Lee Child - Running Blind

“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.”