"Mine?"
"You do have fantasies, don't you, Haddad?"
"No."
"I see."
"I don't." Unless you count thinking about older FBI agents walking in on me when I'm naked, things like that, she thought.
"Okay. But a lot of us do. And where they happen matters."
"Do you mean restraints, blindfolds, that kind of thing?" Pegeen asked after a pause, knowing she ought to let the subject drop but unable to let it go.
"What?"
"I don't have that kind of fantasy."
"Okay," Becker said.
"Do you?"
"What?"
"Never mind." Pegeen was blushing again.
"No."
"Oh."
Becker watched her drive, Pegeen kept her eyes studiously on the road.
"My fantasies are about people," he said finally. "Not equipment."
"I see," she said. "That's normal. Probably."
"I don't know about normal. It's common. I think most of us fantasize about different partners."
Pegeen nodded and thrust her lower lip forward as if pondering the subject.
"Movie stars, people like that?" she asked.
'No, just people. Women I meet, women I know."
Pegeen nodded again in a way that she hoped appeared noncommittal.
"Uh-huh."
"Not you, though," he said.
"Not me?"
"You don't fantasize like that?" he said.
Pegeen felt herself in such a turmoil she didn't trust herself to speak.
She had thought at first that he meant he didn't fantasize about her, and her stomach had seemed to fall away, and then she realized her mistake and was crushed by a sense of her own foolishness. He hadn't meant her, he wasn't thinking about her, the intensity of her awareness of him wasn't even communicating itself across the width of the front seat.
When she trusted herself to breathe again, she steered the conversation back to business and vowed to herself to keep it there.
"What makes you think Swann is even around here?"
"They always come home, in a general sense. If an escaped come from New York ever had sense enough to hide out in New Mexico, we'd have a hell of a time finding him, but they seldom do. First place to look is their mother's house. He grew up around here, lived less than thirty miles from here when he committed the assault on his landlady."
"What if he did? What if he took off for Portland?"
"Then we'll have a hell of a time finding him. But they usually don't.
People stick with what they know. He's comfortable here. He knows how people think, how they talk, the way they do things. Swann's in the region somewhere or he's a rarer breed than I think."
"So what do we do now, go check out all these caves?"
"No, we wait for Swann to tell us which ones to check.
"How does he do that?"
"By his choice of victim. When he takes her, he's going to go to ground pretty close by. He did that with both the girls in the coal mine; he'll do it again. You don't want to have to travel very far with a victim in any event, it's much too dangerous."
"How will we know when he's got a victim, or if he does?"
"Oh, there's no 'if' He'll take someone soon if he hasn't already, and I'm willing to bet he already has. He was in prison for three years, thinking of little else. He'll take someone fast. He'll need to before he bursts. When he does, we'll get a missing persons report. That's Swann's flaw, you know. He's not like most of them, who specialize in drifters, street urchins, migrant workers, prostitutes, people nobody would miss for a long time.
He's so confident of where he takes them, so sure that he won't — be found there, that he doesn't care if there's a search for the victim.
The two girls in the coal mine were connected to solid citizens. A hunt began for them almost immediately. Swann didn't care-he was already underground, doing whatever he does to them and apparently equipped to stay there for a long time. Judging by the amount of melted candle wax and old food tins they found in the mine, I'd say he was down there at least a week."
Pegeen shuddered at the thought of that week for the girls. "The bastard." 'Bastard' hardly does it justice. Our problem is that there's a delay in reporting missing persons. In the case of adults, cops won't even register the report until the person is gone for three days. That means Swann has got that much of a head start whenever he strikes, and my guess is he doesn't need more than an hour or two at the most to cover his tracks."
"So we wait for the missing persons report to come in that meets our profile? There must be something more we can do while we're waiting."
"Sure. We go to a sporting goods store and get what we're going to need."
"Beyond that," Pegeen said.
"I'm open to suggestions," Becker said.
Pegeen carefully assessed his tone to determine if there was anything suggestive in it. Reluctantly, she decided that there was not.
"I'll let you know if I think of anything," she said.
Missing persons reports trickled in with the sluggishness that reflects the degree of importance attached to the matter by most police departments. The simple fact is that most missing persons are not miissing-they have simply chosen to depart without telling anyone.
Husbands and fathers debunk to avoid responsibility; teens and young adults flee school or their parents; employees quit or go on five-day benders; friends prove not to be friendly enough to say goodbye. For every person reported missing who is actually the victim of foul play, there is a full year's worth of reports on people who simply wandered off in this most transient of countries. Police know this, even though the concerned or distraught friends and relatives cannot imagine the missing departing of his or her own steam. The person has, after all, abandoned them, and who could be so fed-up or stressed-out or done-in to want to go to that extreme?
Even though the reports dribbled into the Nashville office slowly, they did so in great quantity. They didn't come quickly, but they kept coming, for this is a nation on the move and Becker had pinpointed a sizable portion of it for his search. The reports were fed into a computer which sorted them according to their conformity to Becker's victim profile.
Becker and Pegeen reviewed the most likely cases themselves, adding human perception and intuition to the process.
"Here's a likely one," she said, lifting one of the printout sheets. She and Becker sat at adjoining desks in the Nashville office, isolated and largely ignored by everyone else in the room.
"Mandy Roesch, eighteen years old, Hazard, Kentucky.
No problems at home, no boyfriend-probably not pregnant then-sang in the church choir, scheduled to start classes at Memphis State in the fall.
Doesn't seem the type to have just taken a hike."
Becker stood at a large map of the Southeastern States that were covered by the Nashville office, atop of which had been placed a clear plastic overlay showing Browne's selection of probable caves.
"She was last seen in Hazard?" he asked.
"Yes. She was supposedly going to choir practice, never showed up."
"Hazard is just a bit too far from either of the closest possible caves.
Mark her as marginal."
Pegeen stared at the map.
"What is it?" he asked when she hesitated.
"It — seems so… hit and miss. This girl sounds exactly like the kind of person he takes. So she's a few miles too far away from one of the caves which we don't know he's going to in the first place. We don't even know that he is going to a cave, much less one of those. We don't know how far away from the cave he's willing to drive with someone. We don't even know he's anywhere on that map. It's not even a needle in a haystack. That assumes you've got all your hay in one place. This is like a needle in a whole field of alfalfa-and we're not sure there is a needle in the first place. We don't know Swann is doing anything."