Find Me

by Carol O'Connell

The two FBI agents had returned to the sheriff ’s conference room. They stood near the door, perhaps as a reminder that they should be leaving soon, and they planned to take the interview subject with them. Nahlman made a point of staring at her watch.

  Charles Butler sat at the long table beside Mr. Kayhill, a member of the caravan, who was also known as the Pattern Man. Kayhill was well below average height, not more than a few inches over five feet, and his physical appearance was best described as a distracted pale white pear with black-rimmed eyeglasses. The little man was also rather clumsy, and this he apologized for while mopping up the coffee spilled across his maps. The nervous disposition and clumsiness could be put down to a bad overdose of caffeine.

  Horace Kayhill’s record time for driving Route 66, he was proud to say, was three days, fueled on little more than coffee and cola.

  Riker’s jaw dropped in a sign of naked admiration. “Back in the sixties, I did it in four days, but I was driving drunk on tequila—the good kind with a worm in the bottle.”

  Sheriff Banner allowed that, in his own teenage days, he had once driven Route 66. And he reckoned that he had done it “—under the influence of something, though I couldn’t say what.” He had no memory of the entire trip. This story was declared the winner.

  Charles, who had never driven the famous road, looked down at the maps as Mr. Kayhill unfolded them and spread them on the table.

  The Pattern Man had spent considerably more travel time on his latest expedition, thus accounting for being late to join up with the caravan at the edge of Illinois. He pointed to small crosses drawn to indicate gravesites. “I got some of these from the Internet groups.” And he had discovered others by making inquiries among people who lived along his route. “Now, this grave was found ten years ago. The locals say the remains were mummified. In other places, people told me the bodies were just skeletons—and one guy said the bones turned to dust when they took them out of the ground, but that was a shallow grave in a flood zone.” He reached across the table to run one finger along the desert area of a California map. “As you can see, these three graves are the same distance apart, roughly twenty miles. Now you might read that as a cluster pattern, but you’d be wrong. I see it as a continuous line, thousands of miles long, at least a hundred graves.” He never saw the startled look on Agent Nahlman’s face when he said, “The FBI agents can back me up on that.”

  Charles watched as Nahlman quickly folded her arms and looked up at the ceiling. She did not intend to back this man up on the time of day. Her partner, Agent Allen, pressed his lips in a thin tight line, determined to blow his teeth out rather than confirm or deny. The young man’s eyes were fixed on the California map and its little crosses, each one a grave.

  “Tell them!” Kayhill stood up suddenly and glared at Agent Barry Allen.

  “Easy now,” said Sheriff Banner, waving the little man back to his chair.

  Kayhill was calmer now, even dignified when he said—when he insisted, “The FBI dug up the center grave.” He pointed to the first cross in a row of three. “Now this site here—this one was found by a highway construction crew twenty years ago.” His finger moved on to the last of three. “And this one was found nine years ago. They’re forty miles apart.” He looked up at Agent Allen. “So how could your people dig up that middle ground and find another grave if you didn’t see the larger pattern? You knew right where to dig.”

  The two agents maintained their silence. Frustrated, Kayhill unfolded other maps, and these had arcs drawn over the crosses along the road. “I have other patterns. Would you like to know where these children came from?”

  Nahlman moved closer to the table, saying, “No, I think we’ve seen enough, Mr. Kayhill. It’s getting late. Agent Allen and I will drive you back to the caravan.”

  “No,” he said, edging his chair away from her. “I want to explain my data.”

  “We should be leaving now,” said Nahlman, disguising the mild order as a request.

  This prompted Riker to ask Horace Kayhill if he wanted another cup of coffee.

  Charles picked up one of the maps. Some crosses were drawn in ink. He guessed that the ones done in pencil were projected gravesites, as yet undiscovered. “Isn’t this a bit like geographic profiling?”

