Carol O’Connell - Find Me

What?

Not waiting for an answer, she carried the wastebasket out to the balcony. “It fits. I’ve never heard Riker use a child killer’s name. He always calls them cockroaches.” She turned to the neighboring balcony, leaning over the rail for a better look at the windows of the next room.

Checking for eavesdroppers-witnesses?

She looked down at the contents of the wastebasket. “If the chain of possession ever led back to Riker, he’d lose his badge. But he couldn’t destroy evidence-he just couldn’t go that far.” She came back inside and walked up to Charles. “So he gave it to you. But you’re not the type to collect souvenirs from a murder.”

What now? Was she accusing him of something?

“I told you,” he said, “Riker thought the California map might be useful.”

“He knew you’d throw away the rest of it.”

What rubbish. However, in a twisted way, he looked upon this rationale of hers as a sign of healing; Mallory was more herself, for only a truly paranoid personality could come up with a contrivance as tortured and far-flung as this one.

No-that was unfair.

Her bedrock for this cracked idea was her absolute faith in her partner. She would never come up with any scenario where that man could make an error as careless and costly as this one. She must believe the bag had been given to Riker after the case was closed. Or did she?

“What if the New Mexico police come looking for their evidence?”

“The chance is pretty slim.” She took his arm and led him through the open door to the balcony. “Kronewald helped them close out Kayhill’s murder, and they pinned it on the right man. No harm done. Odds are, they think one of their own guys lost the bag. And they’d b e right about that. No receipt-that’s really sloppy police work.” Mallory looked down and nudged the wastebasket with her shoe. “I’m a cop. I can’t destroy evidence.”

However, Charles apparently could, for now she handed him a book of matches.

“Up to you,” she said. “If you burn it, Riker can never know about this. Nobody can. You understand that, right?”

Indeed.

Mallory would continue to believe the worst of her partner and trust him less because of that-if Charles could only keep his silence and commit a crime to obfuscate Riker’s innocence.

She walked back inside, closing the glass door behind her, and now the drapes were also closing. No need to watch-to witness. She had every confidence that he would break the law for her.

Left alone on the balcony, he looked down at the metal wastebasket- and the evidence. After railing against Dale Berman’s incompetence, Riker would be destroyed by this oversight of his own-a detail missed, a life lost. Armed with the identity of a serial killer, a man known on sight, the Finns’ FBI escort would have been searching faces instead of shadows, and they would have detected the fugitive in their midst. If not for Riker’s failure to inspect a small bag-Christine Nahlman would not have died.

Was Mallory convinced that her partner had committed the crime of concealing evidence? Or did she guess the truth in that moment when she handed over the driver’s license with its damning photograph? Had she detected a flicker of horror on Charles’s face-his tell-all face? He could never risk posing the question to her, and she knew it. Or did she? He would never know. But this was a knot worthy of Mallory, tied with threads of truth and lies and loyalty, and it could not be undone.

Everyone was tainted except for Charles Butler, the last one standing with clean hands-until he struck the match.

They continued on a northern route up the coast highway, fairylands of woods breaking into dazzling vistas of rock cliffs and crashing ocean waves. Charles was beginning to enjoy the road. The scary, hairy turns made it more like a carnival ride with a view. When he gave the wheel over to Mallory, her malaise seemed to brighten, and he picked this lighter moment to ask about her father’s eyeglasses.

No, she did not remember if he had been wearing glasses when she saw him all those years ago. “Probably not. Ray Adler said he never wore them.”

And now Charles had her permission to ransack her knapsack for the old photographs and the letters. He sifted through the pictures of young Peyton Hale, studying them by the poor light of the dashboard. In every snapshot, a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles rested in the man’s shirt pocket. “He always kept them close-the glasses.”

But he never wore them. Neither did Riker. Did Peyton Hale also have the flaw of vanity? That would explain so much.

Mallory’s concentration was elsewhere. Her eyes were on the twisty road, the ride. She simply did not care why Peyton Hale had passed her by on that faraway beach in her childhood. Charles might as well be talking to himself when he said, “He’s very young in these photos. His prescription for glasses would’ve been much stronger by the time you met him. You could be mistaken about-”

Oh, no. She was listening that time, and how dare he challenge her? She turned to glare at him while completing a sharp turn with the precision of a missile guidance system, no sign of human fear for the inch-away trees and rocks in the headlights. “He saw me, Charles. He was as close as you are now. He looked right at me. But he didn’t recognize my face, my mother’s face.”

Well-Mallory the Machine was back.

Charles sensed more progress in these moments when he irritated her the most. She was rebuilding herself, taking back all the flyaway pieces, the paranoia, the suspicion and her cold calculation for debit columns of cheats and losses. Cold as stone, but such a lovely face-unforgettable. In the old black-and-white photographs, it might well be Mallory standing beside Peyton Hale, so alike were mother and daughter.

With the aid of her penlight, Charles read the letters written for O.B. They had been authored by a deeply romantic man, though there was nothing to say that Peyton had ever taken a lover and not one word about Cassandra’s coming child. The letters were all about Route 66, the man’s only passion. In one context, they comprised a book of rules on how to live in a world of constant motion, where the road could suddenly shift beneath the traveler’s w heels or vanish from sight. Every line was polished prose and suitable for publication.

And the opening-for O.B.? A book title perhaps, or the initials of an editor.

Mallory must have been so disappointed in these pages, for her theory was vindicated here: When the letters were all one had to go by, it seemed that she and her mother had never existed.

The silver convertible drove on in a winding fashion, climbing, climbing, and then came a sensation approaching freefall as they dropped down the roller-coaster road in the dark, kissing mountainside then leafy branches. They were heading toward that far patch of coastline once visited by fourteen-year-old Kathy Mallory. He could see her as she was then, a girl poised on a beach at the edge of the world-so young to have no safety net-so full of hope for this meeting of father and child. Then came the moment. And the child had walked away alone.

It was a rare road that had three endings and one resolution.

They had arrived in this small coastal community at an unnatural hour for visiting. And so it was morning when the silver car pulled away from the hotel on Main Street and rolled through the fog that shrouded Mendocino, California. The sun had risen hours ago; Charles took this on faith since he could not see it.

Not an auspicious beginning for the day.

The road climbed up through cloudland, and the car broke into bright sunlight and lush green forest thick with fern and flowering plants. There were no houses visible from the road, only lot numbers to tell him that the more reclusive citizens of Mendocino were in there somewhere. These outlying rural householders seemed to like their privacy. The car approached a small dirt road that could only be a private driveway, and here Charles slowed a bit for there was no number to be read on the mailbox-in fact no mailbox, only a broken post. Half of it protruded from the ground, and the rest of it lay on the grass, having fallen victim to wood rot.