Find Me

by Carol O'Connell

  The two men wore more casual clothing this morning. Of course, Charles Butler’s blue jeans and denim shirt were matched by the same dye lot, custom-tailored and more costly than the entire contents of the detective’s closet back home. However, Riker felt great affection and loyalty for his own flannel shirt and authentically faded jeans that fit in all the right places. Years of wear had made them baggy and threadbare at the knees—good driving jeans. He was at the wheel and on the way to the sheriff’s office as they rehashed last night’s conversation. “No, I’ve got no idea what her father’s name is. In ever thought of anyone but Lou Markowitz as her dad. You think Mallory’s hunting her real father down for payback?”

  “Payback,” said Charles. “For what? Think about it. She’s only now looking for this absentee father? I’d let go of the vengeance idea.”

  Riker knew that Mallory had been born out of wedlock, and now he could lay the blame for that on Savannah, the other woman. Charles was probably right. In all likelihood, father and daughter had never met by reason of mutual disinterest. Yet he still worked on a revenge theory. “Let’s say Cassandra was pregnant with Mallory when this guy took off and abandoned her. You don’t think that would piss the kid off?”

  “Without knowing the circumstances, I couldn’t say. Now what about this FBI agent, Dale Berman? What exactly did he do to Mallory?”

  “Oh, Dale doesn’t even know.” There were a hell of a lot of cops who could enlighten the man, but they no longer spoke to Special Agent Berman.

  “It wouldn’t be a small thing,” said Charles, “not if you think Mallory still carries a grudge.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Riker rolled to a stop and cut the engine a block away from the sheriff’s office. “Did you ever hear her call Lou Markowitz by his first name? No, you never did. In her kiddy days, she called him Hey Cop. Years later, after she’d warmed up to Lou, his name was Hey Markowitz. She loved that old man, I know she did. But right up to the end, the kid was still packing grudges from her days as a runt street thief. Lou was always the cop who caught her. She never forgets, never forgives.”

  “But surely Dale Berman factors into—”

  Riker waved off any further discussion of the FBI man’s offenses. This was a subject that always made him sad. He restarted the car and glanced at the dashboard clock as he eased back on the road. “Mallory should be in Oklahoma by now.”

  “You mean Kansas. That’s the next state on Route 66.”

  “The Kansas segment is real small,” said Riker. “You blink, you miss it.” When he finally chased Mallory down, he would have to deal with payback for his own black mark in her personal account books. It would only have taken her six seconds to make a connection between himself and the Chicago LoJack tracker. She would vote him the cop most likely to activate her antitheft device and spy on her. And this time her paranoia would nicely mesh with reality. Only one telling question remained: Did she know Savannah Sirus was dead?

  He had to see her eyes when he gave her the news.

  And now He thought of another question. He did not want to pry into this personal area, but he had no choice. Everything that might contribute to Mallory’s current malady was also the detective’s personal business. “Hey, Charles? Is the kid holding a grudge against you?”

  “No, why would she?” The man faced the windshield not wanting to meet his friend’s eyes, and he wore the slight blush of a lie—a small one, most likely a lie of omission. Poor Charles had a give-away face that could not hide a falsehood or a good hand in a game of cards.

  The Mercedes slowed to a crawl when the sheriff’s office was in sight. Riker was not willing to end this conversation just yet. “I’m guessing you two had a fight. Mallory holes up in her apartment for months, and you go off to Europe. What am I supposed to think? So what happened?”

  “I asked her to marry me.” Charles pointed to the windshield. “Oh, look. A reception committee.”

  Startled, Riker almost hit a deputy as he turned the wheel to enter the municipal lot. Another man in uniform flagged down the Mercedes and waved them into a parking space.

  Charles rolled down the passenger window and asked, “We’re not late, are we?”

  “No, sir,” said the deputy. “Things just got off to an early start. The FBI agents didn’t want to wait.” He ushered them inside the building and down the hall to a small conference room and a meeting in progress.

