Find Me (7 page)

As Mallory lingered over her breakfast, she learned that Sally held the keys to the tourist cabins. She handed the waitress her credit card to rent a bed for a few hours of sleep.

So tired.

Yet she sat awhile longer in the booth by the window. Tw o other din- ers arrived in separate cars, half an hour apart. Both men were obviously locals, for Sally had their orders on the counter before the steel and glass door had swung open. After finishing their coffee-and pie for one, a doughnut for the other-the two men departed at their separate times. An hour had passed.

The green sedan and its horde of flies remained.

There were more flies now, so many that their angry buzzing penetrated the window glass. Back in New York City, Chief Medical Examiner Edward Slope had always referred to these insects and their maggot broods as God’s little undertakers.

Mallory wondered if murder
was a low priority in this part of Illinois. Twenty minutes had passed between her phone call and the appearance of a patrol car in the diner’s parking lot. The young state trooper who emerged from the vehicle was close to her own age, though the small nose, almost pug, belonged to a boy years younger. She guessed that he had played football in high school. He carried himself with the confidence of an athlete who has won a few games and fancies that he did that single-handed. Worse yet, he was the moseying type. She marveled that he could drag out the simple maneuver of leaving his car and donning his hat for the long walk of six steps to the diner.

A key to one of the tourist cabins was in her hand, and she planned to make short work of this business so she could get some sleep.

The door swung open, and the trooper nodded to the waitress. “Hey, Sally.” He approached the booth by the window and, with the fine deduction of a hick cop, addressed the only customer as “Miss Mallory?”

“Just Mallory,” she said.

After introducing himself as Gary Hoffman, “Just Gary, if you like,” he settled into the other side of the booth, removing his hat and smiling. “Would’ve been here sooner if I’d known how pretty you are.” When this attempt at charm fell flat, his smile became foolish. He opened a notebook and fished through his pockets to find a pen. “So you want to report a suspicious vehicle.” He looked out the window with a view of the green sedan and the silver convertible. “I’m guessing that old Ford’s not yours. I got you pegged as a Volkswagen girl.”

If the trooper had seen the brief smile that crossed her face, he would not have taken it for any happy expression.

“I want you to pop the Ford’s trunk,” said Mallory.

He gave her a kind but condescending smile, as if he were playing Officer Friendly to a kindergarten class. “Well, now, you see… here in Illinois… there’s a reason why we don’t usually do things like that.”

Mallory squeezed the cabin key until the metal dug into her hand. She was badly in need of sleep, and she was not going to wait around all day for him to finish his sentences. “Last night, back in Chicago, the cops found an unidentified murder victim-and it’s missing a body part.”

“The way I heard it-“

“The corpse was laid out like a damn road sign pointing this way.”

“Ma’am, Chicago is hundreds of miles-”

“I
know
that. I
drove
it. That’s why my car has the same water streaks as the Ford.” She nodded toward the window on the parking lot. “Out there, you’ve got an abandoned vehicle that was rained on in Chicago last night. This part of the state hasn’t seen rain for a month. Did you notice the flies all over the back end of the Ford?”

“Oh, flies,” he said, waving off the one that had flown in the door with him. “I’ve seen that before.” And by that, he meant for her to know that he had seen it
all
-every damn thing. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

She wondered what might have given that away-her accent? Or was it the New York plate on her car, the one parked right under his nose?

“Now what we’ve got here,” said the trooper, perhaps pausing to catch his breath-so many words to get out and all in one day, “well, it’s probably a deer carcass in the trunk… and that’s no reason to break into a man’s c ar.”

“A
deer
.” Mallory stared at the green sedan, as if reading the trooper’s entire future on the hood of that car: He would never open his eyes to any observation but his own; he would never rise higher in rank; and he would be taken by surprise on the day he was fired. She planned to alter his future, but not from any act of kindness on her part. Cutting this man at the knees would open his eyes very fast-and then she could get some sleep.

