Running Blind (The Visitor)

Blake and his team from Andrews direct to Spokane and he had sent it over to Sea-Tac to collect Harper and Reacher. It was waiting on the apron right next to the Continental gates, and the same guy as before had been hauled out of the Seattle Field Office to meet them at the head of the jetway and point them down the external stairs and outside. It was raining lightly, and cold, so they ran for the Lear’s steps and hustled straight inside. Four minutes later, they were back in the air.
    Sea-Tac to Spokane was a lot faster in the Lear than it had been in the Cessna. The same local guy in the same car was waiting for them. He still had Alison Lamarr’s address written on the pad attached to his windshield. He drove them the ten miles east toward Idaho and then turned north onto the narrow road into the hills. Fifty yards in, there was a roadblock with two parked cars and yellow tape stretched between trees. Above the trees in the far distance were the mountains. It was raining and gray on the western peaks, and in the east the sun was slanting down through the edge of the clouds and gleaming off the tiny threads of snow in the high gullies.
    The guy at the roadblock looped the tape off the trees and the car crawled through. It climbed onward, past the isolated houses every mile or so, all the way to the bend before the Lamarr place, where it stopped.
    “You need to walk from here,” the driver said.
    He stayed in the car, and Harper and Reacher stepped out and started walking. The air was damp, full of a kind of suspended drizzle that wasn’t really rain but wasn’t dry weather either. They rounded the curve and saw the house on the left, crouching low behind its fence and its wind-battered trees, with the road snaking by on the right. The road was blocked by a gaggle of cars. There was a local police black-and-white with its roof lights flashing aimlessly. A pair of plain dark sedans and a black Suburban with black glass. A coroner’s wagon, standing with all its doors open. The vehicles were all beaded with raindrops.
    They walked closer and the front passenger door on the Suburban opened up and Nelson Blake slid out to meet them. He was in a dark suit with the coat collar turned up against the damp. His face was nearer gray than red, like shock had knocked his blood pressure down. He was all business. No greeting. No apologies, no pleasantries. No I-was-wrong-and-you-were-right.
    “Not much more than an hour of daylight left, up here,” he said. “I want you to walk me through what you did the day before yesterday, tell me what’s different. ”
    Reacher nodded. He suddenly wanted to find something. Something important. Something crucial. Not for Blake. For Alison. He stood and gazed at the fence and the trees and the lawn. They were cared for. They were just trivial rearrangements of an insignificant portion of the planet’s surface, but they were motivated by the honest tastes and enthusiasms of a woman now dead. Achieved by her own labors.
    “Who’s been in there already?” he asked.
    “Just the local uniformed guy,” Blake said. “The one that found her.”
    “Nobody else?”
    “Nobody.”
    “Not even you guys or the coroner?”
    Blake shook his head. “I wanted your input first.”
    “So she’s still in there?”
    “Yes, I’m afraid she is.”
    The road was quiet. Just a hiss of breeze in the power lines. The red and blue light from the police cruiser’s light bar washed over the suit on Blake’s back, rhythmically and uselessly.
    “OK,” Reacher said. “The uniformed guy mess with anything?”
    Blake shook his head again. “Opened the door, walked around downstairs, went upstairs, found his way to the bathroom, came right out again and called it in. His dispatcher had the good sense to keep him from going back inside.”
    “Front door was unlocked?”
    “Closed, but unlocked.”
    “Did he knock?”
    “I guess.”
    “So his prints will be on the knocker, too. And the inside door handles.”
    Blake shrugged. “Won’t matter. Won’t have smudged our guy’s prints, because our guy doesn’t leave prints.”
    Reacher nodded. “OK.”
    He walked past the parked vehicles and on past the mouth of the driveway. He walked twenty yards up the road.
    “Where does this go?” he called.
    Blake was ten yards behind him. “Back of beyond, probably.”
    “It’s narrow, isn’t it?”
    “I’ve seen wider,” Blake allowed.
    Reacher strolled back to join him. “So you should