The car’s engine idled as Mallory pulled an old letter from her knapsack. This was only ceremony; the pale blue ink was illegible by street lamp, and the discolored paper was falling apart at the folds. The opening line, committed to memory, began with green lions-and there they were. The matched pair of statues flanked the broad steps of the Chicago Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, and they pointed the way down Adams Street.
The letter went on to say, “There are travelers who recognize this intersection of commerce, high art and green lions as the beginning of the Mother Road, though its original starting point was elsewhere. Historically a shifting highway, now it’s vanishing, reduced to a patchwork of interrupted pavement scattered through pieces of eight states, all that remains of a fine romance with the journey and the automobile.”
Mallory was not of the romantic ilk. The night was wet and cold, and she was disinclined to wax poetic on the American car culture.
Angling the headlights into the darkness, she anticipated police barricades, but these wooden sawhorses bore the name of a Chicago contractor. The crime scene was also a construction site, and this was one detail that was not picked up on her police scanner. Her high beams lit up concrete segments of an old water main stacked beside earthmoving equipment. The late hour and a recent storm had cleared the area of witnesses-not that she cared. She killed the engine and left her car to push one of the barricades aside, and now she walked toward the bulky machines that might hide more obstructions.
Wooden planks spanned two of the traffic lanes, and an orange sign warned her of a large hole beneath the boards, but all that interested Mallory was a large sheet of crumpled blue plastic nudged along the ground by the wind. At each corner was a crude tear where the thin material had been ripped loose. She easily found the former moorings of this blown-down canopy; bits of twine were still tied around lampposts and signs. Other tarps, ones belonging to the contractor, were made of light canvas and sized to cover machines. The workmen would have needed no cover; they would have been gone before the late-night storm; road repair might carry on in the dark-but not in the rain. And this flimsy material was not something a crime-scene van would carry. It could serve only one purpose here-a temporary cover for a killer who wanted privacy from high windows and the elevated train that bisected Adams Street.
The killer had brought his own tarp to the party, and the crime-scene unit had failed to confiscate this evidence, mistaking it for construction debris.
Mallory pulled out her cell phone and placed a call to Chicago PD. Failing to introduce herself, she demanded the name of the detective who owned this homicide.
“Kronewald?”
We ll, that conjured up a familiar face. She could picture the old man turning a heart-attack shade of red when he found out what the CSU team had left behind-plastic, a fingerprint technician’s wet dream. “Tell him to collect the blue tarp. It belongs to the killer, not the contractor.”
The desk sergeant was asking for her name as she ended the call. Mallory, never inclined to waste words, was busy just now. One more barricade to go, and then she must be on her way before Detective Kronewald turned up to find a New York cop on his little patch of turf.
The blue plastic was on the move again, and she picked up a piece of concrete to weight it down. The wind had carried it clear of the rough boards that patched the contractor’s hole, exposing yellow tape laid down to form the crude shape of a body. And this made her smile.
The Chalk Fairy strikes again.
In large towns and small ones, every now and then, a homicide team would arrive at an otherwise pristine crime scene and find this outline drawn with a piece of chalk or a crayon borrowed from a child. An angry detective would then demand to know which helpful idiot had committed this travesty, and guilty-looking young rookies in uniform would flap their arms and fly away with cries of “I dunno. It wasn’t me.”
It was a mystery.
Tonight, Mallory could easily guess the Chalk Fairy’s secret identity. It could only be the scared young cop who had given up bizarre details of this crime on an all-too-public radio frequency-forgetting everything taught at the police academy. Oddly enough, he had remembered the one thing he should never do, a lesson of television cop shows. Instead of chalk for his outline of the victim, he had used crime-scene tape, tacking it down with construction-site nails when it failed to adhere to wet wood. Thus, with every good intention, the first officer on the scene tonight had butchered the evidence of other nails used by a murderer to stake a human body to the ground.
Damn Chalk Fairy.
She should be leaving now. How much time had passed since her chat with the desk sergeant? A police cruiser could only be minutes away. Instead of heading for her car, she pulled out a penlight and trained the beam on the killer’s nail holes, the ones inside the taped outline, where the victim’s wrists and ankles had been pinned to the boards. Scattered at her feet were nails like the ones used to make the wooden road patch. When she dropped one into a hole, it was smaller than the opening.
This killer’s murder kit had duplicated onsite materials. Obviously a cautious one, maybe he was also a long-range planner, and his plan may have begun long before the city of Chicago decided to rip up this street. So he had packed his kit with bulky plastic, heavy iron nails-and bones. How that rookie cop must have freaked to see those bones attached to a fleshed-out corpse. Now the Chicago police had a double homicide, old bones and fresh kill, one corpse short of the body count needed to call this a serial killing, yet Mallory had no trouble making that call with only the evidence laid out before her.
She stared at the taped outline that described the arrangement of the body, an invitation to a game. It had been laid out for show with one arm extended, pointing down the road to say Follow me.
A distant siren was screaming, coming closer, and yet Mallory did not hurry. When one more barricade was moved aside, she did not run-she walked back to the car, settled in behind the wheel and started up the engine. The siren was louder, almost on top of her. After depressing a button on the face of the speedometer, her trip monitor went down to zeros.
