Carol O’Connell - Find Me

She raised her gun a little higher, aiming for his face. “I think you know I like you well enough to shoot you.”

He understood at once, and he believed her, but he would not let go.

She dropped the gun and threw her knapsack at his head. Reflex made him release the pipe to catch the sack, and-that quickly-she was gone.

His heart was banging on the run as he reached the rise in time to see her car poised once again on the rancher’s road, her headlights flashing twice, then steady. Charles ran faster, legs churning, chest burning. He was so close. Mallory revved her engine to a roar. The car lurched forward. In seconds only, she had closed the distance, and in the duel of clashing headlights, horizontal stalks of brilliant light blended into fusion-with the breaking of glass and the crash of metal on metal. Each vehicle was blinded by one lost headlight and married together by Mallory’s lance. The running man stumbled when he saw her body in silent flight, shooting upward in an arc that ended behind the obstacle of the ruined silver car.

Dodie, unharmed, was still standing in front of the pickup truck. Her harness leash had come loose, and yet she was slow to move away from the one unshattered headlight. Charles ran past her, past the wreckage where Mallory’s right fender was joined to one side of the truck’s twisted grille. Following the beam of her surviving headlight, he found her body broken on the ground.

Mallory had counted on Newton’s first law: the pickup truck, the vehicle at rest, had remained at rest, despite the impact of her car. She had stayed on course long enough to send her lance through the other windshield, and she had turned hard left, but one bumper had crashed into the truck. The swerve had saved Dodie, but there had been no time for Mallory to save herself.

No need to look inside the cab of the pickup truck. Surely there was a headless corpse behind the wheel. Charles was busy staunching the blood flow from Mallory’s wounds to the tune of a musical fragment, eight notes hummed in a child’s voice. Dodie Finn was lost in the dark of some interior landscape with no moon or stars or ken of pain.

The strangled sound of crying… that came from Charles.

No more reporters ran wild in the streets of Kingman, Arizona. The media was long gone-off to Chicago, following a trail of breadcrumbs left by Detective Kronewald.

A celebrity patient in the Kingman hospital was awake and making good use of his recovery time. Mallory’s knapsack lay on the bed beside Riker; it was unzipped, violated, and the detective was reading the words of Peyton Hale. Caught in this act of trespass, he smiled at his visitor. “Hey, Charles.” He held up one page of lines penned in faded blue ink. “Well, you wouldn’t read them. Somebody had to. It’s a character flaw-I always want the whole story.”

Apparently Charles Butler also liked to know the beginning, middle and end to things, and he was an admirable upside-down reader, but the man showed no interest in the letters scattered on the bed in plain sight. Instead, he picked up the typewritten pages half buried by sheets. “So this is the official police report on the wreck.”

“Check out the line about the seat belt on the driver’s side.” Against the law and hospital rules, Riker lit up a cigarette.

Looking up from his reading, the psychologist met the detective’s sorry eyes. “You have to get past this business of her accident.”

“Is that what we’re calling it?”

Charles, the most loyal of conspirators, opened a window to lose the smoke before the head nurse, a woman with the nose of a cadaver dog, could rush in to confiscate the detective’s last pack of cigarettes.

“It was matter of bad timing,” said Charles. “I was there, remember?”

“I didn’t have to see the wreck,” said Riker. “I watched Kathy Mallory grow up. I’ve seen her take falls from bicycles and playground swings. When she was thirteen, she borrowed a cop’s motorcycle. It was parked right in front of the damn stationhouse. Well, it was a learn-as-you-go kind of thing. The kid popped the clutch and did this amazing wheelie. God, I’ll never forget that-she must’ve ridden thirty feet on the back wheel-and then she went flying. So I’m the expert here, okay? The kid always landed like a cat. And she should’ve walked away from that wreck.”

“I’m sure she intended to.” Charles laid the accident report on the bed sheet and turned away to look out the window-to hide a face that could not hide a lie. “Mallory tried to steer clear of the truck after she sent that pipe through the windshield.”

“No, she didn’t,” said Riker. “Mallory only steered clear of the kid. She always knew she’d have to hit that truck’s front end. Even a dead man’s foot on the gas pedal would’ve killed Dodie Finn.” The detective picked up the report and waved it like a flag. “You read this, Charles. You know her seat belt was functional. But Mallory-didn’t-buckle-up.” He wadded the document into a tight ball. “Even though she knew the crash was coming.” Riker held up his next piece of evidence, letters from Peyton Hale that were once the property of Savannah Sirus. “And I know who to blame… for all the good it does me.”

Upon entering the hospital room, Charles Butler was surprised to see the bedside chair usurped by a friendly bear of a man, who introduced himself as Ray Adler from Kansas. “I’m a friend of the family.” And now the Kansan turned back to the unconscious Kathy Mallory and resumed his earnest lecture on the terrible importance of seat belts.

When Ray Adler left Arizona, he had the wreckage of the silver convertible in tow. And he had left Charles Butler with a better understanding of Mallory’s simple quest: All she had wanted was this one small thing-to drive her father’s road through his life and times.

The New York detective with the fewest broken bones and sutures was the first to be released from the hospital. Riker donned dark glasses to shade his eyes from the Arizona sun as he walked past the first bright window. He turned to the large man beside him, who had just won the luggage war and carried the detective’s bag down the corridor. “So, you read her father’s letters? Would you say that guy was obsessed with Route 66?”

“I didn’t read them.” Charles Butler set down the duffel bag and depressed a button to bring the elevator. “But when I gave her the letters, she accused me of reading them anyway.”

“Well, a little hostile paranoia is a good sign. More like my old Kathy.”

“Really? She seems to have lost all interest in this case. Does that sound normal to you?”

“Sure it does.” Riker fished in his pockets for a pack of cigarettes so that he would be ready to light up just the moment that he escaped from the hospital. “If I was back in New York right now, I’d have a new case on my desk before I could get blind drunk and wonder what the last one was all about. So, yeah, this is normal. It’s over.”

“No, it isn’t.” The elevator doors opened, and Charles stepped in.

Riker limped in, and they descended through the floors. Above the mechanical sound of the gears, the detective could hear the tumblers working in the other man’s b rain. “Okay, what’s your problem with this case?”

“The killer has no name.”

“Well, he doesn’t need one anymore. He’s dead.”

“Then why didn’t Kronewald release the name of that suspect from Illinois?”

“Egram? That’s never gonna happen, Charles. Kronewald can’t find any relatives for a DNA link to the corpse. At a time like this, the only thing that draws relatives out of the woodwork is a nice fat lawsuit. Kronewald’s gonna bury the Egram file. Count on it.” Riker watched the descending floor numbers, clicking his lighter in anticipation.