The Edge of Sleep

Chapter 3

The helicopter landed on a private air strip that normally handled only two single-engine planes and the gliders they towed aloft for rides at fifty dollars per trip. Since most of the customers returned to earth disappointed by the noise and bumpiness of glider travel-if not actually airsick-there was little repeat business. The field was almost knee high with weeds, and the shack that served as control tower/reception area looked equally unkempt and neglected.

The owner of the airfield was overjoyed and a bit awed by the sudden arrival of a chopper filled with FBI agents. He entertained the pilot at the counter that served as ticket office and operations room while Becker and Karen Crist sat across the room at the magazine-littered wrought-iron table that had once served as lawn furniture.

The owner brought Karen and Becker plastic foam cups of instant coffee and, at a glance from her, retired to talk to the pilot. He tried to engage the pilot in flying stories, but the other man only grunted, wishing the owner would shut up so that he could more effectively eavesdrop on his boss and her legendary guest.

Becker looked at the coffee with some distaste. Clots of white artificial cream floated on the surface.

They had not tried to fight the roar of the helicopter engine and had ridden in silence. When he spoke, it was the first time he had addressed her since their initial meeting.

“Thanks for the ride,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to come here.”

“I thought we could talk better here than on the side of a mountain,” Karen said.

Becker sighed. “I thought I was retired.”

“It probably just felt that way because you weren’t working. Actually, you’re on what’s called ‘indeterminate medical extension.’ I looked it up in your file.”

Karen looked at the surface of her coffee as she stirred it. It was hard to meet his eyes after all these years. But he still looked straight at her most of the time. She remembered that. She remembered most of it, maybe all. Which didn’t necessarily mean that she was ready to deal with it again.

“I wanted to make sure,” she continued.

“Of what?”

“That you were available.”

“Silly me. I was actually convinced I was out of the business.”

“Indeterminate medical…”

“Who determines when it’s determined? Me or the Bureau?”

“It’s a mutual thing,” she said. “You can come back to work whenever you think you’re ready.”

“Or?”

“Or the Bureau can reinstate you.”

“They can, huh?”

“I mean, they can change your status.”

He grinned. “Have you come to change my status, Karen? No one’s touched it in such a long time, I didn’t think I still had one.”

“That’s not what I heard,” she said.

“Is that in my file, too?”

“There’s an unofficial file, too,” she said. “You know that.”

“I seem to remember.”

“They say you were living with a woman during the Roger Dyce business.”

“I was.”

“And?”

He was looking squarely at her. Karen forced herself to keep her gaze on the bridge of his nose. It could give the impression that she was looking him in the eye; not that Becker would be fooled, of course.

“What happened with you and… ”

“Cindi. With an i”

“Cindi.” Karen squirmed in her seat, crossed her legs, looked away from him. She remembered clearly that he was wonderful to talk to when she was willing to be as honest as he was. It was only when she was being evasive or less than candid that it got uncomfortable. Becker had so little tolerance for doing things in a roundabout way. It always made him act as if he knew the joke and was just waiting for her to get to the punchline. It was the way he was acting now.

He was going to make her ask again.

“Are you still together?” she asked.

“The file is out of date?” He sounded amused. “She found it rather difficult to live with me. I’m sure you can sympathize with that.”

“Actually, you and I never really lived together,” Karen said.

“Not actually.”

Karen sighed. “Look, do we have to go into it?”

“Not if you want to avoid it.”

“I don’t want to avoid it… I just don’t want to go into it. It’s very painful, all right?”

“Sorry.” Becker changed the subject. “What are you now, second in command in Kidnapping?”

“How did you know?”

“I read your file.”

“When?”

“Most recently? Six months ago.”

“They let you do that? While you’re on indeterminate?”

Becker laughed. The pilot glanced in their direction.

“They let me do all kinds of things, as long as I don’t ask officially. No one wants Hatcher to find my name on any request memos.”

“Hatcher has nothing to do with Kidnapping,” Karen said.

“I know. He keeps getting kicked upstairs. All he has to do is screw up one more case, blame it on somebody else, and he’ll make Deputy Director of the whole Bureau.”

Karen let the Hatcher discussion die. It would only make her job more difficult if Becker got riled up about his former colleague.

Becker swept all the magazines into a pile and dropped them behind him on the sagging Naugahyde sofa. The sofa frequently doubled as a bed for the owner, and his form was permanently molded into the cushions.

