Find Me

by Carol O’Connell

  Nahlman moved closer to the table, saying, “No, I think we’ve seen enough, Mr. Kayhill. It’s getting late. Agent Allen and I will drive you back to the caravan.”

  “No,” he said, edging his chair away from her. “I want to explain my data.”

  “We should be leaving now,” said Nahlman, disguising the mild order as a request.

  This prompted Riker to ask Horace Kayhill if he wanted another cup of coffee.

  Charles picked up one of the maps. Some crosses were drawn in ink. He guessed that the ones done in pencil were projected gravesites, as yet undiscovered. “Isn’t t his a bit like geographic profiling?”

  “Yes!” said the Pattern Man, suddenly elated that someone in this company could appreciate his work. “And it’s based on consistent spacing of gravesites. I’ve been able to pin down fourteen bodies dug up on this road, and that’s enough to project numbers for the entire group. Some of my data comes from websites for missing children.” He glanced at Agent Nahlman. “One of them is an FBI website.” Now he leaned toward Charles, who was clearly his favorite audience. “Think of Route 66 as the killer’s home base.”

  Sheriff Banner handed a slip of paper to Riker. The detective nodded, then turned to the Pattern Man. “So, Horace, maybe our perp drives a mobile home.”

  “Yes, of course!” Horace Kayhill glowed with goodwill for the detective. “That’s very good. So the killer actually lives on this road-the whole road.”

  Charles shifted his chair closer to Riker’s at the head of the table, and now he could clearly read the paper in the detective’s hand. It was the vehicle registration for Mr. Kayhill’s mobile home.

  The little man was exuberant, unfolding all of his maps to cover every inch of table space. “You see these half circles in green ink? The arcs represent the areas of day trips between abductions and graves. If he’s as smart as I think he is, then he takes the children from one state and buries them in the next one down the road. Of course, that’s based on the only two girls who were ever identified. Police searches for missing children are usually confined to a single state-unless the FBI becomes involved, but they so rarely bother with these children.”

  Nahlman stiffened, then signaled her partner by sign language to make a phone call, and Agent Allen promptly left the room.

  Riker called after him, “Horace likes his coffee with cream and lots of sugar.” The detective smiled at Nahlman. She looked at the floor.

  And the Pattern Man continued. “Think of him as a shark.”

  “A shark?” Nahlman drew closer to Kayhill’s c hair. “How did you come up with that analogy?”

  This was not mere curiosity. Charles detected a more authoritarian note in her voice. She was slipping into the interrogation mode, though she forced a smile for Kayhill’s b e nefit, and the little man returned that smile, so happy that she was at last showing interest.

  “A shark fits the pattern,” said Kayhill. “It has a vast territory, wide and long, and this creature is constantly in motion, always looking for prey.” One hand waved low over the spread maps. “These gravesites have no chronological order. So he goes back and forth over the road. And look here.” He pointed to long red lines that spanned one of his maps. “This is his outside territory. Now I admit that my data is limited for this particular pattern. Only one fresh corpse was ever found, and that girl was kidnapped within twenty-four hours of finding her grave. So I assume he won’t keep a child for more than a day. And he’ll always drive the lawful speed limit.”

  Charles nodded. “The killer wouldn’t w ant to attract attention from the police.”

  “Yes!” said the happy Pattern Man. “That’s how I fixed his geographical limits.”

  “Good theory,” said Riker. “And a mobile home would cover his dig site. Hell, he could dig a grave anywhere on that road in broad daylight. All he’d have to do was let the air out of one tire and leave a jack propped up in plain sight. That would guarantee that no cop’s g o nna stop to give him a hand.” He studied the lines drawn on either side of the map. “So how big is our shark’s t e rritory?”

  “Well, I’ve drawn lines to include an area six hundred miles wide, two thousand and four hundred miles long. Amazing, isn’t it?” He reached under one of his maps and pulled out a small notebook. “These are more specific calculations on gravesites that haven’t been found yet. I used the distance between known graves, then made allowances for populated areas and inaccessible places. There’s one segment in Illinois where Route 66 dead-ends into a lake.” He handed the notebook to Riker. “It’s yours. I think you’ll find it helpful.”