  Sheriff Banner made the introductions, gesturing first to the old man. “You’ve met Dr. Magritte.” He turned to face two strangers on the other side of the room. “But not these folks.”

  Riker had expected to see a young couple from the caravan, the two people he had picked out for embedded FBI moles, but these were new faces. He ignored the younger agent, who had just started shaving last week, and he stared at the woman.

  No one would call her pretty, but she was appealing. He would guess her age at forty by the strands of silver mixed in with the brown, but the short haircut gave her a youthful tomboy look. And a man could get lost in those tranquil gray eyes. The sun had popped out a few freckles on her nose, and she had a slight overbite; these were Riker’s other favorite qualities in a woman. The lady was dressed from a catalogue for campers. There was even a Swiss Army knife clipped to her belt. Riker wondered where she carried her gun; it was that well hidden.

  The light-haired man beside her was attired from the same mail-order box, but he was much younger, a recent graduate of the FBI academy with the requisite well-scrubbed, earnest face—no wrinkles, no experience.

  “Agents Christine Nahlman and Barry Allen,” said the sheriff. “They’ll be traveling undercover with the caravan. Dr. Magritte’s cooperating with the FBI.”

  “So that makes four of you,” said Riker, nodding to the woman. In this count, he was including the two campers he believed to be FBI moles. Agent Nahlman’s silence was slightly frosty, neatly confirming this theory.

  “This is for you.” Sheriff Banner reached across the conference table to hand a folded paper to Riker. “It’s a message from their boss, the agent in charge. He called this morning to make their arrangements.”

  Riker opened the sheet of paper and read Dale Berman’s simple question, “What’s eating Mallory?” This was followed by the FBI man’s coveted cell-phone number, one that even Dale’s wife would not have.

  Trouble.

  The detective waved this note as he faced the two federal agents. “So you guys met my partner? Detective Mallory?”

  Oh, yes, they had—no doubt about it. And, in the strained exchange of glances between them, he could see that theirs had not been a happy experience. Riker smiled. “The kid makes a hell of a first impression, doesn’t she?” And by that, he meant permanent damage. “So how’s old Dale? Haven’t seen the guy in a while. No recent bullet holes, no broken bones?”

  “She kicked him in the balls.” Agent Barry Allen’s voice had a trace of awe.

  “That’s my baby.” Riker said this with pride—and relief. Dale Berman’s punishment could have been so much worse.

  After looking over the FBI-approved route map, he listened to their plans to make Oklahoma by nightfall and agreed that it was doable on the interstate, where they could get up some speed. Then he sided with Dr. Magritte after hearing the old man’s concerns about the proposed hotel.

  “The doc’s right. They should camp on this private land.” Riker held up the map marked with a prearranged site. “It’s isolated, easier to keep all the sheep together. You don’t wanna move these people indoors tonight, not even if it rains. No walls between them and you.”

  Nahlman, the older, seasoned field agent, was nodding in agreement, but her younger partner asked, “Why?”

  “Well,” said Riker, always patient with kids, “you wanna be able to hear the screams.”

  “Your dad only stayed two weeks that last visit,” said Ray Adler. “Just time enough to rebuild the wrecked Porsche.”

  Mallory was hardly listening anymore
. She stared at the photograph of her father, taken when he was her own age. His blond hair was tied back, and his smile was slightly crooked and winning. “Handsome and wild,” her mother once said on that rare occasion when she was willing to talk about him with her six-year-old daughter. The photograph had one other detail, a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles tucked into the breast pocket of his shirt. “He wore glasses.”

  “Well, he owned glasses.” Ray laid down an earlier photograph of himself and Peyton Hale as teenage boys. “Your dad’s only sixteen in this one. See the eyeglasses in his pocket? Never once caught him wearing them. Men can be as vain as women—sometimes more so.”