Karen allowed herself to study Becker for the moment that he wasn’t looking at her. He seemed so little changed by the intervening decade since she had seen him last. The unfairness of it almost made her laugh aloud. She was showing every one of her thirty-six years and probably a half dozen more thanks to stress and insufficient sleep. By all appearances Becker, whose internal life she knew to be as tormented as a self-flagellating anchorite’s, seemed impervious to age. The jawline was still as firm, the stomach as flat, the eyes as unwrinkled as ever. There was a bit more gray in the hair, but that only served to add a touch of distinction. It was worse than unfair. She thought he had even improved with age.

“So you’ve been a hermit for all this time?” she asked. “Hermit-or pariah… let’s just say I’ve been living alone and managing well enough.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I mean, that you’re managing well enough.”

“Which is not to be confused with liking it,” Becker said.

“So how often do you look at my file?” she asked.

Becker shrugged. “A couple times a year.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Going fishing? Why do you suppose I look at it?”

“I didn’t want to suppose. I wanted to know. That’s why I asked you.”

“What makes you think I’ll tell you?”

“Because I think you’d rather be honest than smart,” she said. “You’re completely without guile when it comes to women, aren’t you?” She touched the back of his hand and he recoiled slightly with an involuntary movement.

“Have you been theorizing about me for the last nine years?”

“It’s been ten years, and it wasn’t a full-time preoccupation.”

“And you concluded from my lack of guile that I’m a block of stone, is that it?”

“On the contrary. I think you’re the most vulnerable man I’ve ever known.”

To her surprise, Becker looked away from her shyly.

After a moment he said, “I’m not going to do it, Karen.”

“Do what?”

“Whatever you’ve come to ask me to do.”

“Okay. I didn’t think you would.”

“I can’t ”

“I understand.”

“I have everything under control now. I want to keep it that way.”

“You no longer feel the urge…”

Becker shook his head. She tried again.

“The compulsion…”

“Desire,” he said.

“… to kill…”

“More like lust than anything else. But stronger. Much stronger

… but it’s gone now. There’s no reason for it to arise in my new life.”

“I understand,” she said.

“I doubt it. The only people around who can really understand are in prison.”

“You put them there,” Karen said.

“Some of them. Some of them I killed.”

“You were always justified,” she said.

“So they tell me.”

“Why don’t you ever take it easy on yourself. John?”

“Because everyone else does, I suppose. Somebody’s got to punish me.”

He grinned, but she knew he was not joking.

“You’re a lot more open about it than you used to be,” she said.

“It’s the AA twelve-step method. First you admit what you are to the group. Problem is, I can’t seem to get a group together. Every time I find somebody with the same problem, he ends up dead. We never seem to have conversations.”

“You didn’t kill Roger Dyce.”

“No.”

“He tried to kill you. You were alone with him, he was armed, he tried to kill you. The man had murdered at least a dozen people, he killed an agent, he was about to kill your friend, the cop…”

“Chief of Police. He’s touchy on the subject. Tee Terhune.”

“You had provocation, you had cause, you had opportunity. Maybe you wanted to, I don’t know.”

“I wanted to. The way an addict wants a fix.”

“But you didn’t. You didn’t. You brought him in.”

“It was a very near thing,” Becker said.

“We knew that. Everyone knew that. But you battled yourself and won.”

“My file must be popular reading.”

“It’s not in your file.”

“But the Bureau knows.”

Karen shrugged. “They know you’ve caught people no one else could find. They know you’ve been in situations no one else would have survived. They know you’re the best hunter in the FBI, with more skill, more courage, more intelligence, more… what should I call it? More ‘understanding’ of the mind of serial killers than anyone in the Bureau.”

“Call it ‘fellow feeling.’”

“I won’t call it that and I don’t see what good it does you to do so. You’ve never done a thing that wasn’t in the line of duty and perfectly justified by the circumstances.”

“Thank you. I feel so much better now. You’ve helped me to see that I’ve been beating up on myself for no reason at all.”

“Gold thinks you’re ready to work again.” Karen said.

“Good of him. The alcoholic is sober so take him out and buy him a beer.”

“He doesn’t see it that way.”

“Possibly because he has his head up his ass. Hard to see things my way from that position.”

“I would think that is your position,” Karen said.

Becker laughed.

“But for me it’s a normal posture.” He touched her hand with one finger, drawing it slowly from wrist to fingertip.

“I’m sorry I jerked away from you a minute ago,” he said. “I’m not used to being touched.”

“You used to be very receptive.” she said. She noticed that the pilot and owner had stopped talking. She did not look at them.

