Find Me

by Carol O’Connell

  This vanishing act was the only event of the day that did not have a clear explanation-considering the vehicle that she was driving-and it would color his permanent memory of her. Over the years to come, whenever he told his best story of old Route 66, he would not make Mallory any taller than she was, and even the size of her gun would remain the same. Nothing would need to be exaggerated.

  Hours and miles west of the Illinois diner, one vehicle changed lanes to glide up alongside another, and now the encroaching driver was close enough to the Finns’ old Chevy to see the silhouette of a little girl in the back seat.

  The six-year-old had been facing the other side of the family car when she turned suddenly to peer through her own window, as if she had felt a breath on the back of her neck. The watcher’s c ar dropped further behind and blended into the line of the caravan. Dodie Finn turned toward the front seat and a reassuring sight, the back of her father’s head. She rocked and hummed.

  Her brother, Peter, rifled the glove compartment, then reached over his seat to pass her a stick of gum, asking, “Everything okay, Dodie?”

  Inside she was screaming; outside she was smiling, unwrapping her gum.

  “Seat belt,” said their father.

  Peter obediently pulled back and disappeared with the click of the belt fastener.

  Dodie hummed her little song; it quieted her heart, this same refrain, over and over-all that she could remember. She raised one small hand to rub the back of her neck, still sensing a touch of something nasty.

  5

  Charles Butler was wide awake, a great improvement over yesterday, when he had returned to New York from Europe after being marooned in one airport after another, missing planes for security searches and suffering massive sleep deprivation. Late this morning, he had awakened in the passenger seat of his Mercedes, wondering whither he was bound and what had possessed him to give the car keys to Riker, a man with no driver’s license. T r y as he might, Charles could not remember any conversation from the previous night, and thus he had traveled through the morning in the silent fog of the jet-lagged brain.

  However, this afternoon he was rather enjoying himself, seated in this bright and lively restaurant. He was in the excellent company of two homicide detectives, who, between bites of steak and potato salad, discussed the bloody details of a recent murder.

  So cheerful.

  Detective Kronewald bore a slight resemblance to the late Louis Markowitz, particularly when the heavyset man gathered his hound-dog jowls into a brilliant smile. Riker seemed to like this Chicago policeman, and the oft-used phrase “you bastard” was apparently a term of endearment.

  “Okay,” said Riker, “ I’ll tell you why Mallory turned you down cold. It’s the way you dole out information.” He leaned closer to the Chicago detective. “You think the kid doesn’t know you held out on her? She’s a bet- ter cop than I am, and fifteen minutes after I hit town, I found out about the other bodies.”

  Riker paused a beat to accept the paperwork that would attach him and his absent partner to Chicago Homicide. “If you don’t give us everything, then I can’t talk Mallory into working this case.” He unfolded an Illinois map and laid it out on the table. “Now, if it’s not too much trouble-you bastard-just mark the places where the feds dug up the kids’ bodies.”

  When Kronewald hesitated, Riker put a pen in the man’s hand, saying, “Mallory’s as good as they come, and you know that. By now, I promise you-these gravesites are all you got left to give away.”

  “No, there’s more,” said their host, for this meal was compliments of the city. “I got it all with me.”

  Riker made a rolling motion with his hand. “Let’s have it before my hair turns white.”

  “I got the background check on Paul Magritte.” Apparently Detective Kronewald assumed that this name would be meaningful to his luncheon guests.

  Charles leaned forward to beg a question from the stout policeman. “Sorry, but I’m rather late coming into the details on this matter.” Indeed, he had only recently discovered that Riker and Mallory were working on a case. “Who is Mr. Magritte?” While awaiting a response from Kronewald, he saw relief and thanks on Riker’s face. And what was that about?

  Kronewald responded with the hint, “Magritte’s leading that civilian parade.”

  No help. What parade?

  Charles turned to Riker for clarity. However, the New York detective was apparently clueless on the subject of parades and unwilling to expose his ignorance.

