Find Me

8

Past the small sleeping town of Galena, Kansas, Mallory departed from a street marked by signs as Historic Route 66. She turned right to travel down a narrow road that cut through countryside and crop fields. Watching her trip monitor, she counted off the miles to her next turn: ten, eleven, almost there. Over the distance of green flatlands, she could see the silhouette of the autobody shop, a garage described as “-the size and shape of an airplane hangar.” And the letter went on to tell her that this place did a round-the-clock business with three full-time crews, and “-old Ray was always up before dawn.”

She turned onto a long dirt driveway, then stopped to select Led Zeppelin music to orchestrate her entrance. Moving forward again, she played it at top volume. “Black Dog” was reported to be Ray Adler’s secret theme song. Mallory roared into the lot, revved her engine and honked her horn to add to the noise of the band. The song was switched off and the visor lowered to hide her face. She sat very still in the shadows of the car, her back to the rising sun.

A man in his fifties came to the door of the garage and stood there squinting into the morning light. And now came the look of recognition- the song and the car. He was running across the lot, grinning and yelling, “You old son of a bitch, is that you?” The man’s e yes were still half blinded by sunrise. “I knew you’d come back.” He all but ripped off the driver’s s ide door in his haste to open it. He bent down to look at her face, and now he wore an expression of dumbfounded surprise. Though he had expected to see someone else behind the wheel, his smile spread wider.

“Even better,” he said, standing back a pace to stare at her. “You’re Peyton’s kid, all right. You got his weird green eyes. Not another pair like ’em. And you got your mama’s pretty face. But this ain’t your daddy’s c ar. We ll, damn. Let’s see what you got, girl.” He started toward the front where the engine ought to be on this recent model, and then he stopped, saying, “No, don’t t e ll me.” He turned around and headed for the trunk, and she obligingly pulled the release lever to open it for him.

“Oh, damn, that’s beautiful!”

She left the car to stand beside him as he admired the Porsche engine.

“You outdid old Peyton, girl. His Porsche was old when he bought it, and that was before you were born. What a damn wreck that car was. Not a bit of the body that wasn’t d e nted or crushed. He got it for a dollar and a promise not to sue the drunk who totaled his Volkswagen. Happened back down the road not twenty miles. God, how Peyton loved that old VW. That would’ve been the Bug’s tenth run down Route 66. Well, your dad was determined to finish the trip the way he started out. When he pulled in here, he was driving the Porsche and towing the Bug. But we couldn’t s plice ’ em together. And I wasn’t about to waste all the best parts of that sports car. So you can see, can’t you-just using the Porsche’s engine was out. Now Peyton once put a V- 8 in another Bug. But that’s another story. So we used the old car’s c o nvertible top-all we could salvage-and we put it on a prefab shell a lot like this one here. Big as a Beetle, and maybe a little longer. Same paint job, too. Now, silver to go with that black ragtop, that was my idea. Back then, there wasn’t another car like it on the road.”

Mallory already knew the history of the other car, but never lost patience with this man’s retelling of the story. She had yet to say a word, and Ray Adler was only now realizing this. His face turned beet red.

“I talk too much. My wife, rest her soul, used to tell me that all the time. Never give folks a chance to get a word in.” He smiled at her, not able to get enough of her green eyes, the eyes of Peyton Hale. “So tell me, how’s your dad and his pretty bride?”

“I never met the man,” said Mallory. “My mother died when I was six, and she was never married.”

Riker tried to ignore the knocking on his motel room door, but the early morning caller was persistent. The shower was running in the bathroom; no help was coming from Charles Butler. The detective dragged his legs to the edge of the bed. The drapes were flimsy, and the room was entirely too bright. He put on his sunglasses to answer the door.

Standing in the awful sunlight of a cloudless new day was the young desk clerk he had met last night. The boy handed him a bag imprinted with the name of a local restaurant. “Mr. Butler already paid for it, sir. The tip’s covered, too.”

Evidently, Charles had finally broken the language barrier and explained the concept of room service to the staff of this backwater motel. And the tip must have been huge. The boy’s g rin was that wide, that friendly. Riker slammed the door.

Too much sun.

The paper bag yielded coffee to start his heart and pastries for a sugar rush. He lit a cigarette, and his life was complete-all the drugs necessary to begin the day.

Eyes all the way open now, he noticed the small black-and-white photograph of a young man in a rock ’n’ roll T-shirt. It was propped up against the alarm clock so he would not fail to see it. This was the picture once hidden in the lining of Savannah’s s u itcase. On the back of it was a date that made the boy close to Savannah’s age when this snapshot was taken. Riker flipped it over to stare at the faded portrait of a damn good-looking youngster in his twenties. Long, fair hair grazed the shoulders, and the face had the makings of rock-star style: a touch of wit to the eyes and the hint of a wild side in his smile. The image was worn in the center with traces of pink lipstick, and he guessed that Savannah had kissed it too often. That spoke to the absence of her lover. So the lady had lost this man. The affair had ended and the photo was all she had left.

Or maybe not.

Riker looked up to see his friend in a bathrobe. He held up the photograph of the boy. “The letters Mallory wanted-the kid meant old love letters, right?”

“That would be my guess,” said Charles Butler. “It’s the sort of correspondence that Miss Sirus was most likely to keep for all these years.” He nodded at the snapshot in Riker’s hand. “You saw the date on the back? The relationship probably ended when Savannah Sirus was as young as that boy.”

Riker set down the photograph. “This doesn’t t e ll me why Mallory would want that woman’s o ld love letters.”

Charles, the quintessential gentleman, kept silent, showing great confidence that the detective would work this out in another minute.

