by Child, Lee
Stavely used the scalpel and slit the rubber around the feet, up alongside the legs, around the contours of the hips, up her flanks, close to her elbows, around her shoulders and head. He pulled away the strips of rubber until the bag was gone, all except for the front surface, which was trapped between the crust of paint and the steel of the table.
The crust of paint was top down to the table, because she was upside down. Its underside was bubbled and jellified. It looked like the surface of a distant alien planet. Stavely started rinsing its edges, where it was stuck to her skin.
“Won’t that damage her?” Blake asked.
Stavely shook his head. “It’s the same stuff as nail polish remover.”
The skin turned greenish white where the paint washed off. Stavely used his gloved fingertips to peel the crust away. The strength in his hands moved the body. It lifted and fell, slackly. He pushed the hose underneath her, probing for stubborn adhesions. The technician stood next to him and lifted her legs. Stavely reached under them and cut the crust and the rubber together, peeling it away up to her thighs. The acetone ran continuously, rinsing the green stream into the drain.
Stavely moved up to the head. Placed the hose against the nape of her neck and watched as the chemical flooded her hair. Her hair was a nightmare. It was matted and crusted with paint. It had floated up around her face like a stiff tangled cage.
“I’m going to have to cut it,” he said.
Blake nodded, somber.
“I guess so,” he said.
“She had nice hair,” Harper said. Her voice was quiet under the noise from the fan. She half turned and backed off a step. Her shoulder touched Reacher’s chest. She left it there a second longer than she needed to.
Stavely took a fresh scalpel from the cart and traced through the hair, as close to the paint crust as he could get. He slid a powerful arm under the shoulders and lifted. The head came free, leaving hair matted into the crust like mangrove roots tangled into a swamp. He cut through the crust and the rubber and pulled another section free.
“I hope you catch this guy,” he said.
“That’s the plan,” Blake said back, still somber.
“Roll her over,” Stavely said.
She moved easily. The acetone mixed with the slick paint was like a lubricant against the dished steel of the table. She slid face up and lay there, ghastly under the lights. Her skin was greenish white and puckered, stained and blotched with paint. Her eyes were open, the lids rimed with green. She wore the last remaining square of the body bag stuck to her skin from her breasts to her thighs, like an old-fashioned bathing suit protecting her modesty.
Stavely probed with his hand and found the metal implement under the rubber. He cut through the bag and wormed his fingers inside and pulled the object out in a grotesque parody of surgery.
“A screwdriver,” he said.
The technician washed it in an acetone bath and held it up. It was a quality tool with a heavy plastic handle and a handsome chromed-steel shaft with a crisp blade.
“Matches the others,” Reacher said. “From her kitchen drawer, remember?”
“She’s got scratches on her face,” Stavely said suddenly.
He was using the hose, washing her face. Her left cheek had four parallel incisions running down from the eye to the jaw.
“Did she have these before?” Blake asked.
“No,” Harper and Reacher said together.
“So what’s that about?” Blake said.
“Was she right-handed?” Stavely asked.
“I don’t know,” Poulton said.
Harper nodded. “I think so.”
Reacher closed his eyes and trawled back to her kitchen, watched her pouring coffee from the jug.
“Right-handed,” he said.
“I agree,” Stavely said. He was examining her arms and hands. “Her right hand is larger than the left. The arm is heavier.”
Blake was leaning over, looking at the damaged face. “So?”
“I think they’re self-inflicted,” Stavely said.
“Are you sure?”
Stavely was circling the head of the table, looking for the best light. The wounds were swelled by the paint, raw and open. Green, where they should have been red.
“I can’t be sure,” he said. “You know that. But probability suggests it. If the guy did them, what are the chances he would have put them in the only place she could have put them herself?”
“He made her do it,” Reacher said.
“How?” Blake asked.
“I don’t know how. But he makes them do a hell of a lot. I think he makes them put the paint in the tub themselves.”
“Why?”
“The screwdriver. It’s to get the lids off with. The scratches were an afterthought. If he’d been thinking about the scratches, he’d have made her get a knife from the kitchen instead of the screwdriver. Or as well as the screwdriver.”
Blake stared at the wall. “Where are the cans right now?”
“Materials Analysis,” Poulton said. “Right here. They’re examining them.”
“So take the screwdriver over there. See if there are any marks that match.”
The technician put the screwdriver in a clear plastic evidence bag and Poulton shrugged off his gown and kicked off his overshoes and hurried out of the room.
“But why?” Blake said. “Why make her scratch herself like that?”
“Anger?” Reacher said. “Punishment? Humiliation? I always wondered why he wasn’t more violent.”
“These wounds are very shallow,” Stavely said. “I guess they bled a little, but they didn’t hurt much. The depth is absolutely consistent, all the way down each of them. So she wasn’t flinching.”
“Maybe ritual,” Blake said. “Symbolic, somehow. Four parallel lines mean anything?”
Reacher shook his head. “Not to me.”
“How did he kill her?” Blake asked. “That’s what we need to know.”
“Maybe he stabbed her with the screwdriver,” Harper said.
