Find Me
Page 40
Ray Adler had made good on his promise, delivering Mallory’s car, dent-free, on the day of her discharge in the month of June. “Good as new,” said the man from Kansas, “and maybe a little better.”
Charles Butler went up to Mallory’s hospital room to fetch down the bags. The door was ajar, and he hung back in the hallway to watch, or, more accurately and clinically, to observe. She was packing clothes, moving slowly, as if she did this chore underwater. The bruises, casts and bandages were gone. The curls of her hair hid the savage scalp wound that had cost her so much blood, and her other suture scars were covered with a T-shirt and jeans. By outward appearances, she was healed, or nearly so—or so it seemed.
She was not wearing her weapon. It lay wrapped in the straps of her shoulder holster on the bedside table, and this worried Charles. Some people kept their identities in their wallets; hers was in the gun. One by one, she was losing every quality that defined her. And he was also changed. Now he was the one who kept up her ledger for all the cheats of her young life, everything lost or stolen from her. She was numbed to all of these injuries. Charles felt the pain for her; he was reeling with it.
He stepped into the room. “Did Kronewald call? Are you going to testify at Dale Berman’s trial?”
She shook her head as she opened a drawer in the bedside table. “Riker won the coin toss.”
Bad news. This could only mean that she no longer cared about revenge, and he might applaud that as a sign of growth in anyone else of his acquaintance—but not in her unique case. He sat down on the bed to watch her fold T-shirts. “Kathy,” he said. And she did not shoot him. “I know why you hated Dale Berman so much. It’s all about Louis’s wife, isn’t it? Helen…and the way she died.”
The young detective idly perused the contents of a nightstand drawer. “Helen Markowitz died of cancer.”
“Yes, right after a high-profile case was solved.” Charles had anesthetized Riker with contraband beer while the man was still on his sickbed in order to extract a few painful facts. “The police in New York had just found a kidnapped boy.”
“The old man found the boy,” she said, crediting her foster father in a listless monotone.
“And his wife died the next day,” said Charles. “Louis was supposed to be on family leave that week. But when that child was kidnapped, all the leaves were canceled.”
Mallory nodded as she collected small items from the drawer, filling her hand with a toothbrush, a comb, a pen, saying, “I walked off the job.”
“To be with Helen—but Louis couldn’t do that, could he?”
“No.” She slammed the bedside drawer. “He had to stay and find that kid. There were feds in the house. He thought they might get the boy killed.”
“I remember the day of Helen’s funeral,” said Charles. “Louis ran into me on the street—literally. He ran his car into mine. That’s how we met. Well, of course, he apologized profusely. Said he couldn’t see the traffic for the tears. ‘I put my wife in the ground this morning,’ he said. ‘My kid’s locked in her room. And me? I’m driving around in circles. Everybody’s gott a be somewhere, right?’ And then he smiled.”
Louis Markowitz’s smile made him the most charming man on the planet, even though he had also been crying on this particular occasion. Charles had taken the policeman home to keep him off the street and out of further trouble. He had cooked dinner for the man and stayed up all night listening to favorite stories about the remarkable Helen Markowitz. “We were friends for years, but Louis never told me about the FBI agent who lied to him and led him down false trails…and cost him all the days he had left with his wife.”
No, Louis had let go of that baggage early on, a wise choice, but not suitable for the likes of Kathy Mallory, who so loved revenge. Charles planned to help her savor what she had won. “Louis told me he only had a few hours with Helen before they wheeled her into the operating room. Poor man, he was expecting a surgical cure.”
“That’s what all the doctors told him.” Mallory dropped a tube of tooth-paste into her duffel bag. “That’s why the old man didn’t walk away from the kidnapping case.”
Charles nodded. “That last day, Louis still believed that he was going to grow old with Helen.”
“And then she died on the operating table.” Mallory stared at the items laid out on the bed, as if the order in which she packed them might need all of her attention.
“And you blamed Dale Berman for dragging out that old case, for deceiving Louis and stealing all his precious time with Helen.”
Mallory carefully folded another T-shirt, as if she had never loved Helen beyond all reason, as if she had never felt the loss of this good and gentle woman who had fostered her and loved her back.
No reaction at all—not from her.
It was Charles who balled his hands into fists, Charles who hated Dale Berman—hate enough for two, himself and Mallory. He turned his tell-all face away from her and made a show of searching the room for overlooked items that she might want.
The flowers were gone. Once, this room had smelled like a florist shop—or a mortuary. She had also thrown away her press clippings collected for her by Detective Kronewald. And gone were all the cards sent by high-ranking politicians and police officials. The only one she had saved was a card handmade by Dodie Finn, and this was added to the duffel bag—Mallory’s only trophy.
“I love that one.” Charles looked down at the card in the open bag. He smiled at the childish rendering of the Finns’ farmhouse and the happy-face stick figures of a small family. “The drawing is perfectly awful. Shows no artistic talent whatever—so utterly normal.”
According to the companion letter from Joe Finn, his daughter had ceased to hum, and now she talked to him, and he could not shut her up. This had been followed with a phrase that came awkwardly to the boxer: He had wished Mallory the same wondrous recovery.
