Running Blind

by Child, Lee

  “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.

  “So now what?” he said.

  “Back to Quantico,” she said.

  IT 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.”

  “She figured it was for her roommate,” Harper said. “She didn’t live alone. So the list of eleven doesn’t mean anything.”

  But Blake shook his head.

  “No, it means what it always meant,” he said. “Eleven women who look like they live alone to somebody studying the paperwork. We checked with all the others on the phone. Eighty calls. Told them we were customer services people with a parcel company. Took us hours. But none of them knew anything about unexpected cartons. So there are eighty women out of the loop, and eleven in it. So Reacher’s theory still holds. The roommates surprised him, they’ll surprise the guy.”

  Reacher glanced at him, gratified. And a little surprised.

  “Hey, credit where it’s due?” Blake said.

  Lamarr nodded and moved and wrote a note on the end of a lengthy list.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Reacher said to her.

  “Maybe it could have been avoided,” she said. “You know, if you’d cooperated like this from the start.”

  There was silence.

  “So we’ve got seven out of seven,” Blake said. “No paperwork, vague women.”

  “We’ve got one other roommate situation,” Poulton said. “Then three of them have been getting regular misdeliveries and they’ve gotten slow about sorting them out. The other two were just plain vague.”

  “Scimeca was pretty vague, for sure,” Harper said.

  “She was traumatized,” Reacher said. “She’s doing well to function at all.”

  Lamarr nodded. A small, sympathetic motion of her head.

  “Whatever, she’s not leading us anywhere, right?” she said.

  “What about the delivery companies?” Reacher asked. “You chasing them?”

  “We don’t know who they were,” Poulton said. “The paperwork is missing, seven cartons out of seven.”

  “There aren’t too many possibilities,” Reacher said.

  "Aren’t there?” Poulton said back. "UPS, FedEx, DHL, Airborne Express, the damn United States Postal Service, whoever, plus any number of local subcontractors. ”

  “Try them all,” Reacher said.

  Poulton shrugged. “And ask them what? Out of all the ten zillion packages you delivered in the last two months, can you remember the one we’re interested in?”

  “You have to try,” Reacher said. “Start with Spokane. Remote address like that, middle of nowhere, the driver might recall it.”

  Blake leaned forward and nodded. “OK, we’ll try it up there. But only there. Gets impossible, otherwise.”

  “Why are the women so vague?” Harper asked.

  “Complex reasons,” Lamarr answered. “Like Reacher said, they’re traumatized, all of them, at least to some extent. A large package, coming into their private territory unasked, it’s an invasion of sorts. The mind blocks it out. It’s what I would expect to see in cases like these.”

  Her voice was low and strained. Her bony hands were laid on the table in front of her.

  “I think it’s weird,” Harper said.

  Lamarr shook her head, patiently, like a teacher.

  “No, it’s what I would expect,” she said again. “Don’t look at it from your own perspective. These women were assaulted, figuratively, literally, both. That does things to a person.”

  “And they’re all worried now,” Reacher said. “Guarding them meant telling them. Certainly Scimeca looked pretty shaken. And she should be. She’s pretty isolated out there. If I was the guy, I’d be looking at her next. I’m sure she’s capable of arriving at the same conclusion.”

  “We need to catch this guy,” Lamarr said.

  Blake nodded. “Not going to be easy, now. Obviously we’ll keep round-the-clock security on the seven who got the packages, but he’ll spot that from a mile away, so we won’t catch him at a scene.”

  “He’ll disappear for a while,” Lamarr said. “Until we take the security off again.”

  “How long are we keeping the security on?” Harper asked.

  There was silence.

  “Three weeks,” Blake said. “Any longer than that, it gets crazy.”

  Harper stared at him.

  “Has to be a limit,” he said. “What do you want here? Round-the-clock guards, the rest of their damn lives?”

  Silence again. Poulton butted his papers into a pile.

  “So we’ve got three weeks to find the guy,” he said.

  Blake nodded and laid his hands on the table. “Plan is we spell each other twenty-four hours a day, three weeks, starting now. One of us sleeps while the others work. Julia, you get the first rest period, twelve hours, starting now.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  Blake looked awkward. “Well, want it or not, you got it.”

  She shook her head. “No, I need to stay on top of this. Let Poulton go first.”

  “No arguments, Julia. We need to get organized.”

  “But I’m fine. I need to work. And I couldn’t sleep now, anyway.”

  “Twelve hours, Julia,” Blake said. “You’re entitled to time off anyway. Compassionate leave of absence, twice over.”

  “I won’t go,” she said back.

  “You will.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I need to be involved right now.”

  She sat there, implacable. Resolution in her face. Blake sighed and looked away.

  “Right now, you can’t be involved,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  Blake looked straight at her. “Because they just flew your sister’s body in for the autopsy. And you can’t be involved in that. I can’t let you.”