“No sign of it,” Stavely said. “No puncture wounds visible anyplace that would kill a person.”
He had the final section of the body bag peeled back and was washing paint away from her midsection, probing with his gloved fingers under the acetone jet. The technician lifted the rubber square away and then she lay naked under the lights, collapsed and limp and utterly lifeless. Reacher stared at her and remembered the bright vivacious woman who had smiled with her eyes and radiated energy like a tiny sun.
“Is it possible you can kill somebody and a pathologist can’t tell how?” he asked.
Stavely shook his head.
“Not this pathologist,” he said.
He shut off the acetone stream and let the hose retract into its reel on the ceiling. Stepped back and turned the ventilation fan back to normal. The room turned quiet again. The body lay on the table, as clean as it was ever going to get. The pores and folds of skin were stained green and the skin itself was lumpy and white like something that lives at the bottom of the sea. The hair was spiky with residue, roughly hacked around the scalp, framing the dead face.
“Fundamentally two ways to kill a person,” Stavely said. “Either you stop the heart, or you stop the flow of oxygen to the brain. But to do either thing without leaving a mark is a hell of a trick.”
“How would you stop the heart?” Blake asked.
“Short of firing a bullet through it?” Stavely said. “Air embolism would be the best way. A big bubble of air, injected straight into the bloodstream. Blood circulates surprisingly fast, and an air bubble hits the inside of the heart like a stone, like a tiny internal bullet. The shock is usually fatal. That’s why nurses hold up the hypodermic and squirt a little liquid out and flick it with their nail. To be sure there’s no air in the mix.”
“You’d see the hypodermic hole, right?”
“Maybe, maybe not. And definitely not on a corpse like this. The skin is ruined by the paint.
But you’d see the internal damage to the heart. I’ll check, of course, when I open her up, but I’m not optimistic. They didn’t find anything like that on the other three. And we’re assuming a consistent MO here, right?”
Blake nodded. “What about oxygen to the brain?”
“Suffocation, in layman’s terms,” Stavely said. “It can be done without leaving much evidence. Classic thing would be an old person, wasted and weak, gets a pillow held over the face. Pretty much impossible to prove. But this isn’t an old person. She’s young and strong.”
Reacher nodded. He had suffocated a man once, way back in his long and checkered career. He had needed all of his considerable strength to hold the guy’s face down on a mattress, while he bucked and thrashed and died.
“She’d have fought like crazy,” he said.
“Yes, I think she would,” Stavely said. “And look at her. Look at her musculature. She wouldn’t have been a pushover.”
Reacher looked away instead. The room was silent and cold. The awful green paint was everywhere.
“I think she was alive,” he said. “When she went in the tub.”
“Reasoning?” Stavely asked.
“There was no mess,” Reacher said. “None at all. The bathroom was immaculate. What was she, one twenty? One twenty-five? Hell of a dead weight to heave into the tub without making some kind of a mess.”
“Maybe he put the paint in afterward,” Blake said. “On top of her.”
Reacher shook his head. “It would have floated her up, surely. It looks like she slipped right in there, like you get into a bath. You know, you point your toe, you get under the water.”
“We’d need to experiment,” Stavely said. “But I think I agree she died in the tub. The first three, there was no evidence they were touched at all. No bruising, no abrasions, no nothing. No postmortem damage either. Moving a corpse usually damages the ligaments in the joints, because there’s no muscle tension there to protect them. At this point, my guess is they did whatever they did strictly under their own power.”
“Except kill themselves,” Harper said.
Stavely nodded. “Suicide in bathtubs is pretty much limited to drowning while drunk or drugged, or opening your veins into warm water. Obviously, this isn’t suicide.”
“And they weren’t drowned,” Blake said.
Stavely nodded again. “The first three weren’t. No fluid of any kind in the lungs. We’ll know about this one soon as she’s opened up, but I would bet against it.”
“So how the hell did he do it?” Blake said.
Stavely stared down at the body, something like compassion in his face.
“Right now, I have no idea,” he said. “Give me a couple of hours, maybe three, I might find something.”
“No idea at all?”
“Well, I had a theory,” Stavely said. “Based on what I read about the other three. Problem is, now I think the theory is absurd.”
“What theory?”
Stavely shook his head. “Later, OK? And you need to leave now. I’m going to cut her up, and I don’t want you here for that. She needs privacy, time like this.”
19
THEY LEFT THEIR gowns and overshoes in a tangle by the door and turned left and right through walkways and corridors to the pathology building’s front exit. They took the long way around through the parking lots to the main building, as if brisk motion through chill fall air would rid them of the stink of paint and death. They rode the elevator four floors underground in silence. Walked through the narrow corridor and spilled into the seminar room and found Julia Lamarr sitting alone at the table, looking up at the silent television screen.
“You’re supposed to be out of here,” Blake said to her.
“Any conclusions?” she asked quietly. “From Stavely? ”
Blake shook his head. “Later. You should have gone home.”
She shrugged. “I told you. I can’t go home. I need to be on top of this.”
“But you’re exhausted.”
“You saying I’m not effective?”
Blake sighed. “Julia, give me a break. I’ve got to organize. You collapse with exhaustion, you’re no good to me.”
