“A pattern for two thousand miles of road?”

“Just listen, okay? Seven years ago, the telephone company dug up a grave in a place where the pavement doesn’t even exist anymore, but it used to be Route 66. I called local police for details. The case was so old. Notes got lost-evidence, too. I dug up my own buried skeleton twenty miles down the road, and then I found another one. I checked missing persons reports on neighboring states and found matches on personal items from the graves. Then-big mistake-I contacted the parents to ask them for DNA samples.”

“And one of them was Jill’s D ad? George Hastings?”

“When Berman found out, he went ballistic. So then he formed the recovery detail.”

“The body snatchers.”

“Right,” she said. “Hit and run, no paperwork with the local cops. Berman had a bona fide serial killer, and he didn’t w ant to lose the case to a task force out of D.C.”

“And he had you. You knew where to dig.”

“My estimates weren’t e x act. There were gaping holes in my pattern. So I still have to go out and eyeball the land, looking for likely places-nothing near a town, no homes close by. If there’s a house near one of my sites, I have to find out when it was built. And I walk a lot of miles with the cadaver dogs.”

“So you’ve been working the case for a year.” According to Kronewald, the war of cops and feds had begun with the graves of three children stolen from Illinois.

“Working it? Ye s and no. I spend all my time mapping sites for the body snatchers. I don’t know how many of them panned out. And I’ve got no idea what Dale does with evidence-if he does anything at all.” She pushed her glass to the rail of the bar. “I know you don’t like my boss, but you always call him by his first name. Why is that?”

In the town of Santa Rosa, New Mexico, Mallory sat in the dark of her parked car and stared at the façade of Club Café. It was closed-forever.

One of the entrance posts was bent, and a neon sign had been taken down and discarded with other trash to one side of the building. In the younger days of Route 66, this place had done a booming business, and she would have known that even without her father’s letters. A gravel lot adjoined this paved one to catch the overflow of customers on a Saturday night.

“They finally closed the doors back in ninety-two,” said the gray-haired man in the passenger seat. He opened a cold bottle of beer from his grocery sack. Handing it to her, he lifted a second bottle in a toast. “To better times.”

The old man had lived in this country for most of his life, but Mallory could hear a trace of Mexico when he spoke of the legendary party that had lasted for years-Club Café.

“But most of all, I miss that man,” said Aldo Ramon. He turned to his drinking companion, the young woman who had her father’s e yes. “Where has Peyton been all this time?”

“It was my neighbor’s fault,” said Riker as he watched Nahlman sign an illegible scrawl on the register for the fleabag motel. “I grew up next door to a man with a dog named Dale.”

He had no illusions about this invitation to finish off a bottle in her room. The rest of their conversation simply required more privacy. She paid in cash, no travel vouchers to say that she had wandered away from the other FBI agents-to get tight in a bar.

Outside again, he followed her down a row of doors until she fitted her key in a lock.

“So,” said Riker, continuing the saga of why he called Agent Berman by his first name, “the neighbor’s dog-”

“A dog named Dale.” She seemed dubious about this part as she waved him inside.

“Yeah.” Riker plopped himself down in an armchair, lit a cigarette and pulled a bottle from a brown paper sack. “Now, when you meet up with a real mean dog, you show some respect, right? Well, Dale-”

“Your neighbor’s dog.”

“Yeah, that Dale. He wasn’t ballsy enough to be vicious-no barking, no warning. He’d come up from behind and sink his teeth into your leg. And then he’d run for cover. I hated that dog-sneaky, nasty mutt.”

“You made that up.”

“Just the part about the dog,” he said. “Your turn, Nahlman. What about Joe Finn’s girl? Ariel was a teenager. She never fit your pattern.”

“I zeroed in on every odd thing along Route 66. Ariel’s body was left on the road, but the dumpsite matched up with a potential grave. I called the Kansas Bureau and found out about the little sister who did fit that pattern. That case got stranger by the minute. I found out that Ariel’s father wouldn’t even look at the body to make the formal ID.”

“You suspected him?”

“No, he was in a Kansas City hospital when Ariel was taken. The first time I met Dodie-sweet kid-she said hello and told me the name of her doll.”

“So the kid was talking back then. You get anything useful?”

Nahlman shook her head. “I didn’t s it in on the interviews when she was in custody. I’m guessing she couldn’t describe the man who killed her sister. That would’ve been a lead that even Dale Berman couldn’t ignore.”

“He cut you out of the loop, didn’t he?”

“Well, I never got any feedback on my leads, but I still had a lot of work to do, lots of overtime. I forget the last night I slept in my own bed.” She stretched out on the mattress. Her eyes had gone dark, and they wandered from one corner of the ceiling to another.

She was lost.

“The next time I saw Dodie-at the campsite in Missouri-she was humming that song. I didn’t expect her to remember me. But I don’t think she even remembers her dolls anymore.” Nahlman turned to Riker. “You know that song, right?”

“Yeah, ‘Mack the Knife.’ ”

“That’s also the code name Berman used when he opened this case three years ago.”

“I don’t get it.” Riker found it difficult to drink, smoke and do math simultaneously. Or had he missed something here? “Three years ago, he was still posted in North Dakota-no killer, no case. Where’s the tie to the song?”

“It’s in a bogus case file. The early reports include hearsay testimony of a dead witness, an old woman who tied the song to a murder. But that witness died years before I was assigned to Berman’s field office-before I found him a pattern for a serial killer. For some reason, he needed a connection to his early work-collecting random homicides. Do you get it now, Riker?”

“You’re telling me that Dale taught that song to Dodie Finn?”

“That’s my theory. It’s so easy to plant fake memories in a little kid’s mind. And by now I’m sure Dodie thinks she heard that song when Ariel died-if Dodie thinks at all. Berman went too far.”

“He pushed her over the edge.”

“Looks that way,” she said.

“Why would he do that to her?”

Nahlman closed her eyes, and Riker assumed that she had passed out, but it was premature to cover the woman with a blanket. She threw it off as she opened her eyes.

“No, Riker, you only think I’m dead drunk. I wish I was. Every damn day, it seems to take more and more liquor so I can sleep at night. A blackout night with no dreams, that’s all I want. I’m giving you information because this has to end, and Dale Berman can’t o r won’t w rap this case.”

As Riker gently pulled the door shut after him, Agent Nahlman was still staring at the ceiling, entirely too sober. No sleep tonight.

Riker stood at the edge of the campsite, discussing the problems of keeping track of caravan vehicles.

“It’s out of control,” said Agent Barry Allen. “At last count, we had two hundred and seventy-five license plates on this list, but eight of the parents are missing tonight, and now I’ve got close to three hundred vehicles.”

Riker scanned the campfires. “I still can’t find the Pattern Man, and that little guy’s really easy to spot.”

“If he’s gone again,” said Allen, “Agent Berman won’t s end out another search party. He thinks you were pulling his leg about Mr. Kayhill as a suspect.”