Chapter 5
HE WAS OUT of there just after three in the morning. Jodie was agitated, torn between staying with him and getting back to the office to finish her all-nighter. He convinced her to calm down and go do her work. One of the local guys drove her down to Wall Street. They gave him back his possessions, except for the wad of stolen cash. Then the other local guy drove him back to Garrison, hustling hard, fifty-eight miles in forty-seven minutes. He had a red beacon on the dash connected to the cigar lighter with a cord, and he kept it flashing the whole way. The beam swept through the fog. It was the middle of the night, dark and cold, and the roads were damp and slick. The guy said nothing. Just drove and then jammed to a stop at the end of Reacher's driveway in Garrison and took off again as soon as the passenger door slammed shut. Reacher watched the flashing light disappear into the river mist and turned to walk down to his house.
He had inherited the house from Leon Garber, who was Jodie's father and his old commanding officer. It had been a week of big surprises, both good and bad, back at the start of the summer. Meeting Jodie again, finding out she'd been married and divorced, finding out old Leon was dead, finding out the house was his. He had been in love with Jodie for fifteen years, since he first met her, on a base in the Philippines. She had been fifteen herself then, right on the cusp of spectacular womanhood, and she was his CO's daughter, and he had crushed his feelings down like a guilty secret and never let them see the light of day. He felt they would have been a betrayal of her, and of Leon, and betraying Leon was the last thing he would have ever done, because Leon was a rough-and-ready prince among men, and he loved him like a father. Which made him feel Jodie was his sister, and you don't feel that way about your sister.
Then chance had brought him to Leon 's funeral, and he had met Jodie again, and they had sparred uneasily for a couple of days before she admitted she felt the exact same things and was concealing her feelings for the exact same reasons. It was a thunderclap, a glorious sunburst of happiness in a summer week of big surprises.
Whispers: Interactive StoriesMake your own choices and decide what happens next!
So meeting Jodie again was the good surprise and Leon dying was the bad one, no doubt about it. But inheriting the house was both good and bad. It was a half-million-dollar slice of prime real estate standing proudly on the Hudson opposite West Point, and it was a comfortable building, but it represented a big problem. It anchored him in a way which made him profoundly uncomfortable. Being static disconcerted him. He had moved around so often in his life it confused him to spend time in any one particular place. And he had never lived in a house before. Bunkhouses and service bungalows and motels were his habitat. It was ingrained.
And the idea of property worried him. His whole life, he had never owned more than would fit into his pockets. As a boy he had owned a baseball and not much else. As an adult he had once gone seven whole years without owning anything at all except a pair of shoes he preferred to the Defense Department issue. Then a woman bought him a wallet with a clear plastic window with her photograph in it. He lost touch with the woman and junked the photograph, but kept the wallet. Then he went the remaining six years of his service life with just the shoes and the wallet. After mustering out he added a toothbrush. It was a plastic thing that folded in half and clipped into his pocket like a pen. He had a wristwatch. It was Army issue, so it started out theirs and became his when they didn't ask for it back. And that was it. Shoes on his feet, clothes on his back, small bills in his pants, big bills in his wallet, a toothbrush in his pocket, and a watch on his wrist.
Now he had a house. And a house is a complicated thing. A big, complicated, physical thing. It started with the basement. The basement was a huge dark space with a concrete floor and concrete walls and floor joists exposed overhead like bones. There were pipes and wires and machines down there. A furnace. Buried outside somewhere was an oil tank. There was a well for the water. Big round pipes ran through the wall to the septic system. It was a complex interdependent machine, and he didn't know how it worked.
Upstairs looked more normal. There was a warren of rooms, all of them amiably shabby and unkempt. But they all had secrets. Some of the light switches didn't work. One of the windows was jammed shut. The range in the kitchen was too complicated to use. The whole place creaked and cracked at night, reminding him it was real and there and needed thinking about.
And a house has an existence beyond the physical. It's also a bureaucratic thing. Something had come in the mail about title. There was insurance to consider. Taxes. Town tax, school tax, inspection, assessment. There was a bill to pay for garbage collection. And something about a scheduled propane delivery. He kept all that kind of mail in a drawer in the kitchen.
The only thing he had bought for the house was a gold-colored filter cone for Leon 's old coffee machine. He figured it was easier than always running to the store to buy the paper kind. Ten past four that morning, he filled it with coffee from a can and added water and set the machine going. Rinsed out a mug at the sink and set it on the counter, ready. Sat on a stool and leaned on his elbows and watched the dark liquid sputtering into the flask. It was an old machine, inefficient, maybe a little furred up inside. It generally took five minutes to finish. Somewhere during the fourth of those five minutes, he heard a car slowing on the road outside. The hiss of damp pavement. The crunch of tires on his asphalt drive. Jodie couldn't stand to stay at work, he thought. That hope endured about a second and a half, until the car came around the curve and the flashing red beam started sweeping over his kitchen window. It washed left to right, left to right, cutting through the river mist, and then it died into darkness and the motor noise died into silence. Doors opened and feet touched the ground. Two people. Doors slammed shut. He stood up and killed the kitchen light. Looked out of the window and saw the vague shapes of two people peering into the fog, looking for the path that led up to his front door. He ducked back to the stool and listened to their steps on the gravel. They paused. The doorbell rang.
