Running Blind (The Visitor)

life?”
    “Usually,” Reacher said.
    “So you were acting alone,” Deerfield said. “Just a concerned citizen. No contact with gangsters, no instructions by phone.”
    He turned to Cozo, a question in his eyes. “You comfortable with that, James?”
    Cozo shrugged and nodded. “I’ll have to be, I guess.”
    “Concerned citizen, right, Reacher?” Deerfield said.
    Reacher nodded. Said nothing.
    “Can you prove that to us?” Deerfield asked.
    Reacher shrugged. “I could have taken their guns. If I was connected, I would have. But I didn’t.”
    “No, you left them in the Dumpster.”
    “I disabled them first.”
    “With grit in the mechanisms. Why did you do that?”
    “So nobody could find them and use them.”
    Deerfield nodded. “A concerned citizen. You saw an injustice, you wanted to set it straight.”
    Reacher nodded back. “I guess.”
    “Somebody’s got to do it, right?”
    “I guess,” Reacher said again.
    “You don’t like injustice, right?”
    “I guess not.”
    “And you can tell the difference between right and wrong.”
    “I hope so.”
    “You don’t need the intervention of the proper authorities, because you can make your own decisions.”
    “Usually.”
    “Confident with your own moral code.”
    “I guess.”
    There was silence. Deerfield looked through the glare.
    “So why did you steal their money?” he asked.
    Reacher shrugged. “Spoils of battle, I guess. Like a trophy.”
    Deerfield nodded. “Part of the code, right?”
    “I guess.”
    “You play to your own rules, right?”
    “Usually.”
    “You wouldn’t mug an old lady, but it was OK to take money off of a couple of hard men.”
    “I guess.”
    “When they step outside what’s acceptable to you, they get what they get, right?”
    “Right.”
    “A personal code.”
    Reacher said nothing. The silence built.
    “You know anything about criminal profiling?” Deerfield asked suddenly.
    Reacher paused. “Only what I read in the newspaper. ”
    “It’s a science,” Blake said. “We developed it at Quantico, over many years. Special Agent Lamarr here is currently our leading exponent. Special Agent Poulton is her assistant.”
    “We look at crime scenes,” Lamarr said. “We look at the underlying psychological indicators, and we work out the type of personality which could have committed the crime.”
    “We study the victims,” Poulton said. “We figure out to whom they could have been especially vulnerable.”
    “What crimes?” Reacher asked. “What scenes?”
    “You son of a bitch,” Lamarr said.
    “Amy Callan and Caroline Cooke,” Blake said. “Both homicide victims.”
    Reacher stared at him.
    “Callan was first,” Blake said. “Very distinctive MO, but one homicide is just one homicide, right? Then Cooke was hit. With the exact same MO. That made it a serial situation.”
    “We looked for a link,” Poulton said. “Between the victims. Not hard to find. Army harassment complainants who subsequently quit.”
    “Extreme organization at the crime scene,” Lamarr said. “Indicative of military precision, maybe. A bizarre, coded MO. Nothing left behind. No clues of any kind. The perpetrator was clearly a precise person, and clearly a person familiar with investigative procedures. Possibly a good investigator himself.”
    “No forced entry at either abode,” Poulton said. “The killer was admitted to the house in both cases, by the victims, no questions asked.”
    “So the killer was somebody they both knew,” Blake said.
    “Somebody they both trusted,” Poulton said.
    “Like a friendly visitor,” Lamarr said.
    There was silence in the room.
    “That’s what he was,” Blake said. “A visitor. Somebody they regarded as a friend. Somebody they felt a bond with.”
    “A friend, visiting,” Poulton said. “He knocks on the door, they open it up, they say hi, so nice to see you again.”
    “He walks in,” Lamarr said. “Just like that.”
    There was silence in the room.
    “We explored the crime, psychologically,” Lamarr said. “Why were those women making somebody mad enough to kill them? So we looked for an Army guy with a score to settle. Maybe somebody outraged by the idea of pesky women ruining good soldiers’ careers, and then quitting anyway. Frivolous women, driving good men to suicide?”
    “Somebody with a clear sense of right and wrong,” Poulton said. “Somebody confident enough in his own code to set these injustices right by his own hand.