Find Me

by Carol O’Connell

  “So one of your contacts disappeared?”

  She nodded. “I’d waited too long to claim my daughter. So she was really lost-not a lie anymore. It’s been twelve years. I’ll never find her, will I?”

  “It was brave to try,” said Riker. “You knew the risks, but you tried.”

  “But I wasn’t b rave. The whole purpose of the caravan was publicity- getting attention for our lost kids-lost causes. The most I hoped for was local exposure, a few small-town reporters here and there. I never expected the story to get this big. I was afraid of the cameras, my only chance to find someone who would recognize my little girl. I’m a coward.”

  “Well, tonight, her picture was on television from coast to coast- yours, too,” said Riker. “So now you should be thinking about your next move.”

  “You mean leave the caravan? Oh, no. I can’t do that.”

  Riker shook his head. “Darwinia, I only wish you were a coward. How many times have you left the caravan to paste up your posters?” And, so long as the media was not an option for her, he knew Darwinia would do it again and again. This was the lady’s j o b, going out into the dark, always looking over one shoulder to see if her bone-snapping husband was onto her-him or a serial killer.

  Which monster would get to her first?

  ***

  The elderly psychologist sat in the company of FBI agents. The moles hovered by the door, waiting to see if Nahlman would give them up for failing to keep a close eye on the old man. She had no plans to rat them out; she might find some later use for this leverage if she needed more agents in her own camp.

  Special Agent Dale Berman was telling the elderly doctor that he had a lot of explaining to do. The man’s voice was more in the range of chastising a child than interrogating a suspect. “What were you thinking, old man-carrying that thing around?”

  “You mean the pouch,” said Dr. Magritte.

  “What pouch?” Berman raised his eyes to stare at Agent Nahlman, who had personally escorted the psychologist and ex-priest to this motel room. The doctor had been her prime exhibit while carefully bringing home the point that the background checks on the caravan were not all that they should be.

  Berman prompted her now. “What’s he mean, Nahlman? What pouch?”

  “I think he means his knapsack,” she said. “That’s where he kept the gun.”

  The blue pouch with the tiny bones was locked in the glove compartment of her car. She was the only one to see the astonished look in Paul Magritte’s eyes.

  Paul Magritte rode back toward the caravan in Agent Nahlman’s automobile. She played the radio, and he replayed his memories of that tumble-down house back in Illinois. For him, it was no longer springtime. Winter was coming. It was not night anymore, but a long-ago day. It was four weeks following his first encounter with the Egrams.

  This was no feat of memory anymore. He was reliving it.

  Once more he wore a cassock, and again he traveled down a rural segment of Route 66, returning his young charge to the Egram home. The ten-year-old sat beside him as the car rolled down the road of stark winter trees and overcast sky. The child’s face was still swollen from surgery.

  On this Saturday following Thanksgiving, here and there along the way, men on ladders were stringing up long wires of colored light bulbs to line their rooftops for the next holiday. The priest was in a good humor that afternoon, for he was about to deliver a fine Christmas present indeed. Paul Magritte had lost his smile as he pulled over to the side of the road.

  The Egram house had a hollowed-out look. Every curtain was gone from the windows, and blank walls could be seen beyond the glass. The child beside him could not fail to understand what this meant. It was the priest who was in denial.

  How could they be gone?

  “Stay here. I won’t be long.” He saw himself leaving the car and walking down the road to the nearest house, and then the next one and the next. No one had seen the couple depart, nor could anyone say where they had gone. The truck driver and his wife had moved by night-and so stealthy. They had not caused one dog to bark. It was only the matter of the dogs that these people found remarkable, not that the Egrams should leave without a word to neighbors of long acquaintance. That they could accept.

  Had the police been wrong to clear the parents of blame for the little girl who was lost and likely dead? Flight spoke to guilt, and this might explain why the father had been quick to sign the consent forms: traveling with a deformed child would have made the fugitives stand out on any road.

