Find Me

by Carol O'Connell

  She turned back to her computer screen. He was now dead to her, and it did not matter whether he left her table or not. There would be no discussion of the good old days or his last assignment in New York. Years had passed since then. How could she hold a grudge? The case had been delayed on his account, but that kidnapped child had been found alive. He decided that Charles Butler must be wrong. No one could have died because of what he had done to Lou Markowitz. Yet the idea would remain with him all through the day.

  Riker and Charles took turns shooting covert glances at Mallory, who sat alone on the other side of the room. The caravan parents were also staring at her. Apparently a kick-ass cop had more cachet in this room than ten feds. But none of the parents were quite as brave as Mrs. Hardy. They preferred to admire the young detective from afar.

  “I think I’d feel better,” said Riker, “if there was some connection between Savannah Sirus and this serial killer. It’s a pain in the tail working two cases at the same time.”

  “Surely Mallory’s not a suspect in Miss Sirus’s death.”

  The detective shook his head. “No, Charles. Suicide was Dr. Slope’s official call. The kid’s got no trouble with the law. But the details are gonna get out, and every cop in town will have a problem with that case. And then there’s her little vanishing act—all the days she missed from work. Now, thanks to an out-of-town serial killer, I can put out a rumor that the kid was working this case all that time. But I need a solid reason for Savannah’s suicide—something other cops can believe in…or they might not wanna work with her anymore.”

  Charles turned toward Mallory’s table. “She seems all right to me.”

  Riker’s face brightened like a proud parent. “And look. She’s playing with the computer. I think that worried me the most—the kid traveling without one. And that low-tech Volkswagen. Remember her old car? It had equipment that only another computer could recognize.”

  He could see that Charles was about to raise a point about the empty engine compartment, but he cut the man off, saying, “Hold it. Now, just put the invisible engine to one side. Did you get a look at her dashboard? Nothing you wouldn’t find on a regular car, right?”

  “I don’t have a police scanner in my car.”

  “You wouldn’t even have a car if you could get around on a horse. But Mallory? Going low-tech is just strange.” The detective sat well back in his chair and smiled. “But now she’s wired up to a computer again—just like her old self. Yeah, that’s a good sign—a real good sign.”

  Rising from her chair without a word or gesture of good-bye, she quit the restaurant, got into her car and drove out of the parking lot in no particular hurry. Riker stared at the laptop, its screen still glowing on the table. She had abandoned it—a very un-Mallory-like thing to do. He closed his tired eyes. “I take it all back.”

  A small hand tugged on Riker’s sleeve, and he looked up to see Peter Finn. The boy had panic in his eyes.

  “Where is she going?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Riker. “She won’t be gone long.”

  Did he believe that?

  Well, so much depended on the way that Lou Markowitz had raised his foster child, and how much of the old man’s rulebook remained with her. Riker recalled one of Lou’s key commandments: Thou shalt not abandon the sheep…or the lamb.

  According to Kronewald, there was another child’s grave up ahead. Mallory pulled over to the side of the road, switched on her scanner and listened to the chatter for a moment, then said, “You’re right.”

  “What,” said the Chicago detective on the other end of the cell-phone connection, “you couldn’t take my word for it?”

  “How did they find the grave?”

  “They didn’t,” said Kronewald. “I did—with a little help from you and Riker. And thanks for the FBI files, but they didn’t have any of Nahlman’s reports. So I call in my own guy, and he—”

  “Why would you expect to find reports from Agent Nahlman?”

  “She’s a geographic profiler. You didn’t know? I checked her out. A real hotshot—as good as it gets.”

  This made no sense. Mallory prided herself on being a very thorough thief; she overlooked nothing. A geographic profiler’s work would have been the bedrock of a case like this one. How could that data be missing from the purloined files?

  “Anyway,” said Kronewald, “I fed the data to my guy, all the known grave locations. He gave me the same twenty-mile spread that Riker got from the Pattern Man. Now, eighteen years ago in Oklahoma, about twenty miles from where you are now, a drunk hit a dog on the road.”

  “I’m going to hang up on you now.”

  “Holdon, kid, I’m getting to the good part. Well, this guy’s a dog lover. He’s out in the middle of now here, and he decides to bury this dog. So he pulls out his silly little camp shovel, and, before he digs the hole, he looks around for some stones to put over the body. He doesn’t want wild animals to eat the dead mutt. Now remember, this guy’s real drunk, and he’s just determined to do this right. Well, he finds a pile of rocks, and the dirt underneath is real loose. The ground’s been turned over. Less work, right?”

  “So he dug a grave for a dog and found a dead child.”

  “Right. A fresh kill with one wound—the kid’s throat was cut. Now the Oklahoma cops can’t find the old files on that kid, but they say there was no molestation.”

  “They lost the files?”

  “Hell no. Those cops had a visit from Dale Berman’s crew nine months ago, and the feds probably walked off with everything they had on the case. So I asked them to check for another rock pile down the road.”

  Finally—an answer to a simple question. Mallory abruptly ended the call.

