Find Me
Carol O’Connell
From one of the most acclaimed crime writers in America comes her most astonishing novel: a story of love, loss, death-and discovery.
Over the course of eight novels, Carol O'Connell and her protagonist, New York detective Kathy Mallory, have carved out a unique place for themselves. But all that has been prelude to the remarkable story told in Find Me.
A mutilated body is found lying on the ground in Chicago, a dead hand pointing down Adams Street, also known as Route 66, a road of many names. And now of many deaths. A silent caravan of cars, dozens of them, drives down that road, each passenger bearing a photograph, but none of them the same. They are the parents of missing children, some recently disappeared, some gone a decade or more-all brought together by word that childrens' grave sites are being discovered along the Mother Road.
Kathy Mallory drives with them. The child she seeks, though, is not like the others'. It is herself-the feral child adopted off the streets, her father a blank, her mother dead and full of mysteries. During the next few extraordinary days, Mallory will find herself hunting a killer like none she has ever known, and will undergo a series of revelations not only of stunning intensity- but stunning effect.
Carol O’Connell
Find Me
The ninth book in the Kathleen Mallory series, 2006
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO HISTORIC ROUTE 66, the Mother Road. One day it will be gone. Pieces of it disappear as I write this line. And when it dies, among its remains will be many tales and memories of the way it never was, and that’s all right; for the road is mythic, and myths tend to swell with each telling. From now on, let every tall story begin: Once upon a time, there was a great highway…
And that part is true.
Acknowledgments
Only two people in this book are not fictional characters: Fran Houser of the MidPoint Café in Adrian, Texas; and Joe Villanueva of Clines Corners in New Mexico. Many thanks to them for the history lessons and for permission to write them into my landscape. And thanks to my researcher Dianne Burke for technical support above and beyond. I thank Richard Hughes for musical suggestions and psychological insights. My brother, Bruce, contributed expertise on camping gear that you won’t find in stores. He also gave me the recipe for cowboy coffee, and helpful hints like how to set fire to wet logs and kindling. Ed Herland was my Porsche consultant, and I could not have done this without him. Thanks, Ed. And thanks to Patrick O’Connell (no relation) for help with roll bars and airbags, and to his father, Dan, for a guided tour of the Seligman loop of Route 66 in Arizona. And a long overdue thanks to the work of E. W. Mitchell, The Aetiology of Serial Murder: Towards an Integrated Model (1997), University of Cambridge, UK. This academic may not appreciate finding his name in a work of fiction, but his excellent paper helped to shape my view of profiling as the dog-and-pony show of junk science. As for The Who, the Eagles, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Bob Dylan, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and all the other musicians, singers and writers of melodies and lyrics- thanks for the road songs.
Prologue
The haunt of Grand Central Station was a small girl with matted hair and dirty clothes. She appeared only in the commuter hours, morning and evening, when the child believed that she could go invisibly among the throng of travelers in crisscrossing foot traffic, as if that incredible face could go anywhere without attracting stares. Concessionaires reached for their phones to call the number on a policeman’s c ard and say, “She’s back.”
The girl always stood beneath the great arch, pinning her hopes on a tip from a panhandler: Everyone in the world would pass by-so said the smelly old bum-if she could only wait long enough. The child patiently stared into a thousand faces, waiting for a man she had never met. She was certain to know him by his eyes, the same rare color as her own, and he would recognize young Kathy’s face as a small copy of her mother’s. Her father would be so happy to see her; this belief was unshakable, for she was a little zealot in the faith of the bastard child.
He never came. Months passed by. She never learned.
Toward the close of this day, the child had a tired, hungry look about her. Hands clenched into fists, she raged against the panhandler, whose fairy tale had trapped her here in the long wait.
At the top of rush hour, she spotted a familiar face, but it was the wrong one. The fat detective was seen in thin slices between the bodies of travelers. Though he was on the far side of the mezzanine, Kathy fancied that she could hear him huffing and wheezing as he ran toward her. And she waited.
