17
A WALKWAY CAME off the driveway on the left and
looped through the dark around some rockery plantings to a set of
wide wooden steps in the center of the front porch. Harper skipped
up them but Reacher’s weight made them creak in the night silence
and before the echo of the sound came back from the hills the front
door was open and Rita Scimeca was standing there watching them.
She had one hand on the inside doorknob and a blank look on her
face.
“Hello, Reacher,” she said.
“Scimeca,” he said back. “How are you?”
She used her free hand to push her hair off her
brow.
“Reasonable,” she said. “Considering it’s three
o’clock in the morning and the FBI has only just gotten around to
telling me I’m on some kind of hit list with ten of my sisters,
four of whom are already dead.”
“Your tax dollars at work,” Reacher said.
“So why the hell are you hanging with them?”
He shrugged. “Circumstances didn’t leave me a whole
lot of choice.”
She gazed at him, deciding. It was cold on the
porch. The night dew was beading on the painted boards. There was a
thin low fog in the air. Behind Scimeca’s shoulder the lights
inside her house burned warm and yellow. She looked at him a moment
longer.
“Circumstances?” she repeated.
He nodded. “Didn’t leave me a whole lot of
choice.”
She nodded back. “Well, whatever, it’s kind of good
to see you, I guess.”
“Good to see you, too.”
She was a tall woman. Shorter than Harper, but then
most women were. She was muscular, not the compact way Alison
Lamarr had been, but the lean, marathon-runner kind of way. She was
dressed in clean jeans and a shapeless sweater. Substantial shoes
on her feet. She had medium-length brown hair, worn in long bangs
above bright brown eyes. She had heavy frown lines all around her
mouth. It was nearly four years since he had last seen her, and she
looked the whole four years older.
"This is Special Agent Lisa Harper,” he said.
Scimeca nodded once, warily. Reacher watched her
eyes. A male agent, she’d have thrown him off the porch.
“Hi,” Harper said.
“Well, come on in, I guess,” Scimeca said.
She still had hold of the doorknob. She was
standing on the threshold, leaning forward, unwilling to step out.
Harper stepped in and Reacher filed after her. The door closed
behind them. They were in the hallway of a decent little house,
newly painted, nicely furnished. Very clean, obsessively tidy. It
looked like a home. Warm and cozy. A personal space. There were
wool rugs on the floor. Polished antique furniture in gleaming
mahogany. Paintings on the walls. Vases of flowers
everywhere.
“Chrysanthemums,” Scimeca said. “I grow them
myself. You like them?”
Reacher nodded.
“I like them,” he said. “Although I couldn’t spell
them.”
“Gardening’s my new hobby,” Scimeca said. “I’ve
gotten into it in a big way.”
Then she pointed toward a front parlor.
“And music,” she said. “Come see.”
The room had quiet wallpaper and a polished wood
floor. There was a grand piano in the back corner. Shiny black
lacquer. A German name inlaid in brass. A big stool was placed in
front of it, handsome buttoned leather in black. The lid of the
piano was up, and there was music on the stand above the keyboard,
a dense mass of black notes on heavy cream paper.
“Want to hear something?” she asked.
“Sure,” Reacher said.
She slid between the keyboard and the stool and sat
down. Laid her hands on the keys and paused for a second and then a
mournful minor-key chord filled the room. It was a warm sound, and
low, and she modulated it into the start of a funeral march.
“Got anything more cheerful?” Reacher asked.
“I don’t feel cheerful,” she said.
But she changed it anyway, into the start of the
Moonlight Sonata.
“Beethoven,” she said.
The silvery arpeggios filled the air. She had her
foot on the damper and the sound was dulled and quiet. Reacher
gazed out of the window at the plantings, gray in the moonlight.
There was an ocean ninety miles to the west, vast and silent.
“That’s better,” he said.
She played it through to the end of the first
movement, apparently from memory, because the music open on the
stand was labeled Chopin. She kept her hands on the keys until the
last chord died away to silence.