  “You got that right.” Riker accepted this gift with a rather disingenuous smile. He lit a cigarette and slumped low in his chair, so relaxed- almost harmless. “Now what about you, Horace? Did you lose a kid?”

  “Oh, no. I’ve never even been married.”

  “You don’t s ay,” said Riker. “So what do you do?”

  “My interest is mainly statistics, patterns and such, and-of course- Route 66. I know every website for that road. That’s how I found two of Dr. Magritte’s people. I met them in a Route 66 chatroom. Other parents, too. They were coming together with common statistics, stories of murdered children recovered along the old road.”

  Riker exhaled a cloud of smoke and watched it curl upward. “And what do you do for a living, Horace? You didn’t s ay.”

  “I’m a statistician.”

  “Of course,” said the smiling detective. “What was I thinking?”

  A deputy entered the room and laid down a sheet of paper in front of her boss. After a glance, the sheriff handed it to Riker, and Charles read over his friend’s shoulder. It was a background check on Horace Kayhill, and it fit all the expectations for a man with his disorder. He was on full disability, unemployed and unemployable. Though the sheet of rough data did not include the nature of his disability, Charles already knew. The man was an obsessive compulsive, which neatly explained all the layers of patterns, one chaining into the other.

  Riker studied the map of Missouri, which included sections of neighboring states. One of the penciled crosses was twenty miles from here. The next one was in Kansas. The detective planted one finger on this penciled-in cross for the small Kansas segment of Route 66.

  And now Sheriff Banner was also staring at the map, saying, “That’s where they found that teenager with the missing hand, but she wasn’t in the ground. They found her body laid out on the road-maybe a day after she was killed.”

  “A teenager? Well, that’s wrong,” said Mr. Kayhill. “And an unburied corpse won’t fit the pattern. The pattern is everything. There’s a child’s body buried there. You simply haven’t found it yet.” He leaned toward Riker and tapped his gift, the notebook in the detective’s hand. “But you’ll find it. You’ll find them all.”

  Ray Adler handed Mallory the keys to his pickup truck so she could finish the Kansas leg of Route 66. “It’s just a little bitty corner of the state,” he said. “Shouldn’t t ake more than fifteen minutes from Galena to Baxter Springs. It only takes a little longer if you have to get out and push the truck.”

  She rejoined the old road and returned to Galena, where people on the street waved to her, blind to the driver, seeing only the neon-green truck with the fabulous prefabricated front end of a giant, vintage Jaguar, replete with a silver-cat hood ornament. After a few minutes, she slowed down for a look at the old arch bridge, another landmark from the letters, but all of the graffiti had been painted over, and the structure served no function anymore; traffic crossed a new bridge built alongside it.

  That took a minute more of her time.

  Mallory followed the road around the inside corner that squared off the Kansas segment. She stopped by a baseball field, but this was no landmark of old. The small stadium had the clean red-and-white look of newly laid bricks and fresh mortar. So Peyton Hale’s old ballfield in Illinois had vanished, a new one had appeared here in Kansas-and another minute of her life had bee
n lost.

  What caught her attention next, and held it, was the digging equipment down the road. She rolled on, moving slowly, wanting to attract attention- and she did. She cut the engine a few yards away from a utility truck and an unmarked van. The vehicles partially obscured the dig site, and a plastic curtain had been raised to hide most of the hole. The workmen were gathering at the edge of the road and taking an equal interest in Mallory. And so they stared at one another until a police cruiser pulled up behind her. She knew the diggers had called local cops to drive her off.

  An officer approached the window of the pickup truck, saying that old standard line, “Driver’s license and registration, please.”

  Mallory ignored this request and leaned out the window to ask, “Is this where they found the body of Ariel Finn? It was about a year ago. The teenager with a missing hand?”

  Predictably, the officer rolled up his eyes, taking her for a crime-scene tourist. He would have dealt with quite a few of them a year ago when the mutilated teenager had made the news in this state. And now he would designate her as ghoulish but harmless. His next words were also predictable. “Miss, forget the license and registration, okay? But I have to ask you to move along now.”