  Ray wore his own spectacles as he sorted through the papers in the box. “Your dad wrote me from time to time. Always got a Christmas card. After he came through that last time, I got a few postcards from the road, then nothing.” Sitting well back in his chair, he pushed his glasses to the top of his head. “Nothing in all this time.” Ray heaved a sigh, then looked down at the floor for a moment of silence. “I love Peyton Hale. And I wouldn’t say that about another man in this world.” He turned his sad eyes to Mallory. “If you meet your father on the road, you give him my regards. If he’s dead, then lie to me. I don’t ever want to hear that.”

  He pushed the box toward her. “That’s all yours now. Old notebooks, more pictures and such. You might want some quiet time to look it over.” He rose from the table. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta check on my crew. I’ve got them working on a roll bar for that car of yours.”

  “I don’t want a roll bar.”

  “But you’re gonna get one. If you flip that thing, you’ll die.”

  Having already seen a gravestone with her name on it, Mallory did not offer further protest. When Ray had quit the house, she opened one of Peyton Hale’s notebooks and read the opening lines. “In the beginning, there was the wheel. Then along came the fire of the internal combustion engine. The car was born. And away we go. It’s a romance that has no end.”

  Next she picked up the photograph of her parents posed with Savannah Sirus. After ripping the latter—the interloper—from the picture, Mallory dropped the torn piece into an ashtray and looked around for matches to burn it. Throwing Savannah into the garbage can was not enough. Only total destruction would do.

  The two parents from the caravan had arrived. They were excited and hopeful. Anticipation was everything to them. These two still abided in that fantasy world where little girls never died, where a lost child could still be found innocently wandering in the woods, perhaps a little dirty after all this time—years of time—but no worse for wear, no harm done—not dead, not murdered. The mother and father were looking into the corners of the room, leaning a bit to see around the long table and chairs. Charles Butler winced. They thought they were here to pick up their living daughter and take her home.

  The Missouri sheriff held up a keychain fob in the shape of a horseshoe. The mother seized it, ripped it from the plastic bag and kissed it. And then the sheriff told her that the fob had been found with the remains of her child.

  “Your little girl was laid to rest in local ground. She was among good people, and her grave was always tended to. Fresh flowers every—”

  The mother collapsed. She would have fallen, but she was caught by the helping hands of her husband and Sheriff Banner. A chair was fetched close to her, and she was lowered into it. The husband stood behind her so she would not see his face contorted in agony, a silent scream of No! followed by tears and the quake of crying with no sound.

  On the other side of the room, Riker, a veteran of many scenes like this one, kept his voice low when he spoke to Charles. “There’s no good way to tell the parents, but I like to think that quick is better. Less torture.”

  Dr. Magritte stood apart from the parents and was wisely quiet. It would be a while before these two people were ready for grief counseling. Closure was a term dreamed up by fools. Today the parents’ pain would begin in earnest, and their imaginings would send them reeling.

  Charles turned to the tall brunette beside him, finding this FBI agent less forbidding as he detected in her eyes a profound sympathy.

  “They can’t go home again, can they?”

  “No,” said Agent Nahlman. “There’s an escort car on the way. They’ll be taken to a safe house till this is over.”

  “Rather extreme,” said Charles. Suspicions were contagious things, and he had picked this one up from Riker: What if Gerald Linden was not the only adult victim? “So you believe there’s a real threat to the parents, a permanent change in victim profile.”

  There would be no response. He knew this when Agent Nahlman raised her chin, a sign of intractable tenacity. She silently recomposed herself, losing that sad, soft quality of the eyes—unreadable now.

  Riker leaned toward her. “You guys should get the rest of the parents off this road.” The detective might as well be addressing the stone building that housed a giant federal bureaucracy. The FBI agent only stared straight ahead, deaf to this good advice. Riker edged closer to the woman, saying, “But hey, Nahlman, it’s only life and death, right?”

  That got the field agent’s attention. She turned to the detective and gave him an almost imperceptible nod, the single giveaway that her opinion of FBI command decisions was only marginally better than his. But she would follow her orders, and that was made clear as the good soldier walked in lockstep with her partner, following Dr. Magritte’s lead as the old man guided the parents out of the room.

