by David Wiltse
“I’m out of practice.” he said at last.
Karen breathed deeply and placed her hands in her lap. She forced herself to keep them folded and to keep her attention focused there.
“Sorry,” she said softly.
“Tell me about number five.”
“Stamford. Connecticut. A mall, a very big one called the Town Center.”
“Where the cookie man-Steinholz? — worked.”
“Correct. Larry Shapiro, shopping for a birthday present for his mother with his teenage sister who met some friends, got talking, told Larry to amuse himself for a minute. She thought he had gone to the toy store… They found his body on the divider of the Merritt Parkway six weeks later.”
“On the divider? Not the side of the road?”
“On the divider. Is that significant?”
“Curious, anyway. The divider is on the driver’s side of the car, in the passing lane. I know the Merritt Parkway; there’s no way you could pull over and stop on the divider without drawing an awful lot of attention to yourself.”
“Which means?”
“Which means either he stopped on the right-hand shoulder, which is not uncommon and wouldn’t attract too much attention-but then he’d have to carry the body across the highway to the divider. Or he pushed the body out of the driver’s side while driving, which makes him both very strong and very adroit. The boy was how old?”
“Nine.”
“While driving he had to lift a corpse weighing what? Sixty? Sixty-five? Seventy pounds? This one was in a garbage bag, too?”
“The manufacturer calls them leaf bags. You can buy them in any grocery store by the dozen.”
“So he had to manipulate a seventy-pound bag, even tougher because there’s nothing to grab on to, no arms or legs for leverage.”
“Christ. Becker.”
“You want me to stop?”
“I don’t like the image of this monster grabbing a nine-year-old boy by the arm and tossing him out the window.”
“The boy was already dead.”
“I’m not sure that makes it any easier to take.”
“He was already dead, wasn’t he?”
“Forensics said he’d been dead about three hours before he was thrown onto the divider.”
“He was thrown then?”
“At some time after death, anyway. There was vast post-mortem trauma.”
“Was the bag torn?”
“I don’t know. But they’re made not to tear.”
“Find out.”
Karen nodded.
“So either we have this guy performing a considerable feat of strength while driving a car at some speed, or else we have him dashing across the highway with a body bag in his arms. Either way he’s taking a considerable risk. Why?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Only one reason I can think of offhand. Were the others found on the side of the road?”
“Yes.”
“So why is this one in the middle? What is there about the middle of the road that is different from the side-where it would be a lot easier and safer to put the body?”
“Don’t play Socrates with me, John. If you know, tell me.”
“If the body is on the middle divider, you can’t tell which way the car was going when the body was dropped. If the body is on the right-hand side, you might as well place an arrow saying ‘car going this way.’ But if it’s in the middle, the car could have been going in either direction.”
“Which tells us the bastard is concerned about being followed. He knows, or thinks he knows, that we’re after him.”
“Maybe,” Becker said.
“Which means he’s left a pattern and is aware of it and thinks we are, too.”
“Although you’re not,” Becker said.
“Yet,” said Karen. “Which means he knows we’re after him in the first place. Now, how would he know that? We weren’t posting rewards, there was no publicity suggesting a connection between these cases.”
“But the Bureau had, in fact, already linked these deaths?”
“I’ve been working on it since Ricky Stine in Newburgh. The computer alerted us to the similarities.”
“You’ve been on the case for a year?”
“Seven months.”
“Two kids killed in seven months’ time?”
“Six months. We found the latest a month ago.”
“He’s accelerating very rapidly.”
“That’s part of the reason I’m here, John. This guy has started to need them so frequently he’s practically in free-fall. If he knows we’re on to him, it hasn’t slowed him down, it’s only made him cagier.”
“So how does he know you’re on to him? Does he have a spy in the Bureau?”
“I’m not that paranoid.”
“Maybe he knows someone has been asking questions.”
“How?”
“Maybe he knew someone who was interrogated?” Becker left it hanging for her.
“Or maybe we interrogated him? Christ, Becker, do you think we might have talked to this guy and let him go?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t change his pattern until after the fifth one was snatched-and before you knew he was dead. I’d go back over the interviews at Stamford; maybe you’ll catch something you missed the first time.”
Karen’s face had turned grim, her jaw clenched.
“If he’s in the interviews. I’ll find him.” she said. “There’s another possibility for covering his tracks in Stamford, of course, that might not have anything to do with his knowing about your investigation. It might just be a special place for him. Maybe he’s from Stamford originally. Maybe someone who knows him is there. Maybe there’s a clue of some kind there that he knows about but can’t change. Just an awareness of his increased vulnerability could cause him to act differently.”
“Still another reason to go back to Stamford.”
“I’d say so. It can’t hurt to go over the ground again. And there’s one other thing the body on the divider can tell us.”
“Why do I have to ask?”
