Find Me

by Carol O’Connell

  In the town of Santa Rosa, New Mexico, Mallory sat in the dark of her parked car and stared at the façade of Club Café. It was closed-forever.

  One of the entrance posts was bent, and a neon sign had been taken down and discarded with other trash to one side of the building. In the younger days of Route 66, this place had done a booming business, and she would have known that even without her father’s letters. A gravel lot adjoined this paved one to catch the overflow of customers on a Saturday night.

  “They finally closed the doors back in ninety-two,” said the gray-haired man in the passenger seat. He opened a cold bottle of beer from his grocery sack. Handing it to her, he lifted a second bottle in a toast. “To better times.”

  The old man had lived in this country for most of his life, but Mallory could hear a trace of Mexico when he spoke of the legendary party that had lasted for years-Club Café.

  “But most of all, I miss that man,” said Aldo Ramon. He turned to his drinking companion, the young woman who had her father’s e yes. “Where has Peyton been all this time?”

  “It was my neighbor’s fault,” said Riker as he watched Nahlman sign an illegible scrawl on the register for the fleabag motel. “I grew up next door to a man with a dog named Dale.”

  He had no illusions about this invitation to finish off a bottle in her room. The rest of their conversation simply required more privacy. She paid in cash, no travel vouchers to say that she had wandered away from the other FBI agents-to get tight in a bar.

  Outside again, he followed her down a row of doors until she fitted her key in a lock.

  “So,” said Riker, continuing the saga of why he called Agent Berman by his first name, “the neighbor’s dog-”

  “A dog named Dale.” She seemed dubious about this part as she waved him inside.

  “Yeah.” Riker plopped himself down in an armchair, lit a cigarette and pulled a bottle from a brown paper sack. “Now, when you meet up with a real mean dog, you show some respect, right? Well, Dale-”

  “Your neighbor’s dog.”

  “Yeah, that Dale. He wasn’t ballsy enough to be vicious-no barking, no warning. He’d come up from behind and sink his teeth into your leg. And then he’d run for cover. I hated that dog-sneaky, nasty mutt.”

  “You made that up.”

  “Just the part about the dog,” he said. “Your turn, Nahlman. What about Joe Finn’s girl? Ariel was a teenager. She never fit your pattern.”

  “I zeroed in on every odd thing along Route 66. Ariel’s body was left on the road, but the dumpsite matched up with a potential grave. I called the Kansas Bureau and found out about the little sister who did fit that pattern. That case got stranger by the minute. I found out that Ariel’s father wouldn’t even look at the body to make the formal ID.”

  “You suspected him?”

  “No, he was in a Kansas City hospital when Ariel was taken. The first time I met Dodie-sweet kid-she said hello and told me the name of her doll.”

  “So the kid was talking back then. You get anything useful?”

  Nahlman shook her head. “I didn’t s it in on the interviews when she was in custody. I’m guessing she couldn’t describe the man who killed her sister. That would’ve been a lead that even Dale Berman couldn’t ignore.”

  “He cut you out of the loop, didn’t he?”

  “Well, I never got any feedback on my leads, but I still had a lot of work to do, lots of overtime. I forget the last night I slept in my own bed.” She stretched out on the mattress. Her eyes had gone dark, and they wandered from one corner of the ceiling to another.

  She was lost.

  “The next time I saw Dodie-at the campsite in Missouri-she was humming that song. I didn’t expect her to remember me. But I don’t think she even remembers her dolls anymore.” Nahlman turned to Riker. “You know that song, right?”

  “Yeah, ‘Mack the Knife.’ ”

  “That’s also the code name Berman used when he opened this case three years ago.”

  “I don’t get it.” Riker found it difficult to drink, smoke and do math simultaneously. Or had he missed something here? “Three years ago, he was still posted in North Dakota-no killer, no case. Where’s the tie to the song?”

  “It’s in a bogus case file. The early reports include hearsay testimony of a dead witness, an old woman who tied the song to a murder. But that witness died years before I was assigned to Berman’s field office-before I found him a pattern for a serial killer. For some reason, he needed a connection to his early work-collecting random homicides. Do you get it now, Riker?”

