“Now we’ll see,” Dee said. “Now we’ll see. Now we’ll see.”
She beat him in rhythm with her voice, but Bobby soon ceased to make sense of her words. Her only real message was pain.
Chapter 13
Karen awoke to music and it took her a moment to figure out where it was coming from. The sound was muted and faint and the strumming of an acoustical guitar gave her a fleeting sense of being serenaded from outside her window. Then she realized it was coming from Jack’s room. He was up and playing his favorite tape of children’s songs. She glanced at the red numerals on the clock radio, the two dots separating the hours and the minutes blinking methodically. It was too early for her to be up; but not too early for Jack. She could never understand how he functioned so well on so little sleep, or how he seemed to awake fully refreshed and smiling while she had to claw her way into consciousness.
Remembering that she was not alone in the bed, she rolled her head to look at Becker, but his side of the bed was empty. His clothes, which he had tossed on the chair the night before, were gone. The son of a bitch has slipped out on me, she thought. Not so much as a goodbye, no farewell kiss. Just grab his socks and go. How typical, how sneakily, self-centeredly, inconsiderately typical. They were all sons of bitches, so it wasn’t her fault that she kept picking bad ones. There were no good ones.
Karen washed her face and brushed her teeth and when she was certain she could muster a cheerful smile for her son, she went in to see him. Becker was sitting on the floor making another newspaper tree and Jack, still dressed in his airplane pajamas, was dancing around the room in a bounding gavotte that included frequent leaps onto and off of his bed.
“You still here?” Karen said. She was surprised by the tightness in her voice.
Becker held the newspaper over his head. “By popular request.” he said.
“Stop jumping on your bed,” she said to Jack.
“I was just showing him,” Jack said. He pointed at Becker as if to clarify any doubt.
“You know you’re not supposed to jump on your bed. Now stop it.”
Although she had not raised her voice. Jack stopped in mid-bounce and stepped carefully to the floor.
“I forgot,” he said lamely.
“How long have you been up?” she asked Becker.
“A couple of hours. I got up when I heard the fax machine working.”
“You can’t hear the fax machine from my bedroom.”
“You can’t hear the fax machine.” he corrected her.
“What did it say?”
“It’s not my place to be reading your faxes,” he said.
“What did it say?”
“The first one was a report on the detailed search of the mall.”
“And?”
“Nothing. He wasn’t hidden there and they found no indication that he ever was.”
“And the second fax?”
“It’s a printout of all the delinquencies at hotels, motels, and monthly rental homes within a thirty-five-mile radius of Stamford within forty-eight hours of the time the boy was found. It’s six pages long.”
“What boy?” Jack asked.
“No one, honey. How about you getting dressed now.”
“He said a boy was found,” Jack insisted. “Was a boy lost?”
“Not really. Now you get dressed. Mr. Becker and Mommy have a little work to do.”
“How did he get lost?”
“Jack… ”
Becker kneeled in front of the boy.
“He got lost because children do sometimes,” Becker said, “but the reason he stayed lost so long was that he didn’t do what he should have done. Do you know what he should have done when he got lost?”
“What?”
“He should have yelled,” Becker said. “He should have yelled and screamed and made as much noise as he could so that the people looking for him could find him. There were a lot of people trying to find the boy, including your mommy. Your mommy is a very good finder, did you know that, Jack?”
Jack shook his head uncertainly. He was not certain of his mother’s finding abilities, but he was fascinated to learn.
“Well, she is. Your mommy is very, very good at it. But even she couldn’t find the lost boy, because she didn’t know where to look because he didn’t make enough noise. He should have made all the noise he possibly could and he should have kept doing it until he was found. The worst thing to do if you ever get lost is to keep quiet about it. If you’re in trouble of any kind, you be sure to call for help. Okay?”
“Okay… but what happened to him?”
“He finally got found,” Becker said.
“Did you find him, Mommy?”
“Not personally, sweetheart.”
“The people who work for your mommy found him,”
Becker said. “The boy is safe at home now, and your mommy gets a lot of the credit for that.”
Jack smiled. He was not sure that he completely understood, but the sense of pride he felt about his mother was clear enough.
“You’re a pretty good liar,” Karen said to Becker when they were alone in the kitchen. “I thought you prided yourself on telling the truth.”
“When the truth is appropriate,” Becker said. “If a lie is called for, I can usually manage.”
“So how do I know if you’re telling me the truth?” she asked.
“Why not assume I’m telling you the truth until you see my nose grow?”
“I think it’s safer to assume you’re lying until I see your nose shrink… but thanks for the plug with Jack.”
“You deserve it.”
“It’s nice to have your kid think you’re good at what you do-even if he doesn’t know what it is.”
As Karen drove them toward the mall in Bickford. Becker went through the printout that had come in by fax.
“You check my logic as I go along,” Becker said. “First we can eliminate the women from the list, right?”
“As devil’s advocate, why?”
“Women almost never commit serial murders, one. Two, the upper body strength required to pitch the victim out the window of a moving car while driving it at the same time would make her some kind of steroid- huge, iron-pumping giant. That’s the kind of person who would have been noticed in the mall or museum. Women like that are certain to get a stare from every man in the place.”
“Women would notice her, too. All right, eliminate the women from the list.”
They were silent for a few moments as Becker went through the six pages and struck off the names that were obviously women. He circled those given names that were just initials for further investigation.
“You’re very good with him,” Karen said.
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t think you would be.”
Becker looked up from the list and studied her profile. “Why?”
She shrugged. “No practice, maybe. I don’t know. It just took me sort of by surprise.”
“Do you think I’m some kind of monster?” He sounded hurt.
