“She was lying about that?”
Reacher nodded. “Had to be. Suddenly it made a lot of sense. I realized she doesn’t look rich. She dresses very cheap. She has cheap luggage.”
“You based it on her luggage!”
He shrugged. “I told you it was a house of cards. But in my experience if somebody’s got money outside of their salary, it shows up somewhere. It might be subtle and tasteful, but it’s there. And with Julia Lamarr, it wasn’t there. So she was poor. So she was lying. And Jodie told me her firm has this so what else thing. If they find a guy lying about something, they ask themselves so what else! What else is he lying about? So I thought what if she’s lying about the
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relationship with her sister too? What if she still hates her and resents her, like when she was a little kid? And what if she’s lying about the equal inheritance? What if there’s no inheritance for her at all?”
“Did you check it out?”
“How could I? But check it out yourself and you’ll see. It’s the only thing that fits. So then I thought what the hell else? What ‘^everything is a lie? What if she’s lying about not flying? What if that’s a big beautiful lie too, just sitting there, so big and obvious nobody thinks twice about it? I even asked you how she gets away with it. You said everybody just works around it, like a law of nature. Well, we all did. We just worked around it. Like she intended. Because it made it absolutely impossible it was her. But it was a lie. It had to be. Fear of flying is way too irrational for her.”
“But it’s an impossible lie to tell. I mean, either a person flies, or she doesn’t.”
“She used to, years ago,” Reacher said. “She told me that. Then presumably she grew to hate it, so she stopped. So it was convincing. Nobody who knows her now ever saw her fly. So everybody believed her. But when it came to it, she could put herself on a plane. If it was worth it to her. And this was worth it to her. Biggest motive you ever saw. Alison was going to get everything, and she wanted it for herself. She was Cinderella, all burning up with jealousy and resentment and hatred.”
“Well, she fooled me,” Harper said. “That’s for sure.”
Reacher stroked Scimeca’s hair.
“She fooled everybody,” he said. “That’s why she did the far corners first. To make everybody think about the geography, the range, the reach, the distance. To move herself right outside the picture, subconsciously.”
Harper was quiet for a beat. “But she was so upset. She cried, remember? In front of us all?”
Reacher shook his head. “She wasn’t upset. She was frightened. It was her time of maximum danger. Remember just before that? She refused to take her rest period. Because she knew she needed to be around, to control any fallout from the postmortem. And then I started questioning the motive, and she got tense as hell because I might be heading in the right direction. But then I said it was weapons theft in the Army, and she cried, but not because she was upset. She cried with relief, because she was still safe. I hadn’t smoked her out. And you remember what she did next?”
Harper nodded. “She started backing you up on the weapons theft thing.”
“Exactly,” Reacher said. “She started making my case for me. Putting words
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in my mouth. She said we should think laterally, go for it, maximum effort. She jumped on the bandwagon, because she saw the bandwagon was heading in the wrong direction. She was thinking hard, improvising like crazy, sending us all down another blind alley. But she wasn’t thinking hard enough, because that bandwagon was always bullshit. There was a flaw in it, a mile wide.”
“What flaw?”
“It was an impossible coincidence that the eleven witnesses could be the only eleven women obviously living alone afterward. I told you it was partly an experiment. I wanted to see who wouldn’t support it. Only Poulton wouldn’t. Blake was out of it, upset because Lamarr was upset. But Lamarr backed it all the way. She backed it big-time, because it made her safe. And then she went home, with everybody’s sympathy. But she didn’t go home. At least not for more than the time it takes to pack a bag. She came straight here and went to work.”