And Riker did. Everything was clear, for Mallory’s s hort note to Savannah had demanded the letters, as if she had a right to them. The kid had wanted her letters. “They were written by Mallory’s father.”

“Seems logical, doesn’t it? But more important,” said Charles, “the love letters were written to a woman who was not Mallory’s mother.”

That would explain a lot, given the compulsive way that Mallory had always kept track of every transgression, real and imagined. “So Mallory’s father abandoned her mother to run off with Savannah Sirus.” One more cheat, another old score to settle. And now, in Riker’s o w n personal autopsy of suspicious suicide, he had motive.

Mallory, what did you do to that woman?

“The first time I met your dad, he was a sixteen-year-old car thief out of California,” said Ray of Ray’s Autobody Shop. “Didn’t e ven have a driver’s license.” Mallory’s host sat down at a long wooden table stained with rings from a thousand coffee cups. “Well, not a car thief-I’m exaggerating. I’m sure he owned that old Volkswagen-even if he wasn’t legally old enough to drive it. But he tried to steal the parts he needed to keep it running.”

Mallory looked around the kitchen, aching to put it in order. This was the mess of a man who lived alone, though finger paintings and photographs of young grandchildren were stuck to the refrigerator with cartoon magnets. The washing machine in the corner was merely a repository for dirty laundry that even this impossibly grimy man would no longer wear. Here and there, she could make out the layer of years when his wife was still living. Signs of her were in the rosebud pattern of the curtains. The teacups were ornate. Judging by the pile of dishes in the sink, he used the good china every day-because it reminded him of his wife. She looked at the worn pattern on her spoon-real silver, and silverware was a tradi- tional wedding gift. The kitchen called up memories of her foster father’s house in the years following the death of Helen, the woman who had raised her from the age of ten.

Ray Adler poured hot coffee into her cup, then set a carton of milk on the table alongside a five-pound bag of sugar with another silver spoon sticking out of the tear in the top. “Now the last time Peyton came through, he was heading the other way, back to the West Coast, and it was ten years later. He had two college degrees and he was working on a third. That was a predictable outcome. Peyton was one smart kid.”

Mallory drank her coffee black and listened to the story of Ray’s father catching the young thief in the act of stealing engine parts by dead of night. This might have been her own story, but Lou Markowitz had caught her robbing a Jaguar when she was a child-a more precocious thief than Peyton Hale.

“My father didn’t t u rn him in,” said Ray. “Dad didn’t w ant to mess up a kid’s whole life for thirty dollars’ worth of parts. So he made Peyton work for what he stole. Well, it was like going back to school for my dad-and me, too. That boy could make a busted carburetor rise again from the dead and bark at the moon. In other words-the boy had a way with cars. All that summer, old junkers rolled into the garage, and they rolled out again the next best thing to new. It was magic. Our local trade doubled, and we even pulled in folks from Missouri. That’s when Peyton got Dad going on the autobody work, prefabs, real strange modifications. That got us business from four states. These days, I build race cars, too. I get work from as far away as Oregon. Oh, your father was so smart. The back seat of his car was just chock full of old paperbacks, real thick ones. Instead of a salary, Dad gave him a cut on the trade that summer. So when Peyton got back on the road again, he had a stake.”

“And he went back to school.”

“Yeah, he did. But he’d come back here every summer, work some to make his tuition, then drive on to California and back. Last time through, he was writing a history of Route 66. He wanted to get it all down on paper before it disappeared. But it was more than history. He was building a whole new philosophy around the car. Philosophy, that was his major in school. Odd thing is-it suited him. If you’d only known him, you’d see that clear as I do.”

Ray left the room for a minute or two and returned with a wooden box.

“These are things that got left behind on his last road trip.” He opened it with a key and a trace of reverence, as if it contained religious artifacts. Gently he picked up a photograph. “This is him and your mother. Yo u look just like Cass. That could be you standing there. But I don’t know the lady on his other arm.”

Mallory did.

Savannah Sirus’s young face was turned toward Peyton Hale who, like her mother, Cassandra, was smiling for the camera. Was this a picture of a crime in progress, maybe taken on the day when Savannah began to lay her plans?

The two men wore more casual clothing this morning. Of course, Charles Butler’s b lue jeans and denim shirt were matched by the same dye lot, custom-tailored and more costly than the entire contents of the detective’s closet back home. However, Riker felt great affection and loyalty for his own flannel shirt and authentically faded jeans that fit in all the right places. Years of wear had made them baggy and threadbare at the knees- good driving jeans. He was at the wheel and on the way to the sheriff’s office as they rehashed last night’s conversation. “No, I’ve got no idea what her father’s name is. I never thought of anyone but Lou Marko-witz as her dad. You think Mallory’s hunting her real father down for payback?”

“Payback,” said Charles. “For what? Think about it. She’s only now looking for this absentee father? I’d let go of the vengeance idea.”

Riker knew that Mallory had been born out of wedlock, and now he could lay the blame for that on Savannah, the other woman. Charles was probably right. In all likelihood, father and daughter had never met by reason of mutual disinterest. Yet he still worked on a revenge theory. “Let’s say Cassandra was pregnant with Mallory when this guy took off and abandoned her. You don’t t hink that would piss the kid off?”

“Without knowing the circumstances, I couldn’t s ay. Now what about this FBI agent, Dale Berman? What exactly did he do to Mallory?”

“Oh, Dale doesn’t e ven know.” There were a hell of a lot of cops who could enlighten the man, but they no longer spoke to Special Agent Berman.

“It wouldn’t be a small thing,” said Charles, “not if you think Mallory still carries a grudge.”