And now it begins.
The car rolled through the crime scene, continuing west on Adams Street for a while, nearly overshooting the turn for Ogden -just as the letter had predicted. Mallory carried no maps, only a route created from words that were written before she was born. Dropping down, southwest through Cicero, she searched for the next landmark. According to the letter, “He’s so big, you can’t possibly miss him.” Yet there was no sign of a giant folk hero holding a large hotdog. She retraced long stretches of Ogden on both sides of Lombard Avenue, where the fiberglass statue belonged, but it was no longer there. Her next landmark was far from here, way past the town of Joliet. She was heading toward a road by that same name and an open field that might not be there anymore. An entire town could have grown over the old baseball diamond since the first yellowed letter was written to say, “One day you won’t be able to get here from there. This is a time as much as a place, and even the stars might be gone. That’s the problem with progress. Can’t see stars by city lights.”
Detective Sergeant Riker had Route 80 to himself except for the occasional freight truck. His destination was a gas station where Mallory had last used her credit card, and it was eight hundred miles from New York City.
Flying to Chicago had never been an option, though, given his errand tonight, he might have overcome a secret terror of airplanes. However, at the other end of a flight or a train ride, the car rental companies always expected to see a valid driver’s license before they would trust him with their wheels. Years back, when faced with a choice between drinking and driving, he had given up his car. In Riker’s e x perience, rehabilitation just sucked all the charm out of life.
Tonight he drove a Mercedes-Benz that belonged to a friend, and the gas pedal was pressed close to the floor. This fine automobile was not a model that he could ever afford or even live up to-not him-not a cop in a cut-rate suit, a man in need of a new pair of shoes and a shave. If he got stopped for speeding on this road, Riker knew he could only be taken for a car thief. A portable siren sat on the dashboard, and he was prepared to slap it on the roof at the first sight of a police cruiser, but since he had not yet crossed New Jersey, he could reasonably expect all the state troopers to be napping at the side of the road until sunrise.
If he could only keep up this speed-nearly three times the legal limit- he would close the gap between himself and Mallory by late morning. Considering the car that his partner was driving these days, that was doable. He knew her lead in miles, but what about time? The doorman at Mallory’s New York apartment building had not been able to recall the exact hour of her departure, but then Frank was paid lavish tips to be vague about her comings and goings.
The detective wore a headset for his cell phone, needing one hand free to slug back coffee from a thermos while he spoke to another cop in Illinois. His caller was the man who had picked up the LoJack signal from Mallory’s car and tracked her from the safe distance of a mile or two. No shadowing detail could be more covert, less detectable-just the thing for tailing the ultimate paranoid personality. The Illinois cop was bringing Riker up to date on Mallory’s t ravels.
“She drove through a crime scene?”
“Yeah, but no harm done,” said the man in Chicago. “The rain did a lot of damage before she got there. Homicide didn’t e ven bother to post a guard.”
Riker was well into Pennsylvania when he heard about the number of times that Mallory had traveled up and down the same stretch of road in Cicero.
And the cop from Chicago said, “I think she’s lost.”
Riker thought so, too, but not in terms of geography. And now he listened to a litany of all the places she had gone since then. Oh, Joliet-now that was a memory and a half. He had not traveled south of Chicago since his teenage days, yet these towns that Mallory had passed through or close to, from Elwood to Gardner, had names that sounded like old friends. And then her car stopped on a desolate section of road.
The Illinois cop also pulled over to maintain a covert distance. “I know that area. No houses out there. Couple of abandoned buildings. You want me to get closer-see if she ditched the vehicle?”
“No, don’t go near that car.”
The cop at the other end of this call had no solid information on the driver, and he could only guess that the vehicle was stolen. By agreement prior to a hefty withdrawal from the Favor Bank, Riker had not provided any details. But now the man in Illinois asked the first hard question, and his voice was more formal-more guarded. “Are you making a request to treat her as armed and dangerous?”
Riker hesitated. Well, Mallory never went anywhere without her gun, and every wounded creature was dangerous; this one was damaged to the core. But all he said to the Illinois tracker was, “Don’t get within a mile of that car.”
“Okay, I’ll just sit tight till she moves.”
“Thanks.” When Riker terminated the call, dawn was still a long ways off, but he was already framing excuses for not showing up on the job come morning. He was uncomfortable with the idea of lying to his lieutenant or any other cop.
And yet it had been easy to spin a yarn for a civilian who was also a friend, a fake excuse to explain an urgent need for this fabulous automobile. Maybe that falsehood had come so easily because he had always known that Charles Butler would not believe him. And, since Charles was the quintessential gentleman, it was not in his nature to nail a friend for a lie badly told. The man had only intuited one truth from Riker, and that was desperation-a good enough reason to hand over the keys of a wildly expensive vehicle to a driver who was unlicensed and uninsured, a man whose hands shook when he needed a drink. Riker needed one now. He gripped the wheel tightly.
How would he explain his absence to Lieutenant Coffey? Well, he could say it was a family thing and say no more than that.
Was Mallory family?