There were two light switches in the hallway. One of them operated a porch light. He wasn't sure which one. He gambled and got it right and saw a glow through the fanlight. He opened the door. The bulb out there was a spotlight made of thick glass tinted yellow. It threw a narrow beam downward from high on the right. The beam caught Nelson Blake first, and then the parts of Julia Lamarr that weren't in his shadow. Blake's face was showing nothing except strain. Lamarr's face was still full of hostility and contempt.
"You're still up," Blake said. A statement, not a question.
Reacher nodded.
"Come on in, I guess," he said.
Lamarr shook her head. The yellow light caught her hair.
"We'd rather not," she said.
Blake moved his feet. "There someplace we can go? Get some breakfast?"
"Four thirty in the morning?" Reacher said. "Not around here. "
"Can we talk in the car?" Lamarr asked.
"No," Reacher said.
Impasse. Lamarr looked away and Blake shuffled his feet.
"Come on in," Reacher said again. "I just made coffee. "
He walked away, back to the kitchen. Pulled a cupboard door and found two more mugs. Rinsed the dust out of them at the sink and listened to the creak of the hallway floor as Blake stepped inside. Then he heard Lamarr's lighter tread, and the sound of the door closing behind her.
"Black is all I got," he called. "No milk or sugar in the house, I'm afraid. "
"Black is fine," Blake said.
He was in the kitchen doorway, moving sideways, staying close to the hallway, unwilling to trespass. Lamarr was moving alongside him, looking around the kitchen with undisguised curiosity.
"Nothing for me," she said.
"Drink some coffee, Julia," Blake said. "It's been a long night. "
The way he said it was halfway between an order and paternalistic concern. Reacher glanced at him, surprised, and filled three mugs. He took his own and leaned back on the counter, waiting.
; "We need to talk," Blake said.
"Who was the third woman?" Reacher asked.
" Lorraine Stanley. She was a quartermaster sergeant. "
"Where?"
"She served in Utah someplace. They found her dead in California, this morning. "
"Same MO?"
Blake nodded. "Identical in every respect. "
"Same history?"
Blake nodded again. "Harassment complainant, won her case, but quit anyway. "
"When?"
"The harassment thing was two years ago, she quit a year ago. So that's three out of three. So the Army thing is not a coincidence, believe me. "
Reacher sipped his coffee. It tasted weak and stale. The machine was obviously all furred up with mineral deposits. There was probably a procedure for cleaning it out.
"I never heard of her," he said. "I never served in Utah. "
Blake nodded. "Somewhere we can talk?"
"We're talking here, right?"
"Somewhere we can sit?"
Reacher nodded and pushed off the counter and led the way into the living room. He set his mug on the side table and pulled up the blinds to reveal pitch dark outside. The windows faced west over the river. It would be hours until the sun got high enough to lighten the sky out there.
There were three sofas in a rectangle around a cold fireplace full of last winter's ash. The last cheery blazes Jodie's father had ever enjoyed. Blake sat facing the window and Reacher sat opposite and watched Lamarr as she fought her short skirt and sat down facing the hearth. Her skin was the same color as the ash.
"We stand by our profile," she said.
"Well, good for you. "
"It was somebody exactly like you. "
"You think that's plausible?" Blake asked.
"Is what plausible?" Reacher asked back.
"That this could be a soldier?"
"You're asking me if a soldier could be a killer?"
Blake nodded. "You got an opinion on that?"
"My opinion is it's a really stupid question. Like asking me if I thought a jockey could ride a horse. "
There was silence. Just a muffled whump from the basement as the furnace caught, and then rapid creaking as the steam pipes heated through and expanded and rubbed against the floor joists under their feet.
"So you were a plausible suspect," Blake said. "As far as the first two went. "
Reacher said nothing.
"Hence the surveillance," Blake said.
"Is that an apology?" Reacher asked.
Blake nodded. "I guess so. "
"So why did you haul me in? When you already proved it wasn't me?"
Blake looked embarrassed. "We wanted to show some progress, I guess. "
"You show progress by hauling the wrong guy in? I don't buy that. "
"I already apologized," Blake said.
More silence.
"You got anybody who knew all three?" Reacher asked.
"Not yet," Lamarr said.
"We're thinking maybe previous personal contact isn't too significant," Blake said.
"You were thinking it was, couple of hours ago. You were telling me how I was this big friend of theirs, I knock on the door, they let me right in. "