“Nice,” Reacher said. “So, you’re doing OK?”
She turned away from the keyboard and looked him in
the eye. “You mean have I recovered from being gang-raped by three
guys I was supposed to trust with my life?”
Reacher nodded. “Something like that, I
guess.”
“I thought I’d recovered,” she said. “As well as I
ever expected to. But now I hear some maniac is fixing to kill me
for complaining about it. That’s taken the edge off it a little
bit, you know?”
“We’ll get him,” Harper said, in the silence.
Scimeca just looked at her.
“So can we see the new washing machine in the
basement?” Reacher asked.
“It’s not a washing machine, though, is it?”
Scimeca asked. “Not that anybody tells me
anything.”
“It’s probably paint,” Reacher said. “In cans.
Camouflage green, Army issue.”
“What for?”
“The guy kills you, dumps you in your bathtub and
pours it over you.”
“Why?”
Reacher shrugged. “Good question. There’s a whole
bunch of pointy heads working on that right now.”
Scimeca nodded and turned to Harper. “You a pointy
head?”
“No, ma’am, I’m just an agent,” Harper said.
“You ever been raped?”
Harper shook her head. “No, ma’am, I
haven’t.”
Scimeca nodded again.
“Well, don’t be,” she said. “That’s my
advice.”
There was silence.
“It changes your life,” Scimeca said. “It changed
mine, that’s for damn sure. Gardening and music, that’s all I’ve
got now.”
“Good hobbies,” Harper said.
“Stay-at-home hobbies,” Scimeca said back. “I’m
either in this room or within sight of my front door. I don’t get
out much and I don’t like meeting people. So take my advice, don’t
let it happen to you.”
Harper nodded. “I’ll try not to.”
“Basement,” Scimeca said.
She led the way out of the parlor to a door tucked
under the stairs. It was an old door, made up of pine planks
painted many times. There was a narrow staircase behind it, leading
down toward cold air smelling faintly of gasoline and tire
rubber.
“We have to go through the garage,” Scimeca
said.
There was a new car filling the space, a long low
Chrysler sedan, painted gold. They walked single file along its
flank and Scimeca opened a door in the garage wall. The musty smell
of a basement bloomed out at them. Scimeca pulled a cord and a hot
yellow light came on.
“There you are,” she said.
The basement was warm from a furnace. It was a
large square space with wide storage racks built on every wall.
Fiberglass insulation showed between the ceiling joists. There were
heating pipes snaking up through the floorboards. There was a
carton standing alone in the middle of the floor. It was at an
angle to the walls, untidy against the neat shelving surrounding
it. It was the same carton. Same size, same brown board, same black
printing, same picture, same manufacturer’s name. It was taped shut
with shiny brown tape and it looked brand-new.
“Got a knife?” Reacher asked.
Scimeca nodded toward a work area. There was
pegboard screwed to the wall, and it was filled with tools hanging
in neat rows. Reacher took a linoleum knife off a peg, carefully,
because in his experience the peg usually came out with the tool.
But not this one. He saw that each peg was secured to the board
with a neat little plastic device.
He came back to the box and slit the tape. Reversed
the knife and used the handle to ease the flaps upward. He saw five
metal circles, glowing yellow. Five paint can lids, reflecting the
overhead light. He poked the knife handle under one of the wire
hoops and lifted one of the cans up to eye level. Rotated it in the
light. It was a plain metal can, unadorned except for a small white
label printed with a long number and the words Camo/Green.
“We’ve seen a few of those in our time,” Scimeca
said. “Right, Reacher?”
He nodded. “A few.”
He lowered the can back into the box. Pushed the
flaps down and walked over and hung the knife back where it had
been. Glanced across at Scimeca.
“When did this come?” he asked.
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“Roughly?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe a couple months
ago.”
“A couple of months?”
Harper said.
Scimeca nodded. “I guess. I don’t really
remember.”
“You didn’t order it, right?” Reacher said.
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.”
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.
“Good-bye, 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.
“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.