Find Me Page 5

  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 take 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 shoulder. “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 Volkswagen 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 knap sack, 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 ap
proved 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 cell 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 Volkswagen 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. Two other diners 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.

  3

  Mallory wondered if murder was a low priority in this part of Illinois. Twenty minutes had passed between her phone call and the appearance of a patrol car in the diner’s parking lot. The young state trooper who emerged from the vehicle was close to her own age, though the small nose, almost pug, belonged to a boy years younger. She guessed that he had played football in high school. He carried himself with the confidence of an athlete who has won a few games and fancies that he did that single-handed. Worse yet, he was the moseying type. She marveled that he could drag out the simple maneuver of leaving his car and donning his hat for the long walk of six steps to the diner.

  A key to one of the tourist cabins was in her hand, and she planned to make short work of this business so she could get some sleep.

  The door swung open, and the trooper nodded to the waitress. “Hey, Sally.” He approached the booth by the window and, with the fine deduction of a hick cop, addressed the only customer as “Miss Mallory?”

  “Just Mallory,” she said.

  After introducing himself as Gary Hoffman, “Just Gary, if you like,” he settled into the other side of the booth, removing his hat and smiling. “Would’ve been here sooner if I’d known how pretty you are.” When this attempt at charm fell flat, his smile became foolish. He opened a notebook and fished through his pockets to find a pen. “So you want to report a suspicious vehicle.” He looked out the window with a view of the green sedan and the silver convertible. “I’m guessing that old Ford’s not yours. I got you pegged as a Volkswagen girl.”

  If the trooper had seen the brief smile that crossed her face, he would not have taken it for any happy expression.

  “I want you to pop the Ford’s trunk,” said Mallory.

  He gave her a kind but condescending smile, as if he were playing Officer Friendly to a kindergarten class. “Well, now, you see…here in Illinois…there’s a reason why we don’t usually do things like that.”

  Mallory squeezed the cabin key until the metal dug into her hand. She was badly in need of sleep, and she was not going to wait around all day for him to finish his sentences. “Last night, back in Chicago, the cops found an unidentified murder victim—and it’s missing a body part.”

  “The way I heard it—“

  “The corpse was laid out like a damn road sign pointing this way.”

  “Ma’am, Chicago is hundreds of miles—”

  “I know that. I drove it. That’s why my car has the same water streaks as the Ford.” She nodded toward the window on the parking lot. “Out there, you’ve got an abandoned vehicle that was rained on in Chicago last night. This part of the state hasn’t seen rain for a month. Did you notice the flies all over the back end of the Ford?”

  “Oh, flies,” he said, waving off the one that had flown in the door with him. “I’ve seen that before.” And by that, he meant for her to know that he had seen it all—every damn thing. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  She wondered what might have given that away—her accent? Or was it the New York plate on her car, the one parked right under his nose?

  “Now what we’ve got here,” said the trooper, perhaps pausing to catch his breath—so many words to get out and all in one day, “well, it’s probably a deer carcass in the trunk…and that’s no reason to break into a man’s car.”

  “A deer.” Mallory stared at the green sedan, as if reading the trooper’s entire future on the hood of that car: He would never open his eyes to any observation but his own; he would never rise higher in rank; and he would be taken by surprise on the day he was fired. She planned to alter his future, but not from any act of kindness on her part. Cutting this man at the knees would open his eyes very fast—and then she could get some sleep.

  “No dents in the front en
d,” she said. “He didn’t hit a large animal with his car. So you have to figure he was hunting, right? Now, assuming our hunter could fit a full-grown deer into the Ford’s trunk—and he can’t—you don’t think they have enough deer back in Colorado, where his license plate was issued? Maybe they’ve got a shortage? And what’s the deer population in Chicago—where his car got rained on last night?”

  The trooper grinned, having thought of a solution for this little problem, too. He opened his mouth to speak, but Mallory was faster, saying, “I favor blowflies over cadaver dogs for finding stray body parts. You’ve got jurisdiction and probable cause. So pop the damn trunk.” And then, when he showed no signs of moving, she added, “It’s a good career move.”

  Grinning, He shook his head, as if she had just told him a fine joke. Then he glanced at the row of pies on the shelf behind the counter, maybe planning to stop awhile for breakfast.

  But Mallory did not shoot him.

  Though she had hoped to avoid this, she laid down the gold badge, an emblem of New York’s Finest. “Don’t fool with me. Just do it.”

  The Mercedes-Benz was at a standstill, and Detective Riker waited for an overturned truck to be cleared from the road up ahead. After bumming a cigarette from the driver in the car behind him, he stretched his legs as he sorted through the entries in his notebook. He knew that Mallory had traveled across four states in the fairly straight line of Route 80. That had ended when she stopped for gas in Chicago. Thereafter, she had traveled on back roads separated by stretches of driving on I-55, where that highway had displaced an older one. At first, it had seemed like aimless meandering—just a girl on the road and maybe any road would do. Or the kid might be lost and, true to herself, incapable of asking for direction.