“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.”

8

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 difficult at all. It’s meticulous, is what it is. It’s like everything else. If you plan it properly, if you think it through, if you prepare correctly, if you rehearse, then it’s easy. It’s a technical process, just like you knew it would be. Like a science. It can’t be anything else. You do this, and then you do this, and then you do this, and then you’re done, home free. Three more. That’s all. That’ll do it. The hard part is over. But you keep on thinking. Think, think, think. It worked once, it worked twice, it worked three times, but you know there are no guarantees in life. You know that, better than anybody. So you keep on thinking, because the only thing that can get you now is your own complacency.

" YOU DON’T KNOW?” Reacher said again.

Lamarr was startled. She was staring straight ahead, tired, concentrating, gripping the wheel, driving like a machine.

“Know what?” she said.

“How they died.”

She sighed and shook her head. “No, not really.”

He glanced across at her. “You OK?”

“Don’t I look OK?”

“You look exhausted.”

She yawned. “I’m a little weary, I guess. It was a long night.”

“Well, take care.”

“You worrying about me now?”

He shook his head. “No, I’m worrying about myself. You could fall asleep, run us off the road.”

She yawned again. “Never happened before.”

He looked away. Found himself fingering the airbag lid in front of him.

“I’m OK,” she said again. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Why don’t you know how they died?”

She shrugged. “You were an investigator. You saw dead people.”

“So?”

“So what did you look for?”

“Wounds, injuries.”

“Right,” she said. “Somebody’s full of bullet holes, you conclude they’ve been shot to death. Somebody’s got their head smashed in, you call it trauma with a blunt object.”

“But?”

“These three were in bathtubs full of drying paint, right? The crime scene guys take the bodies out, and the pathologists clean them up, and they don’t find anything. ”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing obvious, not at first. So then naturally they look harder. They still don’t find anything. They know they didn’t drown. When they open them up, they find no water or paint in the lungs. So then they search for external injuries, microscopically. They can’t find anything. ”

“No hypodermic marks? Bruising?”

She shook her head. “Nothing at all. But remember, they’ve been coated in paint. And that military stuff wouldn’t pass too many HUD regulations. Full of all kinds of chemicals, and fairly corrosive. It damages the skin, postmortem. It’s conceivable the paint damage might be obscuring some tiny marks. But whatever killed them was very subtle. Nothing gross.”

“What about internal damage?”

She shook her head again. “Nothing. No subcutaneous bruising, no organ damage, no nothing.”

“Poison?”

“No. Stomach contents were OK. They hadn’t ingested the paint. Toxicology was completely clear.”

Reacher nodded, slowly. “No sexual interference either, I guess, because Blake was happy both Callan and Cooke would have slept with me if I’d wanted them to. Which means the perpetrator was feeling no sexual resentment, therefore no rape, or else you’d be looking for somebody who’d been rebuffed by them, one time or another.”

Lamarr nodded. “That’s our profile. Sexuality wasn’t an issue. The nakedness is about humiliation, we think. Punishment. The whole thing was about punishment. Retribution, or something.”

“Weird,” Reacher said. “That definitely makes the guy a soldier. But it’s a very unsoldierly way to kill somebody. Soldiers shoot or stab or hit or strangle. They don’t do subtle things.”

“We don’t know exactly what he did.”

“But there’s no anger there, right? If this guy is into some retribution thing, where’s the anger? It sounds too clinical.”

Lamarr yawned and nodded, all at once. “That troubles me too. But look at the victim category. What else can the motive be? And if we agree on the motive, what else can the perp be except an angry soldier?”

They lapsed into silence. The miles rolled by. Lamarr held the wheel, thin tendons in her wrists standing out like cords. Reacher watched the road reeling in, and tried not to feel happy about it. Then Lamarr yawned again, and she saw him glance sharply at her.

“I’m OK,” she said.

He looked at her, long and hard.

“I’m OK,” she said again.

“I’m going to sleep for an hour,” he said. “Try not to kill me.”

WHEN HE WOKE up, they were still in New Jersey. The car was quiet and comfortable. The motor was a faraway hum and there was a faint tenor rumble from the tires. A faint rustle of wind. The weather was gray. Lamarr was rigid with exhaustion, gripping the wheel, staring down the road with red unblinking eyes.

“We should stop for lunch,” he said.

“Too early.”

He checked his watch. It was one o’clock. “Don’t be such a damn hero. You should get a pint of coffee inside you.”

She hesitated, ready to argue. Then she gave it up. Her body suddenly went slack and she yawned again.

“OK,” she said. “So let’s stop.”

She drove on for a mile and coasted into a rest area in a clearing in the trees behind the shoulder. She put the car in a slot and turned the motor off and they sat in the sudden silence. The place was the same as a hundred others Reacher had seen, low-profile Federal architecture of the fifties colonized by fast-food operations that lodged behind discreet counters and spread their messages outward with gaudy advertisements.

He got out first and stretched his cramped frame in the cold, damp air. The highway traffic was roaring behind him. Lamarr was inert in the car, so he strolled away to the bathroom. Then she was nowhere to be seen, so he walked inside the building and lined up for a sandwich. She joined him within a minute.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Stray out of my sight.”

“Why not?”

“Because we have rules for people like you.”

She said it without any trace of softness or humor. He shrugged. “OK, next time I go to the bathroom I’ll invite you right inside with me.”

She didn’t smile. “Just tell me, and I’ll wait at the door.”

The line shuffled forward and he changed his selection from cheese to crabmeat, because he figured it was more expensive and he assumed she was paying. He added a twenty-ounce cup of black coffee and a plain doughnut. He found a table while she fiddled with her purse. Then she joined him and he raised his coffee in an ironic toast.