  “Fine,” she said, satisfied that Dale Berman would never know she had been here. “Just tell me where I can find your boss.”

  Te n minutes later, she pulled up to the curb in front of a police station, where an old man with a badge and blue jeans was sitting on a sidewalk bench. His face was lifted to the sky and washed in sunlight. Smoke from his cigar curled in the air as he turned her way and a smile crossed his face. The man stepped up to her window, grinning, saying, “I suppose you killed ol’ Ray. No way he’d let you drive this truck unless you drove it right over his body.”

  She was opening her wallet to show him her badge and ID. He waved this away. “No need to see your driver’s license, miss. Any friend of Ray’s is a friend of mine, even if you did kill him.”

  When they had exchanged names and she had tacked the word “detective” onto hers, he guided her to the bench, arguing that it was too nice a day to conduct any business indoors. He asked if a little cigar smoke would bother her. No, it would not. Lou Markowitz had loved his pipes, and she had grown up with the smell of smoke. Sometimes she missed it. She had forgotten to ask Ray Adler if her real father had been a smoker, and suddenly this seemed more important than the latest grave by the side of the road. She closed her hand to push her long red fingernails into the skin. Pain. Focus. She knew there was a reason for finding two bodies-one year apart-in the same location. A moment ago, it had been clear in her mind.

  Get a grip.

  She loosened her fist before the fingernails could draw blood, a telltale sign that she was not in complete control of herself.

  Two bodies in the same location-one found on the road and one in the ground.

  Yes, she had it now. The lawman beside her knew better than to give this information away-even to another cop. She would have to guess right the first time.

  Riker assured Horace Kayhill that the caravan would not leave without him. “They’ll be getting off to a late start.”

  Agent Nahlman glanced at her watch. “It’s twelve noon. They’ll be at the campsite for another hour.”

  “But we’ll get to Kansas before-”

  “No, Mr. Kayhill,” said Nahlman. “We’re taking a different route. The caravan will bypass Kansas. My partner and I will be leading all of you into Oklahoma on the interstate highway. Now if you’ll just come with us?”

  Riker and Charles stood on the sidewalk outside of the sheriff ‘s o ffice, watching Kayhill drive off with the FBI agents. And now, finally, they had some privacy, and the time was right. The detective turned to his friend. “So you proposed to Mallory.” He splayed his hands, only a little frustrated with the other man’s s ilence. “And that’s it ?”

  Charles nodded and stared at his shoes, clearly embarrassed. Evidently, one day this poor man had snapped, cracked and blown his cover as an old friend of the family; he had dared to propose to Mallory, who liked him well enough, but treated him more like the family pet.

  And, of course, Charles had been turned down, but that was for the best in Riker’s o pinion. The detective had always believed that this man would be happier with someone from planet Earth, a nice, normal woman who did not collect guns. And this prospective wife should want children. Charles would make a wonderful father, and Riker could easily see a brood of eagle-beaked, bug-eyed kids in this man’s future. But he could not believe in a world with more than one version of Mallory; a gang of little blond clones with her green eyes and inclinations was too great a risk; he could not even be certain that she would remember to feed them.

  Riker had lost the heart for this interrogation. Turning to the road and the departing car, he changed the subject. “So tell me what you think of the little guy.”

  “Kayhill? Obsessive compulsive.” Charles was suddenly cheerful again- now that the inquisition was clearly over. “Obviously good cognitive reasoning. But he can’t sustain eye contact for more than a few seconds. That might indicate mild autism-that and the maps. He’s so totally absorbed in his patterns.”

  “Some of them seem a little far-fetched,” said Riker, “but we’ll know more in another few minutes. The sheriff ‘s o n the phone to Kansas.”

