Carol O’Connell - Find Me

The Missouri sheriff held up a keychain fob in the shape of a horseshoe. The mother seized it, ripped it from the plastic bag and kissed it. And then the sheriff told her that the fob had been found with the remains of her child.

“Your little girl was laid to rest in local ground. She was among good people, and her grave was always tended to. Fresh flowers every-”

The mother collapsed. She would have fallen, but she was caught by the helping hands of her husband and Sheriff Banner. A chair was fetched close to her, and she was lowered into it. The husband stood behind her so she would not see his face contorted in agony, a silent scream of No! followed by tears and the quake of crying with no sound.

On the other side of the room, Riker, a veteran of many scenes like this one, kept his voice low when he spoke to Charles. “There’s no good way to tell the parents, but I like to think that quick is better. Less torture.”

Dr. Magritte stood apart from the parents and was wisely quiet. It would be a while before these two people were ready for grief counseling. Closure was a term dreamed up by fools. Today the parents’ pain would begin in earnest, and their imaginings would send them reeling.

Charles turned to the tall brunette beside him, finding this FBI agent less forbidding as he detected in her eyes a profound sympathy.

“They can’t go home again, can they?”

“No,” said Agent Nahlman. “There’s an escort car on the way. They’ll be taken to a safe house till this is over.”

“Rather extreme,” said Charles. Suspicions were contagious things, and he had picked this one up from Riker: What if Gerald Linden was not the only adult victim? “So you believe there’s a real threat to the parents, a permanent change in victim profile.”

There would be no response. He knew this when Agent Nahlman raised her chin, a sign of intractable tenacity. She silently recomposed herself, losing that sad, soft quality of the eyes-unreadable now.

Riker leaned toward her. “You guys should get the rest of the parents off this road.” The detective might as well be addressing the stone building that housed a giant federal bureaucracy. The FBI agent only stared straight ahead, deaf to this good advice. Riker edged closer to the woman, saying, “But hey, Nahlman, it’s only life and death, right?”

That got the field agent’s attention. She turned to the detective and gave him an almost imperceptible nod, the single giveaway that her opinion of FBI command decisions was only marginally better than his. But she would follow her orders, and that was made clear as the good soldier walked in lockstep with her partner, following Dr. Magritte’s lead as the old man guided the parents out of the room.

The sheriff sat down at the table, and his head lolled back, so tired, as if he had run a marathon this morning. “I’ll tell you what I got from Dr. Magritte. Their little girl was never an FBI case-not till long after she turned up dead. Right after the kid disappeared, the feds told her mom and dad that she didn’t meet their criteria. Can you imagine that? Their kid just didn’t make the cut. No agents ever helped with that case.” He turned to the window on the sidewalk, where an official car had arrived to take those wounded people away. “I told them to hire a lawyer to deal with the feds. Then they might get the child’s body returned for a proper burial.” He looked away from the sad little scene being played out on the sidewalk, the crying man, the destroyed woman, who were being folded into the back seat of a car like felons. “I talked to a few more folks while I was out at the campsite this morning. There’s one man who joined the caravan yesterday in Illinois. California plates. He’s been driving Route 66 from the other direction. Suppose I told you this guy might be seriously crazy?”

“That might describe all of the parents to some degree.” Charles was thinking of the one who traveled with a wolf. He took that for a recent relationship, for he had not detected any bond between the man and his- pet. “Grief can work odd changes on people.”

“This one’s a corker,” said the sheriff. “All he wants to talk about is patterns. He can’t follow a conversation that doesn’t have compass points or map sites. Those two FBI agents just blew him off. Well, crazy or not, he might be worth talking to.” He nodded to the deputy standing in the doorway. “Bring in Mr. Kayhill.”

Ray Adler had assured Peyton’s d aughter that the roll bar would be done real quick, and that was true enough. However, in New York time, two days was too damn slow. She stood at the center of the garage, stunned to find her car in pieces.

When she turned on one heel and left for the house, he walked behind her to cross the yard and explain to her back, “Now if my boys were just real fine mechanics, a job like that would take two weeks. A roll bar’s no good unless you marry it up with the frame. But these guys are damn artists -I’m talkin’ real talent here. So, you can see why two days is fast for a roll bar. There’s not another shop in the country that can do it faster- not if you want it done right.”

He followed the girl through the back door of his house. More than three hours had passed since he had last seen his kitchen, and now he opened his eyes wide to bulging with a bad case of surprise, believing for a moment that he suffered from early onset of Alzheimer’s-that he must have wandered into some stranger’s house. T r uly, the first word to pop into his head was insane, and this was followed by flat-out crazy.

Kathy Mallory was standing by the table, her angry eyes cast down as she strung the loops of freshly laundered curtains on a rod. And he could not help but notice that the material was six shades brighter. While she turned her back on him to hang the curtain rod over the window, he looked around the room.

How had she done this in half a morning?

He had forgotten the pattern beneath the dirt on the linoleum, and now the checks of many colors shone through a new wax shine. The mountain of dirty laundry was gone, and the dryer was spinning with a load of wash. His old wooden table had been scrubbed raw, and every last splatter and ring, each memory of past meals was gone. Even the faucet gleamed with maniacal cleaning. Ray guessed that this was payback for her roll bar; he had refused to do money with her. But oh my, this kitchen was insanely tidy.

He sat down at the table and watched her run a rag over a cupboard door handle that could not get any cleaner unless she stripped off the chrome. “Girl, you’re a damn cleaning machine. How is it that you’re not married yet?”

“Never crossed my mind,” she said, setting two cups and saucers on the table.

“But don’t you want kids?”

“No.” Next she brought him a strange coffeepot without a single fingerprint on it.

“Damn,” he said with a bit of wonder. She filled his cup with a brew that smelled better than any he had had since the death of his wife, and he was late to wonder if this might have anything to do with cleaning the pot. When the girl sat down with him, he had to ask, “Why don’t you want kids?”

She gave this a moment of thought before saying, “I don’t know what they’re for.”

The two FBI agents had returned to the sheriff ’s c o nference room. They stood near the door, perhaps as a reminder that they should be leaving soon, and they planned to take the interview subject with them. Nahlman made a point of staring at her watch.

Charles Butler sat at the long table beside Mr. Kayhill, a member of the caravan, who was also known as the Pattern Man. Kayhill was well below average height, not more than a few inches over five feet, and his physical appearance was best described as a distracted pale white pear with black-rimmed eyeglasses. The little man was also rather clumsy, and this he apologized for while mopping up the coffee spilled across his maps. The nervous disposition and clumsiness could be put down to a bad overdose of caffeine.