“That’s when you were single,” he said. He lightly pinched her ring finger where a wedding band should have been. “Did you take it off just for me, or don’t you wear one for professional reasons?”

“The file is out of date,” she said. “I’ve been divorced for four months and separated for three years before that.”

“Sorry,” he said.

“Not at all. But thanks.”

She pulled her hand from his fingers, glancing toward the pilot. The pilot was staring too innocently out the window. He appeared to be discussing the clouds with the owner.

“I’m really not here to stir up any old flames. John. I’m here to get your help.”

“So tell me about it,” he said.

“About what?”

“The case that was so important you needed a helicopter to find me. That’s an expensive item compared to a phone call.”

“Did you have a phone on the mountain with you? Wish I’d known. Besides. I thought you weren’t going to help me.”

Becker shrugged. “I’ll help you if I can. I’m not going to get involved. If I can do anything useful while I’m sitting here. I’m happy to help.”

Karen placed a folder on the table in front of him. He abruptly put his hand on it.

“Don’t start with pictures of the victims,” he said.

“All right.”

“That was always hard to take.”

“I don’t enjoy it either, but how do you know they’re that kind of pictures? This is kidnapping.”

Becker removed his hand from the folder.

“Kidnapping ends up one of two ways,” he said. “The victim is released or the victim is dead. You didn’t come to see me about victims who have been released.”

“There’s a third alternative,” Karen said. “Sometimes the victims stay missing.”

“Those are kids who are taken by one of the parents in a custody dispute and packed off to a different state. You didn’t come to me for that kind of thing, either.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not where my talents lie.”

Karen nodded. “Okay.”

“And it cost you too much personally to seek me out and talk to me again,” he continued.

“Did it?”

“You may not be as guileless as I am, Karen, but that doesn’t mean that you’re unreadable. Whatever this case is, you felt it was worth the price, which means it means a lot to you.”

“Yes. It means a lot.”

“Save the pictures. I’ll look at them if I have to, but first just tell me about it. Let me get a feel for the case without the emotional load of the pictures.”

Karen blew softly and silently through her lips before starting. “It’s kids,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Some son of a bitch is killing kids.”

Karen was surprised and embarrassed by the sudden flood of emotion. Her voice cracked and her eyes filled with tears. Becker reached out to comfort her, but she pulled back from him and shot her chin up. When she spoke again she sounded angry, but there was no sound of tears in her voice.

“Kids-boys-have been missing from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts. Connecticut. They’re gone for a time, a month or two-the longest was eleven weeks-and then they are found dead.”

“How many?”

“Six-that we know about. The first that suits the pattern was a nine-year-old boy named Amell Wicker, who disappeared from a shopping mall in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Eight months later it was a boy from Bethpage, Long Island. Last seen in another shopping mall. His mother let him go for a slice of pizza while she was shopping for shoes. He never came back. They found his body in a garbage bag alongside the highway thirty miles from Bethpage two months later.”

“When was the next one missing?”

“Eight months later. Peabody, Massachusetts. Body discovered six weeks later.”

“How long had he been dead when he was discovered?” Becker asked.

“Less than forty-eight hours. Again it was in a garbage bag, alongside a highway.”

“This one taken from a shopping mall, too?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve checked all the employees to see if any of them worked in more than one of the malls.” It was not a question; Becker knew the answer.

“One employee in common. Peter Steinholz was the manager of a cookie franchise in Upper Saddle River and in Stamford, Connecticut, where the fifth boy was snatched. He’s a family man, wife, two kids.”

“Doesn’t mean anything.”

“No prior arrest record except one DWI three years ago. Reasonable alibi. He checks out pretty clean.”

“Sales reps? Suppliers? Service people? Anybody who might have been at all the malls? The guy who fixes the cookie maker’s ovens, for instance.”

“A few overlaps, six or seven, but the timing is wrong on all of them. You know it wouldn’t be that easy or we would have found him already.”

“I’m just asking out of habit. I know you’ve done all you could or you wouldn’t be here. Tell me about the fourth one.”

“Ricky Stine, Newburgh, New York. Disappeared from a schoolyard during recess. Went out to play with the rest of the kids, never came back. They thought maybe he’d just wandered off, had him listed as a runaway for a couple of weeks until they found his body.”

“Why a runaway?”

“He was hyperactive, always into trouble of some kind. Not a bad kid, just hard to control. His parents said he’d had a history of running away from home, showing up again in a day or two. This time he didn’t show up again.”

“How long was that after the kid from Peabody was found?”

