She just started talking on the telephone, assuming she would be recognized. It was one of Becker’s pet peeves and he played with the notion of asking who the hell she was. There was no particular reason for him to recognize her voice-but he did. And how had she known he would? Or did she usually start like this, as if she were always in mid-conversation?
“I’ve been trying to reach you for the past day and a half I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine. I was in Washington, yesterday.”
“Really? Washington?”
She paused, waiting for him to explain, which also annoyed Becker. “I went there to see a shrink.”
“That’s a long way for a shrink.”
“He’s a special shrink.”
“Does that mean you’re a special guy, or that you’re especially screwed up?” She had seemed so sympathetic when he was dangling upside down on a rope. Maybe that brought out the best in people. On the other hand, she had taken the trouble to find out how he was feeling. Nosy but concerned. Not the worst trade-off, he thought.
“It means I’m screwed up in a special way. How about you?”
“Just the usual way, I suppose, but I’m kind of proud of it.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “Does it have to do with the way you relate to other people and your feelings of guilt and aggression and codependency and your inability to form a truly lasting bond with another human being?”
“No. My fear of heights. Alan and I are going up again today. I just thought I’d let you know if you wanted to join us.”
“I got the impression last time that Alan was a little annoyed that I spoiled the party.”
“Alan was just upset because during your three minutes of crisis he wasn’t the center of attention. We’re starting around two so the sun won’t be in our eyes. Okay?”
“If I’m not there, start without me.”
“We will.” She hung up without saying good-bye. Another thing that annoyed Becker.
Alan had found a new route that obliged him to hang upside down for a distance of five feet before restoring himself to the merely vertical. Going straight up at ninety degrees was bad enough, but one hundred twenty seemed to be pushing beyond stupidity into lunacy. Becker was not even sure that a fly could handle an outcropping like the one Alan was negotiating as Becker arrived. Cindi was halfway up the rockface, spread-eagled against the stone as if she’d been staked out for torture, but calmly watching Alan perform. Becker was relieved to see Tee’s cop car parked alongside the highway; if he talked to Tee long enough maybe Cindi and Alan would get to the top and Becker could tackle the more conventional route up. If he went up at all. His bones ached just thinking about it.
As he approached Tee, Becker realized there was someone else in the car.
“Mick Seeger’s wife,” Tee said with a great show of innocence.
“Oh, subtle. Widows and orphans.”
“I didn’t know you’d be here, did I? We were just passing by. I saw your friend hanging up there like a chandelier; it’s free entertainment, and I don’t know how it’s going to come out. I didn’t think you’d be here after that spill.”
“Uh-huh. How long have you been waiting?”
“Just got here. Swear to God, John…”
“Good thing God isn’t listening to you anymore. Tee. You’d be in big trouble.”
“Laurie, come on out here and say hello to John Becker. John’s the man I was telling you about.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Becker. Thank you so much.”
She was about Cindi’s age, maybe a year or two younger, but she seemed to be from a different generation, one in which innocence still existed. Mick Seeger had married a baby, thought Becker.
“I’ve been so worried, I just can’t tell you. Mickey and I haven’t been apart for even a day since we got married and now…”
Her face quivered with the effort to keep from crying. Becker thought she was the kind of woman for whom tears were never very far away.
Becker looked angrily at Tee, but the policeman was innocently watching the climbers.
“Tee tells me you’re so good at it,” Laurie said.
“Tee doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.”
She laughed, as if the notion of Tee not knowing everything were hilarious. So young, Becker thought. Married, a mother, and so young.
“Have you been watching these climbers long?”
“Not long,” Tee said quickly.
“Only about twenty minutes,” said Laurie. “Tee said you’d be here soon.”
“I was driving Laurie to the gynecologist. My wife and I didn’t think she should be alone at a time like this.”
“Nothing wrong at the doctor’s, I hope,” Becker said, knowing he shouldn’t.
Laurie looked shyly away. “No,” she said.
“Laurie’s pregnant again,” Tee offered happily, watching Becker.
Becker rolled his eyes to the sky. It was bad enough being manipulated, but Tee was so clumsy at it he made Becker feel like a puppet with some strings broken. Tee was tugging like crazy at the ones that remained.
“Oh, I wish you hadn’t told him. Tee,” Laurie said. “I wanted Mickey to be the first to hear the good news.”
“Sorry, honey,” said Tee. “But Mickey will be just as happy to hear it.”
She started to cry again. “I just hope he isn’t hurt. If he doesn’t want to be with me anymore, I can… I just can’t stand the idea of him being hurt somewhere.”
“I’m sure he’s okay, Laurie,” said Tee.
