Carol O’Connell - Find Me

“I can’t do that.”

Interesting.

Mallory had assessed April Waylon as a silly woman, easily frightened and quick to panic. Yet, here she was, traveling in the dark, working through her fear. “What’s so important about this trip of yours?”

“I’m looking for my daughter, my baby. She was only six years old when she was taken.”

Mallory watched her rearview mirror. No one was following. She slowed and rolled onto the shoulder of the road, then stopped awhile, minding the passing minutes, waiting until the time was right. “How old is your daughter now?”

“Nearly sixteen.”

They sat in silence for a while, and then Mallory moved on, going slowly.

April Waylon’s hands folded, fingers tightly interlaced. “You won’t s ay it, but you think I’m ridiculous. All this time-ten years. You think she’s dead. You know she is… And I’m a fool… And you’re right. But I need to find my child and bring her home. All over the world, children come home every day… home from school.” She bowed her head. “It was my fault. The school bus stopped right by the house, but I should’ve been with her… till the bus came. I never saw her again. I used to take it for granted-all those little homecomings. She was only six years old. So you see, don’t you, why I can’t leave her out there?” April turned to the passenger window, watching the nightscape rolling by. “I have to go out and find her.” Her voice became very matter-of-fact. “This is what mothers do.”

Mallory made a sharp turn and then another. And now she had doubled back onto Arch Street. She cut the headlights and the engine to coast silently through the darkness. Up ahead, another car was parked behind the red sedan, and a man with a flashlight was looking in the windows of April’s c ar. The red purse was in his hand. Mallory opened the car door soundlessly and made her way down the street on foot. The man was so preoccupied, he never heard her coming up behind him-until that moment when she wrenched his right arm behind his back and pressed her gun into his neck.

And he yelled, “Knock it off, I’m a cop!”

But Mallory made the pain of the wrenched arm an ongoing thing until the man produced a badge, and even then she was not quite done with him. She looked at the wallet spread on the hood of the red car and read the ID alongside his detective’s shield. This Chicago cop was way beyond his city limit, two hundred miles out of town.

“I know why I was coasting in the dark,” she said. “Now tell me why you cut your lights before you got here.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never cut my lights. I’m on a car-theft task force. I’ve been tracking a stolen car all night. I lost the LoJack signal on this road.”

It was a bad lie. She knew he was not trailing any car thief to a chop-shop, not out here in the boonies. And he would not be worried about a high-speed pursuit at this time of night-no reason to follow from any dis- tance. She believed he was on a surveillance detail, but it had nothing to do with a stolen car. “Where’s your backup? Where’s your vehicle recovery team?”

The Chicago cop was smiling now, and that was a lie, too, because it came with sweat trickling down his face on a cool night. He thought that she was going to kill him. He believed this with all his heart, but the smile never faltered, and she gave him points for that.

“I’m guessing you’re a cop,” he said, tossing this off as a joke.

Mallory was not amused.

“Hey,” he said, “if this is your car, I’m sorry. It’s not the one I was tracking. I saw the hood up and a purse in the road. I figured somebody was in trouble here.”

She released his arm and holstered her weapon.

He stood up straight and rolled back his shoulders, acting the part of a man who had not just wet his pants. “You are a cop, right?”

She lifted his wallet from the hood of the car. “You know I don’t b u y your story, right ?”

“Yeah.” His eyes were on her gun, though it rested in the holster, and he still wore a smile, as if it had somehow gotten stuck to his face and could not be undone.

She glanced at her own car down the road and waved to the passenger, signaling April Waylon to come out and join them. Turning back to the cop from Chicago, she said, “I’ve got a little job for you. If you didn’t lie about cutting your lights, then that woman has a stalker. So you’re going to play babysitter until she hooks up with her friends.” Mallory made a show of reading the ID card in the man’s o pen wallet before handing it to him. “And now that I know where to find you, I can look you up… if anything happens to her. Got a problem with that?”

“Oh, hell no,” he said, “no problem at all.” He was smiling naturally now, just so happy to be alive.

Click.

The noise of the camera was hidden beneath the roar of a car’s engine.

From this distance and deep in shadow, the shot would be dicey with no flash. The only illumination came from the streetlamp and the headlights of the red sedan. And the fast acceleration of the VW convertible had been unexpected. The image developing now was a blur of gold hair and silver metal. In many ways, it was a most telling portrait of the young blonde. By definition, enigmas lacked clarity.

Detective Riker had crossed into Indiana, one state away from Illinois, when he responded to the beep of his cell phone.

The surveillance cop from Chicago said, “She made me, Riker. I swear I don’t know how she did it. This never happened before, not to me.”

Riker kept a tactful silence. This would not have happened if the Chicago cop had kept a mile between his vehicle and the Volkswagen, but then he listened to the tale of the lady tourist and the stalker, and now he understood how Mallory had caught her tracker. The other man was not done talking, but Riker had ceased to listen. His mind was elsewhere. No believer in coincidence, he tried to force the connection of a New York suicide to a crime scene in Chicago and a stalker in downstate Illinois. It hurt his head.

The other man’s long story ended with the tagline, “Sorry.”

“Well, she’s good at spotting shadows,” said Riker. The girl could even see shadows that were not there. “It’s a gift.” And this was true. Mallory had turned a heightened sense of paranoia into an art form. “But thanks for hanging in there all night. I owe you bigtime.”

“That’s good, Riker. ’Cause when I get back, I can’t t e ll my boss that I screwed up. So I’m gonna tell him that you called off the surveillance. That’s okay by you?”

“For sure. I’ll back you up.”

“Thanks. Did I tell you she stuck a gun in my neck?”

“Oh, shit.”

“I’m guessing she’s no car thief-maybe a cop? Maybe the registered owner of that car-Detective Mallory?” When there was no response from Riker, the Chicago man said, “She doesn’t s t rike me as the type to drive a Vo lkswagen.”

Mallory was searching for an on-ramp to Interstate 55, a well-traveled highway with signs for twenty-four-hour fuel stops. The landscape of this old access road was the dark gray of early morning long before sunrise.

An on-ramp was no longer needed. She saw the lights of a gas station up ahead, and that was strange. Another driver might have felt lucky to find one open at this preternatural hour; Mallory was only suspicious. It was a small station with only one pump, and she wondered how it survived on local traffic. There was no garage for auto repairs, and the nearby interstate highway would eat up the commuter trade for gasoline. There was no reason to open for business before the full light of day, and yet a sleepy boy in coveralls was dozing beside the gas pump when she pulled into the lot.