  “You’re telling me that Dale taught that song to Dodie Finn?”

  “That’s my theory. It’s so easy to plant fake memories in a little kid’s mind. And by now I’m sure Dodie thinks she heard that song when Ariel died-if Dodie thinks at all. Berman went too far.”

  “He pushed her over the edge.”

  “Looks that way,” she said.

  “Why would he do that to her?”

  Nahlman closed her eyes, and Riker assumed that she had passed out, but it was premature to cover the woman with a blanket. She threw it off as she opened her eyes.

  “No, Riker, you only think I’m dead drunk. I wish I was. Every damn day, it seems to take more and more liquor so I can sleep at night. A blackout night with no dreams, that’s all I want. I’m giving you information because this has to end, and Dale Berman can’t o r won’t w rap this case.”

  As Riker gently pulled the door shut after him, Agent Nahlman was still staring at the ceiling, entirely too sober. No sleep tonight.

  Riker stood at the edge of the campsite, discussing the problems of keeping track of caravan vehicles.

  “It’s out of control,” said Agent Barry Allen. “At last count, we had two hundred and seventy-five license plates on this list, but eight of the parents are missing tonight, and now I’ve got close to three hundred vehicles.”

  Riker scanned the campfires. “I still can’t find the Pattern Man, and that little guy’s really easy to spot.”

  “If he’s gone again,” said Allen, “Agent Berman won’t s end out another search party. He thinks you were pulling his leg about Mr. Kayhill as a suspect.”

  “Well, Dale has to start somewhere,” said Riker. “Every good cop needs a shortlist, but your boss never developed one solid suspect.”

  If this agent knew anything to the contrary, it did not show in his face, nor did he offer another lame defense of Dale Berman. The boy had a defeated look about him as he walked away. Maybe the boss’s charm was wearing thin among the troops-or, as Riker referred to them, the kiddy cops. Protocol failures were transparent; with the exception of Barry Allen, none of these youngsters had been partnered with a grown-up. Dale had picked them young for good reason: it was harder to con a veteran field agent.

  Mallory came up behind Riker and made him jump when she whispered his name. He blamed her foster father for that heart-stopping habit of hers. Lou Markowitz had taught her this creepy game the year that Kathy had lost interest in baseball. Or maybe she had come to understand why other children never wanted to play with her; she frightened them. But Lou had filled the void as her constant playmate, and the two of them had dreamed up new ways to terrify one another in every room of the old house back in Brooklyn. It had been one of the small joys of Lou’s life to come home after a long hard day with murderers-and get scared witless the minute he walked in the door.

  “Whatever Dale’s up to, Nahlman’s got no part in it.” Riker recited the highlights of his field report, and then summed it up, saying, “None of Dale’s people have more than a piece of this case.”

  “You trust this woman?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Mallory edged a little closer. “Did Nahlman tell you about the little blue pouch?”

  Riker shook his head.

  “Then you can’t t rust her.”

  “Maybe she figured that I’d know what you know. Stupid idea, huh, Mallory? You’re only my
damned partner.”

  His irritation had no effect on her. Mallory’s e yes were tracking Paul Magritte as the doctor slowly crossed the campground. Magritte came to a sudden stop and rifled his knapsack. Now the old man changed direction to head for his car and privacy.

  “Why isn’t he in jail?” asked Mallory.

  Riker would prefer to eat the muzzle of his gun than to ask-one more time-what she meant by that. He walked away from her. He was in no mood for games.

  Dr. Paul Magritte held a large, old-model cell phone to his ear and listened to the prelude of every conversation with an old acquaintance, the ritual words, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” The old man sat in the back seat of his car with all the windows rolled up, and still he looked over his shoulder, fearful of what might be coming up behind him.

  “No,” he said in answer to a question that was also part of their ritual. “I will never betray you.” Following the caller’s instructions, he opened the glove box and pulled out a new stack of photographs taken with a Polaroid camera. He fanned them out. This time it was not a corpse, but candid pictures of Dodie Finn. A living child was a break with tradition-or was she dead? Paul Magritte’s eyes searched the side window for a sign of her.

