Lee Child - Running Blind

“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 of 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 barrack 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 prison 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 traveling 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 made a face. “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 on 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 center. 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 is 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 center 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.