“No,” he said in answer to a question that was also part of their ritual. “I will never betray you.” Following the caller’s instructions, he opened the glove box and pulled out a new stack of photographs taken with a Polaroid camera. He fanned them out. This time it was not a corpse, but candid pictures of Dodie Finn. A living child was a break with tradition-or was she dead? Paul Magritte’s eyes searched the side window for a sign of her.
Dodie, where are you?
One veined hand groped about inside his nylon sack, where, until very recently, he had kept a rusty gun. His hand slowly closed around the hilt of a newly purchased hunting knife. “Dodie Finn is insane,” said Magritte to his caller. “What harm could she do to you?”
He heard a low buzz on the phone and words rising to be heard above the noise. He had the ugly sensation of black flies crawling around in his ear.
“Look at her,” the caller said. “Look to your left, old man. That’s it. You see her now?”
“Yes.” The child was sitting on the edge of a folding chair. Her thin legs were drawn up as she perched there, leaning forward and defying gravity as birds do. She began to rock, and the old man feared that she would fall. Ah, but now her father grabbed her up in his arms and held her close. Joe Finn’s e yes went everywhere, seeking the cause of this upset.
“There. You see it now,” said the voice on the phone. “She rocks, she hums. Dodie’s full of little cues and clues.”
They debated this for another hour. The doctor held a perfectly rational conversation with the devil. All the while, Paul Magritte’s eyes traveled over the dark windows of caravan vehicles. So many newcomers. The FBI agents could no longer keep track of them. Dodie Finn’s stalker had a gift for procuring cars, and there were many here that might harbor him tonight.
“When it’s over,” said his caller, “I give you permission to hand over my photographs to Detective Mallory.”
Of course. Magritte sighed. He should have foreseen this. Now Mallory had been woven into a serial killer’s little story of himself-a legend still in the making. It was the young detective who would explain this wondrous design to the world, for Magritte could not be expected to break his silence after all these years. The old man now saw his only role as the archivist- and suddenly he saw the greater value of the photographs, Polaroids with no negatives.
When it’s over?
What was meant by those words?
Ah, yes, now the elderly psychologist understood it all too clearly. Every legend must have a dramatic finale. But this quest for fame was pathetic, the ploy of a little boy. It was like a letter written to the parents who had run away from him and gone to ground where he could never find them. He would find them now, and it would not matter if he was alive to see their stricken faces. It went beyond revenge-this maniacal communiqué of the abandoned child. And it was possible for the old man to pity a killer of children-even as he plotted to destroy him. With suicidal ideation in the mix, the murderer would become more reckless. The time was right. Dodie must survive.
Magritte looked down at the knife held tight in his right hand. What a fool he had been to believe that he could save a child this way. His best weapon had always been words. “More pictures to burn,” he said to his caller, his torturer.
“What did you say?”
“You didn’t think I kept them, did you?” Magritte waited out the silence for an endless crawling minute. “You never made copies, did you? No, of course not. Well, they’re gone. I burned them all.”
The cell-phone connection was broken, and his usefulness to a psychopath was at an end. He sat bolt upright, the knife clutched in both hands now. Hours passed. The sky was lightening, and every star had been lost when he reached that point where even fear could not keep him awake. His eyes closed, but only for the time it took for the sun to clear the horizon line. The early light was slanting through his windshield when he awoke to the noise of barking dogs. The parents were striking camp and packing vehicles. The caravan would soon be underway. When he turned to the side window, he sucked in his breath. Detective Mallory’s face was inches from his own, and she was staring at the knife in his lap.
She ripped open the car door. “You should be under arrest, old man. What kind of a deal did you do with Agent Nahlman?”
17
A new insurrection had begun . Charles Butler stood at the heart of the crowd, yet Riker had found him. The detective carried a plastic sack, the fruits of a beer run to a liquor store. “What’s going on?”
“Trouble.” Charles pointed to an embedded reporter from a cable news network. The man was standing on the hood of a car, and his voice was amplified by a bullhorn. “He’s trying to convince the parents to drive the scenic route to Santa Fe.”
“Well, that’s not good,” said Riker, as he popped the tab on a beer can and took a deep swallow. “The caravan would choke the Santa Fe loop in fifteen minutes.”
Now Mallory was visible in the distance as she climbed onto the hood of a pickup truck to stand two heads taller than the newsman. She needed no bullhorn. The crowd was hushed, waiting, and then she said, “Come nightfall, you’ll all be strung out as easy pickings in a mile-long traffic jam.” She slowly revolved to catch every pair of eyes in this large group of parents, federal agents and media. “And there’s no point in taking that route.”
“That’s not true!” The cable newsman shouted into his bullhorn to regain the crowd’s attention. “I can guarantee two solid hours of airtime for every day on the Santa Fe loop!” Raising the ante of his bid, he yelled, “You get the prime-time slot!”
“There were no bodies found on that segment of the old road,” said Mallory, and hundreds of heads swiveled to face her again. “None of your children ever went that way.”
“If that was true,” said the cable reporter, “then the FBI agent in charge wouldn’t have approved my route change.” He lowered his bullhorn and climbed down from the hood of his car. Now he had to crane his neck to look up at her and smile. In an unamplified voice he said, “The negotiations are over, Detective.”
“Wrong,” she said.
Charles looked around with the vantage point of the tallest man standing. Dale Berman, the agent in charge, was nowhere to be seen, and Riker had also disappeared. He turned his eyes to Mallory, who still had the high ground atop the truck’s hood.
The reporter at her feet raised his bullhorn again. “It’s a done deal, Detective. We’re going to Santa Fe.”
Mallory removed her jacket, the better to display her gun, and now she clipped her gold shield to a belt loop of her jeans. Hands on hips, she addressed the reporter. “I don’t w ant any doubt in your mind that this is a lawful police order. Now shut your mouth!”
Undeterred, the reporter yelled at her. “Freedom of the press, Detective! Ever heard of the Constitution of the-”
“I got it memorized,” said Riker, stepping out of the crowd to grab a handful of the reporter’s shirt, and now he was dragging the man backward across the campground, his voice trailing off as he loosely paraphrased the reporter’s constitutional right to remain silent. “Don’t flap your mouth anymore.”
And now Mallory owned the crowd. All eyes were on her and every camera lens. The cameras loved her more than the man from the cable news network.
“The Santa Fe loop is part of the old route from the thirties. That’s your great-grandfather’s idea of Route 66-not the killer’s. He dug his graves along the old trucking route from the sixties. That’s his Route 66- and yours.”
As she went on to describe all the changes and versions of this shifting historic highway, Charles Butler realized that she had slipped into someone else’s words. At times she reminded him of a schoolgirl reciting memorized lines of poems.