He had loved her late foster father, a hell of a cop. He loved the old man still, and he missed him every day. And Riker had always been a strong presence during Mallory’s kiddy days, back when he was still allowed to call her Kathy. He had watched her grow up, though, strictly speaking, the little sociopath had never been a real child. He thought of her as the daughter he never had-thank God-the one that people feared in the lottery of parenthood, and, in all the world, there was no one he loved better.
So, yeah, it was a family thing.
His thoughts turned back to his partner’s c hoice for a new car. The old one had never suited her, but Mallory had held the blindsided idea that a plain tan sedan would help her to blend in with her surroundings, as if she ever could. No, that kid belonged in a hot Corvette, a car with some flash; that would have been his choice for her. But she had bought a Vo lkswagen-still traveling in disguise.
With no signpost, only a triple-story birdhouse as a marker, Mallory turned onto an unpaved side road and parked her car. Here, where the old ballfield should be, was a slab of concrete and a warehouse with a large for-sale sign painted on its doors. By flashlight, she opened the letter and reread a passage describing paths worn into the grass to form the baseball diamond and the night games played by the glow of lanterns and the headlights of cars: “ We knocked those balls right up to the stars. The crowd roared, the bleachers shook, and the beer flowed all night long.”
All gone now. This was the right place, but the wrong time.
The rains had never reached this part of the state, and the air smelled like dust. Following the next instruction, she lowered the convertible’s black ragtop. A cold wind ruffled the paper in her hand as she scanned a disappointing sky with only a few bright points of light, far short of the “million, billion” that the letter had promised. The landmarks were gone, and even the stars had been lost, not that she would miss them. Before tonight, she had never thought to look for them.
All of the letters contained notations on the weather, the route and musical directions for the road. At the Bronx autobody shop, where her car’s modifications had been done, the owner had suggested a CD player, but the letter writer had only played cassettes, and that was all Mallory had wanted. However, the world had changed, and the cassette she loaded now was wired up to an iPod that could sing ten thousand songs. The tune she selected followed the letter’s suggestion for music that worked well with starlight.
Her eyes closed for a moment, and then another. The velvet-soft voice of Nat King Cole was all around her, a blanket of surrounding sound, and singing her to sleep with a stellar rendition of “Nature Boy.”
“-a very strange, enchanted boy-”
The car tracker in Illinois assured Riker that the Volkswagen had not moved. Evidently, Mallory had pulled off the road to catch some sleep. Bonus. Breathing room.
He was near the edge of Pennsylvania with only two more states to cross before he entered Illinois. Easing up on the gas pedal, he lit a cigarette. Riker did his best thinking while smoking and coughing; it relaxed him.
The detective returned to the problem of the gunshot victim back in New York City. He was dead certain that Savannah Sirus had decided to take her life after meeting his young partner. One dark picture in his mind was of Mallory teaching her houseguest how to use the gun-so the woman would not bungle the job of self-murder. This bothered him for the next forty miles. Finally, he made peace with the possibility that a violently ruptured heart was Savannah’s o w n idea-maybe a metaphor. Perhaps the note left behind was true and the lady had died of love. Riker had suffered the same ailment once or twice, and this was something he could believe in-if only the note had been signed. Maybe Savannah had been too tired to write anymore, so tired of her life. She was always Savannah to him now. He was on a first-name basis with Mallory’s d e ad houseguest.
The victim’s personal effects were in the trunk of the car, and he had hopes of gleaning more from what had been left behind. But his primary mission was to get to Mallory before she cracked up in her mind or in her car.
Deep in reverie and losing track of time, Riker had driven across the Pennsylvania border and into Ohio before his cell phone beeped with another message from the Illinois tracker: Mallory’s c ar was on the move again.
The detective drove faster, pushing the speedometer’s needle toward the outside limit, and a sleeping bug beneath the gas pedal died horribly.
A packet of letters, tied with ribbon, slipped from the passenger seat to the floor mat. Mallory stopped the car to retrieve them, handling them gently, for they had been worn to torn creases during all the years when Savannah Sirus had owned them and read them every day. Mallory knew so many lines by heart and now recalled the description of “-awesome heaven and a constellation of stars that hung like notes to a road song.” She lifted her face to the sky for the last time that night and saw only a few pinpoints of light arranged with a lack of symmetry. There were no more instructions to follow until sunrise.
She had older guidelines than these, directions handed down by another man, her foster father. Louis Markowitz had given her rules for a life in Copland: Thou shalt protect the sheep; thou shalt not spend a bullet unwisely and get them killed in the process.
Nothing about stars.
However, the old man had loved rock ’n’ roll, and these letters shared his taste for songs by the Rolling Stones and The Who. She played them for miles and miles. Sometimes an old tune would coincide with favorites from Lou Markowitz’s collection of albums that dated back to the days of vinyl records. And when this happened, that old man rode with her for a stretch of highway the length of a song.
She needed food and sleep.
Tomorrow she would try again to grasp the new rules that Peyton Hale had laid down in his letters. The author, once a California boy, had grown to manhood. Homeward bound, he had retraced his old route, laying down tracks with an odd sense of direction. She had failed in her attempt to follow the illogical instruction for how to look at the road ahead by stopping to look up at the sky.
