Find Me

by Carol O’Connell

  “I’m a cop,” said Riker, moseying into the fray. He only had to touch the smaller man’s c hest with one light finger to deflate it. “T a k e it outside, pal.”

  The dinning room quickly became an author-free zone, and three men sat down to lunch.

  Cadwaller looked around, saying, “I thought Dr. Magritte was going to join us.”

  Riker turned a disinterested eye to the parking lot window. “I left him with Dale, down by the bison pens. He’ll be along. I don’t t hink the old man can take much more of your boss’s idiot ideas about security.”

  Cadwaller smiled, obviously enjoying this slam on the special agent in charge. Charles found that odd, but just now his attention was focused on the agent’s hands as the man unconsciously aligned the salt shaker with the pepper shaker.

  Mallory would have done that if she had been here.

  Dr. Paul Magritte had found a quiet place with the cover of shrubs and trees, and he was deep into his daily ritual.

  Unwinding time was a habit with him, and he did it with ease, as if merely fiddling the hands of a clock. Call it penance-undoing the onslaught of hours, days and decades, until all but one of the dead were un-killed. Next came the reconstruction of an afternoon, one detail by another.

  He closed his eyes the better to see.

  The old Egram place perched close to the highway that ran far beyond Illinois, and some called it the Main Street of America. The lines of the house were not true; the porch sagged and its posts leaned forward, fair warning to every visitor who ventured into the yard. His view was partially blocked by a truck parked in the driveway. The householder’s t rade was boldly but badly lettered on one broad side: Short Hauls and Long Ones- not a profitable business.

  The police had never expected a ransom note.

  He pictured the Egrams’ oldest child standing outside on the lawn. The younger one was dead and in the ground that day.

  Paul Magritte opened his eyes. His hand closed tightly upon a small velvet pouch, the repository of tiny bones, one hand only, the hand of Mary Egram, five years old. She had been the first to die.

  12

  Yes! Blueberry pie. Riker sank his fork into the warm flaky crust.

  Charles Butler had finished eating a civilian’s idea of food: meat, vegetables, and no sugar. Who could live on that? And now he was using a cell phone and losing his war against modern technology. “I have a new theory on the killer,” he said to Detective Kronewald. “I think this man-”

  “Or woman,” Riker interjected.

  Charles covered the phone for a moment to say, “No, I’m off that now.” He lowered his hand and resumed his conversation with the Chicago detective. He had to repeat himself. Apparently Kronewald had also reminded him of that earlier theory. “Yes, I know,” said Charles, “but I’ve just learned that he kills the children where he finds them. It would make more sense to scoop them up and take them to a covert location. He doesn’t w ant to handle them while they’re alive, but dead bodies are no problem. You see, what I took for timidity in regard to physical contact with his adult victim- Oh, I see… Yes… Well, thank you.”

  Handing the cell phone back to Riker, he said, “It seems that Mallory’s already thought of the phobia angle.”

  The detective smiled. “She’s good, isn’t s he? Crazy or not, she’s a hell of a cop.”

  “Sorry,” said Charles. “I’m sure Mallory never doubted that the killer was male.”

  “Probably not. So our boy is phobic. When I told you about my little problem with airplanes, you said that phobia was treatable.”

  “Oh, yes. I could suggest a-”

  “And this serial killer? His phobia?”

  “Is it treatable? Well, it might have been possible with early treatment. Perhaps a course of drug therapy and psychiatric counseling.”

  “Suppose he did get treatment. Maybe this slaughter fest is backsliding. Say he met up with the right doctor in his younger days. You think he could’ve fathered a child?” Riker had only to watch the man’s e yes to see the connections being made at light’s speed. This poor bastard had just realized that question was about Cassandra’s c hild-Mallory. And now the detective knew that his scenario was possible. It was all there in Charles Butler’s s o rry eyes.

  Riker’s attention shifted to one of the parents, a woman who was shying away from the cameras, using her long hair as a veil to hide her face. It was odd behavior for this group. And now a cameraman was walking toward her, pointing his lens at her, and this was every caravan parent’s golden moment.

