Carol O’Connell - Find Me

“I don’t have a police scanner in my car.”

“You wouldn’t e ven have a car if you could get around on a horse. But Mallory? Going low-tech is just strange.” The detective sat well back in his chair and smiled. “But now she’s wired up to a computer again-just like her old self. Yeah, that’s a good sign-a real good sign.”

Rising from her chair without a word or gesture of good-bye, she quit the restaurant, got into her car and drove out of the parking lot in no particular hurry. Riker stared at the laptop, its screen still glowing on the table. She had abandoned it-a very un-Mallory-like thing to do. He closed his tired eyes. “I take it all back.”

A small hand tugged on Riker’s s leeve, and he looked up to see Peter Finn. The boy had panic in his eyes.

“Where is she going?”

“Don’t w o rry,” said Riker. “She won’t be gone long.”

Did he believe that?

We ll, so much depended on the way that Lou Markowitz had raised his foster child, and how much of the old man’s rulebook remained with her. Riker recalled one of Lou’s key commandments: Thou shalt not abandon the sheep… or the lamb.

According to Kronewald, there was another child’s grave up ahead. Mallory pulled over to the side of the road, switched on her scanner and listened to the chatter for a moment, then said, “You’re right.”

“What,” said the Chicago detective on the other end of the cell-phone connection, “you couldn’t t ake my word for it?”

“How did they find the grave?”

“They didn’t,” said Kronewald. “I did-with a little help from you and Riker. And thanks for the FBI files, but they didn’t have any of Nahlman’s reports. So I call in my own guy, and he-”

“Why would you expect to find reports from Agent Nahlman?”

“She’s a geographic profiler. You didn’t know? I checked her out. A real hotshot-as good as it gets.”

This made no sense. Mallory prided herself on being a very thorough thief; she overlooked nothing. A geographic profiler’s w o rk would have been the bedrock of a case like this one. How could that data be missing from the purloined files?

“Anyway,” said Kronewald, “I fed the data to my guy, all the known grave locations. He gave me the same twenty-mile spread that Riker got from the Pattern Man. Now, eighteen years ago in Oklahoma, about twenty miles from where you are now, a drunk hit a dog on the road.”

“I’m going to hang up on you now.”

“Hold on, kid, I’m getting to the good part. Well, this guy’s a dog lover. He’s out in the middle of nowhere, and he decides to bury this dog. So he pulls out his silly little camp shovel, and, before he digs the hole, he looks around for some stones to put over the body. He doesn’t w ant wild animals to eat the dead mutt. Now remember, this guy’s real drunk, and he’s just determined to do this right. Well, he finds a pile of rocks, and the dirt underneath is real loose. The ground’s been turned over. Less work, right?”

“So he dug a grave for a dog and found a dead child.”

“Right. A fresh kill with one wound-the kid’s throat was cut. Now the Oklahoma cops can’t find the old files on that kid, but they say there was no molestation.”

“They lost the files?”

“Hell no. Those cops had a visit from Dale Berman’s c rew nine months ago, and the feds probably walked off with everything they had on the case. So I asked them to check for another rock pile down the road.”

Finally-an answer to a simple question. Mallory abruptly ended the call.

After a search of the iPod menu, she selected Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Following this music recommendation, Peyton Hale wrote, “If you only follow the Buddha’s road, you can only go where the Buddha goes… only know what he knows. But all our questions are personal. Why am I here, where did I come from, where am I going?”

The letter was put aside. Her cell phone was beeping again, probably Kronewald, and she responded with a testy, “What now?”

“I know what you did,” said a familiar voice. “Have you gone psycho?”

“You can’t b lame all your screwups on cops.” She wondered if Dale Berman was recording this call in some lame attempt to document her footprints in the FBI computers.

“No, don’t b u llshit me,” said Berman. “I’m talking about the database-all the case details. Now Kronewald’s got everything. And he’s got cops calling him from seven states. Containment is shot to hell. That’s your work, isn’t it?” There was a moment of silence, as if he actually expected an admission of guilt, and then he said, “Tell me you didn’t c all out the media.”

Her thumbnail rested on the button that would end this call.

“Just one more question, Mallory. This perp we’re looking for-is he another psychopath with spooky green eyes? Does insanity run in your family?”

Agent Christine Nahlman sat at Riker’s t able, comparing notes on parents missing from the caravan. “We raised the Wolfman on his CB radio,” she said. “He lost a muffler on the road a few miles back.”

“Jill’s D ad,” said Riker, correcting her. He liked this Internet name and loathed the monster-movie tag that the feds had pinned on that sorry man. “I had Kronewald run a background check. His daughter’s name is Gillian on the birth certificate, Gillian Hastings.”

Nahlman’s e yebrows were slightly raised, and her lower lip tucked under her teeth, the only tells that the more formal name of this child was familiar. So preoccupied was she with this little surprise that Riker caught her nod- ding in unconscious agreement when he blamed the feds for making a mess of the last leg of the trip.

“It’s way out of control,” said the unshaven detective, “and it’s gonna get worse if you try to keep these people on the interstate.”

She shook her head. “I’ve got no choice. The old highway couldn’t handle all of them, not without one bottleneck after another. There’s a public campground only a few hours down the road. Dale wants them all together in one place while it’s still daylight.”

“So he can count noses? Like that matters anymore. His moles couldn’t even keep track of how many people we lost today. No offense. I lost count myself. All these people wanna be on the old road. Let’s get them back on it. Speed isn’t e verything.”

“I can’t do that.” Nahlman rose from the table.

She agreed with him; he knew she did, but the agent would not say a word against her boss, the prince of pricks. Instead, she said, “The best solution would be to catch this guy and catch him quick.”

Riker took her arm to stop her from leaving him. “Dale’s idea of speed is reckless. Don’t let him get you killed. If you’re in a bad place-” He took out his pen and scribbled across a semi-soggy napkin, then handed it to her. “That’s my cell. Call me. I’ll come get you.”

She put the napkin in her jacket pocket, then wiped the smile off her face before she turned around to rejoin the other agents.

He looked out the window on the parking lot. Dr. Magritte and Charles were still trying the reasonable approach with Dale Berman, but the agent only gave them his political smile, a cue that he was not even listening. In another hour, all of these people would be back on the road-the wrong road. How many more parents would they lose today?

The detective looked down at the open laptop that Mallory had abandoned-again. The screen came to life at the touch of the mouse pad, and it was good that she had left it running. Normally, it took him an hour to find the power button on a strange computer, but that was with a hangover. Today he was merely in withdrawal, and the solution for that problem was in hand. Riker popped the cap off his beer bottle, lit up a cigarette and remembered to say grace. He blessed the state of Oklahoma for not going completely nuts on the issue of second-hand smoke. God love these people-they even put ashtrays on the tables.