  She tried to answer. Her mouth opened and closed twice, but no sound came out. Then she blinked once and looked away.

  “So, twelve hours,” Blake said.

  She stared down at the table.

  “Will I get the data?” she asked quietly.

  Blake nodded.

  “Yes, I’m afraid you’ll have to,” he answered.

  18

  THE LOCAL BUREAU team in Spokane had worked hard through the night and gotten good cooperation from a construction business and a crane-hire operation and a trucking crew and an air cargo operator. The construction workers tore Alison Lamarr’s bathroom apart and disconnected the plumbing. Bureau crime scene specialists wrapped the whole tub in heavy plastic while the builders took out the window and removed the end wall down to floor level. The crane crew fixed canvas slings under the wrapped tub and
brought their hook in through the hole in the end of the building and eased the heavy load out into the night. It swung through the chill air and dropped slowly down to a wooden crate lashed to a flatbed truck idling on the road. The truckers pumped expanding foam into the crate to cushion the cargo and nailed the lid down tight and drove straight to the airport in Spokane. The crate was loaded into a waiting plane and flown direct to Andrews Air Force Base, where a helicopter collected it and took it on down to Quantico. Then it was off-loaded by a forklift and set down gently in a laboratory loading bay and left waiting there for an hour while the Bureau’s forensic experts figured out exactly how to proceed.

  “At this point, the cause of death is all I want,” Blake said.

  He was sitting on one side of a long table in the pathology conference room, three buildings and five floors away from the Behavioral Science facility. Harper was sitting next to him, and then Poulton next to her, and then Reacher at the end of the row. Opposite them was Quantico’s senior pathologist, a doctor called Stavely, which was a name Reacher thought he recognized from somewhere. Clearly the guy had some kind of a famous reputation. Everybody was treating him with deference. He was a large red-faced man, oddly cheerful. His hands were big and red and looked clumsy, although presumably they weren’t. Next to him was his chief technician, a quiet thin man who looked preoccupied.

  “We read the stuff from your other cases,” Stavely said, and stopped.

  “Meaning?” Blake asked.

  “Meaning I’m not exactly filled with optimism,” Stavely said. “New Hampshire is a little remote from the action, I agree, but they see plenty down in Florida and California. I suspect if there was anything to find, you’d know about it by now. Good people, down there.”

  “Better people up here,” Blake said.

  Stavely smiled. “Flattery will get you anywhere, right?”

  “It’s not flattery.”

  Stavely was still smiling. “If there’s nothing to find, what can we do?”

  “Got to be something,” Blake said. “He made a mistake this time, with the box.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe he made more than one mistake, left something you’ll find.”

  Stavely thought about it. “Well, don’t hold your breath, is all I’m saying.”

  Then he stood up abruptly and knitted his thick fingers together and flexed his hands. Turned to his technician. “So are we ready?”

  The thin guy nodded. “We’re assuming the paint will be dried hard on the top surface, maybe an inch, inch and a half. If we cut it away from the tub enamel all around we should be able to slide a body bag in and scoop her out.”

  “Good,” Stavely said. “Keep as much paint around her as you can. I don’t want her disturbed.”

  The technician hurried out and Stavely followed him, evidently assuming the other four would file out behind him, which they did, with Reacher last in line.

  THE PATHOLOGY LAB was no different from the others Reacher had seen. It was a large low space, brightly lit by an illuminated ceiling. The walls and the floor were white tile. In the middle of the room was a large examination table sculpted from gleaming steel. The table had a drain canal pressed into the center. The drain was plumbed straight into a steel pipe running down through the floor. The table was surrounded by a cluster of wheeled carts loaded with tools. Hoses hung from the ceiling. There were cameras on stands, and scales, and extractor hoods. There was a low hum of ventilation and a strong smell of disinfectant. The air was still and cold.

  “Gowns, and gloves,” Stavely said.

  He pointed to a steel cupboard filled with folded nylon gowns and boxes of disposable latex gloves. Harper handed them out.

  “Probably won’t need masks,” Stavely said. “My guess is the paint will be the worst thing we smell.”

  They smelled it as soon as the gurney came in through the door. The technician was pushing it and the body bag lay on it, bloated and slick and smeared with green. Paint seeped from the closure and ran down the steel legs to the wheels and left parallel tracks across the white tile. The technician walked between the tracks. The gurney rattled and the bag rolled and wobbled like a giant balloon filled with oil. The technician’s arms were smeared with paint to his shoulders.

  “Take her to X ray first,” Stavely said.

  The guy steered the gurney in a new direction and headed for a closed room off the side of the lab. Reacher stepped ahead and pulled the door for him. It felt like it weighed a ton.