A bit optimistic in Charles’s view.
The great injury done to Mallory had no single cause, nor was there a cure. In the best foreseeable outcome, her malady could only be survived. And, in the best of all possible worlds, she would have no name for the man she had killed that night on the Seligman loop.
The packet of old letters fell from the bed. The enclosing ribbon came undone, and the pages scattered across the floor. Mallory continued to fold her clothes, failing to care. She was letting go of the evidence for Peyton’s betrayal of her mother, Cassandra—these love letters written to another woman. He knelt at Mallory’s feet to retrieve them, handling them carefully. And now, for the first time, he saw the puzzling salutation and read it aloud. “‘For O.B.’ Well, that’s odd.” All the letters in his hand began in this same way. “Is it some sort of pet name for Savannah Sirus?”
At the mention of her late houseguest, Mallory looked down at him, only mildly distracted from the packing. “Why would my father write letters to her?”
Oh, bloody hell.
24
Ray Adler entered the hospital room and ended the conversation. He never noticed the odd expression on the face of Charles Butler, a man left wondering how many times his head could be twisted round before he lost it.
An hour later, smiling and waving good-bye, the man from Kansas was a reflection in the rearview mirror. The silver convertible’s top was down, and the warmth of the summer sun lulled Mallory to sleep in the passenger seat. Charles, a lapsed Luddite, had worked out the mechanics of her iPod and its connection to the radio, but he found no music to fit well with fear.
If the letters had not been written to Savannah Sirus, what else might he have gotten wrong?
He was still pondering his failings as he drove across the state line of Arizona, leaving the grasslands behind. The California terrain was sandy and spotted with clumps of green. No mountain peaks or mesas, only long tedious tracts of desert stretched out before them. Finally, Mallory awakened, and he leaned toward her, prompting her with the puzzle that began each letter from Peyton Hale. “For O.B.?”
“On to Los Angeles?” He took her silence for yes and handed her the California map. “Care to play navigator?”
She unfolded it and stared at the familiar markings, Horace Kayhill’s arcs and lines to define a serial killer’s territory and the crosses that stood for graves. “What are you doing with this?” Unmistakable was her implication that he had stolen it.
“Riker gave it to me—the whole collection. He thought the California map might come in handy. And I must say it’s superior to the average—”
Mallory was not listening to him. She was foraging in the back seat, and now she retrieved the small canvas tote bag with the rest of the Route 66 maps. She pulled one out and spread it across the dashboard. “How did Riker get this away from the New Mexico cops?”
“Well, a state trooper gave it to him. I was there.” And for that matter, Mallory had also been present at the table on the day when it was handed over. Ah, but she had only seen the covering plastic bag. And, as he recalled, Riker had made a cursory inspection, just a glance inside to identify the contents as belongings of the little Pattern Man—poor Horace.
“Why didn’t he turn the bag over to Kronewald?”
“Why would he?” asked Charles.
“And why is Kronewald calling his serial killer a John Doe?”
Apparently, she had been reading the daily newspapers he had brought to her hospital room. This continuing interest of hers promised upsides and down. “There’s a lack of physical evidence,” he said. “No solid tie to Adrian Egram, and I doubt that he’s used that name since he stole his first car. I suppose we’ll never know what persona he adopted.” Charles had intended this as reassurance, a kind of promise.
“Riker knows,” she said.
“Well, he might have a theory.” Was she looking at him now? Did she catch a give-away blush? Could he afford to play a game with her that involved deceit on any level? “There’s certainly no way to prove it—no DNA link, no fingerprints or pictures on file, nothing to—”
“Riker’s not working a theory,” said Mallory. “He knows.”
Her eyes closed.
Though California’s desert landscape was rather dull, tedious in fact, Charles Butler was in dangerous country within and without. The subject of a serial killer’s identity was off limits to him now. She made that clear. Mallory might be sleeping or feigning it. Either way, she was hiding out, a time-out from her life. And Peyton Hale’s letters were all he had left, the only materials with which to build a bridge to Mallory. However, when she awakened, every word on the matter of Savannah Sirus and the letters was met with cold silence.
They stopped for the night. In the hotel restaurant, he asked if she would mind just one more question. “How did Savannah get the letters?” He fell silent as a waitress dropped the menus on their table, and then Mallory told him that the letters had been mailed to Cassandra in Chicago.
“But she never saw them. My mother was working insane hours at the hospital. So her roommate, Savannah, was the only one home when the mail came…when the telephone rang. Peyton called every night. She never knew that, either.”
“When did you discover this?”
“When I found Savannah Sirus.”
Their salad was served and eaten in silence. They were well into the main course when he learned that, after many phone calls from Mallory, Savannah had mailed her one token letter, claiming that she had found it stuffed in an old chair. And thereafter, the woman had ceased to answer the telephone.
