The Edge of Sleep

Chapter 13

Karen awoke to music and it took her a moment to figure out where it was coming from. The sound was muted and faint and the strumming of an acoustical guitar gave her a fleeting sense of being serenaded from outside her window. Then she realized it was coming from Jack’s room. He was up and playing his favorite tape of children’s songs. She glanced at the red numerals on the clock radio, the two dots separating the hours and the minutes blinking methodically. It was too early for her to be up; but not too early for Jack. She could never understand how he functioned so well on so little sleep, or how he seemed to awake fully refreshed and smiling while she had to claw her way into consciousness.

Remembering that she was not alone in the bed, she rolled her head to look at Becker, but his side of the bed was empty. His clothes, which he had tossed on the chair the night before, were gone. The son of a bitch has slipped out on me, she thought. Not so much as a goodbye, no farewell kiss. Just grab his socks and go. How typical, how sneakily, self-centeredly, inconsiderately typical. They were all sons of bitches, so it wasn’t her fault that she kept picking bad ones. There were no good ones.

Karen washed her face and brushed her teeth and when she was certain she could muster a cheerful smile for her son, she went in to see him. Becker was sitting on the floor making another newspaper tree and Jack, still dressed in his airplane pajamas, was dancing around the room in a bounding gavotte that included frequent leaps onto and off of his bed.

“You still here?” Karen said. She was surprised by the tightness in her voice.

Becker held the newspaper over his head. “By popular request.” he said.

“Stop jumping on your bed,” she said to Jack.

“I was just showing him,” Jack said. He pointed at Becker as if to clarify any doubt.

“You know you’re not supposed to jump on your bed. Now stop it.”

Although she had not raised her voice. Jack stopped in mid-bounce and stepped carefully to the floor.

“I forgot,” he said lamely.

“How long have you been up?” she asked Becker.

“A couple of hours. I got up when I heard the fax machine working.”

“You can’t hear the fax machine from my bedroom.”

“You can’t hear the fax machine.” he corrected her.

“What did it say?”

“It’s not my place to be reading your faxes,” he said.

“What did it say?”

“The first one was a report on the detailed search of the mall.”

“And?”

“Nothing. He wasn’t hidden there and they found no indication that he ever was.”

“And the second fax?”

“It’s a printout of all the delinquencies at hotels, motels, and monthly rental homes within a thirty-five-mile radius of Stamford within forty-eight hours of the time the boy was found. It’s six pages long.”

“What boy?” Jack asked.

“No one, honey. How about you getting dressed now.”

“He said a boy was found,” Jack insisted. “Was a boy lost?”

“Not really. Now you get dressed. Mr. Becker and Mommy have a little work to do.”

“How did he get lost?”

“Jack… ”

Becker kneeled in front of the boy.

“He got lost because children do sometimes,” Becker said, “but the reason he stayed lost so long was that he didn’t do what he should have done. Do you know what he should have done when he got lost?”

“What?”

“He should have yelled,” Becker said. “He should have yelled and screamed and made as much noise as he could so that the people looking for him could find him. There were a lot of people trying to find the boy, including your mommy. Your mommy is a very good finder, did you know that, Jack?”

Jack shook his head uncertainly. He was not certain of his mother’s finding abilities, but he was fascinated to learn.

“Well, she is. Your mommy is very, very good at it. But even she couldn’t find the lost boy, because she didn’t know where to look because he didn’t make enough noise. He should have made all the noise he possibly could and he should have kept doing it until he was found. The worst thing to do if you ever get lost is to keep quiet about it. If you’re in trouble of any kind, you be sure to call for help. Okay?”

“Okay… but what happened to him?”

“He finally got found,” Becker said.

“Did you find him, Mommy?”

“Not personally, sweetheart.”

“The people who work for your mommy found him,”

Becker said. “The boy is safe at home now, and your mommy gets a lot of the credit for that.”

Jack smiled. He was not sure that he completely understood, but the sense of pride he felt about his mother was clear enough.

“You’re a pretty good liar,” Karen said to Becker when they were alone in the kitchen. “I thought you prided yourself on telling the truth.”

“When the truth is appropriate,” Becker said. “If a lie is called for, I can usually manage.”

“So how do I know if you’re telling me the truth?” she asked.

“Why not assume I’m telling you the truth until you see my nose grow?”

“I think it’s safer to assume you’re lying until I see your nose shrink… but thanks for the plug with Jack.”

“You deserve it.”