“Are you kidding me?” Riker rolled to a stop and cut the engine a block away from the sheriff ’s o ffice. “Did you ever hear her call Lou Markowitz by his first name? No, you never did. In her kiddy days, she called him Hey Cop. Years later, after she’d warmed up to Lou, his name was Hey Markowitz. She loved that old man, I know she did. But right up to the end, the kid was still packing grudges from her days as a runt street thief. Lou was always the cop who caught her. She never forgets, never forgives.”

“But surely Dale Berman factors into-”

Riker waved off any further discussion of the FBI man’s o ffenses. This was a subject that always made him sad. He restarted the car and glanced at the dashboard clock as he eased back on the road. “Mallory should be in Oklahoma by now.”

“You mean Kansas. That’s the next state on Route 66.”

“The Kansas segment is real small,” said Riker. “You blink, you miss it.” When he finally chased Mallory down, he would have to deal with payback for his own black mark in her personal account books. It would only have taken her six seconds to make a connection between himself and the Chicago LoJack tracker. She would vote him the cop most likely to activate her antitheft device and spy on her. And this time her paranoia would nicely mesh with reality. Only one telling question remained: Did she know Savannah Sirus was dead?

He had to see her eyes when he gave her the news.

And now he thought of another question. He did not want to pry into this personal area, but he had no choice. Everything that might contribute to Mallory’s c u rrent malady was also the detective’s personal business. “Hey, Charles? Is the kid holding a grudge against you ?”

“No, why would she?” The man faced the windshield not wanting to meet his friend’s eyes, and he wore the slight blush of a lie-a small one, most likely a lie of omission. Poor Charles had a give-away face that could not hide a falsehood or a good hand in a game of cards.

The Mercedes slowed to a crawl when the sheriff ‘s o ffice was in sight. Riker was not willing to end this conversation just yet. “I’m guessing you two had a fight. Mallory holes up in her apartment for months, and you go off to Europe. What am I supposed to think? So what happened?”

“I asked her to marry me.” Charles pointed to the windshield. “Oh, look. A reception committee.”

Startled, Riker almost hit a deputy as he turned the wheel to enter the municipal lot. Another man in uniform flagged down the Mercedes and waved them into a parking space.

Charles rolled down the passenger window and asked, “We’re not late, are we?”

“No, sir,” said the deputy. “Things just got off to an early start. The FBI agents didn’t w ant to wait.” He ushered them inside the building and down the hall to a small conference room and a meeting in progress.

Sheriff Banner made the introductions, gesturing first to the old man. “You’ve met Dr. Magritte.” He turned to face two strangers on the other side of the room. “But not these folks.”

Riker had expected to see a young couple from the caravan, the two people he had picked out for embedded FBI moles, but these were new faces. He ignored the younger agent, who had just started shaving last week, and he stared at the woman.

No one would call her pretty, but she was appealing. He would guess her age at forty by the strands of silver mixed in with the brown, but the short haircut gave her a youthful tomboy look. And a man could get lost in those tranquil gray eyes. The sun had popped out a few freckles on her nose, and she had a slight overbite; these were Riker’s o t her favorite qualities in a woman. The lady was dressed from a catalogue for campers. There was even a Swiss Army knife clipped to her belt. Riker wondered where she carried her gun; it was that well hidden.

The light-haired man beside her was attired from the same mail-order box, but he was much younger, a recent graduate of the FBI academy with the requisite well-scrubbed, earnest face-no wrinkles, no experience.

“Agents Christine Nahlman and Barry Allen,” said the sheriff. “They’ll be traveling undercover with the caravan. Dr. Magritte’s cooperating with the FBI.”

“So that makes four of you,” said Riker, nodding to the woman. In this count, he was including the two campers he believed to be FBI moles. Agent Nahlman’s s ilence was slightly frosty, neatly confirming this theory.

“This is for you.” Sheriff Banner reached across the conference table to hand a folded paper to Riker. “It’s a message from their boss, the agent in charge. He called this morning to make their arrangements.”

Riker opened the sheet of paper and read Dale Berman’s s imple question, “What’s eating Mallory?” This was followed by the FBI man’s c o veted cell-phone number, one that even Dale’s wife would not have.

Trouble.

The detective waved this note as he faced the two federal agents. “So you guys met my partner? Detective Mallory?”

Oh, yes, they had-no doubt about it. And, in the strained exchange of glances between them, he could see that theirs had not been a happy experience. Riker smiled. “The kid makes a hell of a first impression, doesn’t she?” And by that, he meant permanent damage. “So how’s old Dale? Haven’t seen the guy in a while. No recent bullet holes, no broken bones?”

“She kicked him in the balls.” Agent Barry Allen’s voice had a trace of awe.

“That’s my baby.” Riker said this with pride-and relief. Dale Berman’s punishment could have been so much worse.

After looking over the FBI-approved route map, he listened to their plans to make Oklahoma by nightfall and agreed that it was doable on the interstate, where they could get up some speed. Then he sided with Dr. Magritte after hearing the old man’s c o ncerns about the proposed hotel.

“The doc’s right. They should camp on this private land.” Riker held up the map marked with a prearranged site. “It’s isolated, easier to keep all the sheep together. Yo u don’t w anna move these people indoors tonight, not even if it rains. No walls between them and you.”

Nahlman, the older, seasoned field agent, was nodding in agreement, but her younger partner asked, “Why?”

“Well,” said Riker, always patient with kids, “you wanna be able to hear the screams.”

“Your dad only stayed two weeks that last visit,” said Ray Adler. “Just time enough to rebuild the wrecked Porsche.”

Mallory was hardly listening anymore. She stared at the photograph of her father, taken when he was her own age. His blond hair was tied back, and his smile was slightly crooked and winning. “Handsome and wild,” her mother once said on that rare occasion when she was willing to talk about him with her six-year-old daughter. The photograph had one other detail, a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles tucked into the breast pocket of his shirt. “He wore glasses.”

