Running Blind (The Visitor)

at the runways. Nothing much was happening down there. Harper joined him for a second and then turned back and sat down in a chair.
    “Talk to me,” she said. “What is it?”
    “Start with the motive,” he said. “Who’s got a motive? ”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Go back to Amy Callan. Suppose she’d been the only victim? Who would you be looking at for a motive? ”
    “Her husband.”
    “Why her husband?”
    “Dead wife, you always look at the husband,” she said. “Because motives are often personal. And the closest connection to a wife is a husband.”
    “And how would you be looking at him?”
    “How? Same as always. We’d sweat him, sweat his alibi, keep on going until something busted open.”
    “And he wouldn’t hold up, right?”
    “Sooner or later, he’d crack.”
    Reacher nodded. “OK, so suppose it is Amy Callan’s husband. How does he avoid getting sweated like that?”
    “He can’t avoid it.”
    “Yes, he can. He can avoid it by going out and finding a bunch of women with some kind of a similarity with his wife and killing them too. Doing it in some bizarre fashion that he knows is going to get everybody rushing off on some flight of fancy. In other words he can camouflage his chosen target behind a farrago of bullshit. He can take the spotlight off of himself by burying the personal connection in a crowd. Like where’s the best place to hide a grain of sand?”
    She nodded. “On the beach.”
    “Right,” he said.
    “So is it Callan’s husband?”
    “No, it isn’t,” he said. “But?”
    “But we only need a motive against one of the women,” she said. “Not all of them together. All but one are just decoys. Sand on the beach.”
    “Camouflage,” he said. “Background noise.”
    “So which one? Which one is the real target?”
    Reacher said nothing. Moved away from the window and sat down to wait.
    YOU WAIT. IT’S cold up there in the hills. Cold, and uncomfortable, crouched next to the rocks. The wind is blowing in from the west, and it’s damp. But you just wait. Surveillance is important. Certainty is everything. You know that if you stay focused, you can do anything. Anything at all. So you wait.
    You watch the cop in his car and amuse yourself thinking about his plight. He’s a few hundred feet away, but he’s in a different world. You can step away from your rock and you’ve got a million acres of mountainside to use as a bathroom. He’s down there in civilization. Streets, sidewalks, people’s yards. He can’t use them. He’d be arrested. He’d have to arrest himself. And he’s not running the motor. So the car must be cold. Does that make it better or worse?
    You watch him, and you wait.
    THE CAPTAIN CAME back a little before the three hours were up. He led them downstairs and out through the same door they had used on the way in. A staff car was waiting there.
    “Have a pleasant flight,” he said.
    The car drove them a mile around the perimeter track and then cut across toward a Boeing airliner standing alone on the apron. Fuel bowsers were disconnecting and ground crew were swarming. The plane was brand-new and stark white.
    “We don’t paint them until we know they work right,” the driver said.
    There was a wheeled ladder at the forward cabin door. Flight crew in uniform clustered at the top, with fat briefcases and clipboards thick with paper.
    “Welcome aboard,” the copilot said. “You should be able to find an empty seat.”
    There were two hundred and sixty of them. It was a regular passenger plane with the fripperies stripped out. No televisions, no in-flight magazines, no stewardess call buttons. No blankets, no pillows, no headsets. The seats were all the same color, khaki. The fabric was crisp and it smelled new. Reacher took three seats for himself and sat sideways, propped up against the window.
    “We’ve done a lot of flying, the last few days,” he said.
    Harper sat down behind him. Buckled her belt.
    “That’s for sure,” she said.
    “Listen up, guys,” the copilot called to them down the aisle. “This is a military flight, not FAA, so you get the military preflight announcement, OK? Which is, don’t worry, because we ain’t going to crash. And if we do, you’re mashed into ground beef and burned to a cinder anyway, so what’s to worry about?”
    Reacher smiled. Harper ignored the guy.
    “So which one is the real target?” she asked again.
    “You can figure it out,” Reacher said.
    The plane moved