“I’m thinking it through. It’s really a pretty clumsy way to put your pursuers off the track. A far better way would be to dump the body somewhere far away from the highway so there’s no clue as to direction at all. Or better yet, hide the body completely, give yourself months to get away. Or simply drop the body on the right-hand side of the road, turn around and go the other way. He didn’t do any of those things, and my guess is that the reason was he was in too much of a hurry. He’d been seen with the kid or something else happened to panic him and drive him off, fast. Check the incident reports with the Stamford police to see if anything unusual happened within a few hours of the estimated time of death. If he left fast, what did he leave behind? Did he leave owing rent, a mortgage? Most likely not, since he seems to be moving around so much. He’s probably a transient. In a motel, not a hotel; you wouldn’t want to walk through a lobby with a kidnapped child. Check all the motels in the area, see who left that day, particularly anyone who left without paying or ahead of time…”
Becker paused and smiled at her.
“You’ve done all of this already, haven’t you?” he asked.
“Most of it,” she said. “But you’re right, it wouldn’t hurt to check again.”
“It’s not what you need me for.”
“In part. You’re very good at it. I hadn’t considered I might actually have interviewed the son of a bitch and let him go. I can’t tell you how that makes me feel.”
“You conducted the interviews, Karen?”
“Some of them.”
“The second in command of Kidnapping is in the field doing interviews in person?”
Karen shifted uncomfortably.
“I haven’t forgotten how. I’m pretty good at it.”
“I don’t doubt it. Normally.”
“What do you mean ‘normally’?”
“If you’re not too involved.”
&nbs
p; “Of course I’m involved. I’ve been working on the case for seven months. I want to hang the bastard by his balls.”
“You were doing interviews in the field in Stamford after the fourth boy’s disappearance. That was after you’d been on the case for only about five months.”
“Five months is a long time.”
“Not really. Certainly not long enough to drive most Deputy Directors out of the office and onto the street. Every one of them I’ve ever known has been more than happy to give up field work. It doesn’t look leader-like, poking around amongst the common folk, asking questions any agent could ask. It doesn’t help someone with ambitions to lay her reputation on the line by going back on the street. It’s a dumb move, Karen, especially if it doesn’t pay off. It makes you look like a poor agent and a lousy executive. That’s why I say too involved.”
“That’s why I came to you.”
“Maybe. Although I doubt that you’d come to me just to save your ass, even assuming I could do it. Or would do it… How old were the victims. Karen?”
“Four of them were ten years old, two were nine.”
“Your file says you have a child. A boy, isn’t it?”
“Jack.”
“About ten?”
“He turns ten in three weeks.”
“Does that have anything to do with your extra involvement?”
“That’s fairly simplistic reasoning, especially coming from you. I don’t see that my son has anything to do with it.”
“You have custody?”
“Of Jack?”
“Someone got custody after the divorce, right? Is it you? Or is it your ex-husband?”
“What the hell does the status of my custody arrangement have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know. What is it?”
“I don’t think you’d be asking a man this question. Would you need to know Hatcher’s ‘extra involvement’? No, you’d just treat him as a fellow professional and get on with it.”
“I happen to know that Hatcher doesn’t have enough creative imagination or sensitivity to get involved in anything other than his own career. You are very different, Karen, although you’re still ambitious as hell. You have both the imagination and the emotional proclivity to get involved.”
“Emotional proclivity? Come on, Becker. Speak English, you’re among friends.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t. And I never did. You wanted me to have some twisted involvement in the Bahoud case. I thought I understood why, back then. You were sleeping with me. We were about half in love. I guess. You wanted someone to share what you were feeling about the case because it frightened you and made you lonely, so you imagined I was the same way. But I wasn’t. I almost wanted to be, just because of our relationship, but I’m not that way. I’m just not. Why you need to think I’m that way today is frankly beyond me.”
Becker stood up and put his hands on the back of his chair. The pilot and owner stopped talking and watched him.
“What?” she asked.
“Tell me about the sixth victim,” Becker said.
“Are you going someplace?”
“I’m listening.”
“Why do men always do that? The minute a problem comes out in the open, the very second you have a chance to discuss something, off you all go. Out of the room, out of the house. Don’t want to talk about it, case closed.” She glanced at the pilot, who was watching with interest.
“I haven’t gone anywhere.”
“You’ve got one foot out the door already.”
“I’m right here. I’m just standing.”
“One foot out the door, one eye on the television.”
“I don’t remember you being quite so much fun to work with the last time,” he said.
“That’s because you were so busy humping me.”
“Humping you? I thought we were ‘half in love.’ ”
“Maybe you were, maybe you weren’t,” she said. “I just said that.”
“Were you?”
Karen shrugged. “Half, a quarter, an eighth. Some, John, okay? Some.”
“So then what’s with the humping?”
“That’s what we did on the bed.”
Karen met the pilot’s gaze directly and defiantly. The pilot looked away as if he had just been casually surveying the room. Once his back was safely turned he grinned at the owner.
