“Evidence?”
“Not a damn thing, so far. They’re still looking, but I’m not optimistic.”
Reacher was focusing on the picture of the hallway. It was a long narrow space leading past the mouth of the living room, back to the bedrooms. On the left was a narrow shelf at waist height, crowded with tiny cactus plants in tiny terra-cotta pots. On the right were more narrow shelves, fixed to the wall at random heights and in random lengths. They were packed with small china ornaments. Most of them looked like dolls, brightly painted to represent national or regional costumes. The sort of things a person buys when she’s dreaming of having a home of her own.
“What did the cleaner do?” he asked.
Blake looked all the way down the table. “Screamed a bit, I guess, and then called the cops.”
“No, before that. She has her own key?”
fu/UUHA (filing 95
“Obviously.”
“Did she go straight to the bathroom?”
Blake looked blank and opened a file. Leafed through it and found a faxed copy of an interview report. “Yes, she did. She puts stuffin the toilet bowl, leaves it to work while she does the rest of the house, comes back to it last.”
“So she found the body right away, before she did any cleaning?”
Blake nodded.
“OK,” Reacher said.
“OK what?”
“How wide is that hallway?”
Blake turned and examined the picture. “Three feet? It’s a small house.”
Reacher nodded. “OK.”
“OK what?”
“Where’s the violence? Where’s the anger? She answers the door, this guy somehow forces her back through the hallway, through the master bedroom, into the bathroom, and then carries thirty gallons of paint through after her, and he doesn’t knock anything off those shelves.”
“C 1”
go?
Reacher shrugged. “Seems awful quiet to me. I couldn’t wrestle somebody
down that hallway without touching all that stuff. No way. Neither could you.”
• Blake shook his head. “He doesn’t do any wrestling. Medical reports show
the women probably aren’t touched at all. It’s a quiet scene, because there is no
violence.”
“You happy with that? Profile-wise? An angry soldier looking for retribution , and punishment, but there’s no uproar?”
“He kills them, Reacher. The way I see it, that’s retribution enough.”
There was silence. Reacher shrugged again. “Whatever.”
Blake faced him down the length of the table. “You’d do it differently?” I “Sure I would. Suppose you keep on pissing me off and I come after you, I
don’t see myself being especially gentle about it. I’d probably smack you around a little. Maybe a lot. If I was mad with you, I’d have to, right? That’s what being mad is all about.”
“So?”
“And what about the paint? How does he bring it to the house? We should go to the store and check out what thirty gallons looks like. He must have a car parked outside for twenty, thirty minutes at least. How does nobody see it? A parked car, or a wagon, or a truck?”
96
l”cw
“Or a sport-utility, rather like yours.”
“Maybe totally identical to mine. But how come nobody sees it?”
“We don’t know,” Blake said.
“How does he kill them without leaving any marks?”
“We don’t know.”
“That’s a lot you don’t know, right?”
Blake nodded. “Yes, it is, smart guy. But we’re working on it. We’ve got eighteen days. And with a genius like you helping us, I’m sure that’s all we’re going to need.”
“You’ve got eighteen days if he sticks to his interval,” Reacher said. “Suppose he doesn’t?”
“He will.”
“You hope.”
Silence again. Blake looked at the table, and then at Lamarr. “Julia?”
“I stand by my profile,” she said. “Right now I’m interested in Special Forces. They’re stood down one week in three. I’m sending Reacher to poke around.”
Blake nodded, reassured. “OK, where?”
Lamarr glanced at Reacher, waiting. He looked at the three black flags on the map.
“Geography is all over the place,” he said. “This guy could be stationed anywhere in the United States.”
“So?”
“So Fort Dix would be the best place to start. There’s a guy I know there.”
“Who?”
“A guy called John Trent,” Reacher said. “He’s a colonel. If anybody’s going to help me, he might.”