  She left her table and headed for the restroom-to hide?

  The detective opened his notebook to jot a few lines on his shortlist, where he had crossed out Darwinia Solho’s name and replaced it with another, the one she had been born with. He added a star, his personal method for ranking murder suspects. He looked up as Dale Berman entered the dining room in company with the redheaded profiler. “So, Charles, now that you’ve had a little chat with Cadwaller, what do you think of the guy?”

  “I’m not sure.” Charles smiled, so happy with this change of topic. “For someone from Behavioral Sciences, that man is surprisingly ignorant.”

  Jill’s D ad walked by. The bowl of water in his hands was no doubt meant for the wolf, but Riker thought this lethargic man was suddenly in too much of a hurry, and the detective left his pie unfinished to walk outside. Agent Nahlman was standing by her car. He only had to lift one finger to tell her that something was up, and she nodded to him as he crossed the lot to the pickup truck.

  The bowl of water lay spilled on the ground by the front tire. Jill’s D ad had opened the passenger door and pulled the wolf out of the cab by its chain. For the first time, the man’s face registered emotion-guilty surprise- when he turned to see Riker standing by the front end of the truck, his gun drawn and aimed at the animal.

  “We had a deal,” said the detective. “No unsupervised exercise for the pooch.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “Let’s take a walk.” Riker stooped low to pick up the empty bowl. He stared at the wolf. “He’s probably thirsty. I saw a water fountain down that road.”

  The wolf led the way downhill toward the bison pens, and Riker walked behind Jill’s D ad, hoping to get this over quickly. It was best to do it now. All the answers to his questions were not worth the likely cost. The greatest risk was killing the wolf in the presence of the man. “It’s just past that pen,” said Riker, knowing that there was no water fountain.

  It should have been predictable that the wolf would want to stop awhile at the chain-link fence that penned the bison. The cold blue eyes were riveted to a small calf. Twenty larger animals abandoned the baby buffalo in their sudden rush to take the sun on the other side of their enclosure. Only the wolf loved the calf. His jaws hung open, panting with love for it, mad to get at it, rising on hind legs, as if he could rip down the metal fence with his front paws. Jill’s D ad pulled on the wolf ’s c hain to drag him down and away. The animal choked, resisting. And now-so fast-he turned on his master. Teeth bared, he crouched, and then he lunged.

  Riker fired once. Two shots rang out. The wolf lay dead.

  “Sorry, pal,” said the detective, though he knew he could take credit only for the shot to the breast. The bullet that had taken out one blue eye was the one that felled the wolf. Riker turned to see Agent Nahlman, his appointed backup, holstering her gun. Beyond her, he saw a gang of agents on the run, guns out and ready, and Dale Berman was leading them-from the rear.

  Riker put his gun away and raised both hands, yelling, “Settle down. The animal went a little nuts. That’s all that happened.” No reporters had turned out yet, and he wondered if gunfire could be heard above the sound of jackals noshing in the buffet room at the top of the road.

  Dale Berman stepped to the front of the pack, pushing his people aside, as if they were suddenly in his way and not acting as human shields. He glared at Nahlman and then pointed at the tall thin man with
the startled eyes. “Tell me you didn’t s hoot this poor man’s dog.”

  Riker shouted, “She saved his life !” And why did this good news seem to disappoint the FBI man?

  Turning on his heel, Dale led the posse back up the hill to the restaurant. In that same moment, Jill’s D ad slumped to the ground in a pile of skinny sticks bent at the elbows and knees. “He didn’t e ven know who I was.”

  Nahlman knelt down beside him. “I didn’t recognize you, either, Mr. Hastings. The last time we met, you didn’t have that beard. I think you wore a suit and tie that day.”