“No dents in the front end,” she said. “He didn’t hit a large animal with his car. So you have to figure he was hunting, right? Now, assuming our
hunter
could fit a full-grown deer into the Ford’s trunk-and he can’t – you don’t think they have enough deer back in Colorado, where his
license plate
was issued? Maybe they’ve got a shortage? And what’s the deer population in Chicago-where his car got rained on last night?”

The trooper grinned, having thought of a solution for this little problem, too. He opened his mouth to speak, but Mallory was faster, saying, “I favor blowflies over cadaver dogs for finding stray body parts. You’ve got jurisdiction and probable cause. So pop the damn trunk.” And then, when he showed no signs of moving, she added, “It’s a good career move.”

Grinning, he shook his head, as if she had just told him a fine joke. Then he glanced at the row of pies on the shelf behind the counter, maybe planning to stop awhile for breakfast.

But Mallory did not shoot him.

Though she had hoped to avoid this, she laid down the gold badge, an emblem of New York’s Finest. “Don’t fool with me. Just do it.”

The Mercedes-Benz
was at a standstill, and Detective Riker waited for an overturned truck to be cleared from the road up ahead. After bumming a cigarette from the driver in the car behind him, he stretched his legs as he sorted through the entries in his notebook. He knew that Mallory had traveled across four states in the fairly straight line of Route 80. That had ended when she stopped for gas in Chicago. Thereafter, she had traveled on back roads separated by stretches of driving on I-55, where that highway had displaced an older one. At first, it had seemed like aimless meandering-just a girl on the road and maybe any road would do. Or the kid might be lost and, true to herself, incapable of asking for direction.

The last pass of her credit card had paid for a meal and a room rental a mile outside a tiny town near the southwest border of Illinois. He knew it for a small town because he recognized it. He also recalled other places she had passed through from night into morning. Riker had a loving memory of that old road in its glory days when he was in his teens, and he could still recite the names of every little burg where a girl had kissed him and bedded him or decked him. This was the Mother Road, the old decommissioned Route 66, still traveled by middle-aged pilgrims seeking vestiges of better times and memories of the way they never were.

He knew young Kathy Mallory did not belong on that road, not as a tourist.

She was hunting.

Mallory opened the window
on the parking lot to let in the roar of flies, but the state trooper still did not get it. Sally, however, received a clear message, and she was out the door with a can of insect spray in hand. While the waitress did battle with the cloud of flies, the trooper
slowly
moseyed out to the parking lot, slid behind the wheel of his cruiser and drove off laughing.

On the way out of the diner, Mallory pulled a metal hanger from the clothes rack and reconfigured the wire to form a straight shaft with a hook. After relieving Sally of her can of insecticide, Mallory jammed the wire between the window glass and the car body to work the lock. Upon opening the door, she reached in and found the lever for the trunk release. She was not up to dealing with the operatic drama of a civilian unaccustomed to gore after breakfast, and so she sent Sally away. And now, standing upon ground layered with dead insects and many that still squirmed, the detective had her first look inside the trunk. The most intrepid flies had found their way in, having survived the waitress’s game attempt at genocide.

After pulling out her cell phone and checking the stored list of numbers, she placed a call to a Chicago homicide detective who was owed a few favors by NYPD. On the other end of the line, a gruff male voice said, “Kronewald!” followed by a slightly menacing
“What!”
This was not a question; it was an order to state her business or get the hell off his damn phone.

“It’s Mallory from NYPD.”

“No shit!” This was said with sudden good cheer. “How the hell are you, kid? And how’s that partner of yours-Riker?”

Not one for small talk, she said, “I popped the trunk of a car and found a man’s hand. It’s cut off at the wrist.”

“Well, damn! That works real nice with a mutilated corpse right here in Chicago.” Then he told her what had been left in place of the man’s stolen hand, and, in typical Kronewald fashion, he added nothing that she had not already learned from her police scanner last night when a rookie cop had run amuck on an open radio.

Always holding out.