  The sheriff sat down at the table, and his head lolled back, so tired, as if he had run a marathon this morning. “I’ll tell you what I got from Dr. Magritte. Their little girl was never an FBI case—not till long after she turned up dead. Right after the kid disappeared, the feds told her mom and dad that she didn’t meet their criteria. Can you imagine that? Their kid just didn’t make the cut. No agents ever helped with that case.” He turned to the window on the sidewalk, where an official car had arrived to take those wounded people away. “I told them to hire a lawyer to deal with the feds. Then they might get the child’s body returned for a proper burial.” He looked away from the sad little scene being played out on the sidewalk, the crying man, the destroyed woman, who were being folded into the back seat of a car like felons. “I talked to a few more folks while I was out at the campsite this morning. There’s one man who joined the caravan yesterday in Illinois. California plates. He’s been driving Route 66 from the other direction. Suppose I told you this guy might be seriously crazy?”

  “That might describe all of the parents to some degree.” Charles was thinking of the one who traveled with a wolf. He took that for a recent relationship, for he had not detected any bond between the man and his—pet. “Grief can work odd changes on people.”

  “This one’s a corker,” said the sheriff. “All he wants to talk about is patterns. He can’t follow a conversation that doesn’t have compass points or map sites. Those two FBI agents just blew him off. Well, crazy or not, he might be worth talking to.” He nodded to the deputy standing in the doorway. “Bring in Mr. Kayhill.”

  Ray Adler had assured Peyton’s daughter that the roll bar would be done real quick, and that was true enough. However, in New York time, two days was too damn slow. She stood at the center of the garage, stunned to find her car in pieces.

  When she turned on one heel and left for the house, he walked behind her to cross the yard and explain to her back, “Now if my boys were just real fine mechanics, a job like that would take two weeks. A roll bar’s no good unless you marry it up with the frame. But these guys are damn artists—I’m talkin’ real talent here. So, you can see why two days is fast for a roll bar. There’s not another shop in the country that can do it faster—not if you want it done right.”

  He followed the girl through the back door of his house. More than three hours had passed since he had last seen his kitchen, and now he opened his eyes wide to bulging with a bad case of surprise, believi
ng for a moment that he suffered from early onset of Alzheimer’s—that he must have wandered into some stranger’s house. Truly, the first word to pop into his head was insane, and this was followed by flat-out crazy.

  Kathy Mallory was standing by the table, her angry eyes cast down as she strung the loops of freshly laundered curtains on a rod. And he could not help but notice that the material was six shades brighter. While she turned her back on him to hang the curtain rod over the window, he looked around the room.

  How had she done this in half a morning?

  He had forgotten the pattern beneath the dirt on the linoleum, and now the checks of many colors shone through a new wax shine. The mountain of dirty laundry was gone, and the dryer was spinning with a load of wash. His old wooden table had been scrubbed raw, and every last splatter and ring, each memory of past meals was gone. Even the faucet gleamed with maniacal cleaning. Ray guessed that this was payback for her roll bar; he had refused to do money with her. But oh my, this kitchen was insanely tidy.

  He sat down at the table and watched her run a rag over a cupboard door handle that could not get any cleaner unless she stripped off the chrome. “Girl, you’re a damn cleaning machine. How is it that you’re not married yet?”

  “Never crossed my mind,” she said, setting two cups and saucers on the table.

  “But don’t you want kids?”

  “No.” Next she brought him a strange coffeepot without a single fingerprint on it.

  “Damn,” he said with a bit of wonder. She filled his cup with a brew that smelled better than any he had had since the death of his wife, and he was late to wonder if this might have anything to do with cleaning the pot. When the girl sat down with him, he had to ask, “Why don’t you want kids?”

  She gave this a moment of thought before saying, “I don’t know what they’re for.”