Find Me

14

The campsite was near an abandoned gas station, and one toilet had been promised to be in working condition. However, the owner had not inspected his property in years, and now he renegotiated the amount of money agreed upon one month ago when the trip was first planned. Today’s price, the owner said, was “Not one red cent, and God bless you all.”

This time, the news media had the affair catered with microwave ovens emitting the smell of reheated pizza to lure the campers and federal agents into the interview zone. But best of all, the most enterprising network crew was unloading Port-O-Potties from a flatbed truck-even better bait that neatly solved the problem of the dysfunctional toilet. As each plastic closet was set upon the ground, a waiting line of parents quickly formed in front of it.

A field reporter stood before a stationary camera, preparing to say his new opening line one more time. Yesterday, he had reported from the Road of Lost Children, but today he said, “This is John Peechem reporting from the Road of Graves.” A cameraman pointed out that he was smiling when he said it that time, too. They did a retake with a more somber expression. And then the lens panned a group of young men and women with the letters FBI emblazoned on their jackets. “This hasn’t been confirmed yet,” the reporter said to his microphone, “but the agents might be looking for body parts.”

A less expensive handheld camera pointed at the caravan’s only children. Brother and sister stood hand in hand, awaiting their turn at one of the big green closets. Standing behind them, their father carried a roll of toilet paper, tearing off sheets and handing them to Peter and Dodie. A reporter was approaching this trio, fair game in the Port-O-Potty zone, when the little boy put up one hand to ward the woman off, saying, “I bite reporters.”

End of interview.

Dodie rocked on her heels and toes, and then she hummed. Louder now. Her father picked her up in his arms and never noticed that his child was pointing to the ground and the shadow of another man.

Click.

Mallory sat in a folding chair near a car that was not her own, fingers flying across the keyboard of a laptop computer that was not hers, either. Christine Nahlman sat down on a neighboring campstool, not offering any conversation, only keeping quiet company with the detective as she watched some of the younger agents search the caravan vehicles. Others were invading tents.

“It’s a waste of time,” said Mallory, never taking her eyes from the laptop. “The perp doesn’t t ravel around with little hand bones. He digs them up along the way.”

“Well, he’s got one hand that we can match up with a fresh corpse.”

“Not anymore. He’s got no use for it.” Mallory looked up at the search in progress. “That’s just Berman’s idea of busywork, a show for the reporters.” She turned her eyes back to the glowing screen in her lap. In sidelong vision, she saw the FBI agent stiffen, and then lean far forward.

There was incredulity in Nahlman’s voice when she finally said, “That’s my laptop.”

Mallory nodded as she scanned a state map of graves. “I liked the early pattern you developed in Illinois. It was a good start.”

“That’s my computer.”

“Well, you left it on the seat of your car.”

“My locked car.”

Mallory waved one hand to say that these little distinctions were un- important. “Geographic profiling won’t predict a kill site-not in this case. When he kills a parent, it’s a crime of opportunity.”

“You broke into my car, stole my laptop-government property.”

“I’m the criminal?” Mallory was not good at mock innocence. “Y o u used a little girl to bait a serial killer.” Ah, bombshell. Annihilation was her forte. The agent looked as if she had been kicked in the gut.

“That was never the plan,” said Nahlman when she found her voice again.

“Back in Oklahoma, you knew what was going to happen before the boxer decked your boss. I saw you arguing with Dale Berman-but you didn’t s t o p him.”

“I’m just one agent, not even the-”

“You let him draw a target on Dodie Finn.” Mallory leaned close to the woman, the better to cut out her heart. “Fr agile, isn’t s he? I found the psych evaluations-Dodie’s FBI file. Federal agents interrogated a little girl who belonged in a hospital. They wouldn’t even let her father visit. And why? Because they knew she’d tell them anything-anything -if they would only let her go home. But Dodie had nothing to give them. Dodie is crazy.”

And now-a little fear.

Mallory only glanced at the lineup of reporters out by the road. “I promised them an interview for the six-o’clock news,” she lied, and then opened her pocket watch, though she knew the time to the hour and the minute. “It’s almost showtime.” The implied threat of ugly disclosure hung in the air between the two women.

“Dale Berman personally guaranteed Dodie’s safety,” said Nahlman. “Two agents on her all the time. That’s why I-”

“He lied. He does that a lot. Berman wanted a serial killer-a kid killer-to believe that Dodie could give up something important. Well, she can’t.” Mallory stared at the screen for a few moments of silence, her best imitation of self-righteous indignation. “Better to sacrifice Dodie than Paul Magritte, right? You’d never risk any damage to your best witness-even though the old man’s got it coming.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why does your boss run sloppy background checks? I’m not going to do his job for him. And one more thing. I’ve seen the FBI files-all of them. You never got any credit for your work. The forensic techs who do your grave digging-they think old Dale’s got a crystal ball.” Mallory scrolled through the maps and data. “No one but your boss has ever seen this material.”

“You do a poor imitation of Agent Berman. That’s his style,” said Nahlman, “pitting people against each other. And he does it better.”

