“How old are you?” Reacher asked.

“Me?” Harper said. “Twenty-nine. I told you that. It’s an FAQ.”

“From Colorado, right?”

“Aspen.”

“Family?”

“Two sisters, one brother.”

“Older or younger?”

“All older. I’m the baby.”

“Parents?”

“Dad’s a pharmacist, Mom helps him out.”

“You take vacations when you were kids?”

She nodded. “Sure. Grand Canyon, Painted Desert, all over. One year we camped in Yellowstone.”

“You drove there, right?”

She nodded again. “Sure. Big station wagon full of kids, happy family sort of thing. What’s this about?”

“What do you remember about the drives?”

She made a face. “They were endless.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly what?”

“This is a real big country.”

“So?”

“Caroline Cooke was killed in New Hampshire and Lorraine Stanley was killed three weeks later in San Diego. That’s about as far apart as you can get, right? Maybe thirty-five hundred miles by road. Maybe more.”

“Is he traveling by road?”

Reacher nodded. “He’s got hundreds of gallons of paint to haul around.”

“Maybe he’s got a stockpile stashed away someplace. ”

“That just makes it worse. Unless his stash just happened to be on a direct line between where he’s based now and New Hampshire and southern California, he’d have to detour to get it. It would add distance, maybe a lot of distance.”

"So?”

“So he’s got a three-, four-thousand-mile road trip, plus surveillance time on Lorraine Stanley. Could he do that in a week?”

Harper made a face. “Call it seventy hours at fifty-five miles an hour.”

“Which he couldn’t average. He’d pass through towns and road construction. And he wouldn’t break the speed limit. A guy this meticulous isn’t going to risk some trooper sniffing around his vehicle. Hundreds of gallons of camouflage basecoat is going to arouse some suspicions these days, right?”

“So call it a hundred hours on the road.”

“At least. Plus a day or two surveillance when he gets there. That’s more than a week, in practical terms. It’s ten or eleven days. Maybe twelve.”

“So?”

"You tell me.”

"This is not some guy working two weeks on, one week off.”

Reacher nodded. “No, it’s not.”

THEY WALKED OUTSIDE and around toward the block with the cafeteria in it. The weather had settled to what fall should be. The air was ten degrees warmer, but still crisp. The lawns were green and the sky was a shattering blue. The dampness had blown away and the leaves on the surrounding trees looked dry and two shades lighter.

“I feel like staying outside,” Reacher said.

“You need to work,” Harper said.

“I read the damn files. Reading them over again isn’t going to help me any. I need to do some thinking.”

“You think better outside?”

“Generally.”

“OK, come to the range. I need to qualify on handguns. ”

“You’re not qualified already?”

She smiled. “Of course I am. We have to requalify every month. Regulations.”

They took sandwiches from the cafeteria and ate as they walked. The outdoor pistol range was Sunday-quiet, a large space the size of a hockey rink, bermed on three sides with high earth walls. There were six separate firing lanes made out of shoulder-high concrete walls running all the way down to six separate targets. The targets were heavy paper, clipped into steel frames. Each paper was printed with a picture of a crouching felon, with target rings radiating out from his heart. Harper signed in with the rangemaster and handed him her gun. He reloaded it with six shells and handed it back, together with two sets of ear defenders.

“Take lane three,” he said.

Lane three was in the center. There was a black line painted on the concrete floor.

“Seventy-five feet,” Harper said.

She stood square-on and slipped the ear defenders into position. Raised the gun two-handed. Her legs were apart and her knees slightly bent. Her hips were forward and her shoulders back. She loosed off the six shots in a stream, half a second between them. Reacher watched the tendons in her hand. They were tight, rocking the muzzle up and down a fraction each time she pulled.

“Clear,” she said.

He looked at her.

“That means you go get the target,” she said.

He expected to see the hits arranged on a vertical line maybe a foot long, and when he got down to the other end of the lane, that is exactly what he found. There were two holes in the heart, two in the next ring, and two in the ring connecting the throat with the stomach. He unclipped the paper and carried it back.

“Two fives, two fours, two threes,” she said. “Twenty-four points. I pass, just.”

“You should use your left arm more,” he said.

“How?”

“Take all the weight with your left, and just use your right for pulling the trigger.”

She paused.

“Show me,” she said.

He stepped close behind her and stretched around with his left arm. She raised the gun in her right and he cupped her hand in his.

“Relax the arm,” he said. “Let me take the weight.”

His arms were long, but hers were too. She shuffled backward and pressed hard against him. He leaned forward. Rested his chin on the side of her head. Her hair smelled good.

“OK, let it float,” he said.

She clicked the trigger on the empty chamber a couple of times. The muzzle was rock steady.

“Feels good,” she said.

“Go get some more shells.”

She peeled away from in front of him and walked back to the rangemaster’s cubicle and got another clip, part loaded with six. He moved into the next lane, where there was a new target. She met him there and nestled back against him and raised her gun hand. He reached around her and cupped it and took the weight. She leaned back against him. Fired twice. He saw the holes appear in the target, maybe an inch apart in the center ring.

“See?” he said. “Let the left do the work.”

“Sounds like a political statement.”

She stayed where she was, leaning back against him. He could feel the rise and fall of her breathing. He stepped away from behind her and she tried again, by herself. Two shots, fast. The shell cases rang on the concrete. Two more holes appeared in the heart ring. There was a tight cluster of four, in a diamond shape a business card would have covered.

She nodded. “You want the last two?”

She stepped close and handed him the pistol, butt-first. It was a SIG-Sauer, identical to the one Lamarr had held next to his head throughout the car ride into Manhattan. He stood with his back to the target and weighed the gun in his hand. Then he spun abruptly and fired the two bullets, one into each of the target’s eyes.

“That’s how I’d do it,” he said. “If I was real mad with somebody, that’s what I’d do. I wouldn’t mess around with a damn tub and twenty gallons of paint.”

THEY MET BLAKE on the way back to the library room. He looked aimless and agitated all at the same time. There was worry in his face. He had a new problem.

“Lamarr’s father died,” he said.

“Stepfather,” Reacher said.

“Whatever. He died, early this morning. The hospital in Spokane called for her. Now I’ve got to call her at home.”

“Give her our condolences,” Harper said.

Blake nodded vaguely and walked away.

“He should take her off the case,” Reacher said.

Harper nodded. “Maybe he should, but he won’t. And she wouldn’t agree, anyway. Her job is all she’s got.”

Reacher said nothing. Harper pulled the door and ushered him back into the room with the oak tables and the leather chairs and the files. Reacher sat down and checked his watch. Three twenty. Maybe two more hours of daydreaming and then he could eat and escape to the solitude of his room.

IT WAS THREE hours, in the end. And it wasn’t daydreaming. He sat and stared into space and thought hard. Harper watched him, anxious. He took the file folders and arranged them on the table, Callan’s at the bottom right, Stanley’s at the bottom left, Cooke’s at the top right, and stared at them, musing about the geography again. He leaned back and closed his eyes.