“Maybe he just lost his memory. That happens, doesn’t it? People just forget who they are for a while? Doesn’t that happen, Mr. Becker?”
Not in my experience, Becker thought, not that he cared to share that with Laurie, particularly given her condition.
“That happens sometimes,” he said.
“Do you think it will take you a long time to find him?”
“That depends on Tee.”
“On Tee?”
“He hasn’t given me the records I need to get started,” said Becker. “Tee-ee!”
“They’re in the car,” said Tee, grinning and opening the back door of the sedan.
Laurie touched Becker’s arm. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said.
“I haven’t really done anything. I may not be able to.”
“You will, I know you will. Tee says you’re the very best there is.”
“It isn’t a good idea to believe absolutely everything Tee tells you.”
Laurie strained up on tiptoes and kissed Becker on the cheek.
“Thank you, Mr. Becker. Thank you.” She was crying again as she got into the car.
Tee tucked a file folder into Becker’s hands but avoided his eyes. “I’ll call you,” said Tee.
“No. You won’t. You’ll leave me the fuck alone until I contact you. In fact, you’d better give me plenty of room for quite some time. Tee.”
“Gotcha.”
“Yeah, you got me, but I don’t like the way you did it.”
“I understand,” said Tee. “You’re a good man, John.”
No, thought Becker as Tee’s police car pulled away. No, I’m not, which is why I couldn’t tell that child I wouldn’t do it. Maybe a good man could have been honest enough to break her heart. But a bad man could not take that chance, Becker thought. It would be entirely too revealing.
Alan had reached the top of the palisade and now Cindi was creeping her way under the overhang. For a moment her face was turned directly toward Becker and he thought she smiled at him. With a movement, he realized it was a grimace. Even an expert was struggling against her fear on this particular route.
Becker felt the file folder in his hand and was suddenly glad for it. At least it was something he could handle. I’m like an alcoholic with a bottle in front of me, Becker thought. Sure, it will kill me, but at least it’s something I know how to do.
He waited until Cindi had pulled herself around the overhang and was pressed safely-or as safely as her ego would allow-against the vertical face before driving off.
The contents of the file were spread across the dining room floor in a semicircle around Becker’s chair so he could see them all by twisting his head. The dining table was littered with more papers and scraps of scribbled notes surrounding the computer and its terminal.
“Technically, that’s police property,” said Tee, gesturing at the strewn files. “So?”
Becker was bringing his aging computer to life. The seconds it took to perform its more complex functions had come to seem interminable to Becker.
Tee was standing in the doorway leading to the kitchen, drinking a beer he had taken without comment from the refrigerator. It was a bottle from the same six-pack he had brought to Becker’s house two days before. Leaving beer and finding it untouched later was something novel in Tee’s experience.
“So you should treat them with respect.”
“I give them all the respect they deserve. It’s pretty slack work, Tee.”
“We don’t have the Bureau standards in Clamden.”
“No, you don’t. I spent the last two days running around and filling in the gaps.”
“Sorry. I spent the last two days holding Laurie’s hand and maintaining law and order.”
The computer signaled its readiness and Becker gave it new instructions. The screen filled with columns.
“How do you get it to do that?” Tee asked. “Do they sell a missing-persons software?”
“I programmed it myself”
“You did? Jesus. How do you know how to do that?”
“What age are you living in, Tee?”
“The Iron Age, isn’t it? I don’t know how to smelt ore, though. Fortunately, you do. Did you find out anything?”
“Would I ask you over for social reasons?”
“My wife has been asking me the same thing. About you, I mean. She thinks you don’t love us enough. You’ve got the house, you’ve got the refrigerator. Why don’t you entertain? Why not have friends over, Gloria wants to know.”
“I have no friends.”
“You’ve got at least one.”
“And he takes advantage of me.”
“I meant the human fly, what’s her name, Cindi. I ran into her in the Crossroads the other night. She asked about you.”
“The Crossroads?”
“A restaurant, bar, whatever. It’s where you single people go to arrange your nasty liaisons.”
“I know what it is. What were you doing there?”
“Official drinking. She’s gorgeous, you know, if you take her out of her climbing gear-and wouldn’t I like to. She was asking lots of questions about you: Are you married, why not, what are your sexual preferences, how do you spell that-that sort of thing.”
“What is it about marriage that makes you so horny. Tee? They have an operation that will cure that problem right up, you know. Your local vet could probably take care of it for you.”
“I don’t think so. My local vet’s a man.” Tee drained the beer and crushed the can in his hand.
“Whew,” said Becker. “How do you do that?”
“Scary, isn’t it?”
“Now, Chief, if your testosterone level has settled down, tell me about Mick. Did he fool around, too?”
