nodded sourly and nudged the door with his bagged foot. The door swung back with the same creak of old hinges Reacher remembered from before.
“We all paused here in the hallway,” Harper said. “Then she offered us coffee and we all went through to the kitchen to get it.”
“Anything different in here?” Blake asked.
Reacher looked around. The pine walls, the pine floors, the yellow gingham curtains, the old sofas, the converted oil lamps.
“Nothing different,” he said.
“OK, kitchen,” Blake said.
They filed into the kitchen. The floor was still waxed to a shine. The cabinets were the same, the range was cold and empty, the machines under the counter were the same, the gadgets sitting out were undisturbed. There were dishes in the sink and one of the silverware drawers was open an inch.
“The view is different,” Harper said. She was standing at the window. “Much grayer today.”
“Dishes in the sink,” Reacher said. “And that drawer was closed.”
They crowded the sink. There was a single plate, a water glass, a mug, a knife and a fork. Smears of egg and toast crumbs on the plate, coffee mud in the mug.
“Breakfast?” Blake said.
“Or dinner,” Harper answered. “An egg on toast, that could be dinner for a single woman.”
Blake pulled the drawer with the tip of his finger. There was a bunch of cheap flatware in there, and a random assortment of household tools, small screwdrivers, wire strippers, electrical tape, fuse wire.
“OK, then what?” Blake asked.
“I stayed here with her,” Harper said. “Reacher looked around.”
“Show me,” Blake said.
He followed Reacher back to the hallway.
“I checked the parlor and the living room,” Reacher said. “Looked at the windows. I figured they were secure. ”
Blake nodded. “Guy didn’t come in the windows.”
“Then I went outside, checked the grounds and the barn.”
“We’ll do the upstairs first,” Blake said.
“OK.”
Reacher led the way. He was very conscious of where he was going. Very conscious that maybe thirty hours ago the guy had followed the same path.
“I checked the bedrooms. Went into the master suite last.”
“Let’s do it,” Blake said.
They walked the length of the master bedroom. Paused at the bathroom door.
“Let’s do it,” Blake said again.
They looked inside. The place was immaculate. No sign that anything had ever happened there, except for the tub. It was seven-eighths full of green paint, with the shape of a small muscular woman floating just below the surface, which had skinned over into a slick plastic layer, delineating her body and trapping it there. Every contour was visible. The thighs, the stomach, the breasts. The head, tilted backward. The chin, the forehead. The mouth, held slightly open, the lips drawn back in a tiny grimace.
“Shit,” Reacher said.
“Yeah, shit,” Blake said back.
Reacher stood there and tried to read the signs. Tried to find the signs. But there were none there. The bathroom was exactly the same as it had been before.
“Anything?” Blake asked.
He shook his head. “No.”
“OK, we’ll do the outside.”
They trooped down the stairs, silent. Harper was waiting in the hallway. She looked up at Blake, expectant. Blake just shook his head, like he was saying nothing there. Maybe he was saying don’t go up there. Reacher led him out through the back door into the yard.
“I checked the windows from outside,” he said.
“Guy didn’t come in the damn window,” Blake said for the second time. “He came in the door.”
“But how the hell?” Reacher said. “When we were here, you’d called her ahead on the phone, and Harper was flashing her badge and shouting FBI, FBI, and she still practically hid out in there. And then she was shaking like a leaf when she eventually opened up. So how did this guy get her to do it?”
Blake shrugged. “Like I told you right at the beginning, these women know this character. They trust him. He’s some kind of an old friend or something. He knocks on the door, they check him out in the spyhole, they get a big smile on their faces, and they open their doors right up.”
The cellar door was undisturbed. The big padlock through the handles was intact. The garage door in the side of the barn was closed but not locked. Reacher led Blake inside and stood in the gloom. The new Jeep was there, and the stacks of cartons. The big washing machine carton was there, flaps slightly open, sealing tape trailing. The workbench was there, with the power tools neatly laid out on it. The shelves were undisturbed.
“Something’s different,” Reacher said.
“What?”
“Let me think.”
He stood there, opening and closing his eyes, comparing the scene in front of him with the memory in his head, like he was checking two photographs side by side.
“The car has moved,” he said.
Blake sighed, like he was disappointed. “It would have. She drove to the hospital after you left.”
Reacher nodded. “Something else.”
“What?”
“Let me think.”
Then he saw it.
“Shit,” he said.
“What?”
“I missed it. I’m sorry, Blake, but I missed it.”
“Missed what?”
“That washing machine carton. She already had a washing machine. Looked brand-new. It’s in the kitchen, under the counter.”
“So? It must have come right out of that carton. Whenever it was installed.”
Reacher shook his head. “No. Two days ago that carton was new and sealed up. Now it’s been opened.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Same carton, exact same place. But it was sealed up then and it’s open now.”
Blake stepped toward the carton. Took a pen from his pocket and used the plastic barrel to raise the flap. Stared down at what he saw.
“This carton was
here already?”
Reacher nodded. “Sealed up.”
“Like it had been shipped?”
“Yes.”
“OK,” Blake said. “Now we know how he transports the paint. He delivers it ahead of time in washing machine cartons.”
YOU SIT THERE cold and sweating for an hour and at the end of it you know for certain you forgot to reseal the carton. You didn’t do it, and you didn’t make her do it. That’s a fact now, and it can’t be denied, and it needs dealing with.
Because resealing the cartons guaranteed a certain amount of delay. You know how investigators work. A just delivered appliance carton in the garage or the basement was going to attract no interest at all. It was going to be way down on the list of priorities. It would be just another part of the normal household clutter they see everywhere. Practically invisible. You’re smart. You know how these people work. Your best guess was the primary investigators would never open it at all. That was your prediction, and you were proved absolutely right three times in a row. Down in Florida, up in New Hampshire, down in California, those boxes were items on somebody’s inventory, but they hadn’t been opened. Maybe much later when the heirs came to clear out the houses they’d open them up and find all the empty cans, whereupon the shit would really hit the fan, but by then it would be way too late. A guaranteed delay, weeks or even months.
But this time, it would be different. They’d do a walk-through in the garage, and the flaps on the box would be up. Cardboard does that, especially in a damp atmosphere like they have up there. The flaps would be curling back. They’d glance in, and they wouldn’t see Styrofoam packaging and gleaming white enamel, would they?
THEY BROUGHT IN portable arc lights from the Suburban and arrayed them around the washing machine carton like it was a meteor from Mars. They stood there, bent forward from the waist like the whole thing was radioactive. They stared at it, trying to decode its secrets.
It was a normal-sized appliance carton, built out of sturdy brown cardboard folded and stapled the way appliance cartons are. The brown board was screenprinted with black ink. The manufacturer’s name dominated each of the four sides. A famous name, styled and printed like a trademark. There was the model number of the washing machine below it, and a crude picture representing the machine itself.