“Ricky went missing six months later.”

Becker nodded. He kept his eyes fixed on the folder as if reading it through the cover.

“Significant?” she asked.

“Not yet. How long till number five?”

Karen looked at her notes. “Four and a half months.”

“He’s getting more frequent. There was an interval of eight months after the first two, then six months, then four and a half.”

“Because he’s getting away with it? More confident?” Becker shot her a glance.

“He’s not thinking about getting away with it, not when he snatches them. Later, when he has to dispose of the body, he might think about details then.”

“What is he thinking about when he snatches them?”

“He’s not thinking at all. He’s feeling.”

“Feeling what?”

“I don’t know yet. I don’t know what he does with them.”

“When I tell you what he does with them, will you know what he’s feeling?”

Becker heard the trace of contempt that Karen could not hide and looked up from the folder. He leaned back in his chair.

“It’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t approve, but you’ll use it.”

“I didn’t mean anything, John. I know you don’t like it.”

“I don’t know anything everybody else doesn’t know. The only difference between you and me is that you censor it out. You don’t allow yourself to think it, or feel it, and so you tell yourself it’s alien to you. My particular curse is that I can’t censor it out. I know what those bastards are feeling because I can’t keep it out. You can. Inside, you’re just the same as I am.”

Karen shook her head adamantly.

“You don’t accept that about yourself? That you have the capacity to understand even the worst of the bastards if you’d allow yourself?”

“You wanted me to believe this before. I don’t.”

“You won’t.”

“No, John. I don’t. I do not know what they’re feeling when they do the things they do. I don’t mean anything against you, but I just don’t have the capacity.”

“You don’t want it.”

“You’re right. I don’t want to get into their minds. I don’t want to get into their hearts. I just want to catch them and put them behind bars. That’s all.”

“I’m not suggesting you would ever act on those feelings, Karen. I accept that those who do are different. But having the feelings in the first place…”

“When you see the photos, you’ll know what I mean. I could never empathize with this monster in any way…”

“Empathize is not the same as sympathize. I’m not suggesting you feel sorry for him.”

“I hate him,” she said. She pushed the folder toward him. “Look at them. Look at the pictures and tell me I have anything in common with this beast. Look at them.” She spilled the photos on the table, spread them out with a push without looking at them herself.

Becker winced. The photos were taken in the morgue. He recognized the particular light and clarity, the coldly impersonal attention to detail. It was not as bad as seeing the bodies in person, but it was bad enough.

Becker knew he would have to study the pictures later, but alone, when he could allow himself to feel the complex mix of revulsion and sickened fascination without a witness. The photos were obscene, but he had seen worse. And so had Karen. At this moment the strength of her reaction concerned him as much as the cause of it.

Becker shuffled the photos together and put them back in the folder.

“What were they beaten with?” he asked.

She looked neither at him nor the table.

“A variety of instruments, apparently. Some of them wooden, they left splinters. Some metallic. They found paint chips under the skin. Some were caused by unknown objects.”

“Lumber or wood?”

“What?”

“Were the splinters from processed, finished lumber, or was he using birch switches off of trees.”

“Birch switches? When was the last time anyone used a birch switch for anything? What the hell does a birch look like? Do you think this is some sort of bucolic, romantic operation? The wood was processed, lacquered, chemically preserved, rot-retarded, commercial pine. Birch switches? You’ve been in the mountains a little too long. How can you look at those pictures and ask me if someone beat those kids with a switch?”

Becker sat quietly, waiting for her anger to pass.

“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.”

“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 work, 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.

“You survived it,“ Karen said, her voice still low and gentle. “They didn’t. In a couple of weeks another one won’t.”

“Cause of death?” Karen thought his voice sounded brittle, as if it might crack at any moment, and he with it. He was still looking at the table.

“Asphyxiation.”

Becker came to himself abruptly. “Asphyxiation? Not the beatings?”

Karen shook her head. “Medical thinks the prolonged and repeated trauma must have brought them pretty close to death, but at the end he smothered them.”

“Smothered, not strangled?”

“Medical thinks it was probably a pillow, blanket, something like that. There was no real sign of struggle at the end. But then there wouldn’t have been any hair or skin or blood under the nails, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“They were washed thoroughly after death. ‘Cleansed’ is how Medical put it. Nails cleaned, hair combed, bodies scrubbed. Not a fingerprint on them, not a trace of anything.”

“Hair combed?”

Karen nodded. “Parted and combed… And cut.”

“Cut? He gave them a haircut after he killed them?”

