Carol O’Connell - Find Me

Dodie hummed her little song; it quieted her heart, this same refrain, over and over-all that she could remember. She raised one small hand to rub the back of her neck, still sensing a touch of something nasty.

Charles Butler was wide awake, a great improvement over yesterday, when he had returned to New York from Europe after being marooned in one airport after another, missing planes for security searches and suffering massive sleep deprivation. Late this morning, he had awakened in the passenger seat of his Mercedes, wondering whither he was bound and what had possessed him to give the car keys to Riker, a man with no driver’s license. T r y as he might, Charles could not remember any conversation from the previous night, and thus he had traveled through the morning in the silent fog of the jet-lagged brain.

However, this afternoon he was rather enjoying himself, seated in this bright and lively restaurant. He was in the excellent company of two homicide detectives, who, between bites of steak and potato salad, discussed the bloody details of a recent murder.

So cheerful.

Detective Kronewald bore a slight resemblance to the late Louis Markowitz, particularly when the heavyset man gathered his hound-dog jowls into a brilliant smile. Riker seemed to like this Chicago policeman, and the oft-used phrase “you bastard” was apparently a term of endearment.

“Okay,” said Riker, “ I’ll tell you why Mallory turned you down cold. It’s the way you dole out information.” He leaned closer to the Chicago detective. “You think the kid doesn’t know you held out on her? She’s a bet- ter cop than I am, and fifteen minutes after I hit town, I found out about the other bodies.”

Riker paused a beat to accept the paperwork that would attach him and his absent partner to Chicago Homicide. “If you don’t give us everything, then I can’t talk Mallory into working this case.” He unfolded an Illinois map and laid it out on the table. “Now, if it’s not too much trouble-you bastard-just mark the places where the feds dug up the kids’ bodies.”

When Kronewald hesitated, Riker put a pen in the man’s hand, saying, “Mallory’s as good as they come, and you know that. By now, I promise you-these gravesites are all you got left to give away.”

“No, there’s more,” said their host, for this meal was compliments of the city. “I got it all with me.”

Riker made a rolling motion with his hand. “Let’s have it before my hair turns white.”

“I got the background check on Paul Magritte.” Apparently Detective Kronewald assumed that this name would be meaningful to his luncheon guests.

Charles leaned forward to beg a question from the stout policeman. “Sorry, but I’m rather late coming into the details on this matter.” Indeed, he had only recently discovered that Riker and Mallory were working on a case. “Who is Mr. Magritte?” While awaiting a response from Kronewald, he saw relief and thanks on Riker’s face. And what was that about?

Kronewald responded with the hint, “Magritte’s leading that civilian parade.”

No help. What parade?

Charles turned to Riker for clarity. However, the New York detective was apparently clueless on the subject of parades and unwilling to expose his ignorance.

After crossing the state line, Mallory lowered her visor to reach for a tattered old brochure of the Missouri caverns, but it was gone. She checked her knapsack and the glove compartment. Could she have thrown it away by mistake? No, that was not possible. Even in the privacy of her own mind, she was slow to admit to mistakes. She checked under the seats and in the back, and a search of the trunk proved fruitless. After ransacking her duffel bag, she emptied out the contents of her knapsack and checked each buckled and zippered compartment twice. She could not have thrown it away. Her next theory revolved around a light-fingered member of the caravan. Had she forgotten to lock her car?

Yes, that was it.

No, that would not work. Nothing else was missing from her car, and she was the only person on earth who would see any value in a torn and faded brochure with a few notes that matched the handwriting on Peyton Hale’s letters. She searched the car again, every hidy-hole and crevice where her hand would fit, and finally forced herself to stop. Where had her mind gone? And the time? She was running out of time.

Enough.

As Mallory put the car in motion, she decided that the wind had taken the brochure while the convertible’s top was down. Yes, blame it on the wind.

Kronewald handed a sheaf of papers to his fellow detective. “This is background material. If Mallory’s right, all the people in that caravan met on the Internet. Paul Magritte runs online therapy groups for the parents of missing and murdered children, but we can’t b reak into his website.”

“Wait,” said Riker, a man whose credulity had been overstretched of late. “You’re telling me Mallory couldn’t hack her way into a simple-”

“She’s not traveling with a computer,” said Kronewald. “I thought you knew that. Don’t you guys ever talk? Does that kid ever answer her cell phone?”

Charles Butler and Detective Riker exchanged glances of perfect communion, both of them sharing the same thought: How could Mallory have become unplugged from her computers-and why? Riker seemed even more disturbed by this radical change in his partner, for he had often voiced the theory that Mallory was not simply in love with high technology, but actually required batteries in order to walk and talk.

“Now I got techs that can get me into the website,” said Kronewald, “but not the private chat rooms, not without a warrant. Mallory was right about that, too. The old guy’s a bona fide shrink. His site’s protected by doctor-patient confidentiality. And while we’re on the subject of shrinks.” He turned a charming smile of apology on Charles. “Pardon the expression, Dr. Butler.”

“Call me Charles.” No one ever called him doctor, though his business card had a boxcar line of initials that stood for the degrees of a fully accredited and somewhat overqualified psychologist.

Kronewald leaned down to search a bulky briefcase on the floor by his chair. While the Chicago man’s attention was thus diverted, Riker donned his reading glasses-in public-a rare departure from his only vanity. The detective scanned the background information on Magritte, mad to catch up with his missing details. Each finished sheet was handed to Charles, a speed reader who only needed a fraction of the time to cover every line of text, and now he learned that a sorry troop of parents were driving the roads of Illinois in search of lost children. How many of their youngsters were dead and carted away by the FBI as skeletal bones in body bags? And how might this tie in with the murder of a full-grown man?

Oh. On the next sheet, the victim, Gerald C. Linden, was mentioned as a member of numerous Internet groups for parents of missing children. His own child, a little girl, had been taken by “a person or persons unknown.”

“I could use a second opinion on this killer.” Kronewald, frustrated in the search through his papers, lifted the heavy briefcase from the floor and emptied out the file holders on top of the map. He turned to Riker, whose spectacles had vanished in a quick sleight-of-hand. “I just got off the phone with a state trooper. He’s bringing me the flat tire.”

Charles and Riker both smiled and nodded, as if a flat tire might be a perfectly normal thing to drop into the conversation. It made more sense when the Chicago detective had finished laying out Mallory’s t heory on the murder of Mr. Linden.