Running Blind (The Visitor)

front doors had been crowbarred open. An ambulance was waiting to U-turn through the divider. Reacher turned his head and stared at the sport-utility. It wasn’t his. Not that he thought it could be. Jodie wouldn’t be driving anywhere. Not if she had any sense.
    “In the tub?” he repeated.
    Lamarr nodded at the wheel. “In the tub.”
    “All three of them?” he asked.
    Lamarr nodded again. “All three of them.”
    “Like a signature?”
    “Right,” she said.
    “How does he know they’ve all got tubs?”
    “You live in a house, you’ve got a tub.”
    “How does he know they all live in houses? He’s not selecting them on the basis of where they live. It’s random, right? They could live anyplace. Like I live in motels. And some of them just have showers.”
    She glanced across at him. “You don’t live in motels. You live in a house in Garrison.”
    He glanced down, like he had forgotten.
    “Well, now I do, I guess,” he said. “But I was on the road, before. How does he know these women weren’t?”
    “That’s a catch-22,” she said. “If they were homeless, they wouldn’t be on his list. I mean, to be on his list, they need to live somewhere, so he can find them.”
    “But how does he know they all have tubs?”
    She shrugged. “You live somewhere, you’ve got a tub. Takes a pretty small studio to have just a shower stall.”
    Reacher nodded. This was not his area of expertise. Real estate was pretty much foreign terrain to him. “OK, they’re in the tub.”
    “Naked. And their clothes are missing.”
    She was clear of the crash site and was accelerating into the rain. She put the windshield wipers on high.
    “He takes their clothes with him?” he asked. “Why?”
    “Probably as a trophy. Taking trophies is a very common phenomenon in serial crimes like these. Maybe it’s symbolic. Maybe he thinks they should still be in uniform, so he robs them of their civilian gear. As well as their lives.”
    “He take anything else?”
    She shook her head. “Not as far as we can tell. There was nothing obviously removed. No big spaces anywhere. Cash and cards were all still where they should be.”
    “So he takes their clothes and leaves nothing behind. ”
    She was quiet for a beat.
    “He does leave something behind,” she said. “He leaves paint.”
    “Paint?”
    “Army camouflage green. Gallons of it.”
    “Where?”
    “In the tub. He puts the body in there, naked, and then he fills the tub with paint.”
    Reacher stared past the beating wipers into the rain. “He drowns them? In paint?”
    She shook her head again. “He doesn’t drown them. They’re already dead. He just covers them with paint afterward.”
    “How? Like he paints them all over?”
    She was gunning it hard, making up for lost time. “No, he doesn’t paint them. He just fills the tub with the paint, right up to the rim. Obviously it covers the bodies.”
    “So they’re floating in a tub full of green paint?”
    She nodded. “That’s how they were all found.”
    He fell silent. He turned away and stared through his window and stayed silent for a long time. To the west, the weather was clearer. It was brighter. The car was moving fast. Rain hissed under the tires and beat on the underbody. He stared blankly at the brightness in the west and watched the endless road reel in and realized he was happy . He was heading somewhere. He was on the move. His blood was stirring like an animal at the end of winter. The old hobo demon was talking to him, quietly, whispering in his head. You’re happy now , it was saying. You’re happy, aren’t you? You even forgot for a moment you’re stuck in Garrison, didn’t you?
    “You OK?” 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