Without once falling to her knees and unchanged in any way, Mallory returned to the car, where she opened her notebook and crossed off one more disappointment.

Not his fault.

For her, the sense of emptiness was the familiar thing.

After driving only a few miles, she summoned up a passenger. Sometimes there were so many ghosts in the car that Mallory could not breathe. This time the murder victim was forced to ride in the back seat. Mallory could not quite let go of April Waylon, but, dead or alive, the woman was annoying.

The recently killed mother caught her eye in the rearview mirror and smiled. Dead April leaned forward to say, “It wasn’t your fault, you know. I mean-my murder. You can’t be expected to save the same people over and over again.” In Mallory’s mind, a door suddenly appeared in the back seat of a two-door convertible. It flew open, and April was pushed out of the car.

Her foster mother, Helen Markowitz, was resurrected to ride in the front seat. Mallory had restored the soft roundness that had been lost to cancer years ago.

Gentle Helen, never leave me.

“Oh, Kathy, just look at this mess.” The dead woman was staring at the empty soda cans and wadded-up credit-card receipts that littered the floor mat. There was no derision in Helen’s t o ne. She had been the kindest of people-and the neatest. Everything Mallory knew about cleaning solvents and dust mites she had learned from this extraordinary housekeeper, and then she had taken it to great extremes, never tolerating one thing out of place and not one spot of dirt, not one-

“Something’s gone wrong,” said Helen, frowning at the discarded paper cups. “This is not like you, Kathy.” Tactfully, the late Helen Markowitz said nothing about the dust on the dashboard, but Mallory noticed it and silently inventoried other signs of trouble: a chipped fingernail, a windshield covered with bugs, and a lying mirror that showed her eyes full of tears. But her face was dry. Maybe these were her father’s green eyes-his tears.

At the last stop in Oklahoma, when all the people had been fed and the reporters, too, Riker went over the same instructions for parents who had recently joined up. The ranks of the caravan had swelled to fill every bit of the lot. “Pump your own gas. Don’t leave your car unattended anywhere on this road.”

The FBI and local police had managed to contain the detail of victim mutilation, the chopped-off right hands, but the press had acquired the news and names of the murdered caravan parents. And now Dr. Magritte was allowed to convene the campers in a minute of silent prayer for those who had lost their lives on Route 66. The prayer group was hardly a tableau of statues in silent reverence. They were antsy, feet shifting, anxious to be gone-and smiling.

Riker understood. One of their number had died yesterday, but they were still alive. Civilians and their television ideas of murder-they believed that everything would be all right if they only followed the good camper’s guidelines for traversing a road of sudden death.

“It might be a mistake to give them rules.” Charles Butler was obviously in the mind-reading mode as he sipped coffee from a paper cup. “Makes it all a bit too innocent-like a school field trip.”

“I’d like to clear them all off the road.” Riker shrugged. “But I can’t d o that without an act of Congress. The feds want the parents here.”

“As bait?”

“Yeah, but even if I spelled that out for these people, they still wouldn’t leave. Every time somebody dies, they think they’re getting a little closer to finding their kids. And they’re right about that. Cold, huh?”

Mallory barreled down the road with the volume turned up sky high, and a group called The Who sang,“Won’t get fooled again.”

Was this the one?

Back in New York City, she had asked, “What was my father’s favorite song?”

“There were so many,” Savannah had said, unwilling to admit that she did not know.

And thereafter, Mallory had played a waiting game until one truth emerged and then another. Her enemy had weakened more each day.

Savannah Sirus was one dead woman who would never come for a ride in this car.

She-would-not-dare.

Mallory rejoined the old road and entered a small Texas town. This was the home of Peyton Hale’s beloved Avalon Theater, a going concern when his letter was written. It was closed now. The movie posters had all come down, and the doors were padlocked. The glass of the ticket booth was cracked, and a nearby sign proclaimed this place as a landmark. The silver convertible was the only car on the street. Every parking space was hers for the taking. She had seen other ghost towns along the way, but there were people living in this one. A few of the storefronts were not empty, and one was a town museum that still posted hours.

A diehard town.

She crossed the old theater off her list with no sense of letdown this time. She had come to understand this kind of landmark, “-like a bookmark for a memory.”

Down the road, she found the old Phillips 66 gas station, a tiny house of brick that had been restored for appearance only; it no longer pumped gas. Beyond that was a likely patch of road to bury a body, and troopers were hard at work digging it up. Kronewald’s pattern for the children’s graves was holding up in the state of Texas.

She passed the diggers by. The young detective had had enough of the dead today, both the people and the places. Her car had been emptied of ghosts, and she was done with death. She rejoined the section of newer highway that had displaced the old Route 66 and put on some speed. The music was faster now, more frantic.

“Rock ’n’ roll was the end of boyhood,” wrote Peyton Hale. “The music was wired into my skull, and my toes tapped to rhythms that only I could hear. Dogs were not so quick to come to me just for the pleasure of licking my hand. And the fathers of girls could see me coming from a long ways off. Oh, and the girls, they found me dangerous, and didn’t I love that? My salad days, my outlaw days. The road and the music-just sixteen. And now that I’m an old man of twenty-five, my road is disappearing as I write, as I ride.”

Mallory took the next ramp that would turn her car east. She was heading back toward the grave-digging troopers, though she could not say why. Her debt to Kronewald was surely paid in full. Perhaps it was because April Waylon had come back for another ride, eyes popped wide and searching every bit of road, still so determined to find a lost child.

It might be this one.

The caravan was crossing from Oklahoma into Texas when Riker reached out and turned off the fire and brimstone of a radio evangelist. “Okay, that’s enough local color. Could you talk to Joe Finn when we stop for the night?”

“No point,” said Charles Butler. “He won’t leave the road. Mr. Finn is really no different from the other parents.”

“Oh, he’s different all right.” And Riker had had his fill of wild cards. “Finn’s daughter’s is buried in a Kansas cemetery, and he has to know that’s her body. I’m not buying into this denial crap. I’ve been through this before. It doesn’t last a year-usually just a few minutes. The parents shake their heads at you like you’re crazy. How can their kid be dead? ‘No, you made a mistake, you stupid cop.’ And then they cry. Now this guy, he wouldn’t even look at the corpse. I think Joe Finn wants payback. Probably figures he can find this freak before we do.”

“No, he wouldn’t bring two children on a mission like that.”

“You’re right. That’s nuts.” The detective turned to the passenger window and nursed a theory that fathers of murdered children were not very stable people.

Te n miles of Texas prairie rolled by before Charles broke the silence. “Guilt always comes with a death in the family. Always. People dwell on last days and how they could’ve been different, given a second chance- and, of course, superhuman powers to see into the future. You can’t c u re them with logic. It’s the same when a child goes missing. That’s why these parents can’t leave this road. They’d be consumed by guilt if they didn’t d o everything in their power to bring their children home.”