The Girls He Adored

50

In rooms 15 and 19 of the Sleep-Tite Motel, the whores and johns came and went. In room 17, Pender stuffed his thirty-twodecibel-proof foam plugs into his ears and began mapping out the initial computer search in his head.

Step one: Juvenile records were sometimes expunged, but not if the juvenile went on to become an adult criminal. Assume that was the case with Buckley-a statistically supportable assumption. Then look for hits on criminals with a first or second name of Buckley who'd done time in juvenile facilities anywhere in Oregon between-Casey looked to be in his late twenties-between '82 and '92…

Step two: hope to hell step one came up with a manageable number of hits. Because that was about as far as the search could be narrowed on computer: step three would require a face-to-face interview with every Buckley on the list, in the hope that one of them just might recognize the boy whose name was Max or Christy or Lyssy or Lee from the adult Casey's mug shot.

All that would take time, manpower, and luck, Pender knew, and even if he managed to find out who Casey was, he would still be faced with the daunting task of tracking him down without the considerable resources of the bureau behind him. The sense of exhilaration he'd felt after interviewing Ng suddenly drained away. In its place, exhaustion, discouragement, and a wicked headache.

I'm too old for this shit, thought Pender. He went into the bathroom, washed down two Vicodins with a cupped handful of tepid water scooped out from under the tap (the plastic glass did not claim to have been sanitized for his protection), then brought his bound shadow copy of the Casey file back to bed with him, and while waiting for the medication to kick in, opened it at random like a born-again Christian seeking inspiration in a Bible.

A photocopy of Dolores Moon's eight-by-ten glossy stared up at Pender. Impish grin, curly strawberry blond hair. Tiny little thing with a great big voice. Born Huntington, Long Island, 2/12/69. Last seen, Sandusky, Ohio, 4/17/97. In between, a career playing itself out just below the show-biz radar line-her last role was Snoopy in a Sandusky dinner theater production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Pender flipped backward a few pages. Tammy Brown. Born Pikeville, Kentucky, 9/22/78, last seen Pikeville, 7/3/96. Kentucky collegiate heavyweight power-lifting champion out of (where else?) Pikeville College. Not one of your buffed, ripped, steroid powerlifters, however, but rather a shy, fat, good-natured, drug-free Christian with a round, multiple-chinned face right out of a Botero painting. The polar opposite of Dolores Moon: heavyset, introverted, by all accounts virginal. The two women had nothing in common but strawberry blond hair and bad luck.

The Vicodins were starting to kick in. Pender closed his eyes, saw the vision that in one form or another had been haunting him, driving him on, for the last several years. This time it was Dolores and Tammy staring up at him through the darkness. Waiting. Waiting for him. His eyelids fluttered open again, and he forced himself to turn to the back of the file, to Casey's last victim but one-two if you counted Dr. Cogan.

Donna Hughes. Born Sanford, Florida, 12/20/56. Last seen, Plano, Texas, 6/17/98. Casey did most of his hunting in the spring or summer months, leading the investigators to speculate that he lived in a climate where the winters were not conducive to travel. Pender wondered if Pastor knew that. It might help narrow the search.

“I should be there,” he said aloud, his voice sounding strange and distant with the earplugs in. “I should be there-they'll never catch him without me.”

But he wasn't there, he had to remind himself. Instead he was here. In Dallas. Which was right next door to Plano. And suddenly, though he was by now so wrecked on the painkillers that he could scarcely think, Ed Pender understood to a stone certainty exactly what his next move had to be.