  “Lined with lead,” Stavely said. “We really zap them in there. Big, big doses, so we can see everything we want to see. Not like we have to worry about their long-term health, is it?”

  The technician was gone for a moment and then he stepped back into the lab and eased the heavy door closed behind him. There was a distant powerful hum which lasted a second and then stopped. He went back and came out pushing the gurney again. It was still making tracks across the tile. He stopped it alongside the examination table.

  “Roll her off,” Stavely said. “I want her facedown.”

  The technician stepped beside him and leaned across the table and grasped the nearer edge of the bag with both hands and lifted it half off the gurney, half onto the table. Then he walked around to the other side and took the other edge and flipped it up and over. The bag flopped zipper-side down and the mass inside it sucked and rolled and wobbled and settled. Paint oozed out onto the polished steel. Stavely looked at it and beyond it to the floor, which was all crisscrossed with green tracks.

  “Overshoes, people,” he said. “It’ll get everywhere.”

  They stepped away and Harper found pairs of plastic footwear in a locker and handed them out. Reacher slipped his on and stepped back and watched the paint. It seeped out through the zipper like a thick slow tide.

  “Get the film,” Stavely said.

  The technician ducked back to the X-ray room and came out with large gray squares of film which mapped Alison Lamarr’s body. He handed them to Stavely. Stavely fanned through them and held them up against the light from the ceiling.

  “Instant,” he said. “Like Polaroid. The benefits of scientific progress.”

  He shuffled them like a dealer and separated one of them and held it up. Ducked away to a light box on the wall and hit the switch and held the film against the light with his big fingers splayed.

  “Look at that,” he said.

  It was a photograph of the midsection from just below the sternum to just above the pubic area. Reacher saw the outlines of ghostly gray bones, ribs, spine, pelvis, with a forearm and a hand lying across them at an angle. And another shape, dense and so bright it shone pure white. Metal. Slim and pointed, about as long as the hand.

  “A tool of some sort,” Stavely said.

  “The others didn’t have anything like that,” Poulton said.

  “Doc, we need to see it right away,” Blake said. “It’s important.”

  Stavely shook his head. “It’s underneath her body right now, because she’s upside down. We’ll get there, but it won’t be real soon.”

  “How long?”

  “Long as it takes,” Stavely said. “This is going to be messy as hell.”

  He clipped the gray photographs in sequence on the light box. Then he walked the length of the ghostly display and studied them.

  “Her skeleton is relatively undamaged,” he said. He pointed to the second panel. “Left wrist was cracked and healed, probably ten years ago.”

  “She was into sports,” Reacher said. “Her sister told us.”

  Stavely nodded. “So we’ll check the collarbone.”

  He moved left and studied the first panel. It showed the skull and the neck and the shoulders. The collar-bones gleamed and swooped down toward the sternum.

  "Small crack,” Stavely said, pointing. "It’s what I’d expect. An athlete with a cracked wrist will usually have a cracked collarbone too. They fall off their bike or their Rollerblades or whatever, throw out their a
rm to break their fall, end up breaking their bones instead.”

  “But no fresh injuries?” Blake asked.

  Stavely shook his head. “These are ten years old, maybe more. She wasn’t killed by blunt trauma, if that’s what you mean.”

  He hit the switch and the light behind the X rays went out. He turned back to the examination table and knitted his fingers again and his knuckles clicked in the silence.

  “OK,” he said. “Let’s go to work.”

  He pulled a hose from a reel mounted on the ceiling and turned a small faucet built into its nozzle. There was a hissing sound and a stream of clear liquid started running. A heavy, slow liquid with a sharp, strong smell.

  “Acetone,” Stavely said. “Got to clear this damn paint.”

  He used the acetone sluice on the body bag and on the steel table. The technician used handfuls of kitchen towel, wiping the bag and pushing the thick liquid into the drain. The chemical stink was overpowering.

  “Ventilator,” Stavely said.

  The technician ducked away and twisted a switch behind him and the fans in the ceiling changed up from a hum to a louder roar. Stavely held the nozzle closer and the bag began to turn from wet green to wet black. Then he held the hose low down on the table and set up a swirling rinse under the bag straight into the drain.

  “OK, scissors,” he said.

  The technician took scissors from a cart and snipped a corner of the bag. Green paint flooded out. The acetone swirl caught it and it eddied sluggishly to the drain. It kept on coming, two minutes, three, five. The bag settled and drooped as it emptied. The room went quieter under the roar of the fan and the hiss of the hose.

  “OK, the fun starts here,” Stavely said.

  He handed the hose to the technician and used a scalpel from the cart to slit the bag lengthwise from end to end. He made sideways cuts top and bottom and peeled the rubber back slowly. It lifted and sucked away from skin. He folded it back in two long flaps. Alison Lamarr’s body was revealed, lying facedown, slimy and slick with paint.