“It’s nice to have your kid think you’re good at what you do-even if he doesn’t know what it is.”

As Karen drove them toward the mall in Bickford. Becker went through the printout that had come in by fax.

“You check my logic as I go along,” Becker said. “First we can eliminate the women from the list, right?”

“As devil’s advocate, why?”

“Women almost never commit serial murders, one. Two, the upper body strength required to pitch the victim out the window of a moving car while driving it at the same time would make her some kind of steroid-huge, iron-pumping giant. That’s the kind of person who would have been noticed in the mall or museum. Women like that are certain to get a stare from every man in the place.”

“Women would notice her, too. All right, eliminate the women from the list.”

They were silent for a few moments as Becker went through the six pages and struck off the names that were obviously women. He circled those given names that were just initials for further investigation.

“You’re very good with him,” Karen said.

“Thanks.”

“I didn’t think you would be.”

Becker looked up from the list and studied her profile. “Why?”

She shrugged. “No practice, maybe. I don’t know. It just took me sort of by surprise.”

“Do you think I’m some kind of monster?” He sounded hurt.

“I know you’re not a monster. John. Forget the remark. I didn’t mean anything by it. Some people are good with kids and some aren’t, that’s all I meant.”

“We eliminate all those who stayed less than a week before skipping out.”

“Why?”

“We assume Lamont was holed up with the victim, which is far safer than moving around periodically. Something went wrong, he killed the victim and fled. Remember, he kept all these kids for at least six weeks, right?”

“Except for one.”

“Which makes it very unlikely he was going to a new location every week. That’s too many transfers in and out of the car, too many times to check in, too many things to go wrong.”

“Okay,” Karen said. “Check them off.”

Becker moved slowly over the names, calculating dates. “He likes you,” Karen said.

“Good. I like him, too.”

Karen flashed her headlights at a car in the passing lane in front of her. The driver remained blissfully unaware. At the first opportunity Karen swung past him on the right, then into the left lane again. She jabbed her finger to the right, trying to tell the driver to get over, but she could tell in her mirror that he had barely even noticed her, or how she happened to be in front of him.

“How do you know he likes me?” Becker asked.

“He told me,” she said. She looked at Becker, whose eyes had not left the list on his lap.

“He’s a good boy,” he said.

“He’s a wonderful boy.”

“That, too. I meant he’s well-behaved.”

“Oh. Well, mostly. He has his mad moments.”

“He told me he’s going to sleep-over camp this summer,” Becker said. He drew his pen through a line and went on to the next.

“Next week,” Karen said. “Did he sound… how did he sound when he told you about it?”

“Excited. He’s looking forward to it.”

“Really? Excited? It’s his first time away from home. He’s very ambivalent about it.”

“Didn’t sound that way. How are you?”

“Ambivalent,” she admitted. “He’s so young. He’s never been away, he doesn’t even like to go to sleep-overs at his friends’ houses.”

“So why is he going to camp?”

Karen paused. “He says he wants to but… I’m not sure how much of it is because I pushed him into it. I tried not to. I tried to stay neutral, but maybe the way I worded it, maybe… The idea of two whole weeks without any responsibilities to anyone but myself, it’s like heaven. I mean. I’ll miss him like crazy, I know that, but to just come home after work and vegetate-it’s been ten years. I wanted him to go. I wanted him to want to go… And lie is so quick to anticipate what he thinks I want. When he actually does do something wrong, which is not very often, if he spills his milk, for instance, he gets this look on his face as if he’s going to be shot. It makes me feel like a monster. The other day he put his dinner dishes in the dishwasher without scraping them and he was so apologetic. I don’t know, is it normal? Am I doing it all wrong? Do all parents worry about how they’re raising their kids, or is it just single mothers?

… Or is it just me?”

“It looks to me like you’re doing fine.”

“You think?”

“I think you’ve got a hard job and you’re doing a terrific job of it.”

Karen glanced at him to judge the sincerity of his remark, but Becker was intent on the readout. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and take her reassurance where she could get it.

“I’m going to delete hotels, anyplace where he would have to negotiate a lobby and an elevator with the boy. Too risky. Also any rented rooms in a private home without a separate entrance. Same reason. Agreed?”

“Right,” she said. Becker had already begun to whittle at the list. “For a minute this morning I thought you’d gone.”

“I thought you seemed a little pissed off to see me,” Becker said. “Was that because I was still around?”

“No. I got pissed because I thought you’d skipped off without saying goodbye, and when I saw you in Jack’s room, you got some of the residue. Sorry.”