  After a search of the iPod menu, she selected Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Following this music recommendation, Peyton Hale wrote, “If you only follow the Buddha’s road, you can only go where the Buddha goes…only know what he knows. But all our questions are personal. Why am I here, where did I come from, where am I going?”

  The letter was put aside. Her cell phone was beeping again, probably Kronewald, and she responded with a testy, “What now?”

  “I know what you did,” said a familiar voice. “Have you gone psycho?”

  “You can’t blame all your screwups on cops.” She wondered if Dale Berman was recording this call in some lame attempt to document her footprints in the FBI computers.

  “No, don’t bullshit me,” said Berman. “I’m talking about the data-base—all the case details. Now Kronewald’s got everything. And he’s got cops calling him from seven states. Containment is shot to hell. That’s your work, isn’t it?” There was a moment of silence, as if he actually expected an admission of guilt, and then he said, “Tell me you didn’t call out the media.”

  Her thumbnail rested on the button that would end this call.

  “Just one more question, Mallory. This perp we’re looking for—is he another psychopath with spooky green eyes? Does insanity run in your family?”

  Agent Christine Nahlman sat at Riker’s table, comparing notes on parents missing from the caravan. “We raised the Wolfman on his CB radio,” she said. “He lost a muffler on the road a few miles back.”

  “Jill’s Dad,” said Riker, correcting her. He liked this Internet name and loathed the monster-movie tag that the feds had pinned on that sorry man. “I had Kronewald run a background check. His daughter’s name is Gillian on the birth certificate, Gillian Hastings.”

  Nahlman’s eyebrows were slightly raised, and her lower lip tucked under her teeth, the only tells that the more formal name of this child was familiar. So preoccupied was she with this little surprise that Riker caught her nodding in unconscious agreement when he blamed the feds for making a mess of the last leg of the trip.

  “It’s way out of control,” said the unshaven detective, “and it’s gonna get worse if you try to keep these people on the interstate.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve
got no choice. The old highway couldn’t handle all of them, not without one bottleneck after another. There’s a public campground only a few hours down the road. Dale wants them all together in one place while it’s still daylight.”

  “So he can count noses? Like that matters anymore. His moles couldn’t even keep track of how many people we lost today. No offense. I lost count myself. All these people wanna be on the old road. Let’s get them back on it. Speed isn’t everything.”

  “I can’t do that.” Nahlman rose from the table.

  She agreed with him; he knew she did, but the agent would not say a word against her boss, the prince of pricks. Instead, she said, “The best solution would be to catch this guy and catch him quick.”

  Riker took her arm to stop her from leaving him. “Dale’s idea of speed is reckless. Don’t let him get you killed. If you’re in a bad place—” He took out his pen and scribbled across a semi-soggy napkin, then handed it to her. “That’s my cell. Call me. I’ll come get you.”

  She put the napkin in her jacket pocket, then wiped the smile off her face before she turned around to rejoin the other agents.

  He looked out the window on the parking lot. Dr. Magritte and Charles were still trying the reasonable approach with Dale Berman, but the agent only gave them his political smile, a cue that he was not even listening. In another hour, all of these people would be back on the road—the wrong road. How many more parents would they lose today?

  The detective looked down at the open laptop that Mallory had abandoned—again. The screen came to life at the touch of the mouse pad, and it was good that she had left it running. Normally, it took him an hour to find the power button on a strange computer, but that was with a hangover. Today he was merely in withdrawal, and the solution for that problem was in hand. Riker popped the cap off his beer bottle, lit up a cigarette and remembered to say grace. He blessed the state of Oklahoma for not going completely nuts on the issue of second-hand smoke. God love these people—they even put ashtrays on the tables.

  An icon on the laptop screen had his name on it. Thank you, Mallory. Now he would not have to rely on that ten-year-old boy for technical support. He watched Peter Finn take his little sister by the hand and lead her to the window. Both children faced the direction that Mallory had taken, as if expecting her to reappear at any moment.

  Riker rested one finger on the mouse pad and moved the little arrow to his icon. One click and the computer’s screen changed to a simple menu. Mallory had created a number of options for him: F***.doc was Riker’s idea of overly polite obscenity, but it was Mallory’s old code for feds, which meant the same obscene thing in her lexicon as well. He knew that all her FBI data was stolen goods—finest kind. It was the next item on her menu that troubled him. The media was subdivided into links for every news blog and marginally more legitimate press with websites. Last was a personal note, and he opened that one first.

  Riker, by the time you read this, Mack the Knife will be in the Chicago PD data bank, and cops all along this road will report to Kronewald. He’ll be calling you soon. You may also hear the sound of helicopters. That will be the media. The more eyes on the sheep the better. Good hunting.

  Her letter was disappearing even as he reread it, words breaking up before his eyes. The other documents remained, but he knew every trace of her would be gone from this computer.

  Good hunting?

  What the hell? She would never abandon the caravan parents to the likes of Berman. No, she had to come back. If she did not, then what was he supposed to tell that little boy? As if the child had read his mind, Peter Finn turned his face to Riker’s, and the detective died a little.

  His cell phone was ringing.

  He answered it, and, even before Kronewald could give him the details called in by an Oklahoma trooper, Riker knew that one of the stray parents had been murdered. He was watching the sudden activity in the parking lot. All the portable sirens were coming out as agents burned rubber, their cars ripping back down the road to a fresh kill site.