  And now little Adrian Egram was standing in the road and staring at the empty house. The priest was reaching out to console the youngster when the swollen face lifted to smile at him, and a small voice said, “Forgive me, father, for I have-” And here the ten-year-old paused to compensate for the lisp of a misshapen mouth, taking great care to pronounce the word, “-sinned.”

  These were ritual words, but this child had not been raised as a Catholic. The mother alone had come back to the faith. Father Paul Magritte looked up to the second-floor window, and there in that upstairs bedroom he envisioned Sarah Egram inadvertently teaching her child these words, this formal prelude to confession-while she packed a small bag for the youngster’s t rip to a Chicago hospital. In his mind, Paul Magritte could clearly see the woman-even hear her now-repeating the words over and over, though the priest had been waiting downstairs in the front room-unable to hear her confession.

  Until that day on the road, when he had found the house empty-the child abandoned.

  Young Adrian fed the words back to him like a parrot delivering a long-delayed message, saying once more, “Forgive me, Father, for-”

  “No.” The priest had gently raised one finger to his own lips, a gesture to silence the child. “No more of that.”

  So many years had passed. The house was gone now, and even the patch of road they had stood upon that day had fallen into ruin before the rest of Mrs. Egram’s message was delivered.

  Agent Nahlman checked the rearview mirror. Paul Magritte’s watchers were still following them as she drove toward the campground. The old man beside her was lost in his own quiet thoughts.

  Christine Nahlman’s mind was on the bungled interview. Dale Berman had done his ineffectual little song and dance. Then he had dismissed the idea of any connection that went far beyond a suspected relationship of Internet psychologist and killer. Berman would never admit that his flawed background checks could impede a case. Incredibly, he had even returned the gun to Paul Magritte and demanded that Nahlman apologize to the old man. And she had seen all of this coming her way.

  However, now, in the privacy of this car, it was her interview. She switched off the car radio as a subtle invitation for Magritte to break his long silence.

  The doctor’s voice was tentative, testing the air. “Why didn’t you tell them about the pouch-the little bones?”

  She planned to let him wonder about that for a while. “I have family in Chicago,” she said, though all of the people that she had loved best were dead and lying in California ground. “Chicago. That’s where you were based when you were a priest-a priest psychologist.” That part, according to Detective Mallory, was true. “My mother has the best therapist money can buy. It’s a small community, isn’t it? Shrinks, I mean. Lots of backbiting and gossip. I didn’t know it would be so easy to find out what a third-rate doctor you were.” She had run her bluff, and now she caught him in an unconscious nod, her cue that he had not been a financial success in private practice. “So I had to wonder why you left the priesthood. At least the Catholic Church gave you a steady income.”

  “At one time, I was a bad psychologist… and a worse priest. How could I stay? Oddly enough, since leaving the Church, I’ve become a better man.”

  “I don’t think I can buy that,” said Nahlman. “You knowingly consorted with a child killer. Did he scare you? Are you scared now? You should be. You’re the only one who can identify him.” She turned to look at Magritte in sidelong
glances, checking her progress, waiting for cracks in composure. “You’ve known this freak for a long time.” For punctuation, she slapped the dashboard, hitting the surface hard with the flat of her hand to make the frail old man jump in his skin.

  Well, that was a foolish waste of time. Detective Mallory’s unique interview style would have inured this man to any more sudden shocks-or loud noises.

  Nahlman pressed on. “So your private practice wasn’t making any money. Then you started the Internet therapy groups. Anonymity and no expensive malpractice insurance. Not a bad living, either. Now you drive a luxury car, and you don’t b u y your clothes off the rack, do you? Pa rents of missing children make the best victims. Shrinks and psychics can really cash in on-”

  “I never took a dime from any of them,” said Dr. Magritte, defensive now that she had found his sore spot. “I actually made quite a lot of money in private practice. More than enough to retire. And all my work with the parents is free of charge.”

  This was the long-awaited schism.