“You think I care about your little relationship problems?” Mallory touched the eject button on the agent’s laptop computer, and a disk came sliding out. She held it beyond Nahlman’s reach, saying, “I only came to steal.”

So inattentive were his watchers that Dr. Paul Magritte never feared being missed, though he had driven fifty miles from the campsite to find solitude in this church. Rice grains crunched underfoot as he climbed the short flight of stone stairs. The large wooden doors were unlocked, but, upon entering, he sensed that no one, not even the priest, had remained after the ceremony. A large vase of white blooms graced the altar, and some flower girl had strewn the aisle with rose petals. He pictured a small child in this task, taking slow toddler steps toward the great stained-glass window in advance of the bridal procession. He hoped that this union would be fruitful. If the earth could not restore the lost children, it would at least be replenished.

The psychologist dropped his jacket and his nylon sack on the seat of the first pew. The lightest of burdens were troublesome to an old man with arthritis in every joint, and yet he had come here in search of fresh agony. After climbing three steps to the altar, he lit all the candles and stepped back. Eschewing any comfort of a padded riser, he knelt on the stone floor. This caused great pain to his knees, and he called it atonement.

Mary Egram had been the first to die. It must always begin with the loss of Mary.

The ruby glass beads of his rosary played across his fingers. Each time he performed this ritual, it called up an image of the old Egram house back in Illinois. All those years ago, it had seemed always on the verge of pitching into the front yard. He recalled the interior of the home with the same tension, every wall leaning, and he remembered waiting, moment to moment, for the ceiling to come crashing down.

Next, with hands clasped tightly in prayer, he conjured up the floral patterns of worn upholstery and threadbare scatter rugs. A large television set was the only luxury item, and this would have been chosen by the man of the family, no doubt an avid football fan. In mind’s eye, Mr. Egram was seated on the couch and staring at his blank TV screen, feet tapping the floor, measuring time and willing this visit to pass more quickly.

Paul Magritte had played this home movie in his head a thousand times so that he would not forget one detail, not one tap of the other man’s foot. Memory also recounted exactly twelve votive candles encircling the photograph of Mary, fair-haired and only five years old. The lost child’s shrine had pride of place atop the television set, and this had surely been the mother’s work. The parents had been abandoned and their loss forgotten by the media. However, Mrs. Egram had been determined that her husband would never forget, not even for the respite of a ballgame on a Sunday afternoon.

Small plaster saints had abounded in the Egrams’ front room. The religious theme had also played out in the dining area and the hallway. Mary Egram’s mother had apparently bought out the entire stock of a church gift shop. But that was to be expected, for the woman was a lapsed Catholic who had lately returned to the faith in zealot fashion.

And the father of the missing child? Not a great fan of the Lord.

Sarah Egram had sought to explain her husband’s aloofness with the information that he was from Methodist stock. The Protestant truck driver had borne a look of grim tolerance for his wife, who constantly fretted her rosary beads and moved her mouth in silence, seeking help in magical incantations. Her eyes had sometimes strayed to the window, perchance to see if her prayers had worked. Or maybe she had been keeping watch over the child in the yard-the surviving child.

That had been Paul Magritte’s second thought on that long-ago afternoon.

His eyes snapped open. Perhaps it was the pain in his knees that had called him out of reverie and back to the cold stone floor of this Texas sanctuary. No, he had sensed something-someone. And now the flames of the altar candles flickered and bowed, as if swayed by a body in motion and very close to him. How fragile was he-that a current of air in a drafty old church should have the power to stop his breath-his heart. He feared it still, but never looked behind him, never turned his head. Instead he closed his eyes again, to see the mistakes of his distant past. He escaped into his re-creation of a shabby front room in another time, another place.

Once more, he pictured Mr. Egram seated on the couch beside his wife, reaching out to her with one large hand and gently covering her fingers and beads to end the incessant rattle and movement. The woman’s mouth also ceased to move. Out in the yard, their child was approaching the house, and then the ten-year-old stopped halfway up the flagstone path and stood motionless, possibly taking a cue from the mother.

That afternoon, Paul Magritte had waited out the uncomfortable silence, looking about the room and noting the lighter wallpaper that had marked the old outlines of other picture frames, their places usurped by portraits of the Madonna and a court of saints. And, as if a houseful of religious paraphernalia were not imposition enough, poor Methodist Mr. Egram now had a stranger settled into his favorite chair, for his wife had insisted that their visitor must take the most comfortable seat in the house, the one facing the television set.

Their older child had crept up to the front window. Face pressed hard against the glass, the small features were smeared and made monstrous. One eye bulged and one was lost within deep folds of squeezed flesh.

This little horror show had hardly ruffled Paul Magritte that day. He had seen it as a ploy to gain attention, the normal behavior of a child with emotionally distant parents. Despite a missing sibling, the youngster was well adjusted; a psychological evaluation had been done while Social Services still had custody of this ten-year-old-and while the police had been investigating the parents, suspecting them in the disappearance of their little girl.

That day, only the mother’s behavior had shocked Dr. Magritte. He had wondered how she could have been averse to his wonderful plan to take her surviving child away from her. Fool that he was in those days, he had assumed that she had been unable to fully grasp it all. “You understand,” he had said to her then, “this won’t put a financial burden on your family. The surgeon, the hospital and staff-they’re donating their services.”

