Chapter 15
HARPER WAS STILL in her second suit and her hair was still loose on her shoulders, but those were the only similarities with the last time he had seen her. Her long-limbed slowness was all wiped away by some kind of feverish tension, and her eyes were red and strained. He guessed she was as near to distraught as she was ever going to get.
"What?" he asked.
"Everything," she said. "It's all gone crazy. "
"Where?"
"Spokane," she said.
"No," he said.
"Yes," she said. "Alison Lamarr. "
There was silence.
"Shit," he whispered.
Harper nodded. "Yeah, shit. "
"When?"
"Sometime yesterday. He's speeding up. He didn't stick to the interval. The next one should have been two weeks away. "
"How?"
"Same as all the others. The hospital was calling her because her father died, and there was no reply, so eventually they called the cops, and the cops went out there and found her. Dead in the tub, in the paint, like all the others. "
More silence.
"But how the hell did he get in?"
Harper shook her head. "Just walked right in the door. "
"Shit, I don't believe it. "
"They've sealed the place off. They're sending a crime scene unit direct from Quantico. "
"They won't find anything. "
Silence again. Harper glanced around Jodie's kitchen, nervously.
"Blake wants you back on board," she said. "He's signed up for your theory in a big way. He believes you now. Eleven women, not ninety-one. "
Reacher stared at her. "So what am I supposed to say to that? Better late than never?"
"He wants you back," Harper said again. "This is getting way out of control. We need to start cutting some corners with the Army. And he figures you've demonstrated a talent for cutting corners. "
It was the wrong thing to say. It fell across the kitchen like a weight. Jodie switched her gaze from Harper to the refrigerator door.
"You should go, Reacher," she said.
He made no reply.
"Go cut some corners," she said. "Go do what you're good at. "
HE WENT. HARPER had a car waiting at the curb on Broadway. It was a Bureau car, borrowed from the New York office, and the driver was the same guy who had driven him down from Garrison with a gun at his head. But if the guy was confused about Reacher's recent change of status, he didn't show it. Just lit up his red light and took off west toward Newark.
The airport was a mess. They fought through crowds to the Continental counter. The reservation was coming in direct from Quantico as they waited at the desk. Two coach seats. They ran to the gate and were the last passengers to board. The purser was waiting for them at the end of the jetway. She put them in first class. Then she stood near them and used a microphone and welcomed everybody joining her for the trip to Seattle-Tacoma.
"Seattle?" Reacher said. "I thought we were going to Quantico. "
Harper felt behind her for the seat-belt buckle and shook her head. "First we're going to the scene. Blake thought it could be useful. We saw the place two days ago. We can give him some direct before-and-after comparisons. He thinks it's worth a try. He's pretty desperate. "
Reacher nodded. "How's Lamarr taking it?"
Harper shrugged. "She's not falling apart. But she's real tense. She wants to take complete control of everything. But she won't join us out there. Still won't fly. "
The plane was taxiing, swinging wide circles across the tarmac on its way to the takeoff line. The engines were whining up to pitch. There was vibration in the cabin.
"Flying's OK," Reacher said.
Harper nodded. "I know, crashing is the problem. "
"Hardly ever happens, statistically. "
"Like a Powerball win. But somebody always gets lucky. "
"Hell of a thing, not flying. A country this size, it's kind of limiting, isn't it? Especially for a federal agent. I'm surprised they let her get away with it. "
She shrugged again. "It's a known quantity. They work around it. "
The plane swung onto the runway and stopped hard against the brakes. The engine noise built louder and the plane rolled forward, gently at first, then harder, accelerating all the way. It came up off the ground with no sensation at all and the wheels whined up into their bays and the ground tilted sharply below them.
"Five hours to Seattle," Harper said. "All over again. "
"Did you think about the geography?" Reacher asked. "Spokane is the fourth corner, right?"
She nodded. "Eleven potential locations now, all random, and he takes the four farthest away for his first four hits. The extremities of the cluster. "
"But why?"
She made a face. "Demonstrating his reach?"
He nodded. "And his speed, I guess. Maybe that's why he abandoned the interval. To demonstrate his efficiency. He was in San Diego, then he's in Spokane a couple of days later, checking out a new target. "
"He's a cool customer. "
Reacher nodded vaguely. "That's for damn sure. He leaves an immaculate scene in San Diego, then he drives north like a madman and leaves what I bet is another immaculate scene in Spokane. A cool, cool customer. I wonder who the hell he is?"
Harper smiled, briefly and grimly. "We all wonder who the hell he is, Reacher. The trick is to find out. "
YOU'RE A GENIUS, is who you are. An absolute genius, a prodigy, a superhuman talent. Four down! One, two, three, four down. And the fourth was the best of all. Alison Lamarr herself! You go over and over it, replaying it like a video in your head, checking it, testing it, examining it. But also savoring it. Because it was the best yet. The most fun, the most satisfaction. The most impact. The look on her face as she opened the door! The dawning recognition, the surprise, the welcome!
There were no mistakes. Not a single one. It was an immaculate performance, from the beginning to the end. You replay your actions in minute detail. You touched nothing, left nothing behind. You brought nothing to her house except your still presence and your quiet voice. The terrain helped, of course, isolated in the countryside, nobody for miles around. It made it a real safe operation. Maybe you should have had more fun with her. You could have made her sing. Or dance! You could have spent longer with her. Nobody could have heard anything.