Crouching.
One second, two seconds, three.
When he came within grabbing distance, the game was on-all that passed for sport in the life of a homeless child. She ran for the grand staircase, shooting past him and making the fat man spin. Sneakers streaking, slapping stone, the little blond bullet in blue jeans gained the stairs, feet flying, only alighting on every third step.
Laughing, laughing.
At the top of the stairs, she turned around to see that the chase was done-and so early this time. Her pursuer had reached the bottom step and could not climb another. The fat man was in some pain and out of breath. One hand went to his chest, as if he could stop a heart attack that way.
The little girl mouthed the words, Die, old man.
They locked eyes. His were pleading, hers were hard. And she gave him her famous Gotcha smile.
One day, she would become his prisoner-but not today-and Louis Markowitz would become her foster father. Years later and long after they had learned to care for one another, each time Kathy Mallory gave him this smile, he would check his back pocket to see if his wallet was still there.
1
It appeared that the woman had died by her own hand in this Upper West Side apartment. It was less apparent that anyone had ever lived here.
The decor was a cold scheme of sharp corners, hard edges of glass and steel, with extremes of black leather and bare white walls. Though fully furnished, a feeling of emptiness prevailed. And the place had been recently abandoned-unless one counted the stranger, the corpse left behind in Kathy Mallory’s front room.
The gunshot to the victim’s heart made more sense after reading the handwritten words on a slip of paper that might pass for a suicide note: Love is the death of me.
“If only she’d signed the damn thing,” said Dr. Slope.
The homicide detective nodded.
Chief Medical Examiner Edward Slope had turned out for this special occasion of sudden death at a cop’s address. If not for a personal interest in this case, the remains might have been shipped to his morgue on a city bus for all the doctor cared. A house call was not in his job description; that was the province of an on-call pathologist. But tonight Dr. Slope had departed from protocol and forgotten his socks. And, though he wore a pajama top beneath his suit jacket, he was still the best-dressed man in the room.
By contrast, Detective Sergeant Riker had the rumpled look of one who had gone to bed in his street clothes. His face also had a slept-in effect, creased with the imprint of a wadded cocktail napkin. Drunk or sober, Riker’s nature was easygoing, but his hooded eyes gave him a constant air of suspicion. He could not help it, and he could not hide it tonight of all nights. The gunshot victim had been found in his partner’s apartment, and now he awaited the official coin toss of homicide or suicide.
Because the medical examiner had known Detective Mallory in her puppy days, the older man was only mildly suspicious, only a little sarcastic when he asked, “And where is Kathy tonight?”
Riker shrugged this off, as if to say that he had no idea. Untrue. By a trace of credit card activity, he knew that Mallory had filled her gas tank in the states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. But he thought it best not to mention th
at his young partner was on the run, for the medical examiner had not yet signed off on a cause of death. The detective looked down at the dead woman, who appeared close to his own age of fifty-five. If not for the bullet hole in her chest, Savannah Sirus might be asleep. She looked all in, exhausted by her life.
Dr. Slope knelt beside the corpse. “Well, I can understand why you’d want a second opinion.”
Oh, yeah.
And Detective Riker needed this opinion from someone in the tiny circle of people who cared for his young partner, though she did nothing to encourage affection. Both men had been forbidden to call her Kathy since her graduation from the police academy; she so liked that frosty distance of her surname. However, the doctor had found it hard to break a habit formed in Mallory’s c hildhood, and so she was always Kathy to him. Brave man, he even called her that to her face.
Dr. Slope continued his observation of the corpse. “Not the usual way for a woman to kill herself.” Women were self-poisoners and wrist slashers. Their suicides were rarely this violent.
“Yeah,” said Riker, “but it happens. This looks like a typical vanity shot to me.” That much was true; men were inclined to eat their guns, but the ladies seldom messed up their faces with headshots. He saw the victim’s chest wound as a small blessing in Mallory’s favor.