For the second time, she had said no to him. “It wouldn’t be right.” And then, Sarah Egram had elaborated. “You can’t make everything all normal that way. Nobody will ever see it coming.”

It.

This was how she had referred to her disfigured child.

Memory dissipated like mist, and Paul Magritte’s eyes were jolted wide open. The altar flames did not waver now, but he heard a noise behind him, and what was it? A baby rattle? No, and it was not a rosary, either. The rattle of little bones? Lessons of Sarah Egram: He would not see it coming. The old man had never known such fear, and he could not move; he could not turn around even to save his life. But he could close his eyes-not to pray, but to carry him away from here, back in time to the Egram house, eyes shut tight.

And now he could see that small misshapen face pressed to the pane of the front window, one eye focused on the mother-center of a child’s universe. But Mrs. Egram had been looking elsewhere, and some interior vision had made her tremble. That day Paul Magritte had believed that the poor woman was imagining the fate of her missing five-year-old. Or perhaps the prospect of separation from the older child had unhinged her and made her nonsensical.

“We’d be gone no more than four weeks.” That very day, Paul Magritte had planned to personally escort the youngster to Chicago-if the mother would only listen to reason. “This would be the first in a number of operations. Some procedures are best done during the formative years. Later, when the bones are fully matured-”

“You don’t understand,” the woman had said to him in the slow, mother tones reserved for speaking to young children. “This is not right-not God’s will.”

The truck driver, roused from lethargy, had nearly smiled. “You say it’ll take four weeks? That’s fine with me.” The man had reached out and snatched the consent forms. Sarah Egram had slumped forward, her eyes downcast, while her husband searched his pockets for something to write with. A pen was found. Defeated, the woman had risen from the couch and left the room.

Pen to paper, the trucker had asked, “One signature? That’s enough?”

“It’ll do.” Magritte’s eyes had been focused on Sarah’s retreating back. “Your wife needs help.”

“I know what she needs.” And these had been the truck driver’s last words to him.

A metallic sound called Paul Magritte back to the real and solid environs of a Texas church, where he worked his own rosary and incantations, whispering the magic words, not asking forgiveness or relief from pain; he only wanted to stave off his growing fear. He was not alone in this place, and escape was not possible anymore, not by any door in the present or in his past. His skin prickled. He held his breath.

Which one would it be?

“Who are you praying for, old man?”

“For you.” This was a true thing, and he said it with awe. His movements were slow and full of pain as he rose to his feet and turned to face Detective Mallory with a smile of thank God. It was the first time any prayer of his had been answered, and his new name for this young woman was Deliverance. With another sort of smile, a foolish one, he looked down at the rosary in his hands, saying, “Candles, hocus-pocus and magic beads. This must fit your idea of the average witch doctor.”

“Oh, but you’re more than that, Dr. Magritte.” She sat in the first pew, arms folded against him and daring him to tell a lie. “Did they throw you out of the priesthood? Or was it your idea to leave?”

Mallory’s leather knapsack sat on the floor at her feet. His own sack of light nylon rested on her lap. The zipper was undone, and that must have been the noise that had frightened him so.

“You look worried, Magritte. You shouldn’t be. I don’t have a warrant.” Mallory reached inside his sack and pulled out an ancient revolver. “So I can’t seize this. FBI agents are searching all the cars.” She held up the gun. “I don’t think this is what they’re looking for… so that’s not why you’re hiding out in this church.”

“That was my grandfather’s revolver,” said Paul Magritte. “My inheritance if you like. It’s all he left behind. That’s why I kept it.” Oh, fool, he was making a liar’s worst mistake-overanxious to explain in detail, and now he found that he could not stop himself. “I’m afraid I never took proper care of the gun. Rusty, isn’t it? I very much doubt that it would work. Just as well. It’s not loaded. I wouldn’t even know how to load it.”

Mallory hefted the weight of the weapon, and then examined it more closely. “A twenty-two.” This was said with mild derision. And now she held up a small blue pouch that was also his property. “And this? Another souvenir? It wasn’t very smart to keep it.” She emptied the contents of the pouch into her palm, then closed her fist on the tiny bones of a child’s hand.

Struck dumb, he could only stare at her.

“I’ve got a few possibilities here,” said Mallory. “Did you murder all those little girls?” The detective dangled the little blue pouch. “Or did somebody plant this for the feds to find?”

She had actually provided him with a possible way out. Or was it the way into another trap? In the stillness of the church, he could hear the little bones rattle as she slipped them back into the blue velvet pouch.

“Oh, wait,” said Mallory. “I’ve got one more theory. Did this little bag of bones come in the mail with a note? Something like-oh, how does it go?” She produced a slip of paper yellowed with age-another theft from his knapsack, and she read the words, “ ‘Father, forgive me for I have sinned.’ ” The detective rose to her feet, holding his gun in her right hand, the blue pouch in her left, and she seemed to be weighing them, one against the other, but her eyes were fixed upon him. He imagined another sort of creature might look at its next meal this way, while the prey still breathed and writhed under one clawed paw.