  “Yes!” said the Pattern Man, suddenly elated that someone in this company could appreciate his work. “And it’s based on consistent spacing of gravesites. I’ve been able to pin down fourteen bodies dug up on this road, and that’s enough to project numbers for the entire group. Some of my data comes from websites for missing children.” He glanced at Agent Nahlman. “One of them is an FBI website.” Now he leaned toward Charles, who was clearly his favorite audience. “Think of Route 66 as the killer’s home base.”

  Sheriff Banner handed a slip of paper to Riker. The detective nodded, then turned to the Pattern Man. “So, Horace, maybe our perp drives a mobile home.”

  “Yes, of course!” Horace Kayhill glowed with goodwill for the detective. “That’s very good. So the killer actually lives on this road—the whole road.”

  Charles shifted his chair closer to Riker’s at the head of the table, and now he could clearly read the paper in the detective’s hand. It was the vehicle registration for Mr. Kayhill’s mobile home.

  The little man was exuberant, unfolding all of his maps to cover every inch of table space. “You see these half circles in green ink? The arcs represent the areas of day trips between abductions and graves. If he’s as smart as I think he is, then he takes the children from one state and buries them in the next one down the road. Of course, that’s based on the only two girls who were ever identified. Police searches for missing children are usually confined to a single state—unless the FBI becomes involved, but they so rarely bother with these children.”

  Nahlman stiffened, then signaled her partner by sign language to make a phone call, and Agent Allen promptly left the room.

  Riker called after him, “Horace likes his coffee with cream and lots of sugar.” The detective smiled at Nahlman. She looked at the floor.

  And the Pattern Man continued. “Think of him as a shark.”

  “A shark?” Nahlman drew closer to Kayhill’s chair. “How did you come up with that analogy?”

  This was not mere curiosity. Charles detected a more authoritarian note in her voice. She was slipping into the interrogation mode, though she forced a smile for Kayhill’s benefit, and the little man returned that smile, so happy that she was at last showing interest.

  “A shark fits the pattern,” said Kayhill. “It has a vast territory, wide and long, and this creature is constantly in motion, always looking for prey.” One hand waved low over the spread maps. “These gravesites have no chronological order. So he goes back and forth over the road. And look here.” He pointed to long red lines that spanned one of his maps. “This is his outside territory. Now I admit that my data is limited for this particular pattern. Only one fresh corpse was ever found, and that girl was kidnapped within twenty-four hours of finding her grave. So I assume he won’t keep a child for more than a day. And he’ll always drive the lawful speed limit.”

  Charles nodded. “The killer wouldn’t want to attract attention from the police.”

  “Yes!” said the happy Pattern Man. “That’s how I fixed his geographical limits.”

  “Good theory,” said Riker. “And a mobile home would cover his dig site. Hell, he could dig a grave anywhere on that road in broad daylight. All he’d have to do was let the air out of one tire and leave a jack propped up in plain sight. That would guarantee that no cop’s gonna stop to give him a hand.” He studied the lines drawn on either side of the map. “So how big is our shark’s territory?”

  “Well, I’ve drawn lines to include an area six hundred miles wide, two thousand and four hundred miles long. Amazing, isn’t it?” He reached under one of his maps and pulled out a small notebook. “These are more specific calculations on gravesites that haven’t been found yet. I used the di
stance between known graves, then made allowances for populated areas and inaccessible places. There’s one segment in Illinois where Route 66 dead-ends into a lake.” He handed the notebook to Riker. “It’s yours. I think you’ll find it helpful.”

  “You got that right.” Riker accepted this gift with a rather disingenuous smile. He lit a cigarette and slumped low in his chair, so relaxed—almost harmless. “Now what about you, Horace? Did you lose a kid?”

  “Oh, no. I’ve never even been married.”

  “You don’t say,” said Riker. “So what do you do?”

  “My interest is mainly statistics, patterns and such, and—of course—Route 66. I know every website for that road. That’s how I found two of Dr. Magritte’s people. I met them in a Route 66 chatroom. Other parents, too. They were coming together with common statistics, stories of murdered children recovered along the old road.”

  Riker exhaled a cloud of smoke and watched it curl upward. “And what do you do for a living, Horace? You didn’t say.”