  And Kronewald had an additional piece of news, another child’s grave found by the road, but in the opposite direction—the way Mallory had gone.

  The Mamas and the Papas sang—“California dreaming…on such a winter’s day”—as Mallory drove slowly past the digging men. Pulling up in front of a crime-scene van, she parked on the shoulder of the road.

  A police officer walked up to the car. Not bothering to check her ID, he gallantly opened the door for her, saying, “You’d be the cop from New York City. A Chicago detective—Kronewald was his name—he said you might be by for a look.” He shook her hand as they exchanged names: Henry-J. Budrow-but-most-people-call-me-Bud and Mallory—just Mallory.

  He pushed a police barrier out of their way, and they left the road to walk side by side to the edge of a small grave. A man and a much younger woman had their backs bent over this hole in the ground, and they used soft brushes to remove a layer of dirt from a small skull that had yet to lose its baby teeth.

  Now Mallory was told that these civilians were on loan from the anthropology department of a university, and then her guide in uniform asked, “So who’s running this show? Chicago PD or the FBI?”

  “It’s Detective Kronewald’s case,” said Mallory. “He’s your liaison with the feds.” Loosely translated, the old man was gleefully parceling out information to humiliate the Bureau.

  The officer stared at her knapsack. “Your cell phone is ringing.”

  “It does that,” she said, but made no move to answer it.

  He grinned. “Mine has the same problem every six minutes. I wish they’d never invented the damn things.” The officer watched the anthropologist and his student as the pair slowly uncovered the rest of the skeletonized child. He turned back to Mallory. “You know there’s a much fresher corpse back down the road about twenty miles. That one’s an adult, but Kronewald says it’s connected.”

  She nodded, giving him nothing useful, as she looked into the open grave. “You should find something to help with identification—something small that a kid would carry.”

  “Already found it.” He led her over to the police van. The back door hung open, and what he wanted was within easy reach. “This what you’re looking for?” He held up a bag with paperwork attached.

  Through the clear plastic, she could see a small identification bracelet. “I can’t make out the engraving.”

  “The metal’s corroded, but her little dress is still holding up. Can you believe that?”

  Yes, she could. This was the upside of poverty. Cheap polyester and simulated leather would last forever in the ground.

  He reached farther into the van and pulled out a charcoal rubbing. “The professor made this from the bracelet so we could make out the words.”

  The tiny bracelet identified six-year-old Melissa as a diabetic.

  At a more recent crime scene twenty miles down the road, Dale Berman wondered aloud, “What does he do with their hands?” He looked down at the corpse of a middle-aged woman.

  The dead body was laid out on the shoulder of the old highway. Her right hand had been chopped off at the wrist. Agent Nahlman noted that this mutilation was postmortem. The pool of blood had spilled from the wound to the throat. The rest of the pattern was also holding up. Tiny bones had been positioned near the stump, and so it was a child’s skeletal hand that pointed toward another roadside grave. State troopers with shovels owned this crime scene, and they were waiting on their own people to finish the job of uncovering the smaller of the two victims found early this morning.

  Kronewald had been a bit late to share this information with the FBI.

  The federal contingent was forced to watch the exhumation from behind a police barricade. Dale Berman leaned toward one of the young agents, saying to this man, “Get a picture of the woman’s face. Fax it back to the moles at the restaurant. They might recognize her.”

  “I can identify her,” said Nahlman. “She’s one of the parents
who joined the caravan in Missouri.”

  “Why in hell would she leave the group?” He asked this so innocently, as if Nahlman had not apprised him of the problem with the strays and the need for backup. He was still waiting for her explanation.

  Of course.

  He would want witnesses to her incompetence, her failure as the senior agent to keep the caravan together. Nahlman’s head lolled back. She was looking up from the abyss, that black hole for agents with down-spiraling careers, and she could see Dale waving good-bye to her as she fell from grace.

  “Nahlman, I don’t blame you for this.” His hand was on her shoulder, marking her with all but a Judas kiss, blaming her in front of all these people. He came off well before this audience, so generous with his forgiveness. And the little bastard knew he could depend upon on her not to defend herself.

  “Well, we won’t lose any more of them,” said Berman. “I’m personally taking charge of the caravan. If we keep them moving on the interstate, it’ll be safer.”

  “No,” said Nahlman. “It’s only faster. I explained why—” Her words trailed off. What was the point of trying anymore?

  If he was annoyed by her contradiction, it did not show. He was wearing the smile of a charming boy, almost an invitation to skip school today. But she was immune to professional charm. Nahlman looked down at the dead woman, not listening to the company line any longer, as Dale babbled on about the importance of carrying out command decisions.

  Agent Allen was running toward them, cell phone in hand. “The parents are getting ready to leave the restaurant.” When he stopped in front of them, he was out of breath but posture perfect, and Nahlman half expected him to salute his hero. “They’re going to—”

  “I told them to stay put till we got back,” said Dale Berman, as if this mass disobedience of civilians were still inexplicable to him. “How many of them are leaving?”