“You could help me find him,” she said. “But that’s not going to happen, is it?”

He shook his head.

“The law won’t protect you, Magritte. You’re not a priest anymore.” She waved the yellow paper like a small flag. “And this note wasn’t written inside a confessional.”

He kept his silence.

“Thank you,” said Mallory. “So now I know you’ve got a long history with this freak.” She looked down at the old note and its words of confession, then slipped the small piece of paper into the pouch with the bones. “When the feds see this, they’ll take you away. Who’s going look after your parish on wheels?”

You will.

He had such great faith in Detective Mallory even as she planned to bring him down.

“It’s too bad Special Agent Berman never saw you as a suspect,” she said. “He might’ve run a better background check. Now me-I suspect everybody. When you were with the Church, I know you treated other priests. Does that narrow down my list? Am I looking for an ex-priest like you?”

He finally understood the intensity of her eyes as she stared at his face: she was looking there for tells and tics and other signs of truth or lies.

“Don’t s mile at me, Magritte.”

He had not meant to do that. “I’m so sorry.” He held up his hands in supplication to tell her that he was helpless, as if she did not already know that-on several levels. And now she seemed to tire of playing with him.

Oh, no-not quite yet.

She raised his grandfather’s rusty old gun, aimed at the altar and fired. The air exploded. The vase shattered, water splattered, flower stalks went flying, and-in a special little moment of horror-he fancied that he could hear torn petals softly falling on the stone floor. And then the silence was absolute. All his bones were shaking, legs failing him. He sank to his knees-alone again.

Mallory was gone.

Agent Christine Nahlman was waiting beside the open door as Mallory left the church.

The detective handed her the blue pouch of bones and Magritte’s nylon sack. “Satisfied? Now feed him to Dale Berman. They deserve each other.”

“Wait,” said Nahlman, but Mallory waited for no one, and now the agent followed her down the church stairs, saying, “You know the old man’s not guilty.”

“Yes, he is.” The detective paused on the bottom step and turned around. “He’s holding out on me. So arrest him and charge him with obstruction. Keep him in custody till this case is wrapped.” Mallory snatched the pouch from the agent’s hand and removed the confessor’s note. “There,” she said, handing back the pouch with only the bones inside. “That should make it easier to hold Magritte for a while. Now you can nail him as a murder suspect. He’ll never make bail.”

“Mallory, I can’t-”

“You can’t do anything, can you? If the feds had only cooperated with the Illinois cops, this case would’ve been wrapped by now. Kronewald’s a good detective. But your boss is just a jacked-up PR man-worthless out in the field. And what’s your problem, Nahlman? Are you just too damn polite to stomp Dale Berman into the ground?”

“I was assigned to work on-”

“Don’t feed me any lines about following orders. I robbed your laptop, remember? I read your personal case notes. One of the Illinois graves was deeper than all the rest-very deep. You knew that one had to be his first kill. Kid stuff. He was so afraid of getting caught-he couldn’t bury that little girl deep enough. So you know the perp started young-when he lived near that road. With Kronewald’s help, you would’ve had a name for him by now. Fledgling killers have comfort zones-close to home. He was still murdering kids when he moved away from Route 66. And then, when he was old enough to drive, he went back there and replanted those kills on that road. And that’s why you found two different types of soil in some of the Illinois graves-the shallow ones.”

“You gave all of this to Kronewald?”

“You know I did. He’s working the data now. All the missing little girls from Illinois won’t be in a federal database. The FBI just can’t be bothered with every lost kid. But Kronewald’s got access to all of them, decades of missing little girls. Feeling the pressure now, Nahlman? Maybe it’s time for you to take charge of this mess.”

“Mallory, do you know what I see when I look past Dale Berman to the next link in the chain of command?”

“Another incompetent bureaucrat. And you wonder why cops hate feds. Ta k e over. At least, get rid of Berman.”

“What do you expect me to do-shoot him?”

“It’s a start.”

Riker hunkered next to the bedroll of Darwinia Sohlo, alias Miriam Rainard. What passed for her tent was an old canvas tarp anchored to the door handle of her ten-year-old car. The detective took over the chore of making a fire to keep her warm. The wood and the kindling twigs were damp, and the woman was in tears, saying, “It’s no use. No fire tonight.”

“Just you wait.” He held up a road flare he had found in the trunk of the car. “You can set fire to water with one of these.” He torched the kindling.

The fire burned bright. The woman smiled.

“I’ve got some bad news,” he said.

One hand flew up to her mouth. “My daughter?”

“Oh, no. I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s not about your kid.” He settled one more log on the fire. “I was watching the TV coverage. I know you always hide from the cameramen, but one of those bastards got you on film. Your face made national news tonight. If your husband was watching that-”

No need to finish. She was nodding. If the wife beater had seen that news program back in Wisconsin, he would be coming for her soon, coming to collect his runaway property. Riker watched her face by firelight. He had expected fear, but she seemed resigned to this news of a beating in her future. He had come prepared with a six-pack of beer to medicate her jitters, but there was no need for that now. He offered her a bottle more in the spirit of companionship, and, when she was done with it, she told him her story.