  “It was a brand-new suit,” said the man Nahlman knew as George Hastings. “I bought it for the funeral.” His eyes welled up with tears, and his head moved slowly from side to side. “It wasn’t fair. I had all my paperwork in order.” He reached into his pants pocket and brought out his wallet. Opening it, he produced a folded piece of paper and handed it to Riker. “That’s the permit to bring Jill’s body home on the plane. We bought the plot and the coffin, my wife and me. The stone was ordered. The funeral was all arranged. But that bastard wouldn’t let Jill go. My wife’s still waiting for me to bring our baby home.” He turned to Nahlman. “You people are driving us crazy.”

  Riker could guess the rest of the story. Apparently young Jill Hastings had been buried twice. After digging up her body, the feds had interred her under the avalanche of a giant bureaucracy. The detective leaned down to reach inside the other man’s j acket and found the source of the suspicious bulge-not a gun-a plastic catsup bottle. But it smelled like bacon. He squeezed, aiming the nozzle at the ground. “Bacon grease?”

  He had to admire George Hastings’ ingenuity, though the plan was full of flaws, entirely too risky and seriously insane. Spattering a federal agent with bacon grease was only a crime in dry cleaners’ circles, but sudden death by starving wolf was an original attention getter. Or maybe the man had never intended to escape the penalty. Riker could see that the father of Jill Hastings was only minutes away from a full confession, and plotting to assassinate a federal agent was worth five years in prison.

  “Hey, Nahlman? You don’t w ant to hear any more of this,” he said, as if she had better things to do with her time-as if she did not know what was coming next.

  Her head inclined a bare inch to acknowledge her part in an upcoming crime, a conspiracy of silence. The agent walked back up the hill alone.

  Riker stared at the dead wolf 's o ne blue eye. “It was a beautiful plan. If you kept your mouth shut, at worst, you’d have to pay a fine.” He nudged the animal with one foot. “No dog tags.” He spoke softly now, going gently with this man. “The target was Dale Berman, right?”

  Jill’s D ad nodded. “I’d like to break this to my wife-if that’s all right- before you arrest me.”

  “Naw.” The detective waved this idea away with one hand. “Stupid me, I forgot to read you your rights.” He hunkered down because he needed to see this man’s e yes. “So here’s the deal, George. You forget about Dale Berman, and I’ll find your daughter’s body. I’ll send Jill home.”

  An hour later, the wolf-the evidence-was buried among the tall pines. Riker locked up the pickup truck, slapped the fender of a state trooper’s car, and sent George Hastings into protective custody for the duration of this hunt for a serial killer. Much as he liked Jill’s D ad, the detective did not trust crazy people to keep their promises.

  The caravan was getting underway. He slid into the passenger seat of the Mercedes, and Charles Butler leaned over to ask, “When do you plan to tell Mallory about Savannah Sirus’s suicide?”

  “It never seems like the right time,” said Riker. “This morning, I told her April Waylon was dead. She already knew, and she wasn’t taking it well. I think she blames me, and she’s right. April wandered off on my watch.”

  “I believe in the car,” wrote Peyton Hale. “Break it down to all the parts and lay them on the floor of a garage. Let’s say that no one has ever seen a car all put together. So what would people make of these separate pieces? There’s some who’d latch onto the battery; it’s familiar, and they know it can power their electric lights. The battery people are not even close to the idea of an automobile; they’ve seen the light, and they’re in the dark. Others would pick up the tires and run them downhill-and lose them that way. They only see a tire’s potential to go somewhere without them. The fenders and the hood, all the exterior metal belongs to the unbelievers; they can see how these parts fit together for a fact, and all they ever see is a shell. Useless, they say.

  “Blessed are they who can see the whole car because they’re looking at the road ahead instead of all this crap on the floor of the garage.”

  Mallory put the letter back in her knapsack, too distracted to read any more. She started up the car and pulled back onto the old road, Route 66.

  The late April Waylon had come to ride in her car for a while. The dead woman was missing one hand, yet she seemed cheerful. “It’s a bright day,” said April’s corpse. “You should be wearing your sunglasses, dear.”

  Ah, but Mallory had lost her dark glasses. She had laid them down on the motel reception desk alongside her car keys while checking out this morning. That was the last time she remembered seeing them, and now they were lost. And her mind-lost.

