Carol O’Connell - Find Me

“You got that right.” Riker accepted this gift with a rather disingenuous smile. He lit a cigarette and slumped low in his chair, so relaxed- almost harmless. “Now what about you, Horace? Did you lose a kid?”

“Oh, no. I’ve never even been married.”

“You don’t s ay,” said Riker. “So what do you do?”

“My interest is mainly statistics, patterns and such, and-of course- Route 66. I know every website for that road. That’s how I found two of Dr. Magritte’s people. I met them in a Route 66 chatroom. Other parents, too. They were coming together with common statistics, stories of murdered children recovered along the old road.”

Riker exhaled a cloud of smoke and watched it curl upward. “And what do you do for a living, Horace? You didn’t s ay.”

“I’m a statistician.”

“Of course,” said the smiling detective. “What was I thinking?”

A deputy entered the room and laid down a sheet of paper in front of her boss. After a glance, the sheriff handed it to Riker, and Charles read over his friend’s shoulder. It was a background check on Horace Kayhill, and it fit all the expectations for a man with his disorder. He was on full disability, unemployed and unemployable. Though the sheet of rough data did not include the nature of his disability, Charles already knew. The man was an obsessive compulsive, which neatly explained all the layers of patterns, one chaining into the other.

Riker studied the map of Missouri, which included sections of neighboring states. One of the penciled crosses was twenty miles from here. The next one was in Kansas. The detective planted one finger on this penciled-in cross for the small Kansas segment of Route 66.

And now Sheriff Banner was also staring at the map, saying, “That’s where they found that teenager with the missing hand, but she wasn’t in the ground. They found her body laid out on the road-maybe a day after she was killed.”

“A teenager? Well, that’s wrong,” said Mr. Kayhill. “And an unburied corpse won’t fit the pattern. The pattern is everything. There’s a child’s body buried there. You simply haven’t found it yet.” He leaned toward Riker and tapped his gift, the notebook in the detective’s hand. “But you’ll find it. You’ll find them all.”

Ray Adler handed Mallory the keys to his pickup truck so she could finish the Kansas leg of Route 66. “It’s just a little bitty corner of the state,” he said. “Shouldn’t t ake more than fifteen minutes from Galena to Baxter Springs. It only takes a little longer if you have to get out and push the truck.”

She rejoined the old road and returned to Galena, where people on the street waved to her, blind to the driver, seeing only the neon-green truck with the fabulous prefabricated front end of a giant, vintage Jaguar, replete with a silver-cat hood ornament. After a few minutes, she slowed down for a look at the old arch bridge, another landmark from the letters, but all of the graffiti had been painted over, and the structure served no function anymore; traffic crossed a new bridge built alongside it.

That took a minute more of her time.

Mallory followed the road around the inside corner that squared off the Kansas segment. She stopped by a baseball field, but this was no landmark of old. The small stadium had the clean red-and-white look of newly laid bricks and fresh mortar. So Peyton Hale’s old ballfield in Illinois had vanished, a new one had appeared here in Kansas-and another minute of her life had been lost.

What caught her attention next, and held it, was the digging equipment down the road. She rolled on, moving slowly, wanting to attract attention- and she did. She cut the engine a few yards away from a utility truck and an unmarked van. The vehicles partially obscured the dig site, and a plastic curtain had been raised to hide most of the hole. The workmen were gathering at the edge of the road and taking an equal interest in Mallory. And so they stared at one another until a police cruiser pulled up behind her. She knew the diggers had called local cops to drive her off.

An officer approached the window of the pickup truck, saying that old standard line, “Driver’s license and registration, please.”

Mallory ignored this request and leaned out the window to ask, “Is this where they found the body of Ariel Finn? It was about a year ago. The teenager with a missing hand?”

Predictably, the officer rolled up his eyes, taking her for a crime-scene tourist. He would have dealt with quite a few of them a year ago when the mutilated teenager had made the news in this state. And now he would designate her as ghoulish but harmless. His next words were also predictable. “Miss, forget the license and registration, okay? But I have to ask you to move along now.”

“Fine,” she said, satisfied that Dale Berman would never know she had been here. “Just tell me where I can find your boss.”

Te n minutes later, she pulled up to the curb in front of a police station, where an old man with a badge and blue jeans was sitting on a sidewalk bench. His face was lifted to the sky and washed in sunlight. Smoke from his cigar curled in the air as he turned her way and a smile crossed his face. The man stepped up to her window, grinning, saying, “I suppose you killed ol’ Ray. No way he’d let you drive this truck unless you drove it right over his body.”

She was opening her wallet to show him her badge and ID. He waved this away. “No need to see your driver’s license, miss. Any friend of Ray’s is a friend of mine, even if you did kill him.”

When they had exchanged names and she had tacked the word “detective” onto hers, he guided her to the bench, arguing that it was too nice a day to conduct any business indoors. He asked if a little cigar smoke would bother her. No, it would not. Lou Markowitz had loved his pipes, and she had grown up with the smell of smoke. Sometimes she missed it. She had forgotten to ask Ray Adler if her real father had been a smoker, and suddenly this seemed more important than the latest grave by the side of the road. She closed her hand to push her long red fingernails into the skin. Pain. Focus. She knew there was a reason for finding two bodies-one year apart-in the same location. A moment ago, it had been clear in her mind.

Get a grip.

She loosened her fist before the fingernails could draw blood, a telltale sign that she was not in complete control of herself.

Two bodies in the same location-one found on the road and one in the ground.

Yes, she had it now. The lawman beside her knew better than to give this information away-even to another cop. She would have to guess right the first time.

Riker assured Horace Kayhill that the caravan would not leave without him. “They’ll be getting off to a late start.”

Agent Nahlman glanced at her watch. “It’s twelve noon. They’ll be at the campsite for another hour.”

“But we’ll get to Kansas before-”

“No, Mr. Kayhill,” said Nahlman. “We’re taking a different route. The caravan will bypass Kansas. My partner and I will be leading all of you into Oklahoma on the interstate highway. Now if you’ll just come with us?”

Riker and Charles stood on the sidewalk outside of the sheriff ‘s o ffice, watching Kayhill drive off with the FBI agents. And now, finally, they had some privacy, and the time was right. The detective turned to his friend. “So you proposed to Mallory.” He splayed his hands, only a little frustrated with the other man’s s ilence. “And that’s it ?”

Charles nodded and stared at his shoes, clearly embarrassed. Evidently, one day this poor man had snapped, cracked and blown his cover as an old friend of the family; he had dared to propose to Mallory, who liked him well enough, but treated him more like the family pet.