“I sent my daughter away with the rescue mission. It’s like an underground railroad for women and children.”

“I know what they do.” Riker was familiar with groups who assisted in the escape from abusive spouses. “But you sent her alone.” And that was not normal.

“Yes, I wanted my husband to believe she’d been kidnapped. I stayed with him for two more years-until I was sure he’d given her up for dead. The police always thought she was dead. They watched my husband for a long time. Well, finally it was my turn to run. I didn’t even take a purse. I had this idea that I could just go out and meet up with my child. But you had to go from one contact to the next. If one link in the chain was gone, the trail was lost.”

“So one of your contacts disappeared?”

She nodded. “I’d waited too long to claim my daughter. So she was really lost-not a lie anymore. It’s been twelve years. I’ll never find her, will I?”

“It was brave to try,” said Riker. “You knew the risks, but you tried.”

“But I wasn’t b rave. The whole purpose of the caravan was publicity- getting attention for our lost kids-lost causes. The most I hoped for was local exposure, a few small-town reporters here and there. I never expected the story to get this big. I was afraid of the cameras, my only chance to find someone who would recognize my little girl. I’m a coward.”

“Well, tonight, her picture was on television from coast to coast- yours, too,” said Riker. “So now you should be thinking about your next move.”

“You mean leave the caravan? Oh, no. I can’t do that.”

Riker shook his head. “Darwinia, I only wish you were a coward. How many times have you left the caravan to paste up your posters?” And, so long as the media was not an option for her, he knew Darwinia would do it again and again. This was the lady’s j o b, going out into the dark, always looking over one shoulder to see if her bone-snapping husband was onto her-him or a serial killer.

Which monster would get to her first?

The elderly psychologist sat in the company of FBI agents. The moles hovered by the door, waiting to see if Nahlman would give them up for failing to keep a close eye on the old man. She had no plans to rat them out; she might find some later use for this leverage if she needed more agents in her own camp.

Special Agent Dale Berman was telling the elderly doctor that he had a lot of explaining to do. The man’s voice was more in the range of chastising a child than interrogating a suspect. “What were you thinking, old man-carrying that thing around?”

“You mean the pouch,” said Dr. Magritte.

“What pouch?” Berman raised his eyes to stare at Agent Nahlman, who had personally escorted the psychologist and ex-priest to this motel room. The doctor had been her prime exhibit while carefully bringing home the point that the background checks on the caravan were not all that they should be.

Berman prompted her now. “What’s he mean, Nahlman? What pouch?”

“I think he means his knapsack,” she said. “That’s where he kept the gun.”

The blue pouch with the tiny bones was locked in the glove compartment of her car. She was the only one to see the astonished look in Paul Magritte’s eyes.

Paul Magritte rode back toward the caravan in Agent Nahlman’s automobile. She played the radio, and he replayed his memories of that tumble-down house back in Illinois. For him, it was no longer springtime. Winter was coming. It was not night anymore, but a long-ago day. It was four weeks following his first encounter with the Egrams.

This was no feat of memory anymore. He was reliving it.

Once more he wore a cassock, and again he traveled down a rural segment of Route 66, returning his young charge to the Egram home. The ten-year-old sat beside him as the car rolled down the road of stark winter trees and overcast sky. The child’s face was still swollen from surgery.

On this Saturday following Thanksgiving, here and there along the way, men on ladders were stringing up long wires of colored light bulbs to line their rooftops for the next holiday. The priest was in a good humor that afternoon, for he was about to deliver a fine Christmas present indeed. Paul Magritte had lost his smile as he pulled over to the side of the road.

The Egram house had a hollowed-out look. Every curtain was gone from the windows, and blank walls could be seen beyond the glass. The child beside him could not fail to understand what this meant. It was the priest who was in denial.

How could they be gone?

“Stay here. I won’t be long.” He saw himself leaving the car and walking down the road to the nearest house, and then the next one and the next. No one had seen the couple depart, nor could anyone say where they had gone. The truck driver and his wife had moved by night-and so stealthy. They had not caused one dog to bark. It was only the matter of the dogs that these people found remarkable, not that the Egrams should leave without a word to neighbors of long acquaintance. That they could accept.

Had the police been wrong to clear the parents of blame for the little girl who was lost and likely dead? Flight spoke to guilt, and this might explain why the father had been quick to sign the consent forms: traveling with a deformed child would have made the fugitives stand out on any road.

And now little Adrian Egram was standing in the road and staring at the empty house. The priest was reaching out to console the youngster when the swollen face lifted to smile at him, and a small voice said, “Forgive me, father, for I have-” And here the ten-year-old paused to compensate for the lisp of a misshapen mouth, taking great care to pronounce the word, “-sinned.”

These were ritual words, but this child had not been raised as a Catholic. The mother alone had come back to the faith. Father Paul Magritte looked up to the second-floor window, and there in that upstairs bedroom he envisioned Sarah Egram inadvertently teaching her child these words, this formal prelude to confession-while she packed a small bag for the youngster’s t rip to a Chicago hospital. In his mind, Paul Magritte could clearly see the woman-even hear her now-repeating the words over and over, though the priest had been waiting downstairs in the front room-unable to hear her confession.

