The guy at the roadblock looped the tape off the trees and the car crawled through. It climbed onward, past the isolated houses every mile or so, all the way to the bend before the Lamarr place, where it stopped.
“You need to walk from here,” the driver said.
He stayed in the car, and Harper and Reacher stepped out and started walking. The air was damp, full of a kind of suspended drizzle that wasn’t really rain but wasn’t dry weather either. They rounded the curve and saw the house on the left, crouching low behind its fence and its wind-battered trees, with the road snaking by on the right. The road was blocked by a gaggle of cars. There was a local police black-and-white with its roof lights flashing aimlessly. A pair of plain dark sedans and a black Suburban with black glass. A coroner’s wagon, standing with all its doors open. The vehicles were all beaded with raindrops.
I
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fuHtun* ^iin^ 173
They walked closer and the front passenger door on the Suburban opened up and Nelson Blake slid out to meet them. He was in a dark suit with the coat collar turned up against the damp. His face was nearer gray than red, like shock had knocked his blood pressure down. He was all business. No greeting. No apologies, no pleasantries. No I-waswrongandyouwere-right.
“Not much more than an hour of daylight left, up here,” he said. “I want you to walk me through what you did the day before yesterday, tell me what’s different.”
Reacher nodded. He suddenly wanted to find something. Something important. Something crucial. Not for Blake. For Alison. He stood and gazed at the fence and the trees and the lawn. They were cared for. They were just trivial rearrangements of an insignificant portion of the planet’s surface, but they were motivated by the honest tastes and enthusiasms of a woman now dead. Achieved by her own labors.
“Who’s been in there already?” he asked.
“Just the local uniformed guy,” Blake said. “The one that found her.”
“Nobody else?”
“Nobody.”
“Not even you guys or the coroner?”
Blake shook his head. “I wanted your input first.”
“So she’s still in there?”
“Yes, I’m afraid she is.”
The road was quiet. Just a hiss of breeze in the power lines. The red and blue light from the police cruiser’s light bar washed over the suit on Blake’s back, rhythmically and uselessly.
“OK,” Reacher said. “The uniformed guy mess with anything?”
Blake shook his head again. “Opened the door, walked around downstairs, went upstairs, found his way to the bathroom, came right out again and called it in. His dispatcher had the good sense to keep him from going back inside.”
“Front door was unlocked?”
“Closed, but unlocked.”
“Did he knock?”
“I guess.”
“So his prints will be on the knocker, too. And the inside door-handles.”
Blake shrugged. “Won’t matter. Won’t have smudged our guy’s prints, because our guy doesn’t leave prints.”
Reacher nodded. “OK.”
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He walked past the parked vehicles and on past the mouth of the driveway. He walked twenty yards up the road.
“Where does this go?” he called.
Blake was ten yards behind him. “Back of beyond, probably.”
“It’s narrow, isn’t it?”
“I’ve seen wider,” Blake allowed.
Reacher strolled back to join him. “So you should check the mud on the shoulders, maybe up around the next bend.”
“What for?”
“Our guy came in from the Spokane road, most likely. Cruised the house, kept on going, turned around, came back. He’d want his car facing the right direction, before he went in and got to work. A guy like this, he’ll have been thinking about the getaway.”
Blake nodded. “OK. I’ll put somebody on it. Meantime, take me through the house.”
He called instructions to his team and Reacher joined Harper in the mouth of the driveway. They stood and waited for Blake to catch up with them.
“So walk me through it,” he said.
“We paused here for a second,” Harper said. “It was awful quiet. Then we walked up to the door, used the knocker.”
“Was the weather wet or dry?” Blake asked her.
She glanced at Reacher. “Dry, I guess. A little sunny. Not hot. But not raining.”