“Why would I skip out?”

“Men do.”

“Do they?”

“In my experience.”

“You’ve had a tough history,” he said.

“I’ve had a history. I’m a woman. That’s basically the only kind we have.”

“Nice that you’re not bitter, though,” he said.

“Screw you.”

“Horrors. I’m on duty.”

Karen glided the car into the right lane in preparation for the turnoff to Bickford.

“Anyway, thank you,” she said.

Becker looked at her in surprise.

“Are you really serious?”

“Not just for staying, but the way you did it. Being so nice to Jack, not acting like you were doing me any favors, being so patient and listening to me-and everything.”

“Are we really such shitheels?” Becker asked.

“Given the chance,” she said. “Most men, yeah.”

“Why do women put up with us?”

“It’s in our saintly nature. Besides, what’s the alternative? If a woman waits for a really good man to come along, she’ll die single and horny as hell… the single part’s not so bad.”

Becker laughed and folded the printout on his lap.

“So anyway,” she continued, “thanks for being decent.”

“You make it sound as if you’re not going to see me again,” Becker said.

“I didn’t know how you felt… if you wanted to, or what. I kind of shanghaied you last night.”

Becker touched her hand where it rested on the steering wheel.

“If I didn’t make that clear last night, I guess I’ll just have to try harder.”

Karen thought for a moment about the sexual marathon of the night before and laughed.

“Then I guess I’ll just have to put up with it,” she said. They lapsed into silence, both feeling slightly embarrassed and uncertain of the next move, as Karen guided them onto the exit ramp.

“The boy who didn’t last as long as the others,” Becker said. For a second it seemed jarringly out of context to Karen, but she quickly reminded herself what the real context of their being together was.

“Ricky Stine,” she said. ‘Taken from his schoolyard in Newburgh.”

“Right. Didn’t you say he was hyperactive?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you suppose that’s why he didn’t last as long? Lamont lost patience with him?”

“Or maybe he was harder to control. That goes with your theory that he is trying to pick the docile ones.”

“And maybe it’s their docility that keeps them alive,” Becker said.

“Alive longer,” Karen amended. “Not alive.”

“Maybe alive long enough this time,” he said. “Lamont is out there somewhere within thirty miles of us. We’ve got to get a list of every place a single male transient could be staying within a thirty-mile radius of Bickford. If we find any names on that list that match the ones on this one”-he tapped the printout on his lap-“we’d have a place to start, at least.”

“Why do you think he’s that close? Why wouldn’t he go as far as possible?”

“For one thing, he doesn’t. He stays within a four-state area. Whether because there’s something that keeps him here or whether it’s just familiar territory, I don’t know. But he does stay. Every body was found within fifty miles of the town where it was snatched. You can’t always find a right spot and time on the highway to throw something out; you need a little leeway. I’m guessing ten to twenty miles. If it’s longer, that means he started well within the thirty miles, which is even better. The point is, his pattern is not to snatch a kid and then go hundreds of miles and live with him for a month. He takes them and goes immediately to ground. That means he’s already made a nest where he feels secure before he takes them.”

“You think he’s still here then?” She made a vague semicircular sweep of her hand to indicate “here.”

“Well, yes, depending how you define here. A circle with a thirty-mile radius covers an awful lot of territory.”

“Tell me about it. You see how long it took to compile that list for Stamford, and that was six months ago.”

“We need help,” Becker said. “The Bureau doesn’t begin to have enough people to do it fast enough. We have to get the state and local people working on it.”

Karen snorted. “To us it’s a serial killer. To them it’s a local matter of one missing child. We’ll be asking them to expend God knows how many man-hours on what could very well be a wild-goose chase…”

“Cops are used to chasing wild geese,” Becker said.

“Their own geese. Now we want them to chase ours. We want them to undertake a major search because one boy-for most of them a boy who’s not from their own town or jurisdiction-has been missing for a few days.”

“A week,” said Becker.

“Do you think you can do that?” she asked.

“Me?” Becker asked. “No, I couldn’t hope to do that. I don’t have the skills. I tend to alienate people. I’m too sure of myself. I could never convince them to do it… But you could.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“A pleasure.”

“Any bright ideas as to how I go about it?”

“No,” said Becker. “But you’d better hurry. At the rate Lamont is escalating his hunger. I’d say Bobby Reynolds has two weeks left. Three at the outside-if he’s very, very docile.”