Until that day on the road, when he had found the house empty-the child abandoned.

Young Adrian fed the words back to him like a parrot delivering a long-delayed message, saying once more, “Forgive me, Father, for-”

“No.” The priest had gently raised one finger to his own lips, a gesture to silence the child. “No more of that.”

So many years had passed. The house was gone now, and even the patch of road they had stood upon that day had fallen into ruin before the rest of Mrs. Egram’s message was delivered.

Agent Nahlman checked the rearview mirror. Paul Magritte’s watchers were still following them as she drove toward the campground. The old man beside her was lost in his own quiet thoughts.

Christine Nahlman’s mind was on the bungled interview. Dale Berman had done his ineffectual little song and dance. Then he had dismissed the idea of any connection that went far beyond a suspected relationship of Internet psychologist and killer. Berman would never admit that his flawed background checks could impede a case. Incredibly, he had even returned the gun to Paul Magritte and demanded that Nahlman apologize to the old man. And she had seen all of this coming her way.

However, now, in the privacy of this car, it was her interview. She switched off the car radio as a subtle invitation for Magritte to break his long silence.

The doctor’s voice was tentative, testing the air. “Why didn’t you tell them about the pouch-the little bones?”

She planned to let him wonder about that for a while. “I have family in Chicago,” she said, though all of the people that she had loved best were dead and lying in California ground. “Chicago. That’s where you were based when you were a priest-a priest psychologist.” That part, according to Detective Mallory, was true. “My mother has the best therapist money can buy. It’s a small community, isn’t it? Shrinks, I mean. Lots of backbiting and gossip. I didn’t know it would be so easy to find out what a third-rate doctor you were.” She had run her bluff, and now she caught him in an unconscious nod, her cue that he had not been a financial success in private practice. “So I had to wonder why you left the priesthood. At least the Catholic Church gave you a steady income.”

“At one time, I was a bad psychologist… and a worse priest. How could I stay? Oddly enough, since leaving the Church, I’ve become a better man.”

“I don’t think I can buy that,” said Nahlman. “You knowingly consorted with a child killer. Did he scare you? Are you scared now? You should be. You’re the only one who can identify him.” She turned to look at Magritte in sidelong glances, checking her progress, waiting for cracks in composure. “You’ve known this freak for a long time.” For punctuation, she slapped the dashboard, hitting the surface hard with the flat of her hand to make the frail old man jump in his skin.

Well, that was a foolish waste of time. Detective Mallory’s unique interview style would have inured this man to any more sudden shocks-or loud noises.

Nahlman pressed on. “So your private practice wasn’t making any money. Then you started the Internet therapy groups. Anonymity and no expensive malpractice insurance. Not a bad living, either. Now you drive a luxury car, and you don’t b u y your clothes off the rack, do you? Pa rents of missing children make the best victims. Shrinks and psychics can really cash in on-”

“I never took a dime from any of them,” said Dr. Magritte, defensive now that she had found his sore spot. “I actually made quite a lot of money in private practice. More than enough to retire. And all my work with the parents is free of charge.”

This was the long-awaited schism.

“Let’s say I believe you,” said Nahlman. “Maybe you wanted to atone for shielding a killer of little girls. You saw your chance with the caravan. You wanted to smoke him out. One last shot at grace-but not what I would’ve expected from a priest or a doctor.” She reached out and ripped the knapsack from his lap. With her one free hand, she worked the zipper, then pulled out his old rusted gun. “You were planning to murder the freak.”

His silence was all the acknowledgment she needed.

“Cold-blooded, premeditated murder,” she said, “that’s way more Christian than blowing off the seal of the confessional. But it won’t work. He always attacks from behind. I think he’s been doing this for decades- lots of practice. You won’t hear him coming up behind you till he’s close enough to slit your throat.” She hefted the weight of the gun in her hand. “But I can kill him for you. Tell me how to find him.”

Magritte only stared at the windshield. The glow of the campground was in sight. He was almost free.

But not quite.

Nahlman pulled onto the shoulder of the road and killed the engine. “Mallory tells me you’ve known this freak since he was a kid.” Ah, that startled him. So the New York detective had been right, and the killer had started very young. The skeleton found in the deepest grave might be older than she had imagined. “So tell me this.” Nahlman leaned over to open the glove compartment. She pulled out the small blue pouch. “Exactly when did he give this to you? Let me put that another way. How many little girls died while you were walking around with these bones in your pocket? You won’t even tell me that much? Well, that’s good. Now I can make up a date.” She started the engine. “I can tell the parents that you’ve had these little bones for maybe twenty, thirty years-while their children were being slaughtered like-”

“You’re going to tell them?”

A little piece of the truth was laid out in his words. Perhaps it had taken thirty years or more to kill a hundred little girls.

“No, I won’t tell them.” Nahlman put the car back on the road. “If those people knew what you’d done to them, they’d all want a piece of your hide… So that would be murder.”

