“So he takes their clothes and leaves nothing behind.”
She was quiet for a beat.
“He does leave something behind,” she said. “He leaves paint.”
“Paint?”
“Army camouflage green. Gallons of it.”
“Where?”
“In the tub. He puts the body in there, naked, and then he fills the tub with paint.”
Reacher stared past the beating wipers into the rain. “He drowns them? In paint?”
She shook her head again. “He doesn’t drown them. They’re already dead. He just covers them with paint afterward.”
“How? Like he paints them all over?”
She was gunning it hard, making up for lost time. “No, he doesn’t paint
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them. He just fills the tub with the paint, right up to the rim. Obviously it covers the bodies.”
“So they’re floating in a tub full of green paint?”
She nodded. “That’s how they were all found.”
He fell silent. He turned away and stared through his window and stayed silent for a long time. To the west, the weather was clearer. It was brighter. The car was moving fast. Rain hissed under the tires and beat on the underbody. He stared blankly at the brightness in the west and watched the endless road reel in and realized he was happy. He was heading somewhere. He was on the move. His blood was stirring like an animal at the end of winter. The old hobo demon was talking to him, quietly, whispering in his head. You’re happy now, it was saying. You’re happy, aren’t you? You even forgot for a moment you’re stuck in Garrison, didn’t you?
“You OK?” Lamarr asked.
He turned toward her and tried to fill his mind with her face, the white pallor, the thin hair, the sneering teeth.
“Tell me about the paint,” he said quietly.
She looked at him, oddly.
“It’s Army camouflage basecoat,” she said. “Flat green. Manufactured in Illinois by the hundred thousand gallons. Produced sometime within the last eleven years, because it’s new process. Beyond that, we can’t trace it.”
He nodded, vaguely. He had never used it, but he had seen a million square yards of stuff daubed with it.
“It’s messy,” he said.
“But the crime scenes are immaculate. He doesn’t spill a drop anywhere.”
“The women were already dead,” he said. “Nobody was fighting. No reason to spill any. But it means he must carry it into the house. How much does it take to fill a tub?”
“Somewhere between twenty and thirty gallons.”
“That’s a lot of paint. It must mean a hell of a lot to him. You figured out any significance to it?”
She shrugged. “Not really, not beyond the obvious military significance. Maybe removing the civilian clothes and covering the body with Army paint is some kind of reclamation, you know, putting them back where he thinks they belong, in the military, where they should have stayed. It traps them, you see. Couple of hours, the surface is skinning over. It goes hard, and the stuff
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underneath jellifies. Leave it long enough, I guess the whole tub might dry solid, with them inside. Like people put their baby’s shoe in a Perspex cube?”
Reacher stared ahead through the windshield. The horizon was bright. They were leaving the weather behind. On his right, Pennsylvania looked green and sunny.
“The paint is a hell of a thing,” he said. “Twenty or thirty gallons? That’s a major load to haul around. It implies a big vehicle. A lot of exposure obtaining it. Exposure just carrying it into the house. Very visible. Nobody saw anything?”
“We canvassed, door to door. Nobody reported anything.”
He nodded, slowly. “The paint is the key. Where’s he getting it from?”
“We have no idea. The Army is not being especially helpful.”
“I’m not surprised. The Army hates you. And it’s embarrassing. Makes it likely it’s a serving soldier. Who else could get that much camouflage paint?”
She made no reply. She just drove, south. The rain was gone and the wipers were squealing over dry glass. She switched them off with a small definite movement of her wrist. He fell to thinking about a soldier somewhere, loading cans of paint. Ninety-one women on his list, some skewed mental process reserving twenty or thirty gallons for each one of them. A potential total of two, two and a half thousand gallons. Tons of it. Truckloads of it. Maybe he was a quartermaster.