And now she gave him the name of another tourist with car trouble and a dead phone-just like the Ford that carried the dead man’s hand.

The Mercedes was
on the move again, but only doing civilian time through the last few miles of Indiana. Where were all these people going so early in the damn morning? It was a rare day when Riker ever made it into work before nine. Responding to the beep of his cell phone, he heard a familiar voice out of Chicago.

“Hey, you bastard, it’s Kronewald. Your partner turned off her damn cell phone.”

“Yeah, she does that a lot,” said Riker. “What can I do for you?”

“You guys have done enough for one morning. Mallory wanted a guard on the green Ford so she could get some sleep. Tell her we’re sending the same trooper back there. His barracks commander thinks the humiliation might do the boy some good.”

Riker listened to the details of an incomplete corpse found at the start of old Route 66 and not far from where Mallory had refueled her car. That Chicago gas station was becoming more interesting all the time. The rest of the body, according to Kronewald, had turned up in downstate Illinois- with Mallory. And how did the mutilation of a Chicago corpse tie in with a gunshot victim on the floor of his partner’s New York apartment? Mentioning Savannah Sirus might be dangerous.

“Did Mallory give you the name of a woman who might figure into this?”

“Yeah, she even told us where to start looking,” said Kronewald, “and thanks. Only took three phone calls to find April Waylon’s motel.”

Four hours had passed
before Mallory awakened in the tourist cabin. There was no need to look at the alarm clock on the table; she possessed an interior timepiece that never failed her. However, she did carry a hand-me-down pocket watch for show. The heirloom had belonged to Louis Markowitz, and the back of it bore the engraved names of four generations of police: his grandfather, his father, himself and, last, his foster child, the single name
Mallory
. Shamelessly, she had pulled it out many a time as a reminder to others of favors owed to that old man, favors she had inherited. And sometimes she opened it in the squad room when she felt most alienated from her coworkers, the fifteen elite homicide detectives of Special Crimes Unit, men who had loved Lou Markowitz with all their hearts and loved her not at all. And now, though her freakish brain kept better time, though no one was watching and there was no advantage to be had, she opened the pocket watch and stared at the antique face for a moment- though she would never admit to a need for comfort or any understanding of sentiment. Mallory had no idea why she did this, and she did it all the time.

After a splash of cold water on her face, she turned the key in the cabin’s lock and headed for the diner, where she expected all the paperwork to be ready for her so that she could sign off on the chain of evidence. That done, she planned to sit down to a cup of Sally’s good coffee, all she needed to get back on the road. Her next landmark was across the state line in Missouri.

She found Tr ooper Gary Hoffman in the parking lot. He was sitting on the hood of his cruiser and swatting flies. The waitress, Sally, had been forbidden to use any more insecticide on the green Ford.

The rest of the lot was crowded with vehicles from the caravan she had passed on the road. She recognized a round trailer hitched up to a car and one of the larger mobile homes. The caravan had swelled in numbers while she was sleeping. The paved lot had space for thirty cars but it could not hold them all, and some were crowded into the neighboring field, where a few dogs were barking from rolled-down windows and others strained at leashes tied to grillework and door handles. The diner would not have seen this much business in the quarter century since Interstate 55 had supplanted the old road.

April Waylon’s red sedan was nowhere in sight. Kronewald’s people must have tracked the woman down before she could get back on the road.

Inside the diner, there were no empty tables or stools and not much hope of fast service, either. Frazzled Sally was pulling sodas from the cooler when three customers invaded her territory behind the counter. The waitress did not struggle when the women captured her by each arm and led her to a table. With the gentlest hands and smiling all the while, they forced her to sit down and relax. Other people had quickly formed an assembly line of waving butter knives coating bread, more hands slapping down meat, and sharper knives at work thin-slicing tomatoes and blocks of cheese. Tw o men at the end of the line acted as sandwich wrappers and bag stuffers, and they called out the menu prices to a woman who noted the cost of the food as they packaged it up for the road.