  Mallory’s knapsack rested on her lap. She sat in a wooden chair beside the police chief’s desk. They had taken their conversation indoors so he could check out her reference on the telephone. The chief carried on a guarded conversation with Sheriff Banner, answering most questions with one word. Reassured now, he became more chatty with the Missouri man. “Oh, sure I remember… Yeah, how long ago was that?… No, we identified the girl… No, that’s what we thought at first. Turns out she was a few years younger than we figured-just sixteen… W ell, we landed a flyer in her hometown… Ariel Finn was her name… You don’t s ay. Well, I assumed he identified his daughter. We shipped the body back there.”

  Eavesdropper Mallory wondered why Joe Finn would be traveling with the parents of missing children when his child had been found. Denial was the easy answer. She could see him staring down at the dead body, refusing to believe that it could be his daughter. A corpse was nothing like a sleeping child. Only hours after death, the features would subtly change, eyes clouding and retracting into their sockets, the skin losing its bloom.

  Some parents used each alteration as a rationale for denying their own children.

  There was another possibility that Mallory liked better: Joe Finn might be planning to meet his daughter’s killer on the road and take some satisfaction in a murder of his own.

  When the police chief hung up the phone, Mallory said, “You didn’t t e ll Sheriff Banner about the feds digging up the ground just down the road.”

  “Feds? No, that’s just a crew fixing a busted underground cable.” He sounded only mildly sarcastic when he added, “And I’m sure you saw the electric company’s name on the side of their van.” His crinkled eyes and a smile echoed her own thought: Yeah, right.

  And now it was her turn to be sarcastic. “And you never told the sheriff about the bones that were found in place of Ariel Finn’s missing hand.”

  He only stared at Mallory, saying nothing, no doubt reassessing her. “Either you’re a really good cop, or the feds told you way more than they told that Missouri sheriff.” He seemed to be giving this puzzle some thought as he lit another cigar. “If you’d come by yesterday, I wouldn’t have had any idea what you were talking about. A year ago, Ariel Finn’s body was found by two kids on their way to school. One of them has a very suspicious mother. Yesterday afternoon, she ransacked his room, thought he was doing drugs. And he was only eleven on his last birthday. Don’t you wonder what the world’s coming to? Well, imagine how surprised the mother was to find an old cigar box with bones in it.” He stopped here, waiting for Mallory to add something of her own.

  She knew jus
t the right words. “Tiny bones-from the hand of a child-not the teenager you found on the road.”

  He nodded. “Only half of them were in that cigar box. You see, both of the boys wanted souvenirs. Damn kids. The other boy had the rest of the bones, but he’d thrown his half away a long time ago. Said it gave him bad dreams. I expect he still has nightmares about that girl’s mutilated body. So that boy’s half went out in the garbage with the family chicken bones.” And now he made it clear that it was Mallory’s t u rn.

  She never missed a beat. “When the boys found the bones of the hand laid out in the road, which way was it pointing-was it toward the latest grave?”

  He smiled to tell her she had gotten it right. “Off the road a bit, I found a pile of rocks just a little too neat to be natural, and there was a hollow in the ground, the way grave dirt settles after a burial. I didn’t have to dig very deep before the shovel hit the skull-a very small skull.”

  Each fact dropped into its logical slot, and, though Ariel Finn had died a year ago, Mallory still believed that it was the killer’s recent decision to turn from children to older victims. “Back when you found the other body, the teenage girl, I understand you had a problem pinning down her age. You told the Missouri sheriff she was a teenager or a young woman. So I’m guessing Ariel was tall for sixteen and well developed.”

  The chief nodded. “Her death doesn’t fit too well with a child killer, does it?”

  “No, I think he screwed up somehow. Something went wrong. He probably killed Ariel because she could identify him.”

  And this had also been the chief ’s t heory, for he was nodding as she spoke, and now he said, “So-not one to waste a corpse, this sick bastard used Ariel’s body to call attention to the real work-killing a little kid. And he screwed that up, too.” He leaned forward. “Should I be looking for any more bodies in my neighborhood?”

  “I don’t know.” She reached for a piece of paper and a pencil. “But I’m sure you’ve already been over every road around here. You looked for signs of another grave and came up dry.” After printing out a telephone number, she pushed the paper back across the desk. “Call this detective in Chicago. Kronewald knows where lots of little bodies were buried. I think he’d like to hear from you.”