“Well, he owned glasses.” Ray laid down an earlier photograph of himself and Peyton Hale as teenage boys. “Your dad’s only sixteen in this one.

See the eyeglasses in his pocket? Never once caught him wearing them. Men can be as vain as women-sometimes more so.”

Ray wore his own spectacles as he sorted through the papers in the box. “Your dad wrote me from time to time. Always got a Christmas card. After he came through that last time, I got a few postcards from the road, then nothing.” Sitting well back in his chair, he pushed his glasses to the top of his head. “Nothing in all this time.” Ray heaved a sigh, then looked down at the floor for a moment of silence. “I love Peyton Hale. And I wouldn’t say that about another man in this world.” He turned his sad eyes to Mallory. “If you meet your father on the road, you give him my regards. If he’s dead, then lie to me. I don’t e ver want to hear that.”

He pushed the box toward her. “That’s all yours now. Old notebooks, more pictures and such. You might want some quiet time to look it over.” He rose from the table. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta check on my crew. I’ve got them working on a roll bar for that car of yours.”

“I don’t want a roll bar.”

“But you’re gonna get one. If you flip that thing, you’ll die.”

Having already seen a gravestone with her name on it, Mallory did not offer further protest. When Ray had quit the house, she opened one of Peyton Hale’s notebooks and read the opening lines.“In the beginning, there was the wheel. Then along came the fire of the internal combustion engine. The car was born. And away we go. It’s a romance that has no end.”

Next she picked up the photograph of her parents posed with Savannah Sirus. After ripping the latter-the interloper-from the picture, Mallory dropped the torn piece into an ashtray and looked around for matches to burn it. Throwing Savannah into the garbage can was not enough. Only total destruction would do.

The two parents from the caravan had arrived. They were excited and hopeful. Anticipation was everything to them. These two still abided in that fantasy world where little girls never died, where a lost child could still be found innocently wandering in the woods, perhaps a little dirty after all this time-years of time-but no worse for wear, no harm done-not dead, not murdered. The mother and father were looking into the corners of the room, leaning a bit to see around the long table and chairs. Charles Butler winced. They thought they were here to pick up their living daughter and take her home.

The Missouri sheriff held up a keychain fob in the shape of a horseshoe. The mother seized it, ripped it from the plastic bag and kissed it. And then the sheriff told her that the fob had been found with the remains of her child.

“Your little girl was laid to rest in local ground. She was among good people, and her grave was always tended to. Fresh flowers every-”

The mother collapsed. She would have fallen, but she was caught by the helping hands of her husband and Sheriff Banner. A chair was fetched close to her, and she was lowered into it. The husband stood behind her so she would not see his face contorted in agony, a silent scream of No! followed by tears and the quake of crying with no sound.

On the other side of the room, Riker, a veteran of many scenes like this one, kept his voice low when he spoke to Charles. “There’s no good way to tell the parents, but I like to think that quick is better. Less torture.”

Dr. Magritte stood apart from the parents and was wisely quiet. It would be a while before these two people were ready for grief counseling. Closure was a term dreamed up by fools. Today the parents’ pain would begin in earnest, and their imaginings would send them reeling.

Charles turned to the tall brunette beside him, finding this FBI agent less forbidding as he detected in her eyes a profound sympathy.

“They can’t go home again, can they?”

“No,” said Agent Nahlman. “There’s an escort car on the way. They’ll be taken to a safe house till this is over.”

“Rather extreme,” said Charles. Suspicions were contagious things, and he had picked this one up from Riker: What if Gerald Linden was not the only adult victim? “So you believe there’s a real threat to the parents, a permanent change in victim profile.”

There would be no response. He knew this when Agent Nahlman raised her chin, a sign of intractable tenacity. She silently recomposed herself, losing that sad, soft quality of the eyes-unreadable now.

Riker leaned toward her. “You guys should get the rest of the parents off this road.” The detective might as well be addressing the stone building that housed a giant federal bureaucracy. The FBI agent only stared straight ahead, deaf to this good advice. Riker edged closer to the woman, saying, “But hey, Nahlman, it’s only life and death, right?”

That got the field agent’s attention. She turned to the detective and gave him an almost imperceptible nod, the single giveaway that her opinion of FBI command decisions was only marginally better than his. But she would follow her orders, and that was made clear as the good soldier walked in lockstep with her partner, following Dr. Magritte’s lead as the old man guided the parents out of the room.

The sheriff sat down at the table, and his head lolled back, so tired, as if he had run a marathon this morning. “I’ll tell you what I got from Dr. Magritte. Their little girl was never an FBI case-not till long after she turned up dead. Right after the kid disappeared, the feds told her mom and dad that she didn’t meet their criteria. Can you imagine that? Their kid just didn’t make the cut. No agents ever helped with that case.” He turned to the window on the sidewalk, where an official car had arrived to take those wounded people away. “I told them to hire a lawyer to deal with the feds. Then they might get the child’s body returned for a proper burial.” He looked away from the sad little scene being played out on the sidewalk, the crying man, the destroyed woman, who were being folded into the back seat of a car like felons. “I talked to a few more folks while I was out at the campsite this morning. There’s one man who joined the caravan yesterday in Illinois. California plates. He’s been driving Route 66 from the other direction. Suppose I told you this guy might be seriously crazy?”

“That might describe all of the parents to some degree.” Charles was thinking of the one who traveled with a wolf. He took that for a recent relationship, for he had not detected any bond between the man and his- pet. “Grief can work odd changes on people.”