“There’s no evidence that Miss Sirus held the muzzle to her breast,” said Dr. Slope, raising a point on the debit side.
Absent was the gunshot residue, the smoky halo of point-blank range, and this had set off alarm bells for the first officer on the scene tonight. This wound more closely resembled a conversational range between victim and shooter. Rather than turn another cop over to Internal Affairs, the West Side detectives had shifted this case to the SoHo precinct where Mallory worked. Riker could still make a case for suicide if the woman had held the gun at arm’s length-and that scenario spoke to fear of firearms. Perhaps Savannah Sirus had even closed her eyes before she pulled the trigger.
Or maybe Mallory shot her.
After the corpse had been rolled over, Dr. Slope pulled a thermometer from his black bag. Riker, who was old school, averted his eyes as the medical examiner raised the lady’s s kirt and pulled her panties down. The detective moved to the couch to wait out the findings on the body temperature.
Alongside the Polaroid shots he had taken of the dead body, a cheap handbag lay on the coffee table. It could only belong to the victim, for this was nothing that his partner would carry. Mallory’s t aste ran upscale; even her blue jeans were tailored, and squad-room gossip had it that the studs were made of gold. Perverse kid, she did what she could to encourage rumors of illegal income. This was her idea of fun: Catch me if you can.
Hard rain beat down upon a speeding car that was far from home. The small vehicle was deceptive in its styling, for this was not a model rumored to eat up the road, and yet it raced at wild, outlaw speeds.
Nearing the western edge of rainy Ohio, a lone patrolman blinked rapidly to clear his tired eyes, but there was no mistake of blurred vision. His engine was powerful, pushed to the limit on this wet road-and the Vo lkswagen Beetle was leaving him behind.
Impossible.
His aunt owned a car like that one, and he knew the speedometer topped out at one-forty, though he considered that to be a private joke on the part of the manufacturer.
The convertible’s color scheme of silver body and black ragtop was all too popular, and the lack of a visible license plate further complicated the problem of identification. It was a short chase-hardly a race. The other car was not speeding up, nor was there any wobble or weave to signify that the driver was in any way alarmed by the spinning red light and scream- ing siren. The trooper’s radar clocked the VW’s cruising speed at a constant one hundred and eighty miles an hour.
Oh, fool!
What was he thinking?
He banged his fist on the dashboard. Damned equipment never worked right. Rain-slick road or dry pavement, that speed was an impossible feat for the little ragtop Beetle. But then, he had never met the driver.
And he never would.
At the subtle rise of road ahead, he could swear that he saw bright streaks of forked lightning under the wheels; the silver car had left the ground, flying, hydroplaning on the water.
The silver Beetle was out of sight when the trooper’s c ar stopped well short of the Ohio state line-beaten. There would be no official report on his patrol car being humiliated by, of all things, a V o lkswagen, for this would be akin to reporting alien spacecraft. And so, without a single speeding ticket, the small convertible would run Route 80 through the neighboring state of Indiana and across another border into Illinois. The driver’s destination was the Chicago intersection of Adams Street and Michigan Avenue -the eye of the storm.
Behind his back, Riker heard the snap of the doctor’s latex gloves. The examination of Savannah Sirus was done.
The detective asked, oh so casually, as if there were not a great deal riding on the answer, “So, Doc, what do I put down for the time of death?”
“Your absolute faith in rectal thermometers is really quite touching,” said Dr. Slope. “I don’t s u ppose a helpful neighbor heard the shot while he was looking at his wristwatch?”
The detective looked over one shoulder and smiled at the older man to say, No such luck. The neighbors had heard gunfire from this apartment on other occasions, and, good New Yorkers all, they had become selectively deaf to what Mallory was doing in here.
“Well, then,” said Slope, “just put down today’s d ate for now. Rigor mortis is always a crapshoot, and I’ve got too many variables to call a time of death with body temperature. An open window on a cold night-dried sweat stains on her blouse. For all I know, the woman had a raging fever when she died.” He circled the couch to stand before the detective. “So what’ve you got?”