Click.
The undeveloped photograph came out of the mouth of the camera. The image was slow to emerge inside the square Polaroid format. Now a woman could be seen inside the brightly lit restaurant. Her hair was black, her clothes were red. Still as death, she sat there-in the photograph.
The actual woman was in constant motion, head turning, as if she could have heard the camera clicking out here in the parking lot. Framed once more in the viewfinder, she appeared to be posing for the next shot, frozen in a startled moment. But then she moved again, looking at the other customers, no doubt wondering if one of them was the source of her fears tonight.
Wrong.
And now she must sense that the danger was in the parking lot-good girl-for she picked up her red handbag and moved to another table far from the window.
The photographer started up his vehicle and drove out of the lot to park on a dark side street.
Mallory steered into the bright lights of Dixie Tr uckers Home. Tw o large commercial rigs, big as houses, were topping off their gas tanks at the diesel pumps. She counted ten trucks in the lot. There was only one car, a red sedan with out-of-state plates, though it was four o’clock in the morning and well past the tourist hours. With her knapsack slung over one shoulder, Mallory entered the restaurant and ordered coffee from the man behind the cash register. Then she moved on to the self-service islands with wells of food under warming lights.
A tray in hand, she shoveled robotically, hardly noticing what was heaping on the plate, yet she knew every detail of the room and its occupants seated in islands of ones and twos. The patrons were outnumbered by empty tables-ten men to match the big rigs in the lot and one fidgeting woman, feet tapping, eyes traveling everywhere, probably jazzed on too much coffee. This tourist could only belong to the small red car. Everything about the woman was a different shade of red: the semi-new shoes, baggy pants and a faded sweatshirt that draped her lumpy body like a tent. However, her hair was the black shade of a drugstore dye job and obviously styled in a bathroom mirror.
Mallory carried her tray to the most remote table, aware that all the truck drivers were smiling her way. Their conversations had stopped, and now they stripped her naked with their eyes. They were so fearless in their sense of entitlement-as if they were ticket holders to a strolling peep show. Oh, if eyes could only whoop and holler. She set her knapsack on the table, then removed her denim jacket and draped it over the back of a chair.
“Oh, Lord,” said a passing waitress.
Sans jacket, Mallory displayed a shoulder holster and a.357 Smith & Wesson revolver. With the tight unison of chorus girls, the men turned their faces downward, as if finding their plates infinitely more fascinating.
Problem solved.
Only the waitress seemed to take the gun in stride, shaking her head, as if the lethal weapon might be some minor violation of a dress-code rule. The tourist in red was smiling broadly, raising her fist high in some yesterday symbol of solidarity and sisterhood.
Yeah, right.
Mallory pulled a small notebook from her back pocket and opened it to the page of landmarks. She checked off the green lions of Chicago and drew a line through the missing Cicero statue called Tall Paul. Another line was drawn through the lost ballfield. She checked off a second giant called the Gemini Man, a statue in a space suit, and made one more check for Funks Grove. The list of sights for Illinois was almost done. Only one roadside attraction remained unchecked and that was the Queen of the Road.
“Hi, my name is April.” The tourist in red was hovering over the table and waiting out that polite interval where Mallory would offer her own name in exchange, but seconds dragged by and the woman’s e x istence had yet to be acknowledged. More timid now, she said, “April Waylon from Oklahoma. May I join you?”
Mallory looked up with a frosty glare that said no, April should not even think of sitting at this table.
And the woman sat down. “I wondered if you were traveling east or west.” After another long silence, intrepid April pressed on. “If you were traveling east, you might have passed my friends going the other way-on Route 66-a large group of cars all traveling together. You see, I missed the big meeting in Chicago.”
Mallory looked up.
“That’s where the maps were handed out,” said the tourist, “and I’ve been trying to play catch-up with the caravan. Well, by now, of course they’re at the campsite, but I don’t know how to find them. I had numbers to call. They were stored on my cell phone, but the battery died, and then I-”
“Get off this road and take the interstate,” said Mallory, who did not intend to listen to this woman’s e ntire life story. “All the public campgrounds are marked by signs.”
“Oh, not ours. It’s on private land somewhere on this old road. I don’t know what to do. I can’t go back out there. Tonight I got frightened-really, really scared-and I couldn’t e ven tell you why. That sounds silly, doesn’t it?”
A man in coveralls walked up to the table, wiping his hands on a greasy rag, and he spoke to the woman from Oklahoma. “Your car’s been ready for a while now.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said April Waylon. “I just lost track of time. So the tire’s all right?”
“No, ma’am, it’s not,” said the man who smelled of gasoline. “No holes, but you got a busted air valve. That’s why it went flat. So I changed the tire. But if this ever happens again, you just stay put and wait for a tow truck.”
“I was out in the middle of nowhere, and my cell phone wouldn’t w o rk.”
“Well, that tire was flat as could be when you pulled in here. Now driving it that way-that’s just hell on the wheel and the front-end alignment.”
Mallory’s remote little table for one was turning into a convention center. A portly waitress had deposited a cup of coffee by her tray, and now the woman stayed to read the list of landmarks in her notebook.
