Harper nodded. “By taking their clothes, too.”
“But if he hates them enough to kill them, why would he want to reclaim them?”
“I don’t know. A guy like this, who knows how he thinks?”
“Lamarr thinks she knows how he thinks,” Reacher said.
Lorraine Stanley’s file was the last of the three. Her history was similar to Callan’s, but more recent. She was younger. She had been a sergeant, bottom of the totem pole in a giant quartermaster facility in Utah, the only woman in the place. She had been pestered since day one. Her competence had been questioned. One night her barrack was broken into and all her uniform trousers were stolen. She reported for duty the next morning wearing her regulation skirt. The next night, all her underwear was stolen. The next morning she was wearing the skirt and nothing underneath. Her lieutenant called her into his
fuMiitvt (filing
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oflfice. Made her stand easy in the middle of the room, one foot either side of a large mirror laid on the floor, while he yelled at her for a paperwork snafu. The whole of the personnel roster filed in and out of the office throughout, getting a good look at the reflection in the mirror. The lieutenant ended up in prison and Stanley ended up serving out another year and then living alone and dying alone in San Diego, in the little bungalow shown in the crime scene photographs, in which the California pathologists and forensics people had found absolutely nothing at all.
“How old are you?” Reacher asked.
“Me?” Harper said. “Twenty-nine. I told you that. It’s an FAQ.”
“From Colorado, right?”
“Aspen.”
“Family?”
“Two sisters, one brother.”
“Older or younger?”
“All older. I’m the baby.”
“Parents?”
“Dad’s a pharmacist, Mom helps him out.”
“You take vacations when you were kids?”
She nodded. “Sure. Grand Canyon, Painted Desert, all over. One year we camped in Yellowstone.”
“You drove there, right?”
She nodded again. “Sure. Big station wagon full of kids, happy family sort of thing. What’s this about?”
“What do you remember about the drives?”
She made a face. “They were endless.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly what?”
“This is a real big country.”
“So?”
“Caroline Cooke was killed in New Hampshire and Lorraine Stanley was killed three weeks later in San Diego. That’s about as far apart as you can get, right? Maybe thirty-five hundred miles by road. Maybe more.”
“Is he traveling by road?”
Reacher nodded. “He’s got hundreds of gallons of paint to haul around.”
“Maybe he’s got a stockpile stashed away someplace.”
“That just makes it worse. Unless his stash just happened to be on a direct
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line between where he’s based now and New Hampshire and southern California, he’d have to detour to get it. It would add distance, maybe a lot of distance.”
“So?”
“So he’s got a three-, four-thousand-mile road trip, plus surveillance time on Lorraine Stanley. Could he do that in a week?”
Harper made a face. “Call it seventy hours at fifty-five miles an hour.”
“Which he couldn’t average. He’d pass through towns and road construction. And he wouldn’t break the speed limit. A guy this meticulous isn’t going to risk some trooper sniffing around his vehicle. Hundreds of gallons of camouflage basecoat is going to arouse some suspicions these days, right?”
“So call it a hundred hours on the road.”
“At least. Plus a day or two surveillance when he gets there. That’s more than a week, in practical terms. It’s ten or eleven days. Maybe twelve.”
“So?”
“You tell me.”
“This is not some guy working two weeks on, one week off.”
Reacher nodded. “No, it’s not.”
s/
/ 4^ walked outside and around toward the block with the cafeteria in it. The weather had settled to what fall should be. The air was ten degrees warmer, but still crisp. The lawns were green and the sky was a shattering blue. The dampness had blown away and the leaves on the surrounding trees looked dry and two shades lighter.
“I feel like staying outside,” Reacher said.
“You need to work,” Harper said.
“I read the damn files. Reading them over again isn’t going to help me any. I need to do some thinking.”