David Wiltse - The Edge of Sleep

… 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.”