“How is he killing them?” he asked.
She slid her hands to a firmer grip on the wheel. Swallowed hard and kept her eyes on the road.
“We don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know!” he repeated.
She shook her head. “They’re just dead. We can’t figure out how.”
cut
:4W
There are ninety-one altogether, and you need to do exactly six of them in total, which is three more, so what do you do now? You keep on thinking and planning, is what. Think, think, think, that’s what you do. Because it’s all based on thinking. You need to outwit them all. The victims, and the investigators. Layers and layers of investigators. More and more investigators all the time. Local cops, state cops, the FBI, the specialists the FBI brings in. New angles, new approaches. You know they’re there. They’re looking for you. They’ll find you if they can.
The investigators are tough, but the women are easy. Just about as easy as you expected them to be. There was no overconfidence there. None at all. The victims go down exactly as you imagined. You planned long and hard, and the planning was perfect. They answer the door, they let you in, they fall for it. They’re so damn keen to fall for it, their tongues are practically hanging out. They re so stupid, they deserve it. And it’s not difficult. No, not difficult at all. It’s meticulous, is what it is. It’s like everything else. If you plan it properly, if you think it through, if you prepare correctly, if you rehearse, then it’s easy. It’s a technical process, just like you knew it would be. Like a science. It can’t be anything else. You do this, and then you do this, and then you do this, and then you’re done, home free. Three more. That’s all. That’ll do it. The hard part is over. But you keep on thinking. Think, think, think. It worked once, it worked twice, it worked three times, but you know there are no guarantees in life. You know that, better than anybody. So you keep on thinking, because the only thing that can get you now is your own complacency.
* * *
I
L
ifu/l/U/M (^/t^ 77
m feu don’t know?’ Reacher said again.
Lamarr was startled. She was staring straight ahead, tired, concentrating, gripping the wheel, driving like a machine.
“Know what?” she said.
“How they died.”
She sighed and shook her head. “No, not really.”
He glanced across at her. “You OK?”
“Don’t I look OK?”
“You look exhausted.”
She yawned. “I’m a little weary, I guess. It was a long night.”
“Well, take care.”
“You worrying about me now?”
He shook his head. “No, I’m worrying about myself. You could fall asleep, run us off the road.”
She yawned again. “Never happened before.”
He looked away. Found himself fingering the airbag lid in front of him.
“I’m OK,” she said again. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Why don’t you know how they died?”
She shrugged. “You were an investigator. You saw dead people.”
“C 1”
So?
“So what did you look for?”
“Wounds, injuries.”
“Right,” she said. “Somebody’s full of bullet holes, you conclude they’ve been shot to death. Somebody’s got their head smashed in, you call it trauma with a blunt object.”
“But?”
“These three were in bathtubs full of drying paint, right? The crime scene guys take the bodies out, and the pathologists clean them up, and they don’t find anything.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing obvious, not at first. So then naturally they look harder. They still don’t find anything. They know they didn’t drown. When they open them up, they find no water or paint in the lungs. So then they search for external injuries, microscopically. They can’t find anything.”
“No hypodermic marks? Bruising?”
She shook her head. “Nothing at all. But remember, they’ve been coated in
78
l”M
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?”