When the man in the coveralls had departed, Mallory made another attempt to get rid of April Waylon. She pointed to a departing trucker. “Follow that man to the interstate and get a room for the night. You’ll have better luck finding your friends in the daylight.”
“I’m afraid. I can’t e x plain it. I just-”
“Ask the trucker to keep an eye on your car. You’ll be fine.” But now Mallory noticed that the woman’s o pen handbag had been left at the center table. Either this tourist hailed from some crime-free little town or she lacked common sense.
“But you’re a police officer, aren’t you?” April Waylon was suddenly hopeful. “And you’re traveling west. I can see that now-by your list. It starts in Chicago.” She touched the page. “I remember those green lions. So I could follow you.”
“No, you can’t. ”
“Tall Paul’s out of order,” said the iron-haired waitress, her eyes still on the list of roadside attractions.
And Mallory said, “What?”
“Tall Paul,” said the waitress. “Statue of a man holding a big hot dog,” she added-slowly-in case her customer was only half bright. “Well, he’s in the wrong place on your list. He belongs between Funks Grove and the queen.”
“No,” said Mallory, insisting on this. “Tall Paul was supposed to be up north in Cicero.”
“Not anymore.” The waitress wagged one gnarly finger at the young detective. “I was answering fool questions about this road before you learned to drive, missy, and I should know where that damn statue is. A few years back, it was bought up from an outfit in Cicero and hauled down to Arch Street in Atlanta. That’s the next town over. Now you take a left out of the parking lot and head toward the railroad tracks, but don’t c ross ’em. You’ll see a sign for-”
Mallory was not listening. She was rising from the table, dropping a fifty-dollar bill by the tray-many times the cost of her meal-and then, though her food and coffee were untouched, she headed for the door with some urgency to chase down a statue.
Upon entering Atlanta, Illinois, Mallory had no trouble finding Arch Street; the town was that small. The car lights shone on a fiberglass man, who did indeed carry a big hot dog, and he was tall. “ Tall as a building,” said the letter, “ Tall as a tree. Tall Paul.” So the statue had not been lost, only misplaced.
The author of the letter seemed partial to things on a grand scale, but Mallory could not understand the man’s passion for this road. So far, she had formed a one-word impression of Illinois-flat-with the occasional bump. By flashlight, she reread a few of the letters, wondering what she was missing here. She looked up at the statue.
So this was Peyton Hale’s idea of spectacle?
Headlights appeared in her rearview mirror, and a car pulled up behind the convertible, blinding her with a ricochet of high beams. She heard the other vehicle’s door open and close. When the tourist from Dixie Tr uckers Home came rapping on the window, the woman found herself staring into the muzzle of Mallory’s revolver. April Waylon opened her mouth wide to scream, but all that came out was a squeak, and her arms waved about like the wings of a demented bird.
After watching this for a few moments, Mallory got out of the car, saying, ordering, “Calm down. Now!” And the tourist froze, hardly calm, but not quite so annoying anymore. “What are you doing out here? I told you to take the interstate.”
“There’s a car following me. As I got closer to Atlanta, it dropped behind. Its lights went out, but they didn’t t u rn away. You know what I mean?” With one flat hand, April tried to demonstrate how a car might look if it was veering off the road. “Well, it wasn’t like that. The headlights just shut off. And my cell phone still won’t w o rk. I tried the car charger, but that wouldn’t-Oh, my!”
Mallory grabbed the cell phone from the woman’s hand and opened the battery bay. She had expected to see corrosion or a botched connection.
Now she held up the phone so April could plainly see the compartment where the battery should be. It was empty. “That’s why your phone won’t w o rk.”
“But that’s impossible. I used the phone when it was still light outside. I made a dinner reservation.” April Waylon prattled on. “It was a nice little restaurant. You must have passed it. It was just outside of-”
“While you were having dinner, somebody lifted the cell phone from your purse and stole the battery.” Given this woman’s c arelessness with her handbag, that would have been simple enough. However, the average thief would not risk returning the useless phone.
“Maybe it was him! The one who’s following me. He’s still back there. You have to believe me. I’m not hysterical. I’m not making this up.”
Mallory did believe her. A disabled cell phone worked well with the disabled air valve on April Waylon’s flat tire. “Get in my car.”
The woman meekly did as she was told.
The detective walked back to the red sedan. She opened the hood wide and left it that way. Next, she took the purse from the dashboard and locked the car, leaving the headlights on. Returning to her own car and her passenger, she tossed a red wallet in April’s lap, then hurled the red purse into the middle of the road.
“Oh, my handbag. It’s got all my maps and-” Here, April wisely closed her mouth and faced forward-quietly.
Mallory started up the car and drove off, keeping one eye on the mirror image of the road behind her. “If I don’t c atch your stalker, you should go back to Oklahoma when it gets light.”
“I can’t do that.”
Interesting.
Mallory had assessed April Waylon as a silly woman, easily frightened and quick to panic. Yet, here she was, traveling in the dark, working through her fear. “What’s so important about this trip of yours?”
“I’m looking for my daughter, my baby. She was only six years old when she was taken.”