“Not going to happen.”
“It was an order, you realize that?”
Lamarr waved a hand, like a gesture of refusal. Harper stared at her.
“It was an order,” Blake said again.
“And I ignored it,” Lamarr said. “So what are you going to do? We need to work. We’ve got three weeks to catch this guy. That’s not a lot of time.”
Reacher shook his head. “That’s plenty of time.”
Harper turned her stare on him.
“If we talk about his motive, right now,” he said.
There was silence. Lamarr stiffened in her seat.
“I think his motive is clear,” she said.
There was ice in her voice. Reacher turned to face her, softening his expression, trying to defer to the fact that her family had been wiped out in the space of two days.
“It isn’t to me,” he said.
Lamarr turned to Blake, appealing.
“We can’t start arguing this all over again,” she said. “Not now.”
“We have to,” Reacher said.
“We’ve done this work already,” she snapped.
“Relax, people,” Blake called. “Just relax. We’ve got three weeks, and we’re not going to waste any of it arguing.”
“You’re going to waste all of it, if you keep on like this,” Reacher said.
There was suddenly tension in the air. Lamarr stared down at the table. Blake was silent. Then he nodded.
“You’ve got three minutes, Reacher,” he said. “Tell us what’s on your mind.”
“You’re wrong about his motive,” Reacher said. “That’s what’s on my mind. It’s keeping you away from looking in the right places.”
“We’ve done this work already,” Lamarr said again.
“Well, we need to do it over,” Reacher said, gently. “Because we won’t find the guy if we’re looking in the wrong places. That stands to reason, right?”
“Do we need this?” Lamarr said.
“Two minutes and thirty seconds,” Blake said. “Give us what you’ve got. Reacher.”
Reacher took a breath. “This is a very smart guy, right? Very, very smart. Smart in a very particular way. He’s committed four homicides, bizarre, elaborate scenarios, and he hasn’t left the slightest shred of evidence behind. He’s only made one mistake, by leaving one box open. And that was a fairly trivial mistake, because it’s not getting us anywhere. So we’ve got a guy who’s successfully handled a thousand decisions, a thousand details, under urgent and stressful conditions. He’s killed four women and so far we don’t even know how.”
“So?” Blake said. “What’s your point?”
“His intelligence,” Reacher said. “It’s a specific type. It’s practical, efficient, real-world. He’s got his feet on the ground. He’s a planner, and he’s pragmatic. He’s a problem solver. He’s intensely rational. He deals with reality.”
“So?” Blake said again.
“So let me ask you a question. You got a problem with black people?”
“What?”
“Just answer the question.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Good or bad as anybody, right?”
“Sure. Good or bad.”
“What about women? Good or bad as anybody, right?”
Blake nodded. “Sure.”
“So what if some guy is saying to you that black people are no good, or women are no good?”
“I’d say he’s wrong.”
“You’d say he’s wrong, and you’d know he’s wrong, because deep down you know what the truth of the matter is.”
Blake nodded again. “Sure. So?”
“So that’s my experience, too. Racists are fundamentally wrong. Sexists, too. No room for argument about it. Fundamentally, it’s a completely irratio
nal position to hold. So think about it. Any guy who gets in a big tantrum about this harassment issue is a guy who’s wrong. Any guy who blames the victims is very wrong. And any guy who goes around looking for revenge against the victims is very wrong. He’s got a screw loose. His brain doesn’t function right. He’s not rational. He’s not dealing with reality. He’s can’t be. Deep down, he’s some kind of an idiot.”
“So?”
“But our guy isn’t an idiot. We just agreed he’s very smart. Not eccentric smart, not lunatic smart, but real-world smart, rational and pragmatic and practical. He’s dealing with reality. We just agreed on that.”
“So?”
“So he’s not motivated by anger at these women. He can’t be. It’s not possible. You can’t be real-world smart and real-world dumb, all at the same time. You can’t be rational and irrational. You can’t deal with reality and simultaneously not deal with it.”
There was silence again.
“We know what his motive is,” Lamarr said. “What else could it be? The target group is too exact for it to be anything else.”
Reacher shook his head. “Like it or not, the way you’re describing his motive, you’re calling him deranged. But a deranged guy couldn’t commit these crimes.”
Lamarr clamped her teeth. Reacher heard them click and grind. He watched her. She shook her head. Her thin hair moved with it, stiff, like it was full of lacquer.
“So what’s his real motive, smart guy?” she asked, her voice low and quiet.
“I don’t know,” Reacher said.
“You don’t know? You better be kidding. You question my expertise and you don’t know?”
“It’ll be something simple. It always is, right? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the simple thing is the correct thing. Maybe doesn’t work like that for you guys down here, but that’s how it works out there in the real world.”
Nobody said a word. Then the door opened and Poulton walked into the silence, small and sandy with a faint smile hanging there under his mustache. The smile disappeared as soon as the atmosphere hit him. He sat down quietly next to Lamarr and pulled a stack of paper in front of him, defensively.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Blake nodded toward Reacher. “Smart guy here is challenging Julia’s reading of the motive.”
