by Child, Lee
“I don’t know,” he said.
“We need to talk about it,” she said.
But there was no more talking to be done, not then, because the buzzer from the lobby started up an insistent squawk, like somebody was down there on the street leaning on the button. Jodie stood up and hit the door release and moved into the living room to wait. Reacher stayed on his stool at the granite counter, looking at the quartz sparkles showing between his fingers. Then he felt the elevator arrive and heard the apartment door open. He heard urgent conversation and fast light footsteps through the living room and then Jodie was back in the kitchen with Lisa Harper standing at her side.
15
HARPER WAS STILL in her second suit and her hair was still loose on her shoulders, but those were the only similarities with the last time he had seen her. Her long-limbed slowness was all wiped away by some kind of feverish tension, and her eyes were red and strained. He guessed she was as near to distraught as she was ever going to get.
“What?” he asked.
“Everything,” she said. “It’s all gone crazy.”
“Where?”
“Spokane,” she said.
“No,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Alison Lamarr.”
There was silence.
“Shit,” he whispered.
Harper nodded. “Yeah, shit.”
“When?”
“Sometime yesterday. He’s speeding up. He didn’t stick to the interval. The next one should have been two weeks away.”
“How?”
“Same as all the others. The hospital was calling her because her father died, and there was no reply, so eventually they called the cops, and the cops went out there and found her. Dead in the tub, in the paint, like all the others.”
More silence.
“But how the hell did he get in?”
Harper shook her head. “Just walked right in the door.”
“Shit, I don’t believe it.”
“They’ve sealed the place off. They’re sending a crime scene unit direct from Quantico.”
“They won’t find anything.”
Silence again. Harper glanced around Jodie’s kitchen, nervously.
“Blake wants you back on board,” she said. “He’s signed up for your theory in a big way. He believes you now. Eleven women, not ninety-one.”
Reacher stared at her. “So what am I supposed to say to that? Better late than never?”
“He wants you back,” Harper said again. “This is getting way out of control. We need to start cutting some corners with the Army. And he figures you’ve demonstrated a talent for cutting corners.”
It was the wrong thing to say. It fell across the kitchen like a weight. Jodie switched her gaze from Harper to the refrigerator door.
“You should go, Reacher,” she said.
He made no reply.
“Go cut some corners,” she said. “Go do what you’re good at.”
HE WENT. HARPER had a car waiting at the curb on Broadway. It was a Bureau car, borrowed from the New York office, and the driver was the same guy who had driven him down from Garrison with a gun at his head. But if the guy was confused about Reacher’s recent change of status, he didn’t show it. Just lit up his red light and took off west toward Newark.
The airport was a mess. They fought through crowds to the Continental counter. The reservation was coming in direct from Quantico as they waited at the desk. Two coach seats. They ran to the gate and were the last passengers to board. The purser was waiting for them at the end of the jetway. She put them in first class. Then she stood near them and used a microphone and welcomed everybody joining her for the trip to Seattle-Tacoma.
“Seattle?” Reacher said. “I thought we were going to Quantico.”
Harper felt behind her for the seat-belt buckle and shook her head. “First we’re going to the scene. Blake thought it could be useful. We saw the place two days ago. We can give him some direct before-and-after comparisons. He thinks it’s worth a try. He’s pretty desperate.”
Reacher nodded. “How’s Lamarr taking it?”
Harper shrugged. “She’s not falling apart. But she’s real tense. She wants to take complete control of everything. But she won’t join us out there. Still won’t fly.”
The plane was taxiing, swinging wide circles across the tarmac on its way to the takeoff line. The engines were whining up to pitch. There was vibration in the cabin.
“Flying’s OK,” Reacher said.
Harper nodded. “I know, crashing is the problem.”
“Hardly ever happens, statistically.”
“Like a Powerball win. But somebody always gets lucky.”
“Hell of a thing, not flying. A country this size, it’s kind of limiting, isn’t it? Especially for a federal agent. I’m surprised they let her get away with it.”
She shrugged again. “It’s a known quantity. They work around it.”
The plane swung onto the runway and stopped hard against the brakes. The engine noise built louder and the plane rolled forward, gently at first, then harder, accelerating all the way. It came up off the ground with no sensation at all and the wheels whined up into their bays and the ground tilted sharply below them.