“I knew she was lying,” said Mallory. “That first letter promised the whole road. So there had to be more of them.” The telephone assaults had escalated to ringing the woman’s doorbell in Chicago, sometimes for hours with no response. “But I wore her down.” And a compromise had been arrived at. “I told her she could keep the letters. I just wanted to read them.” And Savannah, only wanting the harassment to end, had accepted Mallory’s invitation to New York City. “I sent her airline tickets and theater tickets. I sent her menus for the best restaurants in town. she thought I was planning a nice friendly visit. I wasn’t.”
Charles wondered how far into that visit Mallory’s houseguest had discovered the merits of full confession. He could not get the image out of his mind—Savannah and her interrogator—the story hour from hell.
“Toward the end, Savannah wanted to confess.” Mallory chased the roast beef with long draughts of wine. “After Peyton left on his road trip, my mother told her about the pregnancy…and the wedding plans.”
And then?
Charles waited—and waited. Patience fraying, then lost, and he said, “So…stolen letters, diverted phone calls. Cassandra never heard from Peyton when he was on the road?”
Mallory shook her head. “She was worried. she thought he might’ve wrecked the car. Peyton didn’t have any family, so my mother called some of his old friends along the road. That’s how she knew he was still traveling. And then she had to wonder why he never called or wrote to her. Months went by, but she never did find out. Then she gave up.”
“Cassandra never heard from him again?”
“No. After a long time, she decided that he’d just abandoned us. I always thought so, too…until I found Savannah Sirus’s phone number.”
“You knew this woman when you were a child?”
“I never met her. When I was little, Savannah sent Christmas cards, but I couldn’t remember where they were from. I couldn’t even remember the woman’s name.” Before Mallory had finished her wine, she gave up the story behind the wall of numbers in her New York apartment. “When She was dying, my mother wrote a phone number on my hand. She said, ‘You call that woman, and she’ll come get you.’” All but four numerals had been smudged away. A child’s tears would do that. Mallory tossed back the rest of the wine and poured another glass. “It took along time to find the rest of that number.”
“So your father never went back to Chicago?”
“He had no reason to come back,” said Mallory. “And that was more of Savannah’s work.”
Charles knew this theme of obsessive love; he had heard that tune playing inside his own head several times a day for all the years he had known Mallory. “Well, now I understand why you despised that woman.”
“No, you don’t. Not yet.”
Maddeningly, she left the table, swinging her room key as she walked away.
On the road again the next morning, Charles made his first error of the day by begging an explanation for the initials O.B. Mallory dodged all conversation with sleep until late afternoon, when they were driving into more congested traffic.
In the area of Los Angeles, Californians had apparently not grasped the concept of passing lanes and turn signals, but this was merely harrowing. The last leg of the trip was the most grueling. Only a few miles along Santa Monica Boulevard, traffic was at a bumper-to-bumper standstill. He might have saved them from this ordeal. Six news bulletins had tried to warn him off, but he had been determined to drive this historic route to the end.
Mallory, however, assured him that it was a better fate to be shot in the head than to die of old age on this twelve-mile-long parking lot of detours and road construction. “Pull into that gas station,” she said, nodding toward a nearby escape path. “This is the end of the road.”
“Oh, no,” he said, hardly believing that he was suggesting this, “we have another ten miles to go before we reach Ocean Boulevard. That’s the official finish to Route 66.” And then, at the end of this road, if he still had his wits, he planned to drive the car into the sea so that they could fly back home to New York.
“N
o,” she said. “Stop the car. This is where my father’s road trip ended.” She kept her silence until he had pulled into the lot and parked the car some distance from the gasoline pumps and a line of customer vehicles.
Charles was somber now, for he believed that he knew what was coming next, and it gave him hope and despair in equal amounts. According to Mallory, the last letter for O.B. had been mailed from Barstow far behind them. This tale could have only one logical end.
Mallory was staring at the gas station. “There used to be a bar on this lot, and there was a phone booth on the corner. He stopped here to call Chicago one last time. Savannah told him that my mother died in a fire.”
“But that’s madness. Savannah must’ve known she’d be found out.”
“It helps if you think like a cop. That was when I knew she’d planned to kill my mother.” Mallory said this with no animosity. It was a simple statement of fact. “It took a long time to break that woman, but I did it. Finally, she told me about starting a fire outside of Mom’s bedroom. My mother could’ve died that night, and I would’ve died inside of her. While Savannah was talking to Peyton on the phone, the apartment was filling up with smoke. If she hadn’t stopped to answer the phone, she could’ve gotten out in time. But she was an amateur arsonist. And she was afraid the ringing would wake up my mother. It did. By then the smoke was everywhere, and Savannah couldn’t find the door. She was disoriented, almost unconscious when my mother dragged her out of there.”
“Your mother saved Savannah’s life.”
“And she never knew her best friend tried to burn her to death.”
Mallory left the car and walked toward the corner. She moved slowly, perhaps using the time to rebuild a long-gone telephone booth so that she could watch Peyton Hale make his last call. “He believed my mother was dead when he hung up the phone and walked into the bar.” She turned to face the gas station, where that saloon had once stood. She rose up on the balls of her feet, chin lifting, anticipating, waiting for her father to finally put down his last glass and come back outside.