Mallory watched her rearview mirror. No one was following. She slowed and rolled onto the shoulder of the road, then stopped awhile, minding the passing minutes, waiting until the time was right. “How old is your daughter now?”
“Nearly sixteen.”
They sat in silence for a while, and then Mallory moved on, going slowly.
April Waylon’s hands folded, fingers tightly interlaced. “You won’t s ay it, but you think I’m ridiculous. All this time-ten years. You think she’s dead. You know she is… And I’m a fool… And you’re right. But I need to find my child and bring her home. All over the world, children come home every day… home from school.” She bowed her head. “It was my fault. The school bus stopped right by the house, but I should’ve been with her… till the bus came. I never saw her again. I used to take it for granted-all those little homecomings. She was only six years old. So you see, don’t you, why I can’t leave her out there?” April turned to the passenger window, watching the nightscape rolling by. “I have to go out and find her.” Her voice became very matter-of-fact. “This is what mothers do.”
Mallory made a sharp turn and then another. And now she had doubled back onto Arch Street. She cut the headlights and the engine to coast silently through the darkness. Up ahead, another car was parked behind the red sedan, and a man with a flashlight was looking in the windows of April’s c ar. The red purse was in his hand. Mallory opened the car door soundlessly and made her way down the street on foot. The man was so preoccupied, he never heard her coming up behind him-until that moment when she wrenched his right arm behind his back and pressed her gun into his neck.
And he yelled, “Knock it off, I’m a cop!”
But Mallory made the pain of the wrenched arm an ongoing thing until the man produced a badge, and even then she was not quite done with him. She looked at the wallet spread on the hood of the red car and read the ID alongside his detective’s shield. This Chicago cop was way beyond his city limit, two hundred miles out of town.
“I know why I was coasting in the dark,” she said. “Now tell me why you cut your lights before you got here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never cut my lights. I’m on a car-theft task force. I’ve been tracking a stolen car all night. I lost the LoJack signal on this road.”
It was a bad lie. She knew he was not trailing any car thief to a chop-shop, not out here in the boonies. And he would not be worried about a high-speed pursuit at this time of night-no reason to follow from any dis- tance. She believed he was on a surveillance detail, but it had nothing to do with a stolen car. “Where’s your backup? Where’s your vehicle recovery team?”
The Chicago cop was smiling now, and that was a lie, too, because it came with sweat trickling down his face on a cool night. He thought that she was going to kill him. He believed this with all his heart, but the smile never faltered, and she gave him points for that.
“I’m guessing you’re a cop,” he said, tossing this off as a joke.
Mallory was not amused.
“Hey,” he said, “if this is your car, I’m sorry. It’s not the one I was tracking. I saw the hood up and a purse in the road. I figured somebody was in trouble here.”
She released his arm and holstered her weapon.
He stood up straight and rolled back his shoulders, acting the part of a man who had not just wet his pants. “You are a cop, right?”
She lifted his wallet from the hood of the car. “You know I don’t b u y your story, right?”
“Yeah.” His eyes were on her gun, though it rested in the holster, and he still wore a smile, as if it had somehow gotten stuck to his face and could not be undone.
She glanced at her own car down the road and waved to the passenger, signaling April Waylon to come out and join them. Turning back to the cop from Chicago, she said, “I’ve got a little job for you. If you didn’t lie about cutting your lights, then that woman has a stalker. So you’re going to play babysitter until she hooks up with her friends.” Mallory made a show of reading the ID card in the man’s o pen wallet before handing it to him. “And now that I know where to find you, I can look you up… if anything happens to her. Got a problem with that?”
“Oh, hell no,” he said, “no problem at all.” He was smiling naturally now, just so happy to be alive.
Click.
The noise of the camera was hidden beneath the roar of a car’s engine.
From this distance and deep in shadow, the shot would be dicey with no flash. The only illumination came from the streetlamp and the headlights of the red sedan. And the fast acceleration of the VW convertible had been unexpected. The image developing now was a blur of gold hair and silver metal. In many ways, it was a most telling portrait of the young blonde. By definition, enigmas lacked clarity.
Detective Riker had crossed into Indiana, one state away from Illinois, when he responded to the beep of his cell phone.
The surveillance cop from Chicago said, “She made me, Riker. I swear I don’t know how she did it. This never happened before, not to me.”
Riker kept a tactful silence. This would not have happened if the Chicago cop had kept a mile between his vehicle and the Volkswagen, but then he listened to the tale of the lady tourist and the stalker, and now he understood how Mallory had caught her tracker. The other man was not done talking, but Riker had ceased to listen. His mind was elsewhere. No believer in coincidence, he tried to force the connection of a New York suicide to a crime scene in Chicago and a stalker in downstate Illinois. It hurt his head.
The other man’s long story ended with the tagline, “Sorry.”
“Well, she’s good at spotting shadows,” said Riker. The girl could even see shadows that were not there. “It’s a gift.” And this was true. Mallory had turned a heightened sense of paranoia into an art form. “But thanks for hanging in there all night. I owe you bigtime.”
“That’s good, Riker. ’Cause when I get back, I can’t t e ll my boss that I screwed up. So I’m gonna tell him that you called off the surveillance. That’s okay by you?”