Karen stood outside the conference room in the Radisson Hotel in Bickford, slowly tearing the tissue she held in her hands to little pieces. The Deputy Chief of the Connecticut state police and the heads or representatives of two dozen local police forces were waiting inside along with as many FBI men from the New York and New England districts as she could command, beg, borrow, or scrape. Getting them all together with only two days’ notice had taken all the authority and good will that her position in the Bureau could muster. And that was the easy part.

Getting them all to do something was not a problem. They would make a token of assistance simply for the asking. What Karen needed, however, was a dedicated effort. Fast and concentrated and thorough. And this from men who resisted, on principle, the very idea, much less the practice, of being told what to do by the federal law enforcement agency. Men who would resist for reasons of turf and professional pride if the directions came from a seasoned agent would resist even more fiercely if they came from a woman.

“A young and beautiful woman at that,” Becker reminded her. He stood next to Karen outside the conference room. Karen had noted that her nervousness only seemed to amuse him.

“They’ll hate me,” she said.

“That is not the average man’s reaction to a young and beautiful woman. Believe me, these guys are very average. You start at an advantage.”

“Are you nuts? I’m walking into a nest of male chauvinists. I’ve got as much advantage as a kitten in a dog kennel.”

“One thing’s for sure, you’ll have their attention,” Becker said, grinning. “Come on, how bad can it be? You command a couple dozen men all the time.”

“I’m their boss. When I talk to them they pay attention, they don’t sit around and grab at their nuts. I don’t have to stand in front of them and convince them of what to do. I tell them.”

“Probably not the best approach to take here,” Becker said.

“Thanks for the advice.”

Becker took her by the hand and removed the decimated tissue.

“Makes you look nervous.” he said.

“No shit. Wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression… I hate talking to groups. I’m not so bad one-on-one…”

“Not bad at all.”

She cast him a dark glance. His amusement was getting very hard to take. “But I hate-hell, I fear talking to groups. Especially a room full of cops.”

“I think you’re supposed to imagine them all sitting there naked. That’s supposed to make them less intimidating and to relax you.”

“You want me to imagine a roomful of overweight, balding, middle-aged cops? That’s disgusting. You try imagining that. I’ll come up with my own nightmares.”

“As a middle-aged cop myself, I rise to say, how unkind,” said Becker.

“I don’t mean you. For one thing, you’re not overweight. You’re not balding. You’re certainly not disgusting.”

“Sounds like damning with faint praise to me.”

“Christ, John. I’m in the middle of a crisis here. I can’t cater to your ego right now. You want me to wet myself just thinking about you when I’ve got to go do this?”

“You’ve got a law degree, don’t you? You had to do a lot of talking to earn that.”

“And I hated every second of it. Why do you think I went into the Bureau?”

“A thirst for justice and social equality?”

“This isn’t funny! I hate it! Why don’t you stop being a fucking wit and help me?”

“All right,” Becker said. “I’ll talk to them.”

He started toward the conference room. Karen caught him by the arm and yanked.

“I’ll do it,” she said angrily. “I said I hated it; I didn’t say I couldn’t do it.” She started toward the door, then paused with her hand on the handle.

“And I know that was a ploy,” she said. “Trying to shame me into it.”

“I know you know.”

“It didn’t work. I’m not so easily manipulated.”

“Never thought you were,” he said.

“Just so you know,” she said. She glanced up and down the corridor to be sure they were alone, then she put her hand briefly in his crotch.

“For luck,” she said, grinning. She entered the room with Becker’s laughter sounding behind her.

Karen strode into the conference room and listened to the quality of the conversational drone change as the men caught sight of her. When she took the podium the drone rose to a quizzical buzz.

“Thank you all for coming,” she said. Her voice caught in her throat as she cleared it, cursing herself for a coward.

“I am Karen Crist, Deputy First Assistant for Kidnapping for the Bureau out of New York.”

They had stopped their murmuring and were looking at her now with curiosity and skepticism. Waiting for me to step on my own tongue, she thought.

The Deputy Chief of the Connecticut state police sat in the front row in a uniform so crisply starched and ironed that it appeared to be made of fresh cardboard. Next to him slouched the chief of one of the local forces, a fat, aging, balding man whose belly slopped over his belt like so much runaway bread dough yeasting beyond the rising bowl. As she watched, the chief unconsciously tugged at his crotch.

Assholes of the world united. Karen thought to herself and wondered if she were in the right profession.

She did not allow the doubts to linger, however. Looking up from the chief at the assembled waiting faces, she began.

“How many of you have children?” she asked.