“I don’t really fool around. I just want to. No, he didn’t. Not that I know of”
“Would you know?”
“I think so. We talked a lot.”
“At the Crossroads?”
“Yeah, some. I’d see him there sometimes, having a beer after work, you know. He’d be at the bar, though. He wasn’t off in a corner with a girl.”
“That’s the last place he was seen before he disappeared.”
“I know. Nothing unusual about his being there, though.”
“There was nothing unusual about him at all,” said Becker. He pointed to the screen. “There was nothing unusual about most of them. At least not at first glance. Or second glance, either. You’ve got to study it for a while. First of all, it’s not fifteen men missing in four years. Not for our purposes. Under normal circumstances in a population of one hundred thousand in this kind of New England situation- non-isolated, small communities, close to major cities-you’d lose five or six in four years. Running out on their wives, skipping out to avoid alimony and child support, just starting over, whatever. So what we have is an aberration of nine or ten disappearances, not fifteen. The question is which nine or ten are unusual, which of them make a pattern. You can’t begin until you see a pattern. So I had the computer try to eliminate the five or six normal disappearances for me, and it went at it a number of ways; annual income, marital status, number of kids, type of work, age, place last seen, you name it. It took awhile because I ran out of questions to ask the computer. Then it took awhile longer because I had to find out more about the missing men, which meant interviewing a lot of people.”
“I could have helped you there.”
“Not if you didn’t know what questions to ask, and I didn’t know until I was halfway through the process, and then I had to go back and ask some more. I stumbled on it when I was checking out this guy named Jensen from Guileford. Salvatore Jensen, strange combination. But half the people I talked to about him didn’t know him as Jensen; they knew him as D’Amico. He was born Sal D’Amico, became an actor and changed his name to Sal Jensen because there was another actor in Actors’ Equity named Sal D’Amico and they have a rule about that kind of duplication.”
“You mean all these guys changed their names? Because Mick didn’t.”
“D’Amico is the only one who changed his name, but it was how he changed it. He did what a lot of actors do, they tell me. He didn’t just make something up the way they used to do in Hollywood. And he didn’t just add a middle initial-apparently all the actors with middle initials? It’s because someone else has registered their name.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“No reason ever to think about it. It’s only an actor’s problem. But what D’Amico did that was significant was to take his mother’s maiden name, Jensen. Do you know Mick’s mother’s maiden name?”
“Her maiden name? That’s Gloria’s brother’s wife, Julie, and she came from Hartford and they’d already been married for about ten years before I even met Gloria-I don’t know. I can find out.”
“It’s Peterssen.”
“Right. That sounds kind of familiar. I think I met her father in Hartford once. So, it’s Peterson. So what?”
“No flash of insight? No light bulb over your head?”
“Give me a break, John. If I had flashes of insight, would I stand here and let you insult my stupidity?”
“They are both Scandinavian names. They are all Scandinavian names.”
Becker pushed another key and eight names came up on the screen.
“Eight of them,” he continued. “Eight of them with mothers with Scandinavian names. Not their own names. Their mothers. Only two of them had Scandinavian names themselves.”
“Wait a minute. Peterson could be English, couldn’t it?”
“If you say it aloud, yes. The s-e-n ending and the s-o-n ending sound the same. You have to see it written to know the difference. And s-e-n is Scandinavian. Primarily Danish or Norwegian, although it could be Swedish as well. With two esses it could also be Icelandic.”
“Icelandic?”
“Look at the names. Tee. Peterssen, Jensen, Cederquist, Nordhohn, Dahl, Lmd, Hedstrom, Nilsson.
Each of those is definitely Scandinavian. Not maybe, not could also be German or Dutch or English. Definitely Scandinavian.”
“How do you know this crap?”
“I have a library card.”
“So what’s going on? There’s some secret meeting of Danes and everyone is sneaking out to it, or what?”
“They’re not going on their own. Someone’s taking them.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t believe in cabals. Tee. I don’t believe in secret summonses or mysterious inheritances or a gathering of the trolls or aliens. I don’t look for fancy explanations. Maybe it’s just a predisposition because of my training, but this stinks all over the place. If they have anything else in common, I can’t find out what it is. They range in age from twenty-five to thirty-six, they’re male, they live around here, and that’s it.”
“Except for their mothers.”
“Except for their mothers’ names. The mothers don’t have much in common, either, although I need to look at that further. It’s not as if they just got off the boat from Copenhagen. Most of the families have been here for many generations. Their only link to Scandinavia is the surname.”
“Who would care if they had Scandinavian names? What difference does it make?”
“I have no idea.”
“And who would even know the surnames?”