  “I’m a statistician.”

  “Of course,” said the smiling detective. “What was I thinking?”

  A deputy entered the room and laid down a sheet of paper in front of her boss. After a glance, the sheriff handed it to Riker, and Charles read over his friend’s shoulder. It was a background check on Horace Kayhill, and it fit all the expectations for a man with his disorder. He was on full disability, unemployed and unemployable. Though the sheet of rough data did not include the nature of his disability, Charles already knew. The man was an obsessive compulsive, which neatly explained all the layers of patterns, one chaining into the other.

  Riker studied the map of Missouri, which included sections of neighboring states. One of the penciled crosses was twenty miles from here. The next one was in Kansas. The detective planted one finger on this penciled-in cross for the small Kansas segment of Route 66.

  And now Sheriff Banner was also staring at the map, saying, “That’s where they found that teenager with the missing hand, but she wasn’t in the ground. They found her body laid out on the road—maybe a day after she was killed.”

  “A teenager? Well, that’s wrong,” said Mr. Kayhill. “And an unburied corpse won’t fit the pattern. The pattern is everything. There’s a child’s body buried there. You simply haven’t found it yet.” He leaned toward Riker and tapped his gift, the notebook in the detective’s hand. “But you’ll find it. You’ll find them all.”

  Ray Adler handed Mallory the keys to his pickup truck so she could finish the Kansas leg of Route 66. “It’s just a little bitty corner of the state,” he said. “Shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes from Galena to Baxter Springs. It only takes a little longer if you have to get out and push the truck.”

  She rejoined the old road and returned to Galena, where people on the street waved to her, blind to the driver, seeing only the neon-green truck with the fabulous prefabricated front end of a giant, vintage Jaguar, replete with a silver-cat hood ornament. After a few minutes, she slowed down for a look at the old arch bridge, another landmark from the letters, but all of the graffiti had been painted over, and the structure served no function anymore; traffic crossed a new bridge built alongside it.

  That took a minute more of her time.

  Mallory followed the road around the inside corner that squared off the Kansas segment. She stopped by a baseball field, but this was no landmark of old. The small stadium had the clean red-and-white look of newly laid bricks and fresh mortar. So Peyton Hale’s old ball field in Illinois had vanished, a new one had appeared here in Kansas—and another minute of her life had been lost.

  What caught her attention next, and held it, was the digging equipment down the road. She rolled on, moving slowly, wanting to attract attention—and she did. She cut the engine a few yards away from a utility truck and an unmarked van. The vehicles partially obscured the dig site, and a plastic curtain had been raised to hide most of the hole. The workmen were gathering at the edge of the road and taking an equal interest in Mallory. And so they stared at one another until a police cruiser pulled up behind her. She knew the diggers had called local cops to drive her off.

  An officer approached the window of the pickup truck, saying that old standard line, “Driver’s license and registration, please.”

  Mallory ignored this request and leaned out the window to ask, “Is this where they found the body of Ariel Finn? It was about a year ago. The teenager with a missing hand?”

  Predictably, the officer rolled up his eyes, taking her for a crime-scene tourist. He would have dealt with quite a few of them a year ago when the mutilated teenager had made the news in this state. And now he would designate her as ghoulish but harmless. His next words were also predictable. “Miss, forget the license and registration, okay? But I have to ask you to move along now.”

  “Fine,” she said, satisfied that Dale Berman would never know she had been here. “Just tell me where I can find your boss.”

  Ten minutes later, she pulled up to the curb in front of a police station, where an old man with a badge and blue jeans was sitting on a sidewalk bench. His face was lifted to the sky and washed in sunlight. Smoke from his cigar curled in the air as he turned her way and a smile crossed his face. The man stepped up to her window, grinning, saying, “I suppose you killed ol’ Ray. No way he’d let you drive this truck unless you drove it right over his body.”

  She was opening her wallet to show him her badge and ID. He waved this away. “No need to see your driver’s license, miss. Any friend of Ray’s is a friend of mine, even if you did kill him.”

