Running Blind (The Visitor)

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