Child, Lee. Running blind

Scimeca shook her head. “I already have one. It’s over there.”

She pointed. There was a laundry area in the corner. Washer, dryer, sink. A vacuumed rug in the angle of the corner. White plastic baskets and detergent bottles lined up precisely on a countertop.

“Thing like this, you’d remember,” Reacher said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I assumed it’s for my roommate, I guess,” she said.

“You have a roommate?”

“Had. She moved out, couple of weeks ago.”

“And you figured this is hers?”

“Made sense to me,” Scimeca said. “She’s setting up housekeeping on her own, she needs a washing machine, right?”

“But you didn’t ask her?”

“Why should I? I figured it’s not for me, who else could it be for?”

“So why did she leave it here?”

“Because it’s heavy. Maybe she’s getting help to move it. It’s only been a couple of weeks.”

“She leave anything else behind?”

Scimeca shook her head. “This is the last thing.”

Reacher circled the carton. Saw the square shape where the packing documents had been torn away.

“She took the paperwork off,” he said.

Scimeca nodded again. “She would, I guess. She’d need to keep her affairs straight.”

200

\P&M

They stood in silence, three people surrounding a tall cardboard carton, vivid yellow light, jagged dark shadows.

“I’m tired,” Scimeca said. “Are we through? I want you guys out of here.”

“One last thing,” Reacher said.

“What?”

“Tell Agent Harper what you did in the service.”

“Why? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I just want her to know.”

Scimeca shrugged, puzzled. “I was in armaments proving.”

“Tell her what that was.”

“We tested new weapons incoming from the manufacturer.”

“And?”

“If they were up to spec, we passed them to the quartermasters.”

Silence. Harper glanced at Reacher, equally puzzled.

“OK,” he said. “Now we’re out of here.”

Scimeca led the way through the door to the garage. Pulled the cord and killed the light. Led them past her car and up the narrow staircase. Out into the foyer. She crossed the floor and checked the spyhole in the front door. Opened it up. The air outside was cold and damp.

“Goodbye, Reacher,” she said. “It was nice to see you again.”

Then she turned to Harper.

“You should trust him,” she said. “I still do, you know. Which is one hell of a recommendation, believe me.”

The front door closed behind them as they walked down the path. They heard the sound of the lock turning from twenty feet away. The local agent watched them get into their car. It was still warm inside. Harper started the motor and put the blower on high to keep it that way.

“She had a roommate,” she said.

Reacher nodded.

“So your theory is wrong. Looked like she lived alone, but she didn’t. We’re back to square one.”

“Square two, maybe. It’s still a subcategory. Has to be. Nobody targets ninety-one women. It’s insane.”

“As opposed to what?” Harper said. “Putting dead women in a tub full of paint?”

Reacher nodded again.

futuutu (filing 201

“So now what?” he said. “Back to Quantico,” she said.

/Tt

took nearly nine hours. They drove to Portland, took a turboprop to Sea-Tac, Continental to Newark, United to D.C., and a Bureau driver met them and drove them south into Virginia. Reacher slept most of the way, and the parts when he was awake were just a blur of fatigue. He struggled into alertness as they wound through Marine territory. The FBI guard on the gate reissued his visitor’s tag. The driver parked at the main doors. Harper led the way inside and they took the elevator four floors underground to the seminar room with the shiny walls and the fake windows and the photographs of Lorraine Stanley pinned to the blackboard. The television was playing silently, reruns of the day on the Hill. Blake and Poulton and Lamarr were at the table with drifts of paper in front of them. Blake and Poulton looked busy and harassed. Lamarr was as white as the paper in front of her, her eyes deep in her head and jumping with strain.

“Let me guess,” Blake said. “Scimeca’s box came a couple of months ago and she was kind of vague about why. And there was no paperwork on it.”