“This one’s a corker,” said the sheriff. “All he wants to talk about is patterns. He can’t follow a conversation that doesn’t have compass points or map sites. Those two FBI agents just blew him off. Well, crazy or not, he might be worth talking to.” He nodded to the deputy standing in the doorway. “Bring in Mr. Kayhill.”

Ray Adler had assured Peyton’s d aughter that the roll bar would be done real quick, and that was true enough. However, in New York time, two days was too damn slow. She stood at the center of the garage, stunned to find her car in pieces.

When she turned on one heel and left for the house, he walked behind her to cross the yard and explain to her back, “Now if my boys were just real fine mechanics, a job like that would take two weeks. A roll bar’s no good unless you marry it up with the frame. But these guys are damn artists-I’m talkin’ real talent here. So, you can see why two days is fast for a roll bar. There’s not another shop in the country that can do it faster- not if you want it done right.”

He followed the girl through the back door of his house. More than three hours had passed since he had last seen his kitchen, and now he opened his eyes wide to bulging with a bad case of surprise, believing for a moment that he suffered from early onset of Alzheimer’s-that he must have wandered into some stranger’s house. T r uly, the first word to pop into his head was insane, and this was followed by flat-out crazy.

Kathy Mallory was standing by the table, her angry eyes cast down as she strung the loops of freshly laundered curtains on a rod. And he could not help but notice that the material was six shades brighter. While she turned her back on him to hang the curtain rod over the window, he looked around the room.

How had she done this in half a morning?

He had forgotten the pattern beneath the dirt on the linoleum, and now the checks of many colors shone through a new wax shine. The mountain of dirty laundry was gone, and the dryer was spinning with a load of wash. His old wooden table had been scrubbed raw, and every last splatter and ring, each memory of past meals was gone. Even the faucet gleamed with maniacal cleaning. Ray guessed that this was payback for her roll bar; he had refused to do money with her. But oh my, this kitchen was insanely tidy.

He sat down at the table and watched her run a rag over a cupboard door handle that could not get any cleaner unless she stripped off the chrome. “Girl, you’re a damn cleaning machine. How is it that you’re not married yet?”

“Never crossed my mind,” she said, setting two cups and saucers on the table.

“But don’t you want kids?”

“No.” Next she brought him a strange coffeepot without a single fingerprint on it.

“Damn,” he said with a bit of wonder. She filled his cup with a brew that smelled better than any he had had since the death of his wife, and he was late to wonder if this might have anything to do with cleaning the pot. When the girl sat down with him, he had to ask, “Why don’t you want kids?”

She gave this a moment of thought before saying, “I don’t know what they’re for.”

The two FBI agents had returned to the sheriff ’s c o nference room. They stood near the door, perhaps as a reminder that they should be leaving soon, and they planned to take the interview subject with them. Nahlman made a point of staring at her watch.

Charles Butler sat at the long table beside Mr. Kayhill, a member of the caravan, who was also known as the Pattern Man. Kayhill was well below average height, not more than a few inches over five feet, and his physical appearance was best described as a distracted pale white pear with black-rimmed eyeglasses. The little man was also rather clumsy, and this he apologized for while mopping up the coffee spilled across his maps. The nervous disposition and clumsiness could be put down to a bad overdose of caffeine.

Horace Kayhill’s record time for driving Route 66, he was proud to say, was three days, fueled on little more than coffee and cola.

Riker’s j aw dropped in a sign of naked admiration. “Back in the sixties, I did it in four days, but I was driving drunk on tequila-the good kind with a worm in the bottle.”

Sheriff Banner allowed that, in his own teenage days, he had once driven Route 66. And he reckoned that he had done it “-under the influence of something, though I couldn’t s ay what.” He had no memory of the entire trip. This story was declared the winner.

Charles, who had never driven the famous road, looked down at the maps as Mr. Kayhill unfolded them and spread them on the table.

The Pattern Man had spent considerably more travel time on his latest expedition, thus accounting for being late to join up with the caravan at the edge of Illinois. He pointed to small crosses drawn to indicate gravesites. “I got some of these from the Internet groups.” And he had discovered others by making inquiries among people who lived along his route. “Now, this grave was found ten years ago. The locals say the remains were mummified. In other places, people told me the bodies were just skeletons-and one guy said the bones turned to dust when they took them out of the ground, but that was a shallow grave in a flood zone.” He reached across the table to run one finger along the desert area of a California map. “As you can see, these three graves are the same distance apart, roughly twenty miles. Now you might read that as a cluster pattern, but you’d be wrong.

I see it as a continuous line, thousands of miles long, at least a hundred graves.” He never saw the startled look on Agent Nahlman’s face when he said, “The FBI agents can back me up on that.”

Charles watched as Nahlman quickly folded her arms and looked up at the ceiling. She did not intend to back this man up on the time of day. Her partner, Agent Allen, pressed his lips in a thin tight line, determined to blow his teeth out rather than confirm or deny. The young man’s e yes were fixed on the California map and its little crosses, each one a grave.

“Tell them!” Kayhill stood up suddenly and glared at Agent Barry Allen.

“Easy now,” said Sheriff Banner, waving the little man back to his chair.

Kayhill was calmer now, even dignified when he said-when he insisted, “The FBI dug up the center grave.” He pointed to the first cross in a row of three. “Now this site here-this one was found by a highway construction crew twenty years ago.” His finger moved on to the last of three. “And this one was found nine years ago. They’re forty miles apart.” He looked up at Agent Allen. “So how could your people dig up that middle ground and find another grave if you didn’t see the larger pattern? You knew right where to dig.”

The two agents maintained their silence. Frustrated, Kayhill unfolded other maps, and these had arcs drawn over the crosses along the road. “I have other patterns. Would you like to know where these children came from?”