“For sure. I’ll back you up.”
“Thanks. Did I tell you she stuck a gun in my neck?”
“Oh, shit.”
“I’m guessing she’s no car thief-maybe a cop? Maybe the registered owner of that car-Detective Mallory?” When there was no response from Riker, the Chicago man said, “She doesn’t s t rike me as the type to drive a Vo lkswagen.”
Mallory was searching for an on-ramp to Interstate 55, a well-traveled highway with signs for twenty-four-hour fuel stops. The landscape of this old access road was the dark gray of early morning long before sunrise.
An on-ramp was no longer needed. She saw the lights of a gas station up ahead, and that was strange. Another driver might have felt lucky to find one open at this preternatural hour; Mallory was only suspicious. It was a small station with only one pump, and she wondered how it survived on local traffic. There was no garage for auto repairs, and the nearby interstate highway would eat up the commuter trade for gasoline. There was no reason to open for business before the full light of day, and yet a sleepy boy in coveralls was dozing beside the gas pump when she pulled into the lot.
An old man stepped out of the small wooden building. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, he hitched up his pants as he walked toward her. Mallory waved him off and put the pump’s nozzle into her gas tank. The old man shrugged to tell her fine by him-less work, and what did he care if she wanted to pump her own gas? He held up one gnarly finger as he named his terms of “Cash and carry. I don’t t ake no damn credit cards.” When she failed to answer him, even by a nod, he stepped up to the car. “You know you’re damn lucky I got any gas at all. Those damn tourists took most all of it yesterday.”
The young boy was circling the convertible, eyes full of love for it, but giving Mallory a wide berth, sensing trouble if he came closer-if he should actually touch her car. Finally, he came to rest a short distance away, asking, “Are you hunting somebody on this road?”
Mallory was rarely taken by surprise, and now it must show on her face.
Encouraged by her reaction, the boy took one step closer, politely asking, “You got a picture to show us?” Failing to get an answer, he took her for a foreigner, and his hands described a square in the air, as if this might communicate a photograph.
“What?”
“A picture!” said the old man, frustrated now that the boy beside him had exhausted his vocabulary in the spoken word and sign language. He jerked one thumb back toward the field on the far side of his gas station. “All those people who camped here last night was carrying damn pictures.”
She hung the nozzle on the pump and crossed the lot to round the small building and look out over the field beyond the gas station. They must have been very neat campers. There was no debris left behind, only charred circles from campfires and the tire marks of many different vehicles. When she returned to the gas pump, the old man was still muttering.
“Like I’d remember every customer who stopped for gas in the past twenty years.” One hand rested a moment on the boy’s s houlder. “And my grandson here, damned if those fools didn’t ask him to have a look, too. Posters and pictures and itty bitty locket photos-just every damn thing.”
“But the ones I saw looked like they was just kids.” The boy shyly edged closer to Mallory. “So… if you’ve got a picture-”
“I don’t.” She had no photographs, only letters. And she did not believe that the old man would remember another V o lkswagen driver who had come this way before she was born, even though that driver had one standout feature.
Mallory listened to the old man grumble about making change for her large bill, and then she drove on down the road. In the rearview mirror, she could see the boy running after her car, waving both hands, and she heard him yell out, “I hope you find him!”
It was unnerving that this child should know her business. She brought one fist down on the dashboard with the force of a hammer.
Pain brought focus.
She glanced at the knapsack, where she had stashed the letters. They would provide her with the structure she needed to get through this day. Mallory could see no farther into the future.
More cars were trickling onto Route 80. Rush hour was dawning on the state of Indiana, and Chicago was still hours away. But Riker was in no hurry now, and he never reached for the portable siren that would scare these civilians out of his lane. He no longer needed the LoJack tracker to tell him which way Mallory was going. The world’s best technology could not predict where she would go next, but suddenly he could. He knew every route she would drive, every town she would pass through. There would be lots of catch-up time ahead, for she was traveling down a very old road, a slow road. He remembered it well.
South of Waggoner, Illinois, if not for the spotlights, she would have driven past the queen. Mallory had expected something larger, given the letter writer’s love of spectacle on the scale of fiberglass giants. This white marble statue was merely life-size and maybe smaller. She pulled off the road to park on a small patch of concrete in front of the shrine to the Virgin Mary, also known as Queen of the Road and Our Lady of the Highways. The nearby farmhouse showed no sign of life. She was no closer to understanding the point of traveling from one odd thing to another. Perhaps she had read too much importance into sightseeing. One clue was in the rule forbidding the use of cameras, lest she “-fall into the trap of looking at stale minutes of a time that passed you by. Life won’t pose for pictures.” However, Illinois was still flat, and this statue provided small relief from the landscape. Disappointed again, she returned to the car and the road.
The sun was rising at her back, and she was playing recommended music for sunrise, Brandenburg Concerto no. 3. The author of the letters had described it as “-sunlit music with acrobatic notes of many colors, airborne tunes that lift you up out of your seat.”
Failing to be uplifted, Mallory went on to the next song for a new day. She put the car in gear and sped down the road with the Rolling Stones screaming lyrics at the recommended volume of the second letter: “If it won’t deafen a cat, it’s not loud enough.”