“Five hours to Seattle,” Harper said. “All over again.”
“Did you think about the geography?” Reacher asked. “Spokane is the fourth corner, right?”
She nodded. “Eleven potential locations now, all random, and he takes the four farthest away for his first four hits. The extremities of the cluster.”
“But why?”
She made a face. “Demonstrating his reach?”
He nodded. “And his speed, I guess. Maybe that’s why he abandoned the interval. To demonstrate his efficiency. He was in San Diego, then he’s in Spokane a couple of days later, checking out a new target.”
“He’s a cool customer.”
Reacher nodded vaguely. “That’s for damn sure. He leaves an immaculate scene in San Diego, then he drives north like a madman and leaves what I bet is another immaculate scene in Spokane. A cool, cool customer. I wonder who the hell he is?”
Harper smiled, briefly and grimly. “We all wonder who the hell he is, Reacher. The trick is to find out.”
YOU’RE A GENIUS, is who you are. An absolute genius, a prodigy, a superhuman talent. Four down! One, two, three, four down. And the fourth was the best of all. Alison Lamarr herself! You go over and over it, replaying it like a video in your head, checking it, testing it, examining it. But also savoring it. Because it was the best yet. The most fun, the most satisfaction. The most impact. The look on her face as she opened the door! The dawning recognition, the surprise, the welcome!
There were no mistakes. Not a single one. It was an immaculate performance, from the beginning to the end. You replay your actions in minute detail. You touched nothing, left nothing behind. You brought nothing to her house except your still presence and your quiet voice. The terrain helped, of course, isolated in the countryside, nobody for miles around. It made it a real safe operation. Maybe you should have had more fun with her. You could have made her sing. Or dance! You could have spent longer with her. Nobody could have heard anything.
But you didn’t, because patterns are important. Patterns protect you. You practice, you rehearse in your mind, you rely on the familiar. You designed the pattern for the worst case, which was probably the Stanley bitch in her awful little subdivision down in San Diego. Neighbors all over the place! Little cardboard houses all crowded on top of each other! Stick to the pattern, that’s the key. And keep on thinking. Think, think, think. Plan ahead. Keep on planning. You’ve done number four, and sure, you’re entitled to replay it over and over, to enjoy it for a spell, to savor it, but then you have to just put it away and close the door on it and prepare for number five.
THE FOOD ON the plane was appropriate for a flight that left halfway between lunch and dinner and was crossing all the time zones the continent had to
offer. The only sure thing was it wasn’t breakfast. Most of it was a sweet pastry envelope with ham and cheese inside. Harper wasn’t hungry, so Reacher ate hers along with his own. Then he fueled up on coffee and fell back to thinking. Mostly he thought about Jodie. But do we want each other’s lives? First, define your life. Hers was easy enough to pin down, he guessed. Lawyer, owner, resident, lover, lover of fifties jazz, lover of modern art. A person who wanted to be settled, precisely because she knew what it was like to be rootless. If anybody in the whole world should live on the fourth floor of an old Broadway building with museums and galleries and cellar clubs all around her, it was Jodie.
But what about him? What made him happy? Being with her, obviously. There was no doubt about that. No doubt at all. He recalled the day in June he had walked back into her life. Just recalling it re-created the exact second he laid eyes on her and understood who she was. He had felt a flood of feeling as powerful as an electric shock. It buzzed through him. He was feeling it again, just because he was thinking about it. It was something he had rarely felt before.
Rarely, but not never. He had felt the same thing on random days since he left the Army. He remembered stepping off buses in towns he had never heard of in states he had never visited. He remembered the feel of sun on his back and dust at his feet, long roads stretching out straight and endless in front of him. He remembered peeling crumpled dollar bills off his roll at lonely motel desks, the feel of old brass keys, the musty smell of cheap rooms, the creak of springs as he dropped down on anonymous beds. Cheerful curious waitresses in old diners. Ten-minute conversations with drivers who stopped to pick him up, tiny random slices of contact between two of the planet’s teeming billions. The drifter’s life. Its charm was a big part of him, and he missed it when he was stuck in Garrison or holed up in the city with Jodie. He missed it bad. Real bad. About as bad as he was missing her right now.
“Making progress?” Harper asked him.
“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.