  Dead April prattled on as they drove down the road.

  Click.

  The Volkswagen convertible was far away now, reduced to a small silver dot in the dark eye of a camera. The photographer held a pair of aviator sunglasses with gold rims. A tongue flicked in and out, as if it were possible to taste Mallory by licking the lenses. The sunglasses were folded away in the glove compartment to join the young detective’s stolen cavern brochure, a pen and a napkin that she had once used. A long-range plan was forming, piece by piece of her.

  Mallory entered the state of Texas miles and hours ahead of the caravan. Stopping in the small town of Shamrock, she made her duty call to the U-Drop Inn, but it was too early in the day to find this landmark saloon open for business. She only stayed long enough to make a checkmark on her list of things to see. She had greater hopes for the next stop.

  She traveled westward toward the map coordinates for a patch of dirt, then pulled off the road and stopped the car on a flat Texas prairie “-with a vista that went to the end of the world.” She stepped out and walked toward the horizon line. Every sign of life on earth was behind her and out of sight.

  And she waited.

  “There is only one way to see America,” wrote Peyton Hale. “An airplane or a train won’t do. You have to feel the earth underfoot. You must be alone and in danger of losing your way. Oh, the sheer size of this country can send a man to his knees. This prairie, this great expanse of open space has that power. It’s the overwhelming sense of emptiness you feel. Only a few steps away from the road and you’re lost-and then you’re changed.”

  Without once falling to her knees and unchanged in any way, Mallory returned to the car, where she opened her notebook and crossed off one more disappointment.

  Not his fault.

  For her, the sense of emptiness was the familiar thing.

  After driving only a few miles, she summoned up a passenger. Sometimes there were so many ghosts in the car that Mallory could not breathe. This time the murder victim was forced to ride in the back seat. Mallory could not quite let go of April Waylon, but, dead or alive, the woman was annoying.

  The recently killed mother caught her eye in the rearview mirror and smiled. Dead April leaned forward to say, “It wasn’t your fault, you know. I mean-my murder. You can’t be expected to save the same people over and over again.” In Mallory’s mind, a door suddenly appeared in the back seat of a two-door convertible. It flew open, and April was pushed out of the car.

  Her foster mother, Helen Markowitz, was resurrected to ride in the front seat. Mallory had restored the soft roundness that had been lost to cancer years ago.

  Gentle Helen, never leave me.

  “Oh, Kat
hy, just look at this mess.” The dead woman was staring at the empty soda cans and wadded-up credit-card receipts that littered the floor mat. There was no derision in Helen’s t o ne. She had been the kindest of people-and the neatest. Everything Mallory knew about cleaning solvents and dust mites she had learned from this extraordinary housekeeper, and then she had taken it to great extremes, never tolerating one thing out of place and not one spot of dirt, not one-

  “Something’s gone wrong,” said Helen, frowning at the discarded paper cups. “This is not like you, Kathy.” Tactfully, the late Helen Markowitz said nothing about the dust on the dashboard, but Mallory noticed it and silently inventoried other signs of trouble: a chipped fingernail, a windshield covered with bugs, and a lying mirror that showed her eyes full of tears. But her face was dry. Maybe these were her father’s green eyes-his tears.

  At the last stop in Oklahoma, when all the people had been fed and the reporters, too, Riker went over the same instructions for parents who had recently joined up. The ranks of the caravan had swelled to fill every bit of the lot. “Pump your own gas. Don’t leave your car unattended anywhere on this road.”

  The FBI and local police had managed to contain the detail of victim mutilation, the chopped-off right hands, but the press had acquired the news and names of the murdered caravan parents. And now Dr. Magritte was allowed to convene the campers in a minute of silent prayer for those who had lost their lives on Route 66. The prayer group was hardly a tableau of statues in silent reverence. They were antsy, feet shifting, anxious to be gone-and smiling.

  Riker understood. One of their number had died yesterday, but they were still alive. Civilians and their television ideas of murder-they believed that everything would be all right if they only followed the good camper’s guidelines for traversing a road of sudden death.