Running Blind by Lee Child Page B

Lamarr asked.
    He turned toward her and tried to fill his mind with her face, the white pallor, the thin hair, the sneering teeth.
    "Tell me about the paint," he said quietly.
    She looked at him, oddly.
    "It's Army camouflage basecoat," she said. "Flat green. Manufactured in Illinois by the hundred thousand gallons. Produced sometime within the last eleven years, because it's new process. Beyond that, we can't trace it."
    He nodded, vaguely. He had never used it, but he had seen a million square yards of stuff daubed with it.
    "It's messy," he said.
    "But the crime scenes are immaculate. He doesn't spill a drop anywhere."
    "The women were already dead," he said. "Nobody was fighting. No reason to spill any. But it means he must carry it into the house. How much does it take to fill a tub?"
    "Somewhere between twenty and thirty gallons."
    "That's a lot of paint. It must mean a hell of a lot to him. You figured out any significance to it?"
    She shrugged. "Not really, not beyond the obvious military significance. Maybe removing the civilian clothes and covering the body with Army paint is some kind of reclamation, you know, putting them back where he thinks they belong, in the military, where they should have stayed. It traps them, you see. Couple of hours, the surface is skinning over. It goes hard, and the stuff underneath jellifies. Leave it long enough, I guess the whole tub might dry solid, with them inside. Like people put their baby's shoe in a Perspex cube?"
    Reacher stared ahead through the windshield. The horizon was bright. They were leaving the weather behind. On his right, Pennsylvania looked green and sunny.
    "The paint is a hell of a thing," he said. "Twenty or thirty gallons? That's a major load to haul around. It implies a big vehicle. A lot of exposure obtaining it. Exposure just carrying it into the house. Very visible. Nobody saw anything?"
    "We canvassed, door to door. Nobody reported anything."
    He nodded, slowly. "The paint is the key. Where's he getting it from?"
    "We have no idea. The Army is not being especially helpful."
    "I'm not surprised. The Army hates you. And it's embarrassing. Makes it likely it's a serving soldier. Who else could get that much camouflage paint?"
    She made no reply. She just drove, south. The rain was gone and the wipers were squealing over dry glass. She switched them off with a small definite movement of her wrist. He fell to thinking about a soldier somewhere, loading cans of paint. Ninety-one women on his list, some skewed mental process reserving twenty or thirty gallons for each one of them. A potential total of two, two and a half thousand gallons. Tons of it. Truckloads of it. Maybe he was a quartermaster.
    "How is he killing them?" he asked.
    She slid her hands to a firmer grip on the wheel. Swallowed hard and kept her eyes on the road.
    "We don't know," she said.
    "You don't know!" he repeated.
    She shook her head. "They're just dead. We can't figure out how."
    There are ninety-one altogether, and you need to do exactly six of them in total, which is three more, so what do you do now? You keep on thinking and planning, is what. Think, think, think, that's what you do. Because it's all based on thinking. You need to outwit them all. The victims, and the investigators. Layers and layers of investigators. More and more investigators all the time. Local cops, state cops, the FBI, the specialists the FBI brings in. New angles, new approaches. You know they're there. They're looking for you. They'll find you if they can.
    The investigators are tough, but the women are easy. Just about as easy as you expected them to be. There was no overconfidence there. None at all. The victims go down exactly as you imagined. You planned long and hard, and the planning was perfect. They answer the door, they let you in, they fall for it. They're so damn keen to fall for it, their tongues are practically hanging out. They re so stupid, they deserve it. And it's not difficult. No, not