Nahlman moved closer to the table, saying, “No, I think we’ve seen enough, Mr. Kayhill. It’s getting late. Agent Allen and I will drive you back to the caravan.”

“No,” he said, edging his chair away from her. “I want to explain my data.”

“We should be leaving now,” said Nahlman, disguising the mild order as a request.

This prompted Riker to ask Horace Kayhill if he wanted another cup of coffee.

Charles picked up one of the maps. Some crosses were drawn in ink. He guessed that the ones done in pencil were projected gravesites, as yet undiscovered. “Isn’t t his a bit like geographic profiling?”

“Yes!” said the Pattern Man, suddenly elated that someone in this company could appreciate his work. “And it’s based on consistent spacing of gravesites. I’ve been able to pin down fourteen bodies dug up on this road, and that’s enough to project numbers for the entire group. Some of my data comes from websites for missing children.” He glanced at Agent Nahlman. “One of them is an FBI website.” Now he leaned toward Charles, who was clearly his favorite audience. “Think of Route 66 as the killer’s home base.”

Sheriff Banner handed a slip of paper to Riker. The detective nodded, then turned to the Pattern Man. “So, Horace, maybe our perp drives a mobile home.”

“Yes, of course!” Horace Kayhill glowed with goodwill for the detective. “That’s very good. So the killer actually lives on this road-the whole road.”

Charles shifted his chair closer to Riker’s at the head of the table, and now he could clearly read the paper in the detective’s hand. It was the vehicle registration for Mr. Kayhill’s mobile home.

The little man was exuberant, unfolding all of his maps to cover every inch of table space. “You see these half circles in green ink? The arcs represent the areas of day trips between abductions and graves. If he’s as smart as I think he is, then he takes the children from one state and buries them in the next one down the road. Of course, that’s based on the only two girls who were ever identified. Police searches for missing children are usually confined to a single state-unless the FBI becomes involved, but they so rarely bother with these children.”

Nahlman stiffened, then signaled her partner by sign language to make a phone call, and Agent Allen promptly left the room.

Riker called after him, “Horace likes his coffee with cream and lots of sugar.” The detective smiled at Nahlman. She looked at the floor.

And the Pattern Man continued. “Think of him as a shark.”

“A shark?” Nahlman drew closer to Kayhill’s c hair. “How did you come up with that analogy?”

This was not mere curiosity. Charles detected a more authoritarian note in her voice. She was slipping into the interrogation mode, though she forced a smile for Kayhill’s b e nefit, and the little man returned that smile, so happy that she was at last showing interest.

“A shark fits the pattern,” said Kayhill. “It has a vast territory, wide and long, and this creature is constantly in motion, always looking for prey.” One hand waved low over the spread maps. “These gravesites have no chronological order. So he goes back and forth over the road. And look here.” He pointed to long red lines that spanned one of his maps. “This is his outside territory. Now I admit that my data is limited for this particular pattern. Only one fresh corpse was ever found, and that girl was kidnapped within twenty-four hours of finding her grave. So I assume he won’t keep a child for more than a day. And he’ll always drive the lawful speed limit.”

Charles nodded. “The killer wouldn’t w ant to attract attention from the police.”

“Yes!” said the happy Pattern Man. “That’s how I fixed his geographical limits.”

“Good theory,” said Riker. “And a mobile home would cover his dig site. Hell, he could dig a grave anywhere on that road in broad daylight. All he’d have to do was let the air out of one tire and leave a jack propped up in plain sight. That would guarantee that no cop’s g o nna stop to give him a hand.” He studied the lines drawn on either side of the map. “So how big is our shark’s t e rritory?”

“Well, I’ve drawn lines to include an area six hundred miles wide, two thousand and four hundred miles long. Amazing, isn’t it?” He reached under one of his maps and pulled out a small notebook. “These are more specific calculations on gravesites that haven’t been found yet. I used the distance between known graves, then made allowances for populated areas and inaccessible places. There’s one segment in Illinois where Route 66 dead-ends into a lake.” He handed the notebook to Riker. “It’s yours. I think you’ll find it helpful.”

“You got that right.” Riker accepted this gift with a rather disingenuous smile. He lit a cigarette and slumped low in his chair, so relaxed- almost harmless. “Now what about you, Horace? Did you lose a kid?”

“Oh, no. I’ve never even been married.”

“You don’t s ay,” said Riker. “So what do you do?”

“My interest is mainly statistics, patterns and such, and-of course- Route 66. I know every website for that road. That’s how I found two of Dr. Magritte’s people. I met them in a Route 66 chatroom. Other parents, too. They were coming together with common statistics, stories of murdered children recovered along the old road.”

Riker exhaled a cloud of smoke and watched it curl upward. “And what do you do for a living, Horace? You didn’t s ay.”

“I’m a statistician.”

“Of course,” said the smiling detective. “What was I thinking?”

A deputy entered the room and laid down a sheet of paper in front of her boss. After a glance, the sheriff handed it to Riker, and Charles read over his friend’s shoulder. It was a background check on Horace Kayhill, and it fit all the expectations for a man with his disorder. He was on full disability, unemployed and unemployable. Though the sheet of rough data did not include the nature of his disability, Charles already knew. The man was an obsessive compulsive, which neatly explained all the layers of patterns, one chaining into the other.

Riker studied the map of Missouri, which included sections of neighboring states. One of the penciled crosses was twenty miles from here. The next one was in Kansas. The detective planted one finger on this penciled-in cross for the small Kansas segment of Route 66.

And now Sheriff Banner was also staring at the map, saying, “That’s where they found that teenager with the missing hand, but she wasn’t in the ground. They found her body laid out on the road-maybe a day after she was killed.”

