Then after she quit she went to Florida, to a beach town on the Atlantic forty miles north of where it stopped being too expensive. She got married
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there, got separated there, lived there a year, then died there. The file was full of notes and photographs about where and nothing much about how. Her house was a modern one-story crouching under an overhanging roof made of orange tile. The crime scene photographs showed no damage to any doors or windows, no disruption inside, a white-tiled bathroom with a tub full of green paint and a slick indeterminate shape floating in it.
The autopsy showed nothing at all. The paint was designed to be tough and weatherproof and it had a molecular structure designed to cling and penetrate anything it was slapped onto. It covered a hundred percent of the body’s external area and it had seeped into the eyes and the nose and the mouth and the throat. Removing it removed the skin. There was no evidence of bruising or trauma. The toxicology was clear. No phenol injection to the heart. No air embolisms. There are many clever ways to kill a person, and the Florida pathologists knew all of them, and they couldn’t find any evidence of any of them.
“Well?” Harper said.
Reacher shrugged. “She had freckles. I remember that. A year in the Florida sun, she must have looked pretty good.”
“You liked her.”
He nodded. “She was OK.”
The final third of the file was some of the most exhaustive crime scene forensics he had ever heard of. The analysis was microscopic, literally. Every particle of dust or fiber in her house had been vacuumed up and analyzed. But there was no evidence of any intruder. Not the slightest sign.
“A very clever guy,” Reacher said.
Harper said nothing in reply. He pushed Callan’s folder to one side and opened Cooke’s. It followed the same format in its condensed narrative structure. She was different from Callan in that she had obviously aimed for the Army right from the start. Her grandfather and her father had been Army men, which creates a kind of military aristocracy, the way certain families see it. She had recognized the clash between her gender and her career intention pretty early, and there were notes about her demands to join her high school ROTC. She had begun her battles early.
She had been an officer candidate, and had started out a second lieutenant. She had gone straight to War Plans, which is where the brainy people waste their time assuming that when push comes to shove your friends stay your friends and your enemies stay your enemies. She had been promoted first lieutenant and posted to NATO in Brussels and started a relationship with her
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colonel. When she didn’t get promoted captain early enough, she complained about him.
Reacher remembered it well. There was no harassment involved, certainly not in the sense that Callan had endured. No strangers had pinched her or squeezed her or made lewd gestures at her with oily gun barrels. But the rules had changed, so that sleeping with somebody you commanded was no longer allowed, so Cooke’s colonel went down, and then ate his pistol. She quit and flew home from Belgium to a lakeside cottage in New Hampshire, where she was eventually found dead in a tub full of setting paint.
The New Hampshire pathologists and forensic scientists told the same story their Florida counterparts had, which was absolutely no story at all. The notes and the photographs were the same but different. A gray cedar house crowded by trees, an undamaged door, an undisturbed interior, folksy bathroom decor dominated by the dense green contents of the tub. Reacher skimmed through and closed the folder.
“What do you think?” Harper asked.
“I think the paint is weird,” Reacher said.
“Why?”
He shrugged. “It’s so circular, isn’t it? It eliminates evidence on the bodies, which reduces risk, but getting it and transporting it creates risk.”
“And it’s like a deliberate clue,” Harper said. “It underlines the motive. It’s definite confirmation it’s an Army guy. It’s like a taunt.”
“Lamarr says it has psychological significance. She says he’s reclaiming them for the military.”