  After crossing the state line, Mallory lowered her visor to reach for a tattered old brochure of the Missouri caverns, but it was gone. She checked her knapsack and the glove compartment. Could she have thrown it away by mistake? No, that was not possible. Even in the privacy of her own mind, she was slow to admit to mistakes. She checked under the seats and in the back, and a search of the trunk proved fruitless. After ransacking her duffel bag, she emptied out the contents of her knapsack and checked each buckled and zippered compartment twice. She could not have thrown it away. Her next theory revolved around a light-fingered member of the caravan. Had she forgotten to lock her car?

  Yes, that was it.

  No, that would not work. Nothing else was missing from her car, and she was the only person on earth who would see any value in a torn and faded brochure with a few notes that matched the handwriting on Peyton Hale’s letters. She searched the car again, every hidy-hole and crevice where her hand would fit, and finally forced herself to stop. Where had her mind gone? And the time? She was running out of time.

  Enough.

  As Mallory put the car in motion, she decided that the wind had taken the brochure while the convertible’s top was down. Yes, blame it on the wind.

  Kronewald handed a sheaf of papers to his fellow detective. “This is background material. If Mallory’s right, all the people in that caravan met on the Internet. Paul Magritte runs online therapy groups for the parents of missing and murdered children, but we can’t b reak into his website.”

  “Wait,” said Riker, a man whose credulity had been overstretched of late. “You’re telling me Mallory couldn’t hack her way into a simple-”

  “She’s not traveling with a computer,” said Kronewald. “I thought you knew that. Don’t you guys ever talk? Does that kid ever answer her cell phone?”

  Charles Butler and Detective Riker exchanged glances of perfect communion, both of them sharing the same thought: How could Mallory have become unplugged from her computers-and why? Riker seemed even more disturbed by this radical change in his partner, for he had often voiced the theory that Mallory was not simply in love with high technology, but actually required batteries in order to walk and talk.

  “Now I got techs that can get me into the website,” said Kronewald, “but not the private chat rooms, not without a warrant. Mallory was right about that, too. The old guy’s a bona fide shrink. His site’s protected by doctor-patient confidentiality. And while we’re on the subject of shrinks.” He turned a charming smile of apology on Charles. “Pardon the expression, Dr. Butler.”

  “Call me Charles.” No one ever called him doctor, though his business card had a boxcar line of initials that stood for the degrees of a fully accredited and somewhat overqualified psychologist.

  Kronewald leaned down to search a bulky briefcase on the floor by his chair. While the Chicago man’s attention was thus diverted, Riker donned his reading glasses-in public-a rare departure from his only vanity. The detective scanned the background information on Magritte, mad to catch up with his missing details. Each finished sheet was handed to Charles, a speed reader who only needed a fraction of the time to cover every line of text, and now he learned that a sorry troop of parents were driving the roads of Illinois in search of lost children. How many of their youngsters were dead and carted away by the FBI as skeletal bones in body bags? And how might this tie in with the murder of a full-grown man?

  Oh. On the next sheet, the victim, Gerald C. Linden, was mentioned as a
member of numerous Internet groups for parents of missing children. His own child, a little girl, had been taken by “a person or persons unknown.”

  “I could use a second opinion on this killer.” Kronewald, frustrated in the search through his papers, lifted the heavy briefcase from the floor and emptied out the file holders on top of the map. He turned to Riker, whose spectacles had vanished in a quick sleight-of-hand. “I just got off the phone with a state trooper. He’s bringing me the flat tire.”

  Charles and Riker both smiled and nodded, as if a flat tire might be a perfectly normal thing to drop into the conversation. It made more sense when the Chicago detective had finished laying out Mallory’s t heory on the murder of Mr. Linden.

  “So now,” said Kronewald, “we got a slew of new questions. I’ll tell you what the department psychologist told my squad. He says this insane detail work-stealing a phone battery and sabatoging that air valve-he says that indicates a compulsive personality, a control freak. Everything has to be just right.”