“It looks that way.”

Becker thought for a moment. “He may be saving the hair. We may be looking for someone with a bag full of trimmings.”

“What does he want with them?”

“How the hell do I know. They were sexually abused, I assume.”

Karen shook her head. “It puzzled all of us, but no. No sign of sexual abuse.”

Becker was silent for a long time. Karen watched his face but could read little there.

“I assume the Investigative Support Unit is involved? Have they given you a profile of the guy?” he asked finally.

“Sort of. It isn’t much help yet. They don’t have a lot to work on and they seem to be thrown by the lack of sexual abuse.”

“Did Gold have anything to offer?”

“Gold was a bit confused.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“He is a good man, Becker.”

“I know, I know.”

“What do you expect from a shrink, after all?”

“Miracles, mostly. If he’s your own.”

“He’s helped you, you’ve said so.”

“Allow me my own twisted response to my shrink, if you don’t mind. What was he confused about?”

“He thought it was very unclear, he was getting conflicting signals from this guy. At least Gold was frank enough to admit it.”

“He’s as honest as his profession will allow,” Becker conceded. “So the psychological profile isn’t much use?”

“As usual. You can give us a better one.”

Becker looked at her, smiled ruefully.

“We know why that is, don’t we?”

She chose to ignore his remark. “I’ll let you see Gold’s profile, of course. I can put everything we have in your hands in less than a day.”

“How much do you have on the man himself?”

Karen cleared her throat. She glanced at the pilot and owner, then back to the file on the table in front of her.

“Nothing,” she said finally.

“Partial description?”

“No one has ever seen him.”

“He took six kids away from public places, once from a schoolyard, once from a school outing at a museum-and no one saw him?”

“No.”

“He just walked off with them? No protests from the kids, no foot dragging, no struggles, no tears. Nothing to make anyone notice? Nothing to even make someone imagine they saw something peculiar? There’s always someone around who’s willing to make up something in exchange for attention from us. No lonely clerk who likes having the FBI talk to him as long as he can fantasize what he thinks we want to hear?”

“Nobody, John.”

“Who is this guy, the Invisible Man?”

“The agents are calling him Lamont Cranston. Apparently there was an old radio show called ‘The Shadow’ about this man, Lamont Cranston, who could cloud men’s minds and become invisible…”

“I remember,” said Becker.

“Before my time,” said Karen.

“Your loss,” said Becker. He fell into a deep announcer’s baritone. “ ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?… The Shadow knows.’ ”

“Yeah. I’ve been hearing a lot of that one,” Karen said.

“Orson Welles did the voice, I think.” Becker said.

Karen waited impatiently, clearly not interested in nostalgia.

From the other side of the room she could hear the pilot’s own sotto voce rendition of “The Shadow knows.” It seemed to be a phrase that men of all ages could not resist crooning, whether or not they had even heard of the original radio show.

“How does he get them to leave so peacefully that no one sees anything?” Becker was musing aloud, not expecting an answer. “As if he had them hypnotized.”

“We checked hypnosis, actually.”

“I wasn’t serious,” Becker said.

“We weren’t either, but we checked it anyway. None of them had ever been previously hypnotized, so there was no posthypnotic suggestion at work.”

“What physical evidence have the forensic people come up with?”

Karen shook her head. “Nothing. I know it’s hard to believe, but nothing. I told you, the bodies had been cleansed. There was nothing in the bags except the bodies. No hair samples, no prints, no fibers

… Part of that is the nature of the plastic used in the bags, apparently. It’s chemically inert and very smooth so it won’t pick up fibers from a car’s seat covers, for instance.”

“No prints on the outside of the bags? That stuff will hold fingerprints.”

“Only the prints of the people who found the bags along the highway. I don’t know. John. It’s like he killed and cleaned them in a scientific lab.”

“You’ve checked that?”

“In every case we investigated every lab within a fifty-mile radius of where the kids were taken. Every medical lab, every scientific research facility, every university with a science department, every place we could think of that keeps a sterile facility.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. Hundreds of names of people who work there or have access to the facilities. But no connections to the victims, at least none that the computer could find. Maybe you could tell the computer what else to look for.”

Becker fell into a deep silence. When Karen started to speak to him he lifted one hand, stopping her. After a moment she slid out of her chair and crossed the room to join the pilot and the airport owner. Instinctively, they all spoke in hushed tones.

“Is he going to help find Lamont?” the pilot asked.

Karen arched her eyebrows, cocked her head slightly. Becker was not a man to make predictions about.