  “Let’s say I believe you,” said Nahlman. “Maybe you wanted to atone for shielding a killer of little girls. You saw your chance with the caravan. You wanted to smoke him out. One last shot at grace-but not what I would’ve expected from a priest or a doctor.” She reached out and ripped the knapsack from his lap. With her one free hand, she worked the zipper, then pulled out his old rusted gun. “You were planning to murder the freak.”

  His silence was all the acknowledgment she needed.

  “Cold-blooded, premeditated murder,” she said, “that’s way more Christian than blowing off the seal of the confessional. But it won’t work. He always attacks from behind. I think he’s been doing this for decades- lots of practice. You won’t hear him coming up behind you till he’s close enough to slit your throat.” She hefted the weight of the gun in her hand. “But I can kill him for you. Tell me how to find him.”

  Magritte only stared at the windshield. The glow of the campground was in sight. He was almost free.

  But not quite.

  Nahlman pulled onto the shoulder of the road and killed the engine. “Mallory tells me you’ve known this freak since he was a kid.” Ah, that startled him. So the New York detective had been right, and the killer had started very young. The skeleton found in the deepest grave might be older than she had imagined. “So tell me this.” Nahlman leaned over to open the glove compartment. She pulled out the small blue pouch. “Exactly when did he give this to you? Let me put that another way. How many little girls died while you were walking around with these bones in your pocket? You won’t even tell me that much? Well, that’s good. Now I can make up a date.” She started the engine. “I can tell the parents that you’ve had these little bones for maybe twenty, thirty years-while their children were being slaughtered like-”

  “You’re going to tell them?”

  A little piece of the truth was laid out in his words. Perhaps it had taken thirty years or more to kill a hundred little girls.

  “No, I won’t tell them.” Nahlman put the car back on the road. “If those people knew what you’d done to them, they’d all want a piece of your hide… So that would be murder.”

  Silence prevailed until Nahlman drove up to the campsite and parked the car. She placed the old man’s g u n with the pouch in the glove compartment. The absence of a weapon might make him less brave, less inclined to wander away from the moles.

  Dr. Magritte leaned toward her. “Why didn’t you give the pouch of bones to Agent Berman?”

  “Let me make a confession,” said Nahlman. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I broke the damn rules. My boss is a lazy-ass screw-up. If I gave him the bones, he’d lock you up for murder. The investigation would be shut down-and people would die. You can live with pointless death, but I can’t. ”

  In the background of the long-distance conversation, Mallory could hear the traffic of a Chicago street. Kronewald excused himself to close the window, and now he came back to the phone.

  “I called the FBI lab,” he said. “When I asked about Nahlman’s s oil samples and the bones, they told me they didn’t have any results yet. Well, I knew that was crap. They were just playing dumb. And you know what, kid? It’s just a gut feeling, but I think this was the first time they were hearing about-”

  “Dale Berman never sent in the samples for analysis,” said Mallory. “And the lab never got any of the bodies, either. Did you find me a victim who lived near Route 66?”

  “Yeah, but I had to go back forty years to find a girl who fit the victim profile-Mary Egram, five years old when she disappeared. Her house was on a state road, an old segment of Route 66.”

  Kronewald fell silent. Mallory could hear the rustle of paper, and she knew he was paging through a hard-copy version of a police report. Forty-year-old unsolved cases would not show up on his computer screen.

  “Okay,” he said, “the catching detective on that case was a guy named Rawlins. He’s dead now, but I got his old notes. He suspected the father. John Egram was a long-haul trucker-could’ve dumped the girl’s body anywhere. The Egrams had one other kid, a ten-year-old named Adrian. The parents skipped town when Adrian was in the hospital. Nice people, huh? At the time, a priest had temporary guardianship. Not much detail on that. Just a few lines of rough notes. Now here’s the kicker. The priest who had guardianship-”

  “Paul Magritte. I know,” said Mallory. “Anything else?”

  “Well, this kid, Adrian, got bounced around from one foster home to another.”

  “Sounds like a recipe for a serial killer,” said Mallory. “Any pictures?”

