Lee Child - Running Blind

“I just want her to know.”

Scimeca shrugged, puzzled. “I was in armaments proving.”

“Tell her what that was.”

“We tested new weapons incoming from the manufacturer. ”

“And?”

“If they were up to spec, we passed them to the quartermasters.”

Silence. Harper glanced at Reacher, equally puzzled.

“OK,” he said. “Now we’re out of here.”

Scimeca led the way through the door to the garage. Pulled the cord and killed the light. Led them past her car and up the narrow staircase. Out into the foyer. She crossed the floor and checked the spyhole in the front door. Opened it up. The air outside was cold and damp.

“Good-bye, Reacher,” she said. “It was nice to see you again.”

Then she turned to Harper.

“You should trust him,” she said. “I still do, you know. Which is one hell of a recommendation, believe me.”

The front door closed behind them as they walked down the path. They heard the sound of the lock turning from twenty feet away. The local agent watched them get into their car. It was still warm inside. Harper started the motor and put the blower on high to keep it that way.

“She had a roommate,” she said.

Reacher nodded.

“So your theory is wrong. Looked like she lived alone, but she didn’t. We’re back to square one.”

“Square two, maybe. It’s still a subcategory. Has to be. Nobody targets ninety-one women. It’s insane.”

“As opposed to what?” Harper said. “Putting dead women in a tub full of paint?”

Reacher nodded again.

“So now what?” he said.

“Back to Quantico,” she said.

IT TOOK NEARLY nine hours. They drove to Portland, took a turboprop to Sea-Tac, Continental to Newark, United to D.C., and a Bureau driver met them and drove them south into Virginia. Reacher slept most of the way, and the parts when he was awake were just a blur of fatigue. He struggled into alertness as they wound through Marine territory. The FBI guard on the gate reissued his visitor’s tag. The driver parked at the main doors. Harper led the way inside and they took the elevator four floors underground to the seminar room with the shiny walls and the fake windows and the photographs of Lorraine Stanley pinned to the blackboard. The television was playing silently, reruns of the day on the Hill. Blake and Poulton and Lamarr were at the table with drifts of paper in front of them. Blake and Poulton looked busy and harassed. Lamarr was as white as the paper in front of her, her eyes deep in her head and jumping with strain.

“Let me guess,” Blake said. “Scimeca’s box came a couple of months ago and she was kind of vague about why. And there was no paperwork on it.”

“She figured it was for her roommate,” Harper said. “She didn’t live alone. So the list of eleven doesn’t mean anything.”

But Blake shook his head.

“No, it means what it always meant,” he said. “Eleven women who look like they live alone to somebody studying the paperwork. We checked with all the others on the phone. Eighty calls. Told them we were customer services people with a parcel company. Took us hours. But none of them knew anything about unexpected cartons. So there are eighty women out of the loop, and eleven in it. So Reacher’s theory still holds. The roommates surprised him, they’ll surprise the guy.”

Reacher glanced at him, gratified. And a little surprised.

“Hey, credit where it’s due?” Blake said.

Lamarr nodded and moved and wrote a note on the end of a lengthy list.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Reacher said to her.

“Maybe it could have been avoided,” she said. “You know, if you’d cooperated like this from the start.”

There was silence.

“So we’ve got seven out of seven,” Blake said. “No paperwork, vague women.”

“We’ve got one other roommate situation,” Poulton said. “Then three of them have been getting regular misdeliveries and they’ve gotten slow about sorting them out. The other two were just plain vague.”

“Scimeca was pretty vague, for sure,” Harper said.

“She was traumatized,” Reacher said. “She’s doing well to function at all.”

Lamarr nodded. A small, sympathetic motion of her head.

“Whatever, she’s not leading us anywhere, right?” she said.

“What about the delivery companies?” Reacher asked. “You chasing them?”

“We don’t know who they were,” Poulton said. “The paperwork is missing, seven cartons out of seven.”

“There aren’t too many possibilities,” Reacher said.

"Aren’t there?” Poulton said back. "UPS, FedEx, DHL, Airborne Express, the damn United States Postal Service, whoever, plus any number of local subcontractors. ”

“Try them all,” Reacher said.

Poulton shrugged. “And ask them what? Out of all the ten zillion packages you delivered in the last two months, can you remember the one we’re interested in?”

“You have to try,” Reacher said. “Start with Spokane. Remote address like that, middle of nowhere, the driver might recall it.”

Blake leaned forward and nodded. “OK, we’ll try it up there. But only there. Gets impossible, otherwise.”

“Why are the women so vague?” Harper asked.

“Complex reasons,” Lamarr answered. “Like Reacher said, they’re traumatized, all of them, at least to some extent. A large package, coming into their private territory unasked, it’s an invasion of sorts. The mind blocks it out. It’s what I would expect to see in cases like these.”

Her voice was low and strained. Her bony hands were laid on the table in front of her.

“I think it’s weird,” Harper said.

Lamarr shook her head, patiently, like a teacher.

“No, it’s what I would expect,” she said again. “Don’t look at it from your own perspective. These women were assaulted, figuratively, literally, both. That does things to a person.”

“And they’re all worried now,” Reacher said. “Guarding them meant telling them. Certainly Scimeca looked pretty shaken. And she should be. She’s pretty isolated out there. If I was the guy, I’d be looking at her next. I’m sure she’s capable of arriving at the same conclusion.”

“We need to catch this guy,” Lamarr said.

Blake nodded. “Not going to be easy, now. Obviously we’ll keep round-the-clock security on the seven who got the packages, but he’ll spot that from a mile away, so we won’t catch him at a scene.”

“He’ll disappear for a while,” Lamarr said. “Until we take the security off again.”

“How long are we keeping the security on?” Harper asked.

There was silence.

“Three weeks,” Blake said. “Any longer than that, it gets crazy.”

Harper stared at him.

“Has to be a limit,” he said. “What do you want here? Round-the-clock guards, the rest of their damn lives?”

Silence again. Poulton butted his papers into a pile.

“So we’ve got three weeks to find the guy,” he said.

Blake nodded and laid his hands on the table. “Plan is we spell each other twenty-four hours a day, three weeks, starting now. One of us sleeps while the others work. Julia, you get the first rest period, twelve hours, starting now.”

“I don’t want it.”

Blake looked awkward. “Well, want it or not, you got it.”

She shook her head. “No, I need to stay on top of this. Let Poulton go first.”

“No arguments, Julia. We need to get organized.”

“But I’m fine. I need to work. And I couldn’t sleep now, anyway.”

“Twelve hours, Julia,” Blake said. “You’re entitled to time off anyway. Compassionate leave of absence, twice over.”

“I won’t go,” she said back.