“Why do you think he’s that close? Why wouldn’t he go as far as possible?”
“For one thing, he doesn’t. He stays within a four-state area. Whether because there’s something that keeps him here or whether it’s just familiar territory, I don’t know. But he does stay. Every body was found within fifty miles of the town where it was snatched. You can’t always find a right spot and time on the highway to throw something out; you need a little leeway. I’m guessing ten to twenty miles. If it’s longer, that means he started well within the thirty miles, which is even better. The point is, his pattern is not to snatch a kid and then go hundreds of miles and live with him for a month. He takes them and goes immediately to ground. That means he’s already made a nest where he feels secure before he takes them.”
“You think he’s still here then?” She made a vague semicircular sweep of her hand to indicate “here.”
“Well, yes, depending how you define here. A circle with a thirty-mile radius covers an awful lot of territory.”
“Tell me about it. You see how long it took to compile that list for Stamford, and that was six months ago.”
“We need help,” Becker said. “The Bureau doesn’t begin to have enough people to do it fast enough. We have to get the state and local people working on it.”
Karen snorted. “To us it’s a serial killer. To them it’s a local matter of one missing child. We’ll be asking them to expend God knows how many man-hours on what could very well be a wild-goose chase…”
“Cops are used to chasing wild geese,” Becker said.
“Their own geese. Now we want them to chase ours. We want them to undertake a major search because one boy-for most of them a boy who’s not from their own town or jurisdiction-has been missing for a few days.”
“A week,” said Becker.
“Do you think you can do that?” she asked.
“Me?” Becker asked. “No, I couldn’t hope to do that. I don’t have the skills. I tend to alienate people. I’m too sure of myself. I could never convince them to do it… But you could.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“A pleasure.”
“Any bright ideas as to how I go about it?”
“No,” said Becker. “But you’d better hurry. At the rate Lamont is escalating his hunger. I’d say Bobby Reynolds has two weeks left. Three at the outside-if he’s very, very docile.”
Karen stood outside the conference room in the Radisson Hotel in Bickford, slowly tearing the tissue she held in her hands to little pieces. The Deputy Chief of the Connecticut state police and the heads or representatives of two dozen local police forces were waiting inside along with as many FBI men from the New York and New England districts as she could command, beg, borrow, or scrape. Getting them all together with only two days’ notice had taken all the authority and good will that her position in the Bureau could muster. And that was the easy part.
Getting them all to do something was not a problem. They would make a token of assistance simply for the asking. What Karen needed, however, was a dedicated effort. Fast and concentrated and thorough. And this from men who resisted, on principle, the very idea, much less the practice, of being told what to do by the federal law enforcement agency. Men who would resist for reasons of turf and professional pride if the directions came from a seasoned agent would resist even more fiercely if they came from a woman.
“A young and beautiful woman at that,” Becker reminded her. He stood next to Karen outside the conference room. Karen had noted that her nervousness only seemed to amuse him.
“They’ll hate me,” she said.
“That is not the average man’s reaction to a young and beautiful woman. Believe me, these guys are very average. You start at an advantage.”
“Are you nuts? I’m walking into a nest of male chauvinists. I’ve got as much advantage as a kitten in a dog kennel.”
“One thing’s for sure, you’ll have their attention,” Becker said, grinning. “Come on, how bad can it be? You command a couple dozen men all the time.”
“I’m their boss. When I talk to them they pay attention, they don’t sit around and grab at their nuts. I don’t have to stand in front of them and convince them of what to do. I tell them.”
“Probably not the best approach to take here,” Becker said.
“Thanks for the advice.”
Becker took her by the hand and removed the decimated tissue.
“Makes you look nervous.” he said.
“No shit. Wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression… I hate talking to groups. I’m not so bad one-on- one…”
“Not bad at all.”
She cast him a dark glance. His amusement was getting very hard to take. “But I hate-hell, I fear talking to groups. Especially a room full of cops.”
“I think you’re supposed to imagine them all sitting there naked. That’s supposed to make them less intimidating and to relax you.”
“You want me to imagine a roomful of overweight, balding, middle-aged cops? That’s disgusting. You try imagining that. I’ll come up with my own nightmares.”
“As a middle-aged cop myself, I rise to say, how unkind,” said Becker.
“I don’t mean you. For one thing, you’re not overweight. You’re not balding. You’re certainly not disgusting.”
“Sounds like damning with faint praise to me.”
“Christ, John. I’m in the middle of a crisis here. I can’t cater to your ego right now. You want me to wet myself just thinking about you when I’ve got to go do this?”
“You’ve got a law degree, don’t you? You had to do a lot of talking to earn that.”
“And I hated every second of it. Why do you think I went into the Bureau?”
“A thirst for justice and social equality?”
“This isn’t funny! I hate it! Why don’t you stop being a fucking wit and help me?”
“All right,” Becker said. “I’ll talk to them.”
He started toward the conference room. Karen caught him by the arm and yanked.
“I’ll do it,” she said angrily. “I said I hated it; I didn’t say I couldn’t do it.” She started toward the door, then paused with her hand on the handle.
“And I know that was a ploy,” she said. “Trying to shame me into it.”
“I know you know.”
“It didn’t work. I’m not so easily manipulated.”
“Never thought you were,” he said.
“Just so you know,” she said. She glanced up and down the corridor to be sure they were alone, then she put her hand briefly in his crotch.
“For luck,” she said, grinning. She entered the room with Becker’s laughter sounding behind her.
Karen strode into the conference room and listened to the quality of the conversational drone change as the men caught sight of her. When she took the podium the drone rose to a quizzical buzz.
“Thank you all for coming,” she said. Her voice caught in her throat as she cleared it, cursing herself for a coward.
“I am Karen Crist, Deputy First Assistant for Kidnapping for the Bureau out of New York.”
They had stopped their murmuring and were looking at her now with curiosity and skepticism. Waiting for me to step on my own tongue, she thought.
The Deputy Chief of the Connecticut state police sat in the front row in a uniform so crisply starched and ironed that it appeared to be made of fresh cardboard. Next to him slouched the chief of one of the local forces, a fat, aging, balding man whose belly slopped over his belt like so much runaway bread dough yeasting beyond the rising bowl. As she watched, the chief unconsciously tugged at his crotch.
Assholes of the world united. Karen thought to herself and wondered if she were in the right