But you didn't, because patterns are important. Patterns protect you. You practice, you rehearse in your mind, you rely on the familiar. You designed the pattern for the worst case, which was probably the Stanley bitch in her awful little subdivision down in San Diego. Neighbors all over the place! Little cardboard houses all crowded on top of each other! Stick to the pattern, that's the key. And keep on thinking. Think, think, think. Plan ahead. Keep on planning. You've done number four, and sure, you're entitled to replay it over and over, to enjoy it for a spell, to savor it, but then you have to just put it away and close the door on it and prepare for number five.
THE FOOD ON the plane was appropriate for a flight that left halfway between lunch and dinner and was crossing all the time zones the continent had to offer. The only sure thing was it wasn't breakfast. Most of it was a sweet pastry envelope with ham and cheese inside. Harper wasn't hungry, so Reacher ate hers along with his own. Then he fueled up on coffee and fell back to thinking. Mostly he thought about Jodie. But do we want each other's lives? First, define your life. Hers was easy enough to pin down, he guessed. Lawyer, owner, resident, lover, lover of fifties jazz, lover of modern art. A person who wanted to be settled, precisely because she knew what it was like to be rootless. If anybody in the whole world should live on the fourth floor of an old Broadway building with museums and galleries and cellar clubs all around her, it was Jodie.
But what about him? What made him happy? Being with her, obviously. There was no doubt about that. No doubt at all. He recalled the day in June he had walked b
ack into her life. Just recalling it re-created the exact second he laid eyes on her and understood who she was. He had felt a flood of feeling as powerful as an electric shock. It buzzed through him. He was feeling it again, just because he was thinking about it. It was something he had rarely felt before.
Rarely, but not never. He had felt the same thing on random days since he left the Army. He remembered stepping off buses in towns he had never heard of in states he had never visited. He remembered the feel of sun on his back and dust at his feet, long roads stretching out straight and endless in front of him. He remembered peeling crumpled dollar bills off his roll at lonely motel desks, the feel of old brass keys, the musty smell of cheap rooms, the creak of springs as he dropped down on anonymous beds. Cheerful curious waitresses in old diners. Ten-minute conversations with drivers who stopped to pick him up, tiny random slices of contact between two of the planet's teeming billions. The drifter's life. Its charm was a big part of him, and he missed it when he was stuck in Garrison or holed up in the city with Jodie. He missed it bad. Real bad. About as bad as he was missing her right now.
"Making progress?" Harper asked him.
"What?" he said.
"You were thinking hard. Going all misty on me. "
"Was I?"
"So what were you thinking about?"
He shrugged. "Rocks and hard places. "
She stared at him. "Well, that's not going to get us anywhere. So think about something else, OK?"
"OK," he said.
He looked away and tried to put Jodie out of his mind. Tried to think about something else.
"Surveillance," he said suddenly.
"What about surveillance?"
"We're assuming the guy watches the houses first, aren't we? At least a full day? He might have already been hiding out somewhere, right when we were there. "
She shivered. "Creepy. But so what?"
"So you should check motel registers, canvass the neighborhood. Follow up. That's how you're going to do this, by working. Not by trying to do magic five floors underground in Virginia. "
"There was no neighborhood. You saw the place. We've got nothing to work on. I keep on telling you that. "
"And I keep on telling you there's always something to work on. "
"Yeah, yeah, he's very smart, the paint, the geography, the quiet scenes. "
"Exactly. I'm not kidding. Those four things will lead you to him, sure as anything. Did Blake go to Spokane?"
She nodded. "We're meeting him at the scene. "
"So he's going to have to do what I tell him, or I'm not sticking around. "
"Don't push it, Reacher. You're Army liaison, not an investigator. And he's pretty desperate. He can make you stick around. "
"He's fresh out of threats. "
She made a face. "Don't count on it. Deerfield and Cozo are working on getting those Chinese boys to implicate you. They'll ask INS to check for illegals, whereupon they'll find about a thousand in the restaurant kitchens alone. Whereupon they'll start talking about deportations, but they'll also mention that a little cooperation could make the problem go away, whereupon the big guys in the tongs will tell those kids to spill whatever beans we want them to spill. Greatest good for the greatest number, right?"
Reacher made no reply.
"Bureau always gets what it wants," Harper said.
BUT THE PROBLEM with sitting there rerunning it like a video over and over again is that little doubts start to creep in. You go over it and over it and you can't remember if you really did all the things you should have done. You sit there all alone, thinking, thinking, thinking, and it all goes a little blurry and the more you question it, the less sure you get. One tiny little detail. Did you do it? Did you say it? You know you did at the Callan house. You know that for sure. And at Caroline Cooke's place. Yes, definitely. You know that for sure, too. And at Lorraine Stanley's place in San Diego. But what about Alison Lamarr's place? Did you do it? Or did you make her do it? Did you say it? Did you?
You're completely sure you did, but maybe that's just in the rerun. Maybe that's the pattern kicking in and making you assume something happened because it always happened before. Maybe this time you forgot. You become terribly afraid about it. You become sure you forgot. You think hard. And the more you think about it, the more you're sure you didn't do it yourself. Not this time. That's OK, as long as you told her to do it for you. But did you? Did you tell her? Did you say the words? Maybe you didn't. What then?
You shake yourself and tell yourself to calm down. A person of your superhuman talent, unsure and confused? Ridiculous. Absurd! So you put it out of your mind. But it won't go away. It nags at you. It gets bigger and bigger, louder and louder. You end up sitting all alone, cold and sweating, absolutely sure you've made your first small mistake.