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.
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?