Silence prevailed until Nahlman drove up to the campsite and parked the car. She placed the old man’s g u n with the pouch in the glove compartment. The absence of a weapon might make him less brave, less inclined to wander away from the moles.

Dr. Magritte leaned toward her. “Why didn’t you give the pouch of bones to Agent Berman?”

“Let me make a confession,” said Nahlman. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I broke the damn rules. My boss is a lazy-ass screw-up. If I gave him the bones, he’d lock you up for murder. The investigation would be shut down-and people would die. You can live with pointless death, but I can’t. ”

In the background of the long-distance conversation, Mallory could hear the traffic of a Chicago street. Kronewald excused himself to close the window, and now he came back to the phone.

“I called the FBI lab,” he said. “When I asked about Nahlman’s s oil samples and the bones, they told me they didn’t have any results yet. Well, I knew that was crap. They were just playing dumb. And you know what, kid? It’s just a gut feeling, but I think this was the first time they were hearing about-”

“Dale Berman never sent in the samples for analysis,” said Mallory. “And the lab never got any of the bodies, either. Did you find me a victim who lived near Route 66?”

“Yeah, but I had to go back forty years to find a girl who fit the victim profile-Mary Egram, five years old when she disappeared. Her house was on a state road, an old segment of Route 66.”

Kronewald fell silent. Mallory could hear the rustle of paper, and she knew he was paging through a hard-copy version of a police report. Forty-year-old unsolved cases would not show up on his computer screen.

“Okay,” he said, “the catching detective on that case was a guy named Rawlins. He’s dead now, but I got his old notes. He suspected the father. John Egram was a long-haul trucker-could’ve dumped the girl’s body anywhere. The Egrams had one other kid, a ten-year-old named Adrian. The parents skipped town when Adrian was in the hospital. Nice people, huh? At the time, a priest had temporary guardianship. Not much detail on that. Just a few lines of rough notes. Now here’s the kicker. The priest who had guardianship-”

“Paul Magritte. I know,” said Mallory. “Anything else?”

“Well, this kid, Adrian, got bounced around from one foster home to another.”

“Sounds like a recipe for a serial killer,” said Mallory. “Any pictures?”

“Nope, just an old police report from downstate Illinois. When Adrian was fifteen, he stole a car from his foster home and ran away. Works nice with your car-thief angle. But the cops never caught him, so we got no prints in the system. No social security number, either. I figure he stopped being Adrian Egram the day he stole that car.”

“But he spent five years in foster care. Not one picture?”

“Mallory, in your dreams Child Welfare has records that go back that far-instead of files rotting in storage boxes. But I got something else you might like. Most of the houses in the Egram neighborhood were torn down or they fell down. We found one of the neighbors in a nursing home. She’s got Alzheimer’s but her long-term memory is still strong. The old lady says Adrian’s mother worked two jobs, so the little boy used to ride with his dad on cross-country hauls. They were probably on the road two hundred days a year. Then Mary was born and it was time for Adrian to start school. No more truck rides with Dad. Now Adrian and his sister didn’t get along too well. And here’s where it gets strange. Adrian was ten years old-Mary was only five.”

“And Adrian was afraid of his little sister,” said Mallory.

“Yeah. You were right. Our perp doesn’t like being touched. Every time the girl went near her big brother, the boy ran like hell. That was gonna be my big finale. So tell me something, kid-why do you bother to call in for updates?”

Mallory ended the cell-phone call, disinclined to waste words, and it would have taken a long time to describe what she was looking at. The detective could see her cold breath on the air as she walked down the rows of rough wooden pallets, each one the bed of a child. Most were skeletons, but some had been mummified and still held the shape of sleeping girls whose lives had been interrupted on the way to school one day. In the paperwork for this warehouse, twenty miles outside of Amarillo, Texas, the field-office rental fee was itemized under a file name: The Nursery.

A silver-haired man in a dark blue suit walked beside her. He appeared to be trying to make sense of what he was seeing-as if he had no idea that this had been going on. Harry Mars, now based in Washington, was the former head of the New York City Bureau, but he had climbed higher in rank since attending the funeral of Inspector Louis Markowitz. Graveside, he had vouched a favor against a day when the old man’s daughter might need one. Half an hour ago, Mars had come through for her, ordering guards to stand down while he stripped the seal from the door of this refrigerated storage facility-The Nursery.

“My people count forty-seven dead children,” said Harry Mars, who ranked one rung below the deputy director of the FBI. He led her to an open metal coffin. “And here we have the remains of an adult.”

“Probably Gerald Linden,” said Mallory, “the Chicago victim.”

“I just can’t believe this incompetence,” said Mars. “The case should’ve gone to our task force for serial killers. I’ve got no idea how Dale managed to keep all these bodies and bones under wraps.”

Mallory understood it too well. A gigantic bureaucracy could never have a handle on what every single field office was up to, not until they heard about it on the evening news. So the Assistant Director of Criminal Investigations was not insulting her intelligence when he told her this utterly believable lie. However, the man was an ally and a friend of the family-and so she would not accuse him of deception-not just yet. Timing was everything.

Harry Mars seemed to be uncomfortable with her silence, and he rushed his words now, so anxious to share.