“A teenager? Well, that’s wrong,” said Mr. Kayhill. “And an unburied corpse won’t fit the pattern. The pattern is everything. There’s a child’s body buried there. You simply haven’t found it yet.” He leaned toward Riker and tapped his gift, the notebook in the detective’s hand. “But you’ll find it. You’ll find them all.”

Ray Adler handed Mallory the keys to his pickup truck so she could finish the Kansas leg of Route 66. “It’s just a little bitty corner of the state,” he said. “Shouldn’t t ake more than fifteen minutes from Galena to Baxter Springs. It only takes a little longer if you have to get out and push the truck.”

She rejoined the old road and returned to Galena, where people on the street waved to her, blind to the driver, seeing only the neon-green truck with the fabulous prefabricated front end of a giant, vintage Jaguar, replete with a silver-cat hood ornament. After a few minutes, she slowed down for a look at the old arch bridge, another landmark from the letters, but all of the graffiti had been painted over, and the structure served no function anymore; traffic crossed a new bridge built alongside it.

That took a minute more of her time.

Mallory followed the road around the inside corner that squared off the Kansas segment. She stopped by a baseball field, but this was no landmark of old. The small stadium had the clean red-and-white look of newly laid bricks and fresh mortar. So Peyton Hale’s old ballfield in Illinois had vanished, a new one had appeared here in Kansas-and another minute of her life had been lost.

What caught her attention next, and held it, was the digging equipment down the road. She rolled on, moving slowly, wanting to attract attention- and she did. She cut the engine a few yards away from a utility truck and an unmarked van. The vehicles partially obscured the dig site, and a plastic curtain had been raised to hide most of the hole. The workmen were gathering at the edge of the road and taking an equal interest in Mallory. And so they stared at one another until a police cruiser pulled up behind her. She knew the diggers had called local cops to drive her off.

An officer approached the window of the pickup truck, saying that old standard line, “Driver’s license and registration, please.”

Mallory ignored this request and leaned out the window to ask, “Is this where they found the body of Ariel Finn? It was about a year ago. The teenager with a missing hand?”

Predictably, the officer rolled up his eyes, taking her for a crime-scene tourist. He would have dealt with quite a few of them a year ago when the mutilated teenager had made the news in this state. And now he would designate her as ghoulish but harmless. His next words were also predictable. “Miss, forget the license and registration, okay? But I have to ask you to move along now.”

“Fine,” she said, satisfied that Dale Berman would never know she had been here. “Just tell me where I can find your boss.”

Te n minutes later, she pulled up to the curb in front of a police station, where an old man with a badge and blue jeans was sitting on a sidewalk bench. His face was lifted to the sky and washed in sunlight. Smoke from his cigar curled in the air as he turned her way and a smile crossed his face. The man stepped up to her window, grinning, saying, “I suppose you killed ol’ Ray. No way he’d let you drive this truck unless you drove it right over his body.”

She was opening her wallet to show him her badge and ID. He waved this away. “No need to see your driver’s license, miss. Any friend of Ray’s is a friend of mine, even if you did kill him.”

When they had exchanged names and she had tacked the word “detective” onto hers, he guided her to the bench, arguing that it was too nice a day to conduct any business indoors. He asked if a little cigar smoke would bother her. No, it would not. Lou Markowitz had loved his pipes, and she had grown up with the smell of smoke. Sometimes she missed it. She had forgotten to ask Ray Adler if her real father had been a smoker, and suddenly this seemed more important than the latest grave by the side of the road. She closed her hand to push her long red fingernails into the skin. Pain. Focus. She knew there was a reason for finding two bodies-one year apart-in the same location. A moment ago, it had been clear in her mind.

Get a grip.

She loosened her fist before the fingernails could draw blood, a telltale sign that she was not in complete control of herself.

Two bodies in the same location-one found on the road and one in the ground.

Yes, she had it now. The lawman beside her knew better than to give this information away-even to another cop. She would have to guess right the first time.

Riker assured Horace Kayhill that the caravan would not leave without him. “They’ll be getting off to a late start.”

Agent Nahlman glanced at her watch. “It’s twelve noon. They’ll be at the campsite for another hour.”

“But we’ll get to Kansas before-”

“No, Mr. Kayhill,” said Nahlman. “We’re taking a different route. The caravan will bypass Kansas. My partner and I will be leading all of you into Oklahoma on the interstate highway. Now if you’ll just come with us?”

Riker and Charles stood on the sidewalk outside of the sheriff ‘s o ffice, watching Kayhill drive off with the FBI agents. And now, finally, they had some privacy, and the time was right. The detective turned to his friend. “So you proposed to Mallory.” He splayed his hands, only a little frustrated with the other man’s s ilence. “And that’s it ?”

Charles nodded and stared at his shoes, clearly embarrassed. Evidently, one day this poor man had snapped, cracked and blown his cover as an old friend of the family; he had dared to propose to Mallory, who liked him well enough, but treated him more like the family pet.

And, of course, Charles had been turned down, but that was for the best in Riker’s o pinion. The detective had always believed that this man would be happier with someone from planet Earth, a nice, normal woman who did not collect guns. And this prospective wife should want children. Charles would make a wonderful father, and Riker could easily see a brood of eagle-beaked, bug-eyed kids in this man’s future. But he could not believe in a world with more than one version of Mallory; a gang of little blond clones with her green eyes and inclinations was too great a risk; he could not even be certain that she would remember to feed them.

Riker had lost the heart for this interrogation. Turning to the road and the departing car, he changed the subject. “So tell me what you think of the little guy.”

