Running Blind (The Visitor)

said.
    Stavely smiled. “Flattery will get you anywhere, right?”
    “It’s not flattery.”
    Stavely was still smiling. “If there’s nothing to find, what can we do?”
    “Got to be something,” Blake said. “He made a mistake this time, with the box.”
    “So?”
    “So maybe he made more than one mistake, left something you’ll find.”
    Stavely thought about it. “Well, don’t hold your breath, is all I’m saying.”
    Then he stood up abruptly and knitted his thick fingers together and flexed his hands. Turned to his technician. “So are we ready?”
    The thin guy nodded. “We’re assuming the paint will be dried hard on the top surface, maybe an inch, inch and a half. If we cut it away from the tub enamel all around we should be able to slide a body bag in and scoop her out.”
    “Good,” Stavely said. “Keep as much paint around her as you can. I don’t want her disturbed.”
    The technician hurried out and Stavely followed him, evidently assuming the other four would file out behind him, which they did, with Reacher last in line.
    THE PATHOLOGY LAB was no different from the others Reacher had seen. It was a large low space, brightly lit by an illuminated ceiling. The walls and the floor were white tile. In the middle of the room was a large examination table sculpted from gleaming steel. The table had a drain canal pressed into the center. The drain was plumbed straight into a steel pipe running down through the floor. The table was surrounded by a cluster of wheeled carts loaded with tools. Hoses hung from the ceiling. There were cameras on stands, and scales, and extractor hoods. There was a low hum of ventilation and a strong smell of disinfectant. The air was still and cold.
    “Gowns, and gloves,” Stavely said.
    He pointed to a steel cupboard filled with folded nylon gowns and boxes of disposable latex gloves. Harper handed them out.
    “Probably won’t need masks,” Stavely said. “My guess is the paint will be the worst thing we smell.”
    They smelled it as soon as the gurney came in through the door. The technician was pushing it and the body bag lay on it, bloated and slick and smeared with green. Paint seeped from the closure and ran down the steel legs to the wheels and left parallel tracks across the white tile. The technician walked between the tracks. The gurney rattled and the bag rolled and wobbled like a giant balloon filled with oil. The technician’s arms were smeared with paint to his shoulders.
    “Take her to X ray first,” Stavely said.
    The guy steered the gurney in a new direction and headed for a closed room off the side of the lab. Reacher stepped ahead and pulled the door for him. It felt like it weighed a ton.
    “Lined with lead,” Stavely said. “We really zap them in there. Big, big doses, so we can see everything we want to see. Not like we have to worry about their long-term health, is it?”
    The technician was gone for a moment and then he stepped back into the lab and eased the heavy door closed behind him. There was a distant powerful hum which lasted a second and then stopped. He went back and came out pushing the gurney again. It was still making tracks across the tile. He stopped it alongside the examination table.
    “Roll her off,” Stavely said. “I want her facedown.”
    The technician stepped beside him and leaned across the table and grasped the nearer edge of the bag with both hands and lifted it half off the gurney, half onto the table. Then he walked around to the other side and took the other edge and flipped it up and over. The bag flopped zipper-side down and the mass inside it sucked and rolled and wobbled and settled. Paint oozed out onto the polished steel. Stavely looked at it and beyond it to the floor, which was all crisscrossed with green tracks.
    “Overshoes, people,” he said. “It’ll get everywhere.”
    They stepped away and Harper found pairs of plastic footwear in a locker and handed them out. Reacher slipped his on and stepped back and watched the paint. It seeped out through the zipper like a thick slow tide.
    “Get the film,” Stavely said.
    The technician ducked back to the X-ray room and came out with large gray squares of film which mapped Alison Lamarr’s body. He handed them to Stavely. Stavely fanned through them and held them up against the light from the ceiling.
    “Instant,” he said. “Like Polaroid. The benefits of scientific progress.”
    He shuffled them like a dealer and separated one