Mallory turned her chair to face away from Riker.

Oh, was his voice getting a little testy? Well, tough.

She spoke only to Charles. “I hope you got something useful off that agent.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Riker was now an invisible man as far as she was concerned. He moved his chair around the table until he was once more in her line of sight. “Cadwaller probably bored poor Charles with his expertise on serial killers. But at least that worthless fed tries to communicate with-”

“Cadwaller has no expertise,” said Charles. “He’s a fraud.”

Okay, playtime with Mallory was over. Riker made a rolling motion with one hand to ask the man to continue that thought.

“Perhaps I was harsh,” said Charles. “I’d s ay, at best, he ’s an expert on bad psychology books written by incompetent hacks for mass consumption. But he’s not a profiler.”

“Kronewald ran a background check,” said Riker. “Cadwaller’s got a history with Behavioral Science Unit.”

“Sometimes,” said Charles, “history gets rewritten. I can only tell you the man is not what he seems.”

This information came as no surprise to Mallory, and Riker had to wonder what else the brat had forgotten to share with him.

“Well,” said Charles, “at least now you have a name for the killer.”

Riker nodded. “For all the good it does. No pictures, no prints, no idea what name the perp’s using now. He’s good at stealing cars. That’s all we know.” He shot a glance at his partner as he corrected himself. “That’s all I know.”

Dr. Magritte passed close to their table, and Mallory turned an accusing eye on Riker, asking, demanding, “Why isn’t t hat old man in custody?”

“What? Back up,” said Riker. “Where does Magritte come in? What did he do? And what the hell did I do wrong?”

Mallory stared at him, incredulous. “Doesn’t Agent Nahlman tell you anything ?”

They met by chance -or this would be Riker’s story. He rehearsed it as he followed Agent Nahlman’s car down a side road that led him far south of Route 66. This was a part of the world where people thought nothing of driving fifty or a hundred miles to do a simple errand. In the dark, the two vehicles might be passing through any small American town of windows lighted by the glow of televisions sets.

The FBI agent’s black sedan stopped in front of a saloon that would cater only to locals, judging by the license plates at the curb and the distance from the interstate. Riker switched off his headlights and waited in the dark until the door closed behind Christine Nahlman. He parked the Mercedes behind her car and waited a patient twenty minutes before following her inside.

The front door opened onto a wall of smoke and sound. A jukebox wailed country-music songs of dead dogs and feckless women, but that had been expected. And it was no surprise to see Nahlman drinking alone at the bar. The lady had a small but appreciative audience of men with baseball caps and pool cues, unshaven and smiling in her direction. They were checking her out and nodding to one another, seeing her as easy prey.

They had no idea that the lady packed a gun and more than enough ammo to dispatch the pool players and the bartender, too, if she felt so inclined.

Riker pulled a barstool closer to hers and sat down.

After the first few minutes of the cop-to-cop small talk that always began, “Hell of a day, huh?” Agent Nahlman was reassured that he was not here to make a play for her, and that was the truth. He had come to her as a thief to steal whatever he could.

He was picking up Mallory’s worst habits.

The detective was quick to find a common ground with Nahlman: the cop and the fed both liked the same brand of cheap Scotch; this was a lie on his part, for he was a bourbon drinker. But he had hopes that this bonding ritual would lead to every field agent’s pastime, bitching about bureaucrats-like the SAC, Dale Berman. Her ability to hold her liquor was impressive, and it was his fear that she might drink him under the bar before uttering the first disparaging word.

After the third round, he laid on a compliment. “So Mallory tells me you did a great job on the geographic profiling-and Dale took all the credit.” Riker shook his head to say, Ain’t life a bitch.

Nahlman shrugged and slugged back her drink. “In a way-Dale Berman should get the credit. He was the one who combed every state data-base for unsolved homicides.”

“He worked cold cases? And they didn’t even belong to the feds?”

“He didn’t work anything,” she said. “He just collected data for deadend homicides-zero evidence, no clues. He favored skeletons discovered years after death.”

Riker had a store of trivia for filling awkward silences. “Did you know that most murder victims are found by drunks stopping to pee by the side of the road?”

“Dale tossed those,” she said. “Not enough similarities. He concentrated on buried victims. A year ago, he gave the list to me, hundreds of gravesites all over the country, and he said, ‘Make me a pattern.’ ”

“Not find one? Make a pattern?”

“That’s right.” She rattled her ice cubes and spoke to her glass. “He wanted to manufacture a serial killer. It’s been done before. A perp confesses to a murder in one state, and cops from all the surrounding states come in with their own unsolved cases. They’re hoping this guy can clear the books for them. And sometimes they get lucky. They find an obliging killer who likes the attention.” Nahlman turned her calm gray eyes on Riker. “So don’t pretend to be shocked, okay? Cops do it, too. Now you promised to tell me how Dale Berman wound up in charge of a field office.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Riker. That bribe had been offered early on with the first drink, the setup. “It’s a real short story. The bastard screwed up a high-profile case in New York. It embarrassed the Bureau. So naturally they promoted him to make the mess stink less.”

“Amen,” said Nahlman. “Always praise the jerk in trouble.”

“But before Dale got the Texas posting, the Bureau buried him in a North Dakota satellite office-in the winter. It is a balanced universe.” Riker lifted two fingers to the bartender for another round, then turned his most sympathetic smile on Nahlman. “So the bastard fobbed the whole pile off on you. Why am I not surprised?” He was too obvious that time. He could see his mistake in the narrowing of her eyes, a slow wince.

“Riker, you should spend more time listening, and less time manipulating me. I think it’s the lack of finesse that pisses me off the most.” She lifted her glass to give him a moment to think that over. “I was glad to have the work, even if it landed me in Berman’s little dynasty. What a joke-a task force for a killer who didn’t exist yet.”

He wondered what Nahlman had done to earn this assignment to a disgraced SAC and a limbo of dead-end cases, but he observed the cop’s etiquette of not asking how she had screwed up her own career. That would be rude. He wondered if it had something to do with drinking on the job. This was not a criticism. It took an alcoholic to read the signs, and this woman was definitely one of his people-almost family.

She drained her glass-again. “Are you ready to listen?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He well understood his own place in this scheme: it was no longer his role to ply her for information-she would never tolerate that; it was Nahlman’s plan to feed it to him.

“I mapped out a lot of areas,” she said, “every place where a body was dug up over the past twenty years-hundreds and hundreds of them. Then I found the anomaly-bodies buried close to roads. If a killer only wanted to hide the remains, why risk being seen by a passing car? When I recognized the roads as different pieces of old Route 66, I had my signature for a serial killer. Then I knocked out all but eight of the graves on Berman’s list. And I had my pattern.”