Charles was still grappling with the idea of the rifle. “But he could shoot if he—”
“No reason for it.” She turned her key in the ignition and the engine purred to life. The automatic control of the roof would not function, and she tried to force it back manually, but it would not budge. “I won’t have a clear target behind the truck’s headlights. I’ve only got one chance to take him down.”
Charles held up one hand. “Allow me.” And now he pushed the convertible’s tattered top back into the boot. “So, obviously, you have a plan.”
She held up a cutting tool from her kit. “I’ll get the wire we need. You load the pipe.”
While she cut through sections of barbed wire, he picked up the one she liked the best, the longest one, and carried it to the car. “I gather you’re not planning to shoot out his headlights, anything like that?”
“No, Charles, not with a hand gun.” She laid three sections of wire on the hood. “But even if I could make those shots, it only takes a second to slit a little girl’s throat. So I don’t plan to give him that much warning time.”
A beeping sound came from her knapsack. “That’s him now, isn’t it?”
“Pretend you don’t hear it, Charles.”
Following her direction, he jammed one end of the pipe into the steel skeleton of rolled-back ragtop. Then he tore his hands on pieces of wire to secure it. The rest of the pipe was angled across the center of the roll bar, and Mallory lashed it down on top of the windshield frame, twisting the barbed wire to make it tight. And now there was blood on her hands, too. The twenty-five feet of pipe remained straight, no sag, no bowing, though at least two thirds of its length was unsupported, stretching far beyond the nose of the car—and aiming upward.
Charles stood back from their handiwork to see what they had done, and it chilled him. The upward angle of the pipe fit so well with the higher windshield of a pickup truck met head on. Mallory had designed a lance for a one-sided joust. For a fraction of a second, the pipe might be visible in her opponent’s headlights, but it would appear to him as a small round dot—and then—
“That’s right,” said Mallory, reading all of this in his face. “I plan to kill him. I’ll take his head off if I can.”
Kronewald was down the road, herding cows and clearing the way for the ambulance. He came back to them, cell phone in hand. “It’ll be a few more minutes.”
“Did you tell them it was an officer down?” she asked.
“Hell, no. They would’ve sent cops.”
“Good job.” Mallory got behind the wheel. “You two stay with Riker.”
“Not so fast.” Charles climbed over the dented passenger door to settle in beside her. And they were off. She tested her high beams then killed the lights, rolling, creeping forward in the dark.
Charles’s eyes were on her face when he said, “If you crash into that truck—”
“No crash,” said Mallory. “His pickup truck is sitting still. Nobody can judge the speed of an oncoming car, and he has no idea what this one can do.”
“But there’s a child in that truck.”
“A tap, Charles. That’s all it’ll take to send this pipe through his window—and his face. I can kill him without even setting off his air bag.”
Mallory positioned her car just beyond the gate and facing down the rancher’s road. She blinked her lights twice, and, in the distance, another set of headlights turned on. “Check out the window on the driver’s side. You see the rifle?”
“No,” said Charles Butler, holding the opera glasses to his eyes.
“Then he’s not using the infrared scope. There’s not enough room inside that—”
“You have another problem.” Charles handed her the opera glasses. “Better take a look.”
She fixed the lenses on the pickup truck, where Dodie Finn was harnessed and tethered to the grille between the headlights.
“Sorry,” said Charles. “You weren’t counting on that. So what’s next?”
“Same plan.”
“You’re mad.”
“I don’t have a lot of options here,” she said. “He’ll sit tight until I get closer. He wants me to watch when he kills Dodie.”
Charles was more than mildly disturbed. Mallory found it too easy to slip inside the mind of a serial killer. “You can’t go ahead with this,” he said. “Not with Dodie standing in front of the truck.”
She cut her lights and backed out of the ranch road, then reversed down the paved highway below the rise. “That’ll make him nuts for a few minutes. If this is going to work, I’ll need a slight adjustment in the pipe.”
“I’m sure you’ve done the math.” Charles climbed out of the car and began to undo the wires that bound the pipe to the frame of the broken windshield. “Speed and distance, that sort of thing.” Of course she had. Mathematics was her gift. At the risk of annoying her by stating the obvious, he said, “So you realize that if we go full out, you won’t have time to brake before we crash. Even you can’t alter the laws of physics.” He was close to smiling, though he shredded his fingers on the barbed wire, winding it, changing the angle to suit her and saying, “Well, this should give us more clearance on the left side of the truck.” Almost done. “I gather we’re going to miss the truck al together.”