  “Nope, just an old police report from downstate Illinois. When Adrian was fifteen, he stole a car from his foster home and ran away. Works nice with your car-thief angle. But the cops never caught him, so we got no prints in the system. No social security number, either. I figure he stopped being Adrian Egram the day he stole that car.”

  “But he spent five years in foster care. Not one picture?”

  “Mallory, in your dreams Child Welfare has records that go back that far-instead of files rotting in storage boxes. But I got something else you might like. Most of the houses in the Egram neighborhood were torn down or they fell down. We found one of the neighbors in a nursing home. She’s got Alzheimer’s but her long-term memory is still strong. The old lady says Adrian’s mother worked two jobs, so the little boy used to ride with his dad on cross-country hauls. They were probably on the road two hundred days a year. Then Mary was born and it was time for Adrian to start school. No more truck rides with Dad. Now Adrian and his sister didn’t get along too well. And here’s where it gets strange. Adrian was ten years old-Mary was only five.”

  “And Adrian was afraid of his little sister,” said Mallory.

  “Yeah. You were right. Our perp doesn’t like being touched. Every time the girl went near her big brother, the boy ran like hell. That was gonna be my big finale. So tell me something, kid-why do you bother to call in for updates?”

  Mallory ended the cell-phone call, disinclined to waste words, and it would have taken a long time to describe what she was looking at. The detective could see her cold breath on the air as she walked down the rows of rough wooden pallets, each one the bed of a child. Most were skeletons, but some had been mummified and still held the shape of sleeping girls whose lives had been interrupted on the way to school one day. In the paperwork for this warehouse, twenty miles outside of Amarillo, Texas, the field-office rental fee was itemized under a file name: The Nursery.

  A silver-haired man in a dark blue suit walked beside her. He appeared to be trying to make sense of what he was seeing-as if he had no idea that this had been going on. Harry Mars, now based in Washington, was the former head of the New York City Bureau, but he had climbed higher in rank since attending the funeral of Inspector Louis Markowitz. Graveside, he had vouched a favor against a day when the old man’s daughter might need one. Half an hour ago, Mars had come through for her, orderi
ng guards to stand down while he stripped the seal from the door of this refrigerated storage facility-The Nursery.

  “My people count forty-seven dead children,” said Harry Mars, who ranked one rung below the deputy director of the FBI. He led her to an open metal coffin. “And here we have the remains of an adult.”

  “Probably Gerald Linden,” said Mallory, “the Chicago victim.”

  “I just can’t believe this incompetence,” said Mars. “The case should’ve gone to our task force for serial killers. I’ve got no idea how Dale managed to keep all these bodies and bones under wraps.”

  Mallory understood it too well. A gigantic bureaucracy could never have a handle on what every single field office was up to, not until they heard about it on the evening news. So the Assistant Director of Criminal Investigations was not insulting her intelligence when he told her this utterly believable lie. However, the man was an ally and a friend of the family-and so she would not accuse him of deception-not just yet. Timing was everything.

  Harry Mars seemed to be uncomfortable with her silence, and he rushed his words now, so anxious to share.

  Yeah, right.

  “I can’t hold any other agents responsible,” he said. “Dale was probably the only one with the total body count. He had different teams working different states. In and out-very fast operation. None of the evidence was ever developed. So it looks like no one but Dale ever had the whole picture.”

  Oh, no. It was not going to be that easy-one sacrificial FBI agent for the media and no harm done to the Bureau.

  “Harry, you’ve known about this case for a while-before you saw it on television.” This was not a question, not an invitation to lie to her. “What tipped you off first, the letters from George Hastings? Maybe you’d know him better by his Internet name-Jill’s D ad? Or was it Nahlman who got your attention?” Mallory smiled. Gotcha.

  Assistant Director Mars looked out over the pallets of dead children, stalling for time. Finally, he pulled a sheaf of folded papers from his inside breast pocket. “The lab got these e-mails from Agent Nahlman. She wanted to know what happened to her test results on some soil samples.”