Carol O’Connell - Find Me

The FBI agent’s black sedan stopped in front of a saloon that would cater only to locals, judging by the license plates at the curb and the distance from the interstate. Riker switched off his headlights and waited in the dark until the door closed behind Christine Nahlman. He parked the Mercedes behind her car and waited a patient twenty minutes before following her inside.

The front door opened onto a wall of smoke and sound. A jukebox wailed country-music songs of dead dogs and feckless women, but that had been expected. And it was no surprise to see Nahlman drinking alone at the bar. The lady had a small but appreciative audience of men with baseball caps and pool cues, unshaven and smiling in her direction. They were checking her out and nodding to one another, seeing her as easy prey.

They had no idea that the lady packed a gun and more than enough ammo to dispatch the pool players and the bartender, too, if she felt so inclined.

Riker pulled a barstool closer to hers and sat down.

After the first few minutes of the cop-to-cop small talk that always began, “Hell of a day, huh?” Agent Nahlman was reassured that he was not here to make a play for her, and that was the truth. He had come to her as a thief to steal whatever he could.

He was picking up Mallory’s worst habits.

The detective was quick to find a common ground with Nahlman: the cop and the fed both liked the same brand of cheap Scotch; this was a lie on his part, for he was a bourbon drinker. But he had hopes that this bonding ritual would lead to every field agent’s pastime, bitching about bureaucrats-like the SAC, Dale Berman. Her ability to hold her liquor was impressive, and it was his fear that she might drink him under the bar before uttering the first disparaging word.

After the third round, he laid on a compliment. “So Mallory tells me you did a great job on the geographic profiling-and Dale took all the credit.” Riker shook his head to say, Ain’t life a bitch.

Nahlman shrugged and slugged back her drink. “In a way-Dale Berman should get the credit. He was the one who combed every state data-base for unsolved homicides.”

“He worked cold cases? And they didn’t even belong to the feds?”

“He didn’t work anything,” she said. “He just collected data for deadend homicides-zero evidence, no clues. He favored skeletons discovered years after death.”

Riker had a store of trivia for filling awkward silences. “Did you know that most murder victims are found by drunks stopping to pee by the side of the road?”

“Dale tossed those,” she said. “Not enough similarities. He concentrated on buried victims. A year ago, he gave the list to me, hundreds of gravesites all over the country, and he said, ‘Make me a pattern.’ ”

“Not find one? Make a pattern?”

“That’s right.” She rattled her ice cubes and spoke to her glass. “He wanted to manufacture a serial killer. It’s been done before. A perp confesses to a murder in one state, and cops from all the surrounding states come in with their own unsolved cases. They’re hoping this guy can clear the books for them. And sometimes they get lucky. They find an obliging killer who likes the attention.” Nahlman turned her calm gray eyes on Riker. “So don’t pretend to be shocked, okay? Cops do it, too. Now you promised to tell me how Dale Berman wound up in charge of a field office.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Riker. That bribe had been offered early on with the first drink, the setup. “It’s a real short story. The bastard screwed up a high-profile case in New York. It embarrassed the Bureau. So naturally they promoted him to make the mess stink less.”

“Amen,” said Nahlman. “Always praise the jerk in trouble.”

“But before Dale got the Texas posting, the Bureau buried him in a North Dakota satellite office-in the winter. It is a balanced universe.” Riker lifted two fingers to the bartender for another round, then turned his most sympathetic smile on Nahlman. “So the bastard fobbed the whole pile off on you. Why am I not surprised?” He was too obvious that time. He could see his mistake in the narrowing of her eyes, a slow wince.

“Riker, you should spend more time listening, and less time manipulating me. I think it’s the lack of finesse that pisses me off the most.” She lifted her glass to give him a moment to think that over. “I was glad to have the work, even if it landed me in Berman’s little dynasty. What a joke-a task force for a killer who didn’t exist yet.”

He wondered what Nahlman had done to earn this assignment to a disgraced SAC and a limbo of dead-end cases, but he observed the cop’s etiquette of not asking how she had screwed up her own career. That would be rude. He wondered if it had something to do with drinking on the job. This was not a criticism. It took an alcoholic to read the signs, and this woman was definitely one of his people-almost family.

She drained her glass-again. “Are you ready to listen?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He well understood his own place in this scheme: it was no longer his role to ply her for information-she would never tolerate that; it was Nahlman’s plan to feed it to him.

“I mapped out a lot of areas,” she said, “every place where a body was dug up over the past twenty years-hundreds and hundreds of them. Then I found the anomaly-bodies buried close to roads. If a killer only wanted to hide the remains, why risk being seen by a passing car? When I recognized the roads as different pieces of old Route 66, I had my signature for a serial killer. Then I knocked out all but eight of the graves on Berman’s list. And I had my pattern.”

“A pattern for two thousand miles of road?”

“Just listen, okay? Seven years ago, the telephone company dug up a grave in a place where the pavement doesn’t even exist anymore, but it used to be Route 66. I called local police for details. The case was so old. Notes got lost-evidence, too. I dug up my own buried skeleton twenty miles down the road, and then I found another one. I checked missing persons reports on neighboring states and found matches on personal items from the graves. Then-big mistake-I contacted the parents to ask them for DNA samples.”

“And one of them was Jill’s D ad? George Hastings?”

“When Berman found out, he went ballistic. So then he formed the recovery detail.”

“The body snatchers.”

“Right,” she said. “Hit and run, no paperwork with the local cops. Berman had a bona fide serial killer, and he didn’t w ant to lose the case to a task force out of D.C.”

“And he had you. You knew where to dig.”

“My estimates weren’t e x act. There were gaping holes in my pattern. So I still have to go out and eyeball the land, looking for likely places-nothing near a town, no homes close by. If there’s a house near one of my sites, I have to find out when it was built. And I walk a lot of miles with the cadaver dogs.”

“So you’ve been working the case for a year.” According to Kronewald, the war of cops and feds had begun with the graves of three children stolen from Illinois.

“Working it? Ye s and no. I spend all my time mapping sites for the body snatchers. I don’t know how many of them panned out. And I’ve got no idea what Dale does with evidence-if he does anything at all.” She pushed her glass to the rail of the bar. “I know you don’t like my boss, but you always call him by his first name. Why is that?”

In the town of Santa Rosa, New Mexico, Mallory sat in the dark of her parked car and stared at the façade of Club Café. It was closed-forever.

One of the entrance posts was bent, and a neon sign had been taken down and discarded with other trash to one side of the building. In the younger days of Route 66, this place had done a booming business, and she would have known that even without her father’s letters. A gravel lot adjoined this paved one to catch the overflow of customers on a Saturday night.