“I get the impression I’m being blamed for that part,” Becker said. “For you it was being some fraction in love and for me it was humping. Is that how you remember it?”
“To tell you the truth, John. I scarcely remember at all… Oh, yeah, I did nearly get killed and spent a month in the hospital. I remember that part. What do you want me to say? Something that lets you off the hook? You’re off the hook. You’re not responsible for any of it.”
“Graciously done.”
“You’re not responsible for seducing a twenty-six-year-old rookie agent. You’re not…”
“Seducing! Seducing? What kind of archaic notion is that?”
“I said you didn’t.”
“Does seducing mean I tricked you into doing something that you didn’t want to do? Is that what that means? You’d already been married and divorced by twenty-six. How did I seduce you? Put drugs in your drink? Did I charm you out of your pants? I think we’ve already established that I don’t have any charm.”
“I believe we agree on that point, yes. The pilot is laughing at us, if that interests you.”
Becker turned toward the pilot, who was now openly staring and trying unsuccessfully to assume a straight face.
“Can you imagine anyone seducing Deputy Assistant Director Crist?” Becker demanded.
The pilot coughed and turned back to the owner again. They became suddenly involved in a weather chart. In fact, the pilot had spent the better part of his trip to the mountains trying to figure a way to make a move on Deputy Assistant Director Crist without endangering his career. If Becker had ever seduced her, the pilot would have loved to know how. So would most of the men in the Bureau. If the Deputy Director had had any private life at all following her divorce, it was exceedingly private. Her brief affair with Becker ten years ago was well known, of course, because Deputy Director Hatcher had flirted briefly with the intention of making an issue of it. But, as with most things involving Agent Becker, this case had fallen into a special category. Becker, it was rumored, literally got away with murder. Like most of the other agents, the pilot did not hold it against him.
Still fuming, Becker strode to the soft-drink machine, kicked it, and returned to the table. The owner thought briefly of saying something, but a glance from the pilot persuaded him otherwise. Becker sat abruptly.
“Feel better?” Karen asked.
“Soda’s bad for your teeth, anyway,” Becker said.
Fighting a smile, Karen said, “I’m supposed to command these people, John. It doesn’t help if you have these little tantrums and involve me in them.”
“Is that the voice you use to keep your son in line? Stern but reasonable?”
“Jack doesn’t kick things,” she said. “And he doesn’t embarrass me in public.”
“Sounds like a dull kid.”
“Never say that to a parent,” she said sharply. “Not if you want to continue the conversation. Jack is a wonderful child, a bright and sensitive and creative boy who doesn’t need to get violent to express himself.”
Becker muttered something unintelligible and then, with an effort, gave her a wan smile. “Sorry,” he said.
Karen straightened the file so that it was directly parallel to the edge of the table. “We seem to have drifted a bit from the point.”
Folding his hands on the table in a parody of a well-mannered schoolboy, Becker relieved himself of a shuddering sigh.
“Ready.”
“The sixth victim… ” Karen said, pausing until Becker dropped his overly attentive act. She knew that when it came to wo
rk, Becker was serious and unemotional, but he was seldom detached when it came to her. The trick was to keep herself out of the work while still directing and controlling it.
“Number six,” she continued, “was Craig Masoon, who vanished from a school trip to the natural history museum in Quincy, Massachusetts.”
“How soon after the previous victim?”
“Two and a half months.”
“Christ. He’s not just hungry anymore. He’s ravenous. How long did he keep this one?”
“A month.”
“And how long ago did you find the body?”
“A week.”
“He’s about due to strike again.”
“That’s another reason I’m here.”
“You expect me to stop him before he takes another kid? You don’t need me, you need a miracle. Try prayer.”
“I have,” she said. “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”
“Glad to hear He helps someone.” Becker said. “What kind of profile do you have on the kids?”
“All boys, nine or ten years old. Caucasian, brown hair, eyes either blue or brown-four brown, two blue. All boys next door.”
“Next door to whom, though? You’ve seen their pictures, I mean the ones from home, not the morgue shots. What do they look like, Karen? Are they ethnic-looking? Beautiful, male model types? Tall, short for their age; do they all wear glasses, were they all wearing baseball caps? Give me something to work with.”
“They’re white-bread,” she said. “Norman Rockwell kids, snub-nosed, freckle-faced-without the actual freckles, if you know what I mean. Nice-looking, nothing extraordinary. None of these kids were living in a slum, they weren’t runners for drug dealers, they weren’t gang members.” A bitterness had crept into her tone. “They look wholesome, if you remember what that’s like. Hell, John, they look sweet. They look innocent.”
There were tears in her eyes, but Becker heard no trace of them in her voice.
“They look the way you probably looked as a kid,” she said.
“At that age, I looked scared,” Becker said.
Karen paused. Then, gently, “I know, John. I remember you told me. These kids must all have looked awfully scared for the last weeks of their lives, too.”
Becker nodded, looking at the table, his vision turned inwards.