involving few clues. Dr. Desinor's your man, if you'll pardon the expression, on a case that requires an instinctive ability to get at the truth.”
“ She puts on a damned good show,” Stephens admitted, “if they have indeed come up with a solution in Georgia based on her reading of that note.”
“ They have Sendak's daughter in custody, the daughter he never had, and she's told authorities where the body is,” replied Paul, obviously impressed not only by what he'd witnessed on the screen but also by the subsequent developments in the Sendak case.
“ I'm most impressed,” Stephens said. “Dr. Desinor puts on quite a show, but then so do you, Dr. Coran. I read about how-with no more than an arm coughed up from the sea in Hawaii-you were able to reconstruct the awful string of murders there which had gone undetected for years.”
“ I had a great deal of help there, a support team of the first caliber, and as for detecting the undetected… well, James Parry was really the one who broke the case wide open.”
“ Modesty becomes you, Jess,” said Zanek.
“ Parry and his team were superb,” she insisted, her stare hard.
“ Yes, well, in any event, I wanted to show Stephens here what I've seen in Desinor, and I wanted to show you, since you'll be stepping aside this go-round so as to catch up on your duties here, and since I've long wanted you to evaluate Dr. Desinor's whole operation to see if the Profiling sector might not wish to avail themselves of her services in the future-possibly even think of her department as a new arm, so to speak.”
An interesting idea, Jessica thought. She'd heard of Dr. Desinor's intriguing work. Not many in the upper echelon of the F B I network hadn't. However, Desinor's work was classified top secret, not for public consumption; consequently, Kim Desinor and her small team had kept a low profile themselves. Their budget, it was rumored, was pretty shabby as well.
“ Paul, I'd like to talk to you alone for a moment, if you don't mind,” Jessica requested.
Stephens flashed a perfunctory frown, his bulbous nose and red cheeks flaring-both frown and drinker's rouge part of his office, she decided-but he quickly recovered, nodded and left the screening room.
5
Her heart is like an outbound ship
That at its anchor swings.
Paul Zanek fished into his private stock and came up with a bottle of Jim Beam and some water and ice. He made himself a drink and offered it to Jessica.
“ You know I've sworn off booze, Paul. If I start drinking now, I might not stop.”
“ Sorry, no, I didn't know.”
“ There's a hell of a lot you don't know, Paul, and maybe that's the problem.”
“ Come on…what is this, Jess? I've got eyes. I know what's driving you, but what's all this hostility? I thought we were on the same side of the fence here.” His voice changed dramatically as he added, “You look like…well, you look like you haven't slept in days.”
“ You really know how to flatter a girl, Paul.”
“ I'm sorry, Jess. You know me… shoot from the lip.”
She waved it off. “No apology necessary.”
“ No letup to the nightmares?”
She shrugged in answer and plopped into a chair before him.
He gritted his teeth as if afraid to ask, but forged ahead anyway. “Dr. Lemonte's prescriptions of no use?”
All of the above, she silently replied. “No, no…nothing like that. I've just been maybe working too long in the lab since getting back.”
“ I'm sorry about Oklahoma, that his trail went cold and that there's been no change, but the bastard's leery now. We came real close to plugging him up, and he knows it.”
“ He's had a lot of time to think about when and where he'll next strike, Paul. He went to Oklahoma for a reason, probably to throw us off, but there was someone or something he wanted there. One of the many background files on him said he had been born in Oklahoma in 1948, his family moving to the Chicago area when he was three or four years old. His father became a baker, his mother a factory laborer. The place where they lived in Oklahoma was gone, but he went back there. Why? He has a reason for every step he takes.”
“ Maybe it wasn't a conscious decision, Jess. Maybe he just took off running and, coincidentally, wound up in Oklahoma.”
“ Where he killed three people in two days.” The trail from Philadelphia to Oklahoma was littered with Matisak's leavings. They'd gotten a make and model on the car he was using, a white four-door Mercury sedan stolen from his last Oklahoma victims just outside of Tulsa. They'd run the car down with a chopper and squad cars, hauled the driver out at gunpoint and pushed his face into the dirt, but it wasn't Matisak.
Matisak had sold the car to the fool for a hundred dollars. They'd traced back to where the transaction had occurred: at Mohawk Boulevard where it became Young Street, within walking distance of the North Tulsa Regional Airport-where, it was surmised, Matisak forced a pilot into the air at gunpoint to make his escape. Flight controllers had seen the plane take off without clearance and without logging a flight plan with the tower. It was a friendly little airport where people parked their toys and came out on weekends for recreation, and it was not unusual for a man to take his Cessna up, circle the area and return within an hour or two, without having logged any flight plans. The place was small enough that the good old boys in the tower didn't think anything of it until they were alerted by the FBI, too late, about the fugitive in the area.
Actually, the tower had been alerted long before, but a shift change hadn't gotten the message. By now Matisak had vanished without a trace. Still, an army of agents had gone to work in the area. Planes, trains, buses and terminals had been searched, but the monster had simply disappeared. Still, Jessica, on hand in Tulsa, had had the undeniable feeling even then that Matisak had had a specific reason for coming to the area. Something quite specific, she'd surmised, and the taking of an airplane was no spur-of-the-moment decision. She'd reasoned that Matisak had planned his every step, including the theft of the plane, his getaway. But why? Did he have family there that no one knew about? Did someone harbor him during the brief stay in the area? Did he know the guy with the plane? A background check on the pilot, a man named Norman East-han, revealed nothing unsavory. He seemed just another innocent who'd gotten in the way. Still, she remembered how many people Matisak had used for cover in Chicago, dupes and losers and desperates who'd clung to Matisak for some sense of identity, only to be set up by him.
Was it possible that the madman was still in Oklahoma somewhere? Was it possible that someone was harboring him? Who would harbor such a fiend? It was not entirely impossible, even though every newspaper had carried his photo and every TV set had flashed his face before millions. He'd been highlighted on America's Most Wanted, his story retold anew along with his desperate escape. The famous TV program had never featured such a bloody episode in its history. If he was being harbored by someone, that someone must know about it.
She couldn't imagine anyone in the country who could not know what Mad Matt Matisak looked like. But now, for some unaccountable reason, a notion lodged in her brain, and Paul Zanek stared at her, knowing something was running frantically through her mind and looking for an escape route.
“ What're you hatching, Jess?” he suspiciously asked.
She was wondering why she hadn't considered the possibility when they were in Oklahoma. “The Indian reservations,” she said aloud.
“ What?” he asked. “What Indian reservations?”
“ Oklahoma is full of Indian reserves. Tribes of half the Indian nations live in the state, are you kidding? What if Matisak knew someone who lived on an Indian reservation down there in Oklahoma, someone who read no
