Carol O’Connell: Find Me

“No,” said Dr. Slope. “I suppose not.”

The weapon on the carpet was a lightweight twenty-two, a lady’s g u n. Kathy Mallory was no lady; she carried a cannon, a Smith & Wesson.357 with a bigger kick and better stopping, maiming, killing power.

However, Riker knew that this gun on the floor did indeed belong to Mallory. She collected all kinds of firearms, none of them registered, and a twenty-two had its uses. But the matter of gun ownership might interfere with the doctor’s finding of suicide.

The detective slouched deep into the leather upholstery as he pondered where his partner was headed tonight. And why had she stopped showing up for work?

Mallory, what did you do with the time-all your crazy days of downtime?

Rising from the black leather couch, Riker forced a yawn, as if he needed to affect a blasé attitude about violent death. In fact, he had been born to it, a true son of New York City. “I’m gonna check out the other rooms.”

He passed by the guestroom and caught a glimpse of rumpled sheets and a blanket used by Savannah Sirus. Farther down the hall, another open door gave him a view of Mallory’s o w n bedding. There was not a single wrinkle in the coverlet, as if no one had ever slept there, and this lent credence to a theory that she never slept at all. Mallory the Machine-that was what other cops called her.

Dr. Slope was walking behind him when Riker entered another room of spotless good order, his partner’s d e n, where no dust mote dared to land. Some people had dogs; Mallory kept computers, and they sat in a neat row of three, their Cyclops eyes facing the door, waiting for her to come home. Even her technical manuals were well trained, each one perched on the precise edge of a bookcase shelf. The back wall was lined with cork, and Riker was puzzled by what, at first glance, had passed for striped wallpaper. He turned his head to catch a look of profound shock in the medical examiner’s e yes.

And that was puzzling, too.

From ceiling molding to baseboards, the cork wall was covered with sheets of paper, each one filled with columns of figures. Riker guessed that these were telephone numbers by the separation spaces for area codes and prefixes. Though reading glasses rested in his breast pocket, he preferred to squint, and now he noticed that six of the numerals were arranged in random combinations, but one floating sequence of four remained the same in every line. So this was what she had been doing with the time since he had seen her last-apart from pumping bullets into her walls, blowing bugs to kingdom come when she could not find a fly swatter. And, given a dead body in the front room, he suspected her of worse behavior. Thankfully, in some saner moment, she had patched the holes in the plaster.

Dr. Slope’s eyes widened as he took in the thousands of numbers on the cork wall. Most had red lines drawn though them, all perfectly straight in machine precision. He moved closer to the wall, the better to see with his bifocals. “Oh, my God. She drew these lines with a pen.”

And those hand-drawn lines could only indicate telephone numbers that had not panned out for Mallory. The detective gripped the medical examiner’s arm and turned the man around to face him. “You’ve seen this before.” Riker’s t o ne slipped into interrogation mode, close to accusation when he said, “You know what this is all about. Talk to me.”

The doctor nodded, taking no offense. “I saw something like this a long time ago-on the Markowitzes’ old phone bills. As I recall, it was that first month after Kathy came to live with them. So she was eleven years old.”

Yeah, sure she was.

Louis Markowitz, a late great cop, and his wife, Helen, had raised the girl as their own, but never would Kathy Mallory talk to them about her origins. She would not even give up her right age. At first, she had insisted on being twelve, and Lou had bargained her down by one year, though she might have been a ten-year-old or a child as young as nine.

The medical examiner stood at the center of the room, wiping the lenses of his bifocals with a handkerchief. “Lou showed me his phone bills, line after line of long-distance calls. Kathy made all of them.” The doctor stepped closer to the wall, nodding now. “Yes, it’s the same. You see, when she was a child, she was prone to nightmares. Lou thought the bad dreams might’ve triggered those calls. Sometimes he’d come downstairs late at night and catch her with the telephone. She made hundreds of these calls that first month. This wall reminds me of the Markowitzes’ phone bill. In every long-distance telephone number, four of the numerals were always the same, and the others just seemed random. She wouldn’t t e ll Lou anything helpful, but he worked out a good theory. He knew there was someone out there, some connection to her early life, but she could only remember part of a telephone number.”

“So Lou called the numbers on his phone bill.”

“Yes, all of them. And he found an odd pattern. Every call was made at some obscene hour of the night-so even the men were inclined to remember them. You see, when a man answered, she hung up the phone. But if a woman answered, she’d always say, ‘It’s Kathy, I’m lost.’ ”

“That must’ve driven the women nuts .”

“Yes, it touched their soft spots and their panic buttons.” The doctor turned his face to a high-rise window on the dark city. “According to Lou, all of the women begged Kathy to tell them who she was-and where could they find her? But the child would just hang up on them. Lou figured that Kathy never got the response she wanted. Those women didn’t know who she was. So then she’d dial the next combination of numbers… trying to make a connection to someone who would recognize her.”

“A woman.” Riker fished through his pockets and pulled out a piece of paper given to him by the first officer on the scene. This note listed sketchy vitals of victim identification, including a home telephone for the late Savannah Sirus. One sequence of four numbers matched the ones repeated on the cork wall. “I guess the kid finally made her connection.”

Eight hundred miles away, another corpse had been found.

Hours after the windows of shops and offices had gone dark, an umbrella was snatched up by a gust of wet wind. Tearing and twirling, it scraped across the broad steps of the Chicago Art Institute. The only watchers were two great cats, standing lions made of bronze and blind to this broken trophy from the battle against horizontal rain. Their green patinas were altered by strikes of lightning and red flashes from the spinning lights of police vehicles. Cars and vans converged upon the construction site at the other side of Michigan Avenue.

Two homicide detectives were soaked through and through. They surrendered, throwing up their hands and then jamming them into coat pockets. Grim and helpless, they watched the heavy rain come down on their forensic evidence and carry it away. There it went, the body fluids, stray hairs and fibers, all flowing off down the gutter. The corpse, washed clean, could tell them nothing beyond the cause of death-extreme cruelty. There had never been a crime scene quite like this one in the history of Chicago, Illinois, nothing as shocking, nothing as sad.

The religious detective made the sign of the cross. The other one closed his eyes.

The dead man at their feet was pointing the way down Adams Street, also known as Route 66, a road of many names. Steinbeck had called it a road of flight.

The rainstorm had abated, but the owner of the gas station had no plans to do any legal business at this late hour. Locked behind the wide door of his garage was one happy crew of gambling men in the grand slam of Chicago crap games, high rollers only, beer flowing, dice clicking and folding money slapping the cement floor.