  Dodie, where are you?

  One veined hand groped about inside his nylon sack, where, until very recently, he had kept a rusty gun. His hand slowly closed around the hilt of a newly purchased hunting knife. “Dodie Finn is insane,” said Magritte to his caller. “What harm could she do to you?”

  He heard a low buzz on the phone and words rising to be heard above the noise. He had the ugly sensation of black flies crawling around in his ear.

  “Look at her,” the caller said. “Look to your left, old man. That’s it. You see her now?”

  “Yes.” The child was sitting on the edge of a folding chair. Her thin legs were drawn up as she perched there, leaning forward and defying gravity as birds do. She began to rock, and the old man feared that she would fall. Ah, but now her father grabbed her up in his arms and held her close. Joe Finn’s e yes went everywhere, seeking the cause of this upset.

  “There. You see it now,” said the voice on the phone. “She rocks, she hums. Dodie’s full of little cues and clues.”

  They debated this for another hour. The doctor held a perfectly rational conversation with the devil. All the while, Paul Magritte’s eyes traveled over the dark windows of caravan vehicles. So many newcomers. The FBI agents could no longer keep track of them. Dodie Finn’s stalker had a gift for procuring cars, and there were many here that might harbor him tonight.

  “When it’s over,” said his caller, “I give you permission to hand over my photographs to Detective Mallory.”

  Of course. Magritte sighed. He should have foreseen this. Now Mallory had been woven into a serial killer’s little story of himself-a legend still in the making. It was the young detective who would explain this wondrous design to the world, for Magritte could not be expected to break his silence after all these years. The old man now saw his only role as the archivist- and suddenly he saw the greater value of the photographs, Polaroids with no negatives.

  When it’s over?

  What was meant by those words?

  Ah, yes, now the elderly psychologist understood it all too clearly. Every legend must have a dramatic finale. But this quest for fame was pathetic, the ploy of a little boy. It was like a letter written to the parents who had run away from him and gone to ground where he could never find them. He would find them now, and it would not matter if he was alive to see their stricken faces. It went beyond revenge-this maniacal communiqué of the abandoned child. And it was possible for the old man to pity a killer of children-even as he plotted to destroy him. With suicidal ideation in the mix, the murderer would become more reckless. The time was right. Dodie must survive.

  Magritte looked down at the knife held tight in his right hand. What a fool he had been to believe that he could save a child this way. His best weapon had always been words. “More pictures to burn,” he said to his caller, his torturer.

  “What did you say?”

  “You didn’t think I kept them, did you?” Magritte waited out the silence for an endless crawling minute. “You never made copies, did you? No, of course not. Well, they’re gone. I burned them all.”

  The cell-phone connection was broken, and his usefulness to a psychopath was at an end. He sat bolt upright, the knife clutched in both hands now. Hours passed. The sky was lightening, and every star had been lost when he reached that point where even fear could not keep him awake. His eyes closed, but only for the time it took for the sun to clear the horizon line. The early light was slanting through his windshield when he awoke to the noise of barking dogs. The parents were striking camp and packing vehicles. The caravan would soon be underway. When he turned to the side window, he sucked in his breath. Detective Mallory’s face was inches from his own, and she was staring at the knife in his lap.

  She ripped open the car door. “You should be under arrest, old man. What kind of a deal did you do with Agent Nahlman?”

  17

  A new insurrection had begun . Charles Butler stood at the heart of the crowd, yet Riker had found him. The detective carried a plastic sack, the fruits of a beer run to a liquor store. “What’s going on?”

  “Trouble.” Charles pointed to an embedded reporter from a cable news network. The man was standing on the hood of a car, and his voice was amplified by a bullhorn. “He’s trying to convince the parents to drive the scenic route to Santa Fe.”

  “Well, that’s not good,” said Riker, as he popped the tab on a beer can and took a deep swallow. “The caravan would choke the Santa Fe loop in fifteen minutes.”