“Kayhill? Obsessive compulsive.” Charles was suddenly cheerful again- now that the inquisition was clearly over. “Obviously good cognitive reasoning. But he can’t sustain eye contact for more than a few seconds. That might indicate mild autism-that and the maps. He’s so totally absorbed in his patterns.”

“Some of them seem a little far-fetched,” said Riker, “but we’ll know more in another few minutes. The sheriff ‘s o n the phone to Kansas.”

Mallory’s knapsack rested on her lap. She sat in a wooden chair beside the police chief’s desk. They had taken their conversation indoors so he could check out her reference on the telephone. The chief carried on a guarded conversation with Sheriff Banner, answering most questions with one word. Reassured now, he became more chatty with the Missouri man. “Oh, sure I remember… Yeah, how long ago was that?… No, we identified the girl… No, that’s what we thought at first. Turns out she was a few years younger than we figured-just sixteen… W ell, we landed a flyer in her hometown… Ariel Finn was her name… You don’t s ay. Well, I assumed he identified his daughter. We shipped the body back there.”

Eavesdropper Mallory wondered why Joe Finn would be traveling with the parents of missing children when his child had been found. Denial was the easy answer. She could see him staring down at the dead body, refusing to believe that it could be his daughter. A corpse was nothing like a sleeping child. Only hours after death, the features would subtly change, eyes clouding and retracting into their sockets, the skin losing its bloom.

Some parents used each alteration as a rationale for denying their own children.

There was another possibility that Mallory liked better: Joe Finn might be planning to meet his daughter’s killer on the road and take some satisfaction in a murder of his own.

When the police chief hung up the phone, Mallory said, “You didn’t t e ll Sheriff Banner about the feds digging up the ground just down the road.”

“Feds? No, that’s just a crew fixing a busted underground cable.” He sounded only mildly sarcastic when he added, “And I’m sure you saw the electric company’s name on the side of their van.” His crinkled eyes and a smile echoed her own thought: Yeah, right.

And now it was her turn to be sarcastic. “And you never told the sheriff about the bones that were found in place of Ariel Finn’s missing hand.”

He only stared at Mallory, saying nothing, no doubt reassessing her. “Either you’re a really good cop, or the feds told you way more than they told that Missouri sheriff.” He seemed to be giving this puzzle some thought as he lit another cigar. “If you’d come by yesterday, I wouldn’t have had any idea what you were talking about. A year ago, Ariel Finn’s body was found by two kids on their way to school. One of them has a very suspicious mother. Yesterday afternoon, she ransacked his room, thought he was doing drugs. And he was only eleven on his last birthday. Don’t you wonder what the world’s coming to? Well, imagine how surprised the mother was to find an old cigar box with bones in it.” He stopped here, waiting for Mallory to add something of her own.

She knew just the right words. “Tiny bones-from the hand of a child-not the teenager you found on the road.”

He nodded. “Only half of them were in that cigar box. You see, both of the boys wanted souvenirs. Damn kids. The other boy had the rest of the bones, but he’d thrown his half away a long time ago. Said it gave him bad dreams. I expect he still has nightmares about that girl’s mutilated body. So that boy’s half went out in the garbage with the family chicken bones.” And now he made it clear that it was Mallory’s t u rn.

She never missed a beat. “When the boys found the bones of the hand laid out in the road, which way was it pointing-was it toward the latest grave?”

He smiled to tell her she had gotten it right. “Off the road a bit, I found a pile of rocks just a little too neat to be natural, and there was a hollow in the ground, the way grave dirt settles after a burial. I didn’t have to dig very deep before the shovel hit the skull-a very small skull.”

Each fact dropped into its logical slot, and, though Ariel Finn had died a year ago, Mallory still believed that it was the killer’s recent decision to turn from children to older victims. “Back when you found the other body, the teenage girl, I understand you had a problem pinning down her age. You told the Missouri sheriff she was a teenager or a young woman. So I’m guessing Ariel was tall for sixteen and well developed.”

The chief nodded. “Her death doesn’t fit too well with a child killer, does it?”

“No, I think he screwed up somehow. Something went wrong. He probably killed Ariel because she could identify him.”

And this had also been the chief ’s t heory, for he was nodding as she spoke, and now he said, “So-not one to waste a corpse, this sick bastard used Ariel’s body to call attention to the real work-killing a little kid. And he screwed that up, too.” He leaned forward. “Should I be looking for any more bodies in my neighborhood?”

“I don’t know.” She reached for a piece of paper and a pencil. “But I’m sure you’ve already been over every road around here. You looked for signs of another grave and came up dry.” After printing out a telephone number, she pushed the paper back across the desk. “Call this detective in Chicago. Kronewald knows where lots of little bodies were buried. I think he’d like to hear from you.”

“Little bodies ? A serial killer with a preference for kids. So, I’m right. Ariel wasn’t meant to die that day.” He rolled his chair over to an open filing cabinet, then pulled out a manila folder and tossed it on the desk. “That’s Ariel’s autopsy report. I’ll make you a copy-pictures, too, if you like. That poor girl was stabbed fifty times. Half those wounds were inflicted after she was dead, but that still leaves time for a lot of cold terror. Can you even imagine what went through that girl’s mind while she was bleeding to death?… And it was all a mistake.”

Yes, a mistake. The humming child-crazy little Dodie Finn-had been the intended target. The older sister had simply gotten in the way.

One by one, she examined the many autopsy photographs and counted up the defensive wounds on the hands and the arms. Not a quick kill. Mallory had difficulty achieving pity and seldom tried-what use was it to her? And so it was with something closer to approval that she imagined a teenage girl-terrified and all alone in her battle with a serial killer- fighting to protect her little sister and giving that child a chance to run, to live.

Fierce Ariel.