She found the letter writer’s choice of tunes lacked any logic or style. This was not the playlist of an orderly brain that made distinctions between classical and rock, pop and jazz. The man’s disorganized mind was irritating. Yet she drove his road and played his songs.
Her car slowed down behind a long line of more law-abiding vehicles. From force of habit, she crawled up on the bumper of the last car, forgetting momentarily that Volkswagens did not inspire fear in the driving public. As the route curved and wound, she waited until the road led her into a straightaway. Switching into the lane for oncoming traffic, she traveled from lawful miles per hour to one-fifty in seconds, passing a Lincoln that trailed a Winnebago following a truck-bed camper and cars pulling small, roly-poly trailers, sedans with roof racks piled high with bedrolls and tent poles, and more cars packed up to the windows with suitcases and duffel bags. It was a caravan of travelers bound together by the close spacing of one vehicle invisibly tethered to the next.
April Waylon’s friends?
This must be the band of neat tourists who had camped last night in the field by the gas station, leaving nothing behind but their ashes and impressions of tire treads.
A moment later, the caravan disappeared from Mallory’s rearview mirror. She was intoxicated with speed, flying across an open road. Car and woman had merged. Her heartbeat was in sync with the racing performance of a perfect engine, for she had become a new kind of creature, one who had legs that rolled with smooth grace in the weave of changing lanes and taking curves. Half an hour down the road, when at last she thought of food, she thought of it as fuel and pulled into the parking lot of a diner.
The countryside around this southwest area of Illinois was blighted and parched. The trees around the lot were specked with dead leaves that had died in their buds, and the grass of a neighboring field had turned brown. The only other car in the parking lot was an old green Ford sedan that carried out-of-state plates and streaks left by rainwater cutting through road dust, and the back end was attracting flies.
Lots of them.
The black insects buzzed and clustered along the edges of the closed trunk, mad for a way to get inside. She looked up to scan the wide windows that lined the diner. The only occupant was a stout young woman wearing a white uniform and running a rag across a Formica countertop. The waitress went on to polish the fixtures of the coffee machines and even the metal brackets for glass shelves holding muffins and pies. Mallory approved of all things neat and clean, and now she knew that the waitress’s car was the old Volvo parked on the dead grass off to one side of the diner. That car had been recently washed, and a pine-tree air freshener hung from the rearview mirror above the plastic Jesus on the dashboard. Mallory guessed that the woman parked outside the spacious lot because she took great pride in her old Volvo; she would not care to see it dented by some drunken driver seeking sobriety in a pot of her coffee.
Swatting at flies, Mallory turned back to the dirty green Ford. It had one new tire, probably the spare. She bent down to look through the driver’s-side window. Old regimens died hard, though it had been months since she had last plied her trade as a homicide detective. There was an auto-club card on the console, and a cell phone was plugged into the ignition charger. A flashlight lay on the floor mat, its lens and bulb broken. So the driver’s c e ll phone was not working. He had stopped to change his own tire-and then something else had gone wrong.
As she entered the diner, she saw an old-fashioned radio on a shelf behind the counter. The tinny voice of a weatherman was predicting another week of drought for the surrounding countryside. The rain-streaked Ford had surely come out of last night’s Chicago storm.
As the sole customer of the morning, she had her choice of counter stools and tables, but she selected the booth by the window, the better to watch the frustrated flies still trying to break into the Ford’s trunk. Approaching the booth was the smiling waitress with a round sign pinned to her ample chest to say: Hello, my name is Sally! This cheerful stranger had come to the booth armed with a coffee mug because, “The first one’s always on the house. And what else can I get for you, hon?”
Mallory ordered two eggs over easy, the same breakfast she had every day of her life. Then she pointed at the green sedan on the other side of the window. “Where’s the driver?”
“Don’t know, hon. That car was there, all by its lonesome, when I opened up this morning. The owner’s probably down the road scaring up some gas. That’s my guess.”
It was doubtful that the driver would leave his cell phone behind as an invitation to break into his car. “How long would it take to walk to a gas station?”
“No more’n twenty minutes… Oh, I see.” Sally lifted her face to look at the clock on the wall. “He really should’ve been back by now. Well, I guess he’ll be along soon. Not that I begrudge him the parking space.” The woman waited for her customer to acknowledge this little joke in view of an overlarge lot with only two parked cars. Apparently a smile was not forthcoming. Undaunted, Sally continued. “My daddy was the counterman back in the heydays before they opened the new interstate. Well, not so new anymore, but I-55 gets all the traffic now.”
Mallory already knew the history of this diner. She looked out over the parking lot, seeing it the way it was when the California boy had first come this way, when the road had been called the Main Street of America. But the waitress would not remember the boy who had stopped here in a Vo lkswagen convertible. And, like Mallory, this woman had not even been born in time for the later trip, when the VW driver had returned as a man in his middle twenties.
“That lot was full all day and all night,” said Sally. “Cars and trucks. And did you see the cabins out back? They used to be full of tourists, all of ’em. Folks from all over came through here. Now, that was a time.”
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.