  The portly detective plucked one folder from the pile and opened a preliminary report on the Linden autopsy. “Our shrink saw this and decided that the perp had to be a small man to make the fatal cut to the throat. The medical examiner agrees that Linden was looking down when his throat was slashed. So-the whole picture? We’re looking for a short detail freak. And he’s probably a very tidy serial killer, not a hair out of place. He’s between twenty and thirty-five years old, and he does this for kicks-a thrill killer. Our shrink also says the guy’s territorial. Now I’m hoping that last part’s solid, ’cause the feds got no right to move in on my case if it doesn’t cross state lines. Tell me what you think, Charles.”

  While he waited for a response, Kronewald cleared the paperwork off of Riker’s map so he could mark the requested locations where bones of children had been stolen by the FBI. His pencil stopped in the middle of one of his X’s as he looked up to prompt his civilian guest. “So… you think our guy’s right about everything?”

  “No,” said Charles.

  “Well, good, ’cause I never trusted that shit-for-brains twerp.” The man sat back in his chair, his smile exuding a charm so at odds with his language and his manner. “What can you tell me?”

  “Very little.”

  “An honest man,” said Kronewald in an aside to Riker. He turned back to beam at Charles, the new center of his universe. “Okay, gimme what you got.”

  “I can’t t e ll you if your killer is short or tall, only that Mallory’s t heory agrees with the autopsy. Her Good Samaritan-if that’s what we’re calling him-he was probably holding the flashlight while Mr. Linden changed that flat tire. Then the killer simply leaned down and slashed the victim’s throat. So you see, the angle of the blade won’t help you with the killer’s height. Linden was most likely looking down at the tire-not a short murderer. And you shouldn’t limit yourself to an age range, either. That’s an FBI cliché.”

  Riker leaned forward. “But we can all agree that the killer is male.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Charles. “You decide. I’ll tell you what argues for a woman. It’s a certain physical timidity in the act of murder. Hence all the trouble with the cell-phone battery and the tire valve-to eliminate all the warning signs on a desolate road late at night. And Linden would be less suspicious of a woman, wouldn’t he? The detail work only shows a concern that the murder should go smoothly. She wants to avoid combat with her victim-a man. Apart from the murder itself, there’s a great deal of exposure and risk taking. Consider the marks from the tow chain-traveling with the victim’s c ar in tow and a severed hand in the trunk. But there was no risk at all in the act of killing Mr. Linden. That was remarkably well thought out, and women are more detail oriented than men.”

  “Charles, I just can’t b u y a woman doing this,” said Riker.

  “Because the victims are children? Let’s say Mr. Linden was the first adult victim. A child can be coerced by guile and easily managed with minimum strength. A full-grown man is a whole new problem-for a woman. Hence the careful planning of Linden’s murder in contrast to the more risky behaviors-transporting the body and laying it out in such a public place. I see a cockiness that comes from experience and confidence.”

  Kronewald seemed skeptical. “You think the next victim will be another adult?”

  “Since Mr. Linden was the father of a missing child-probably a murdered child-the killer may have changed his focus to the parents.”

  “And that ties back to Dr. Magritte’s caravan,” said Riker.

  The Chicago detective pretended not to hear this, perhaps because the caravan had already traveled into the next state, a moveable feast for a serial killer, and Kronewald was being left behind. He resumed his chore of marking out gravesites between Chicago and the southwest border.

  “I have one more disagreement with your department psychologist.” Charles hardly needed to consult his own map, the one Riker had marked for him in red to show all the different names for the same old chopped-up highway and all the towns it passed through. “Linden’s killer wasn’t out for thrills. He just needed another body to decorate his road.”

  “His… road,” said Kronewald. The detective lifted his pencil from the map.

  Riker leaned over to see what had been drawn. “Oh, shit. Five graves on that route, and you’re not even done yet, are you? Don’t e ven think about spinning me a lie. How many bodies so far?”

