“No.”
“He just walked off with them? No protests from the kids, no foot dragging, no struggles, no tears. Nothing to make anyone notice? Nothing to even make someone imagine they saw something peculiar? There’s always someone around who’s willing to make up something in exchange for attention from us. No lonely clerk who likes having the FBI talk to him as long as he can fantasize what he thinks we want to hear?”
“Nobody, John.”
“Who is this guy, the Invisible Man?”
“The agents are calling him Lamont Cranston. Apparently there was an old radio show called ‘The Shadow’ about this man, Lamont Cranston, who could cloud men’s minds and become invisible…”
“I remember,” said Becker.
“Before my time,” said Karen.
“Your loss,” said Becker. He fell into a deep announcer’s baritone. “ ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?… The Shadow knows.’ ”
“Yeah. I’ve been hearing a lot of that one,” Karen said.
“Orson Welles did the voice, I think.” Becker said.
Karen waited impatiently, clearly not interested in nostalgia.
From the other side of the room she could hear the pilot’s own sotto voce rendition of “The Shadow knows.” It seemed to be a phrase that men of all ages could not resist crooning, whether or not they had even heard of the original radio show.
“How does he get them to leave so peacefully that no one sees anything?” Becker was musing aloud, not expecting an answer. “As if he had them hypnotized.”
“We checked hypnosis, actually.”
“I wasn’t serious,” Becker said.
“We weren’t either, but we checked it anyway. None of them had ever been previously hypnotized, so there was no posthypnotic suggestion at work.”
“What physical evidence have the forensic people come up with?”
Karen shook her head. “Nothing. I know it’s hard to believe, but nothing. I told you, the bodies had been cleansed. There was nothing in the bags except the bodies. No hair samples, no prints, no fibers
… Part of that is the nature of the plastic used in the bags, apparently. It’s chemically inert and very smooth so it won’t pick up fibers from a car’s seat covers, for instance.”
“No prints on the outside of the bags? That stuff will hold fingerprints.”
“Only the prints of the people who found the bags along the highway. I don’t know. John. It’s like he killed and cleaned them in a scientific lab.”
“You’ve checked that?”
“In every case we investigated every lab within a fifty-mile radius of where the kids were taken. Every medical lab, every scientific research facility, every university with a science department, every place we could think of that keeps a sterile facility.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Hundreds of names of people who work there or have access to the facilities. But no connections to the victims, at least none that the computer could find. Maybe you could tell the computer what else to look for.”
Becker fell into a deep silence. When Karen started to speak to him he lifted one hand, stopping her. After a moment she slid out of her chair and crossed the room to join the pilot and the airport owner. Instinctively, they all spoke in hushed tones.
“Is he going to help find Lamont?” the pilot asked.
Karen arched her eyebrows, cocked her head slightly. Becker was not a man to make predictions about.
“He’s helped already,” she said.
“Did he come up with something?”
“No. But he’s confirmed that we’ve done all the right things.”
The owner craned his head to look past Karen, studying Becker as if seeing him for the first time.
“Is this guy really all that bright?” the owner asked. Karen shot the pilot a hard glance. She did not like the idea of discussing Bureau business with a civilian.
“I just mentioned that he’s someone special,” the pilot said shamefacedly.
“Doesn’t look it,” said the owner.
“That depends what part of him you’re looking at,” Karen said.
The owner looked at the pilot, suppressing a smile. The woman wasn’t his boss, after all. He had no reason to be afraid of her.
“What part are you looking at?” he asked.
“The part that’s looking at you,” she said.
Becker was still staring blankly at the table.
“He’s not looking at me,” the owner said, puzzled.
“Which ought to tell you something,” Karen said. To the pilot she said, “We’ll be leaving in fifteen minutes. Are you ready?”
“She’s ready when you are.”
“Go to the bathroom first,” she said. “It’s a long flight.”
Karen walked back to Becker.
“I have a bladder infection,” the pilot told the owner sheepishly.
“He wasn’t looking at me at all, was he?” the owner demanded, still puzzled.
The pilot looked at Becker. If one hadn’t heard the stories they told about him, Becker would appear to be a fairly rugged man, no longer young but certainly not old, an ex-athlete perhaps, who still stayed in shape, still had his hair. Presentable but nothing remarkable. But if the viewer had heard the stories; if even half of what they said about him was true…
“From what I hear,” the pilot said, “you’d better be grateful he isn’t looking directly at you. They say he sees everything, anyway. But what he looks at, he hits.” The pilot knew that was not what Deputy Assistant Director Crist had meant, but then she had actually worked with Becker. Humped him, too, apparently. The pilot was not certain just what sort of insight that gave her into Becker’s heart and head. He himself had certainly slept with many women without revealing a damned thing about himself except his sexual preferences, which was just the way he wanted it. How these things worked with Becker, he had no idea and no real desire to know.
Karen sat down at the table again and waited for Becker to return from wherever he had wandered in his mind. She remembered having found him in the middle of the night in the living room of the hotel suite they had shared in New York on the Bahoud case. He had been sitting with the lights out and when she asked him why, he had said because he was afraid of the dark. His face was wet with tears. She had thought he was the strangest, most exciting man she had ever met. That night she had comforted him with her body, and the next day he had killed the murderous Bahoud in a prolonged struggle in the pitch-black subbasement of the apartment building where he had been hiding. Becker had killed the man-who was armed with two weapons-with his bare hands in utter blackness, and Hatcher had said they had located Becker at last only by the screams he emitted. Yet he had wept again when he sat beside her hospital bed and she knew that he was crying as much for himself as for her.
She had lied earlier when she told Becker she had been half in love with him. She had been totally in love with him, and just about as frightened of all that he represented and of the great danger he posed to her control of herself. Ten years later, she still could not look at his hands without wanting to feel them on her body.
“This is going to hurt,” he said, jolting her out of her reverie as he came out of his own.
She understood that he was talking about himself.
“I don’t think I can do it without you,” she said. “He’ll keep on doing this until we get dumb lucky. We don’t have much time.”
“You don’t have any,” Becker said. “He’s snatched another kid already.”
“Are you sure?”
Becker shrugged. He wasn’t certain, but it made no difference. If Lamont hadn’t struck again, he would at any moment.
“Why shouldn’t he? He’s hungry, he’ll eat.”
He looked directly at her for the first time in several minutes.
“It’s going to hurt a lot,” he said.
“I know.” She touched his hand with hers. “I do know, John.”
Karen paused, realizing that it was not enough. “I have sole custody of my son,” she said at last.
“Your husband fought it.” It was not a question.