“Bingo, Tee. No wonder you’re the chief. Who would know the names? You didn’t know your nephew’s mother’s maiden name. And not only know the names, but know them correctly, by spelling. Someone with access to records, obviously. And what kind of records have women’s maiden names?”
“Marriage records.”
“Correct, but marriage licenses don’t tell you if the woman has or had or will have a child.”
“Hospitals, birth certificates.”
“Which will tell you a child was born, but not if he’s still alive at least twenty-five years later, or if he lives around here.”
“We need something where a woman with a Scandinavian last name tells you she’s got a son at least twenty-five years old?”
“Or vice versa. A form of some kind where the son gives his mother’s maiden name.”
“Hell, John, that could be credit-card applications, job applications, a lot of things.”
“Except I’m sure these men didn’t all apply for the same job. The army takes that kind of information, but only two of our men were in it.”
“Social security?”
“No.”
“The goddammed census, I don’t know, what?”
“The census is an idea. Tee, although I don’t think they take that kind of information, but I’ll check it out.”
“You know the answer already or you wouldn’t be jumping me through the hoops. Where would you get the information?”
“Insurance. There are other ways, but they’re harder and not local. The same insurance salesman could easily cover our four towns. And he doesn’t even have to sell you a policy to get the information. They offer to see if they can beat your present insurance rate, you know. Just fill out the form and they’ll get you a free quote, no obligation to buy.”
“I always knew I didn’t like insurance salesmen. So we have to find out if the same insurance salesman talked to all of these men who disappeared?”
“To begin with, we have to see if the same one talked to even two of them. That’s something to start with, but it won’t be easy to find out. Would your wife remember if you had a talk with an insurance salesman six months ago? A year ago? We don’t know how long this guy waits once he selects his victim.”
“Victim? You’re sure that’s what’s going on?”
“Nope. I’m still hoping it’s a case of mass amnesia. But in the meanwhile, I’ll stay cynical.”
“But why the mothers? Wouldn’t it be easier to just pick men with Scandinavian names, if that’s what you were after?”
“Easier, but it would make for an obvious pattern. I only stumbled onto this because of the actor. It wouldn’t show up in a routine scan of the victims’ case studies. It didn’t for you, did it?”
“You think Mick’s dead, then?”
“I think we should start checking out insurance salesmen.”
“Damn it, Becker, I’m not Laurie! Tell me what you think. Is he dead?”
“Did you get a ransom note?”
“Of course not. Why would anybody kidnap Mick? He doesn’t have any money…”
“You’ve checked hospitals, traffic fatalities… It’s not just Mick, there are eight of them. Christ, Tee, you brought this thing to me yourself. What did you think it was? Things like this go on. All the time, all over the country. Read the newspaper; there’s a new case every other month. The Hillside Strangler, the Atlanta murders, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy. There’s some farm couple in Missouri in their seventies who killed at least twenty and counting. Sometimes I think it’s a national competition. And the newspapers are just interested in the big numbers. You never even hear about the creep in Arizona who got caught after three, or the one in Baton Rouge who… Maybe I’m wrong. Tee. Give me another explanation.”
Tee was silent for a moment. Becker looked away, giving him the time in privacy.
“Okay,” said Tee at length.,
“Sorry. Maybe I’m wrong.”
“Okay.”
“It’s my experience. Tee. My training. I look for the worst.”
“I accept that it’s not UFOs… It’s just that Mick and I… okay.”
“It’s not just about Mick, Tee.”
“I know.”
“It’s happening faster, his pace is accelerating. He took the first four in thirty months. He took the last four in eighteen. The time between Timmy Heegan and Mick was only two months. His appetite is getting ravenous, the need is consuming him.”
“The need?”
“That’s what it is. That’s what it becomes. Maybe not the first time; that could be accident or fluke or experiment, but after that, you start to want it-if you’re that kind of person. After awhile you need it, you need the rush of adrenaline or the sexual thrill or whatever it happens to be in your case. Like any addiction, you need more and more. The more you get, the more you need, until eventually, like any addiction, you overdose… Killing grows on you.”
Tee noted the intensity with which Becker spoke and looked away from it. There were some things he didn’t want to witness and some he didn’t want to know.
“Well, so. Insurance salesmen. How much time do you think we have until his ‘appetite’ makes him take somebody else?” asked Tee.
“Mick disappeared fourteen days ago. I’d guess we have a month, maybe less.”
“Unless he stops.”
“Stops?” Becker laughed. “He’s in too far to stop. It’s in his blood, in his gut, it makes him dizzy with desire. He can hear it like a howling in his ears.”
Tee watched Becker with growing unease. He did not want to know how his friend knew such things.