Riker upended Savannah Sirus’s purse and spilled her possessions across the glass coffee table. There were two clusters of house keys. He recognized a silver fob on the set that would open the door to this apartment. “Looks like the lady was Mallory’s houseguest.” Another item from the purse was an airplane ticket from Chicago to New York. “I don’t t hink we’ll be calling out a crime-scene unit for this one.” He was testing the waters here, for the medical examiner had not yet made a pronouncement of suicide.
Dr. Slope turned to face his minions waiting in the hallway beyond the open door. He gave them a curt nod. The two men wheeled a gurney through the front door and set to work on bagging the victim’s remains. When they had cleared the room, taking the late Savannah Sirus with them, the doctor sank down on the couch beside Riker. “You think your partner knows what happened here tonight?”
Rather than lie, the detective said, “Well, you tell me.” One wave of his right hand included the leftovers of a take-out dinner, an empty wineglass and a saucer full of cigarette butts. “Point taken?”
The medical examiner nodded. He was well acquainted with Mallory’s freakish neatness. The young homicide detective would never tolerate anything out of place in her apartment. She was the sort who compulsively straightened picture frames in other people’s houses. Ergo, the mess had been made after her departure. Dr. Slope stared at the open window. “Riker? You think our victim originally planned to jump, then changed her mind and shot herself?”
“No.” But he understood the other man’s reasoning. This was the only open window on a cold spring night-and the screen had been raised. “The woman knew Mallory reasonably well. She’s been staying here awhile.” He held up the plane ticket. “Got here three weeks ago.” He neglected to mention that the ticket was round-trip; Mallory’s houseguest had no thoughts of dying in New York City -not on the day she arrived. “Savannah Sirus didn’t know much about guns and ammo. Now this is the way I see it. She thought the bullet might pass through her body and mess up a wall. Well, Mallory wouldn’t like that, would she?”
The doctor was shaking his head in accord with this.
Riker continued. “So the lady opened that window and pulled up the screen. That’s where she was standing when she shot herself. And it looks like she’s been planning this for a while.” He pointed to the gun on the floor. “You didn’t t hink that was Mallory’s, did you?”
“No,” said Dr. Slope. “I suppose not.”
The weapon on the carpet was a lightweight twenty-two, a lady’s g u n. Kathy Mallory was no lady; she carried a cannon, a Smith & Wesson.357 with a bigger kick and better stopping, maiming, killing power.
However, Riker knew that this gun on the floor did indeed belong to Mallory. She collected all kinds of firearms, none of them registered, and a twenty-two had its uses. But the matter of gun ownership might interfere with the doctor’s finding of suicide.
The detective slouched deep into the leather upholstery as he pondered where his partner was headed tonight. And why had she stopped showing up for work?
Mallory, what did you do with the time-all your crazy days of downtime?
Rising from the black leather couch, Riker forced a yawn, as if he needed to affect a blasé attitude about violent death. In fact, he had been born to it, a true son of New York City. “I’m gonna check out the other rooms.”
He passed by the guestroom and caught a glimpse of rumpled sheets and a blanket used by Savannah Sirus. Farther down the hall, another open door gave him a view of Mallory’s o w n bedding. There was not a single wrinkle in the coverlet, as if no one had ever slept there, and this lent credence to a theory that she never slept at all. Mallory the Machine-that was what other cops called her.
Dr. Slope was walking behind him when Riker entered another room of spotless good order, his partner’s d e n, where no dust mote dared to land. Some people had dogs; Mallory kept computers, and they sat in a neat row of three, their Cyclops eyes facing the door, waiting for her to come home. Even her technical manuals were well trained, each one perched on the precise edge of a bookcase shelf. The back wall was lined with cork, and Riker was puzzled by what, at first glance, had passed for striped wallpaper. He turned his head to catch a look of profound shock in the medical examiner’s e yes.
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