“He’s helped already,” she said.

“Did he come up with something?”

“No. But he’s confirmed that we’ve done all the right things.”

The owner craned his head to look past Karen, studying Becker as if seeing him for the first time.

“Is this guy really all that bright?” the owner asked. Karen shot the pilot a hard glance. She did not like the idea of discussing Bureau business with a civilian.

“I just mentioned that he’s someone special,” the pilot said shamefacedly.

“Doesn’t look it,” said the owner.

“That depends what part of him you’re looking at,” Karen said.

The owner looked at the pilot, suppressing a smile. The woman wasn’t his boss, after all. He had no reason to be afraid of her.

“What part are you looking at?” he asked.

“The part that’s looking at you,” she said.

Becker was still staring blankly at the table.

“He’s not looking at me,” the owner said, puzzled.

“Which ought to tell you something,” Karen said. To the pilot she said, “We’ll be leaving in fifteen minutes. Are you ready?”

“She’s ready when you are.”

“Go to the bathroom first,” she said. “It’s a long flight.”

Karen walked back to Becker.

“I have a bladder infection,” the pilot told the owner sheepishly.

“He wasn’t looking at me at all, was he?” the owner demanded, still puzzled.

The pilot looked at Becker. If one hadn’t heard the stories they told about him, Becker would appear to be a fairly rugged man, no longer young but certainly not old, an ex-athlete perhaps, who still stayed in shape, still had his hair. Presentable but nothing remarkable. But if the viewer had heard the stories; if even half of what they said about him was true…

“From what I hear,” the pilot said, “you’d better be grateful he isn’t looking directly at you. They say he sees everything, anyway. But what he looks at, he hits.” The pilot knew that was not what Deputy Assistant Director Crist had meant, but then she had actually worked with Becker. Humped him, too, apparently. The pilot was not certain just what sort of insight that gave her into Becker’s heart and head. He himself had certainly slept with many women without revealing a damned thing about himself except his sexual preferences, which was just the way he wanted it. How these things worked with Becker, he had no idea and no real desire to know.

Karen sat down at the table again and waited for Becker to return from wherever he had wandered in his mind. She remembered having found him in the middle of the night in the living room of the hotel suite they had shared in New York on the Bahoud case. He had been sitting with the lights out and when she asked him why, he had said because he was afraid of the dark. His face was wet with tears. She had thought he was the strangest, most exciting man she had ever met. That night she had comforted him with her body, and the next day he had killed the murderous Bahoud in a prolonged struggle in the pitch-black subbasement of the apartment building where he had been hiding. Becker had killed the man-who was armed with two weapons-with his bare hands in utter blackness, and Hatcher had said they had located Becker at last only by the screams he emitted. Yet he had wept again when he sat beside her hospital bed and she knew that he was crying as much for himself as for her.

She had lied earlier when she told Becker she had been half in love with him. She had been totally in love with him, and just about as frightened of all that he represented and of the great danger he posed to her control of herself. Ten years later, she still could not look at his hands without wanting to feel them on her body.

“This is going to hurt,” he said, jolting her out of her reverie as he came out of his own.

She understood that he was talking about himself.

“I don’t think I can do it without you,” she said. “He’ll keep on doing this until we get dumb lucky. We don’t have much time.”

“You don’t have any,” Becker said. “He’s snatched another kid already.”

“Are you sure?”

Becker shrugged. He wasn’t certain, but it made no difference. If Lamont hadn’t struck again, he would at any moment.

“Why shouldn’t he? He’s hungry, he’ll eat.”

He looked directly at her for the first time in several minutes.

“It’s going to hurt a lot,” he said.

“I know.” She touched his hand with hers. “I do know, John.”

Karen paused, realizing that it was not enough. “I have sole custody of my son,” she said at last.

“Your husband fought it.” It was not a question.

“Bitterly,” she said.

“And?”

She knew he was way ahead of her already, but there was sometimes a necessity to go through the formalities.

“And I wasn’t sure I should have custody at all. I’m not sure I deserve it… I’m not sure I want it…”

Becker waited, looking at her.

After a moment she said, “It scares me, John. Having complete control over him. I’m… I’m sometimes afraid of what I might do.”

Becker nodded slowly. He gripped her hand with his own, squeezing briefly.

“You won’t,” he said. Becker pulled the file toward himself. “I’ll need to look at everything as soon as you can get it to me,” he said. “But first I need to be alone with these.”

She knew he meant the photographs of the dead boys and she thought she saw him shudder.