“Something like that.”
It was the tone of her voice that set off all his internal alarms, but nothing could have prepared him for the sight of Mallory pointing her gun at him. And his crime? He was holding onto the pipe, holding on tight, for this was his only means of preventing her from going anywhere without him.
“Time to let go, Charles. You’re not coming along.”
Though he loved his life, He shook his head, badly frightened now, for he was staring at her seat belt and it was undone.
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.
23
No more reporters ran wild in the streets of King
man, 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 seatbelts.
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 brain. “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.
“Well, he had another name,” said Charles. “The reporters think the killer was posing as one of the caravan parents. And what about Agent Cadwaller? The last time I—”
“Oh, yeah,” said Riker. “That guy sent me a get-well card and a witness subpoena. You were right about him. He wasn’t a profiler. Cadwaller’s a forensic accountant from another agency. He’s building a case against Dale for padding overtime and falsifying government documents. And New Mexico has a charge for endangering the welfare of a child. Did I tell you Dale’s wife left him? Oh, and his lawyers—they own his house, they’re driving his car.” The detective lightly punched Charles on the arm, grinning, saying, “Hey, is this a great country or what?”
The elevator doors opened, and upon exiting, Riker limped at a faster pace, following the exit signs to freedom and his first smoke of the day.
“All right,” said Charles, “so the killer was posing as someone on the caravan.”
“Hey, works for me.”
“Well, one of those people is dead. Doesn’t that help you narrow it down a bit?”
“Yeah, yeah.” The front door was in sight; the cigarette and lighter were in hand. “You’d have to start with a picture to find a match. Between the parents and the news crews, it’s not like we got a tight list of everybody in that caravan.” Riker pushed through the doors, and now he stood outside at last. “I saw the autopsy pictures. Mallory really did a number on the perp’s face. Damn she’s good.” The air was clean and unpolluted, but he had a remedy for that; he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
“What about a forensic reconstruction of the skull? They might be able to—”
“Nobody’s gonna spend that kind of money on a dead cockroach, Charles. There was no ID found on the body. No picture—no match. Sorry, pal.”
Charles set the duffel bag on the ground and raised one hand to alert a teenager standing near the door, and the boy ran off to fetch the Mercedes. Apparently, the concept of valet parking had been recently introduced to Kingman, Arizona. When the car pulled to curb, Charles tipped the youngster and turned back to the detective, saying, “There must be some clue to the man’s identity—something.…Well, surely you at least know the color of his eyes?”
“Naw,” said Riker, as he opened the trunk of the Mercedes. “The eyeballs probably went out the back of his head in a stew of brains and blood. Or they could be in the glop that was jammed up inside the pipe when it—”
“A simple no would’ve sufficed.” Charles tossed the duffel bag into the trunk.
“But you didn’t ask me a simple question, did you?” Ri
ker dropped the cigarette and crushed it under his heel. “You wanted to know if a serial killer had Mallory’s green eyes. You just asked me if the kid killed her own father that night.” The detective smiled. “But, hey, we never had this conversation, okay? Who cares what the freak looked like?”
Obviously, Charles cared, but the man was looking at his shoes, a sure sign of guilt, and he asked no more questions.
Riker stared at the open trunk. Almost time to say good-bye. “Mallory killed the right man that night. That’s a fact. But she can never be sure who he was. Nobody can, and maybe it’s better that way. Less…personal.”
Charles only nodded in agreement, and both men knew they would never talk about this again.
The detective looked down at the keys in his hand. “You’re sure about this?”
“Oh, yes. Please take the car. The last thing I need is another road trip.”
And Mallory’s driving had not produced a cure for Riker’s fear of flying.
“When she’s discharged,” said Charles. “I’ll take her back on a plane.”
“Ray Adler’s busting his butt to get her car fixed in time.”
Charles shrugged. “I’ll have him ship it directly to New York.”
“No,” said Riker. “I got a better idea.” He reached into the trunk and pulled out a black plastic bag. “Here, a present, a souvenir. You’ll remember this.” He opened the bag and pulled out a coffee-stained canvas tote that bulged with maps.
“Horace Kayhill’s collection?”
“Yeah.” Riker slammed the trunk. “But the state line is a straight shot from Kingman, so all you need is the map for California. Take her down Route 66 all the way to the coast. Mallory deserves to finish this trip. God knows she’s paid enough for the privilege.” The detective climbed in behind the wheel of the Mercedes and rolled down the window to say, “So take her to the end of the road, and then see the lady home.”
Find Me Page 39