Yeah, right.

“I can’t hold any other agents responsible,” he said. “Dale was probably the only one with the total body count. He had different teams working different states. In and out-very fast operation. None of the evidence was ever developed. So it looks like no one but Dale ever had the whole picture.”

Oh, no. It was not going to be that easy-one sacrificial FBI agent for the media and no harm done to the Bureau.

“Harry, you’ve known about this case for a while-before you saw it on television.” This was not a question, not an invitation to lie to her. “What tipped you off first, the letters from George Hastings? Maybe you’d know him better by his Internet name-Jill’s D ad? Or was it Nahlman who got your attention?” Mallory smiled. Gotcha.

Assistant Director Mars looked out over the pallets of dead children, stalling for time. Finally, he pulled a sheaf of folded papers from his inside breast pocket. “The lab got these e-mails from Agent Nahlman. She wanted to know what happened to her test results on some soil samples.”

“And the lab was clueless, but they didn’t w ant to admit it.”

Harry Mars let this comment slide. “Then, the other day, Nahlman made a request to release the body of Jill Hastings. Up till then, I swear I thought George Hastings was a crank.” He wadded these papers into a tight ball. “That’s when we started looking for this warehouse.”

A lie well worded.

Mallory had her own ideas about the starting date of the FBI’s internal investigation. According to Kronewald’s sources, Agent Cadwaller had been attached to Dale’s field office three months ago, and she took him for a spy from the Assistant Director’s office. “Now,” she said, “the next question is motive.”

“For Dale? He’s a bungling screwup.”

“No,” said Mallory. “That’s not it.” Her favorite motive would always be money, but there was no market for the bones of little girls.

“I can suspend him pending investigation,” said Mars. “But I think you’d rather I took out my gun and shot him.”

“Yes, I would.” She rewarded Lou Markowitz’s old friend with a smile, though she knew this man was still holding out on her. “But you’re going to leave him in charge.” It was easier to work around Dale Berman. A competent task force would present problems; they might decide to run her case. “I’ll tell you how this is going to play out with the Bureau-my way.”

Harry Mars was appalled as she laid out her list of demands, but he recovered quickly, and then he smiled. “I wish your old man could see you now. All this leverage to embarrass the Bureau. You’re even better at it than Lou was. I think he’d be so proud.” This was said with no sarcasm whatever.

Riker sat at the boxer’s campfire, trading baseball stats with Joe Finn and his son. Dodie lay quiet in the safe cradle of her father’s arms. Both children were yawning, and the detective was waiting for them to fall asleep. Then he would talk to the boxer about Kronewald’s plan for protective custody. The Finns must leave this road.

The fire had burned low, and Peter dropped his head against his father’s shoulder. At this same moment, a teenage girl came walking through the camp with a sleeping baby riding on one hip. Her big brown eyes searched everywhere. She grinned when she looked toward Darwinia Sohlo’s fire, and she called out, “Mom!”

Heads turned from neighboring campfires as a stunned Darwinia rose on unsteady feet to embrace the young mother and child. The woman would have fallen to her knees, but a young man rushed to Darwinia’s side and caught her up in his arms. He was the same age as the girl, and Riker pegged him as the father of that baby. The youngster was broad in the shoulders and tanned, built like a workingman who did hard labor for his living. This boy was so painfully young that he probably believed he could always keep his family safe; he would not have heard the boxer’s story of Ariel. The conversation around Darwinia’s distant fire was low and Riker could only watch the smiles, the hugs and imagine the talk of miracles and wonders.

What destroyed the detective in this moment was the look in Joe Finn’s e yes.

And the tears.

If this reunion could happen for Darwinia, why not for him? And now it was clear that the boxer preferred his fantasy that Ariel was alive, for he could not live in a world where she had died. And nothing-not an act of God, not even Mallory-could take him off this road.

Charles Butler waved good-bye as Darwinia Sohlo and her family drove off in separate cars but in the same direction, for the woman had not only found a lost child but also a safe haven-a home.

“Shouldn’t t hey have an FBI escort?”

“No,” said Riker. “Those people aren’t part of the pattern. The biggest threat to Darwinia was that nutcase husband back in Wisconsin. And our freak likes to plan his murders around an isolated victim. Can you see him picking a fight with the son-in-law?”

“Yet Dodie’s father’s is a professional fighter, and you worry about her.”

“You bet I do,” said Riker. “Thanks to Dale’s little showdown with the boxer, Dodie’s a threat to a serial killer. There’s a safe house waiting for the Finns in Chicago, but I don’t think Joe can get there from here. Not unless I can reach him.”

Charles shook his head. “He won’t hear you. He’s not thinking clearly. Probably lack of sleep. It took him an hour just to assemble that little pup tent.”

And now, with his children safely tucked away, Joe Finn was too tired to unroll his sleeping bag. He laid his body down in the grass before the closed tent flap. The man’s t hick arms were his pillows, and his gaze was fixed upon heaven. The boxer’s lips moved, perhaps in an old custom of prayers before sleep.

Good night, sweet prince.

Charles raised his eyes to the stars and also bid goodnight to Ariel.