  Now Mallory was visible in the distance as she climbed onto the hood of a pickup truck to stand two heads taller than the newsman. She needed no bullhorn. The crowd was hushed, waiting, and then she said, “Come nightfall, you’ll all be strung out as easy pickings in a mile-long traffic jam.” She slowly revolved to catch every pair of eyes in this large group of parents, federal agents and media. “And there’s no point in taking that route.”

  “That’s not true!” The cable newsman shouted into his bullhorn to regain the crowd’s attention. “I can guarantee two solid hours of airtime for every day on the Santa Fe loop!” Raising the ante of his bid, he yelled, “You get the prime-time slot!”

  “There were no bodies found on that segment of the old road,” said Mallory, and hundreds of heads swiveled to face her again. “None of your children ever went that way.”

  “If that was true,” said the cable reporter, “then the FBI agent in charge wouldn’t have approved my route change.” He lowered his bullhorn and climbed down from the hood of his car. Now he had to crane his neck to look up at her and smile. In an unamplified voice he said, “The negotiations are over, Detective.”

  “Wrong,” she said.

  Charles looked around with the vantage point of the tallest man standing. Dale Berman, the agent in charge, was nowhere to be seen, and Riker had also disappeared. He turned his eyes to Mallory, who still had the high ground atop the truck’s hood.

  The reporter at her feet raised his bullhorn again. “It’s a done deal, Detective. We’re going to Santa Fe.”

  Mallory removed her jacket, the better to display her gun, and now she clipped her gold shield to a belt loop of her jeans. Hands on hips, she addressed the reporter. “I don’t w ant any doubt in your mind that this is a lawful police order. Now shut your mouth!”

  Undeterred, the reporter yelled at her. “Freedom of the press, Detective! Ever heard of the Constitution of the-”

  “I got it memorized,” said Riker, stepping out of the crowd to grab a handful of the reporter’s shirt, and now he was dragging the man backward across the campground, his voice trailing off as he loosely paraphrased the reporter’s constitutional right to remain silent. “Don’t flap your mouth anymore.”

  And now Mallory owned the cro
wd. All eyes were on her and every camera lens. The cameras loved her more than the man from the cable news network.

  “The Santa Fe loop is part of the old route from the thirties. That’s your great-grandfather’s idea of Route 66-not the killer’s. He dug his graves along the old trucking route from the sixties. That’s his Route 66- and yours.”

  As she went on to describe all the changes and versions of this shifting historic highway, Charles Butler realized that she had slipped into someone else’s words. At times she reminded him of a schoolgirl reciting memorized lines of poems.

  The poetry ended. Her hands curled into fists.

  “The next stop is Clines Corners,” she said. “It’s been a landmark on this road for over sixty years. If you take the old Santa Fe loop, you can’t get there from here. Your cars won’t move. You’ll be sitting in the dark- waiting. You think rolling up the windows will protect you?” Mallory pointed at the reporter in Riker’s custody. “You think he cares? Hey, fresh blood means a bonus where he comes from. His network turned dead children into a damn TV show, a soap opera. He wants to drag this out. That’s the only reason for the side trip. And more time on the tube-that’s like currency to you. It’s all about money. He wants to buy your kids. Dead or alive, same price.”

  The caravan was under way -Mallory’s w ay. Her final selling point to the crowd had been the fact that long traffic jams were only worth a mention on the evening news. The reporters would desert them for better entertainment-action shots of the police unearthing small bodies on the old trucker’s route. And now her silver convertible prowled the shotgun lane of I-40 as she watched for strays up and down the line of vehicles.

  Of all the dead who rode with Mallory, she was most compatible with Ariel Finn, perhaps because the teenager never spoke; she could not, for the detective had never heard the sound of the girl’s voice. In Mallory’s version of this murder victim, the pale skin was without blemish or bruises or gaping wounds, and the girl was made whole again; her severed hand had been restored. Ariel raised it as the small silver car approached Joe Finn’s old Chevy. Dodie’s face was pressed to the glass of the passenger window when dead Ariel waved to her little sister.