  When they had exchanged names and she had tacked the word “detective” onto hers, he guided her to the bench, arguing that it was too nice a day to conduct any business indoors. He asked if a little cigar smoke would bother her. No, it would not. Lou Markowitz had loved his pipes, and she had grown up with the smell of smoke. Some times she missed it. She had forgotten to ask Ray Adler if her real father had been a smoker, and suddenly this seemed more important than the latest grave by the side of the road. She closed her hand to push her long red finger nails in to the skin. Pain. Focus. She knew there was a reason for finding two bodies—one year a part—in the same location. A moment ago, it had been clear in her mind.

  Get a grip.

  She loosened her fist before the fingernails could draw blood, a telltale sign that she was not in complete control of herself.

  Two bodies in the same location—one found on the road and one in the ground.

  Yes, she had it now. The lawman beside her knew better than to give this information away—even to another cop. She would have to guess right the first time.

  Riker assured Horace Kayhill that the caravan would not leave without him. “They’ll be getting off to a late start.”

  Agent Nahlman glanced at her watch. “It’s twelve noon. They’ll be at the campsite for another hour.”

  “But we’ll get to Kansas before—”

  “No, Mr. Kayhill,” said Nahlman. “We’re taking a different route. The caravan will bypass Kansas. My partner and I will be leading all of you into Oklahoma on the interstate highway. Now if you’ll just come with us?”

  Riker and Charles stood on the sidewalk outside of the sheriff’s office, watching Kayhill drive off with the FBI agents. And now, finally, they had some privacy, and the time was right. The detective turned to his friend. “So you proposed to Mallory.” He splayed his hands, only a little frustrated with the other man’s silence. “And that’s it?”

  Charles nodded and stared at his shoes, clearly embarrassed. Evidently, one day this poor man had snapped, cracked and blown his cover as an old friend of the family; he had dared to propose to Mallory, who liked him well enough, but treated him more like the family pet.

  And, of course, Charles had been turned down, but that was for the best in Riker’s opinion. The detective had always believed that this man would be happier with someone from planet Earth, a nice, normal woman who di
d not collect guns. And this prospective wife should want children. Charles would make a wonderful father, and Riker could easily see a brood of eagle-beaked, bug-eyed kids in this man’s future. But he could not believe in a world with more than one version of Mallory; a gang of little blond clones with her green eyes and inclinations was too great a risk; he could not even be certain that she would remember to feed them.

  Riker had lost the heart for this interrogation. Turning to the road and the departing car, he changed the subject. “So tell me what you think of the little guy.”

  “Kayhill? Obsessive compulsive.” Charles was suddenly cheerful again—now that the inquisition was clearly over. “Obviously good cognitive reasoning. But he can’t sustain eye contact for more than a few seconds. That might indicate mild autism—that and the maps. He’s so totally absorbed in his patterns.”

  “Some of them seem a little far-fetched,” said Riker, “but we’ll know more in another few minutes. The sheriff’s on the phone to Kansas.”

  Mallory’s knapsack rested on her lap. She sat in a wooden chair beside the police chief’s desk. They had taken their conversation indoors so he could check out her reference on the telephone. The chief carried on a guarded conversation with Sheriff Banner, answering most questions with one word. Reassured now, he became more chatty with the Missouri man. “Oh, sure I remember…. Yeah, how long ago was that?…No, we identified the girl…. No, that’s what we thought at first. Turns out she was a few years younger than we figured—just sixteen…. Well, we landed a flyer in her hometown…. Ariel Finn was her name…. You don’t say. Well, I assumed he identified his daughter. We shipped the body back there.”

  Eavesdropper Mallory wondered why Joe Finn would be traveling with the parents of missing children when his child had been found. Denial was the easy answer. She could see him staring down at the dead body, refusing to believe that it could be his daughter. A corpse was nothing like a sleeping child. Only hours after death, the features would subtly change, eyes clouding and retracting into their sockets, the skin losing its bloom. Some parents used each alteration as a rationale for denying their own children.