  Kronewald looked down at his map. “I swear there’s only five confirmed gravesites we can link to the feds’team of body snatchers.” He looked down at his map again. Reluctantly, his pencil moved on to draw more X’s. And now there were ten. “These three here.” He tapped the map with one finger. “These are places where an FBI helicopter was reported landing. Evidence of digging, but no confirmation on whether or not the feds stole a body.”

  “And the last two?” Riker leaned closer. “Come on! Give! ”

  “Fifteen years ago, a pack of kids found a grave here.” Kronewald tapped the map location with his pencil. “They thought a pile of rocks just looked too neat-like somebody was hiding something. So they started digging.” His pencil moved to another gravesite. “And this one was found when a phone pole was relocated. That was about ten years ago.”

  Riker closed his eyes in the manner of a man who has seen enough for one day. “I’ll ask once. I know about the lines and the circle carved on Linden’s face. And I know you were never gonna share that, okay? So don’t bullshit me. Just tell me this. Do the lines and the circle look like a number? A hundred and one? A hundred and ten?”

  Before the other detective could answer, Charles said, “My guess would be a hundred and one killings. It works nicely with a sudden drastic change in victim profiles-children to adults. Am I correct?“

  Kronewald nodded.

  “Well, then,” said Charles. “It appears that your department psychologist was right about the territorial aspect. Unfortunately, this killer’s t e rri-tory ranges for another two thousand miles beyond Illinois. He’s fixated on Route 66.”

  Eyes wide open now, Riker leaned close to Kronewald, as if to whisper in the man’s e ar, and then he yelled, “But you already knew that!”

  Mallory had traveled thirty miles into the state of Missouri to arrive in time for the last tour of the caverns, but it had been disappointing so far. Trailing behind a small group of German tourists on a trek of more than three hundred feet below ground, she listened to the tour guide’s spiel on points of interest: three species of bats never seen and a river of blind cave fish that were also unseen because they shied away from the light-even though they were blind. Now and then, the guide would pause to turn on a switch so lights could dramatically illuminate stalactites and stalagmites.

  Mallory endured all of this.

  If she could only believe in the man who had written the letters, the best was yet to come, and he had promised, “-the payoff will be Miss Smith.”

  Onward and upward they walked
single-file on a gentle incline to the finale, touted as the world’s largest cave formation. “Seventy feet high,” said the guide, “and sixty feet wide. Millions of years old.”

  Following the Germans, Mallory climbed some fifty-odd steps to arrive in another cave. This one was outfitted with rows of chairs facing into the dark. When the small audience was seated, the guide turned on the lights to stun them with a formation of stalactites that draped in the shape of an immense theater curtain. The rock bed below it resembled a stage with the hollow of an alcove where a narrator might stand.

  Now she understood the poetry that had accompanied this landmark in the letters, lines from Rilke: “And you wait, are awaiting the one thing / that will infinitely increase your life / the powerful, the uncommon, the awakening of stones.” Mallory stared at this fantastic formation like any other theatergoer who had every right to expect the ancient curtain to part, the rock to open wide. Anticipation alone was exquisite-almost magic.

  The guide was reciting a history that involved a large-chested diva of the nineteen fifties, the late Kate Smith, and now he had Mallory’s attention again, for Miss Smith was the promised payoff.

  “On with the show,” said the guide as he pressed a button on a console. A woman’s booming voice sang, “God bless America-” at a startling volume. The lights flashed red, white and blue, and, for the finale, a gigantic American flag was projected onto the natural wonder of the stone curtain.

  The German tourists were tactfully, quietly shocked by this marriage of staggering beauty and kitsch. The guide was crestfallen, perhaps expecting applause for the dead diva, the flag and the disco lights. Those who knew Mallory and swore she had no sense of humor would never have looked to her as the source of the giggling. It bubbled up out of her mouth, and, unaccustomed to any spontaneous outburst of happiness, she was helpless to stop it. Her on/off switch for the giggles had been lost when her mother died. She laughed-she roared. The rest of the party, fearing hysteria, hovered around her but could do nothing with her.