At some point in the last half hour Virgil’s pepperoni and mushroom pizza had congealed in his stomach into a ball of grease and half-digested cheese. Now that the caffeine and sugar had burned away it was becoming clear that his attempt to wash the remains of his dinner out of his system with a double helping of Original Coke had failed as well.
Ignoring the dull ache in his gut he looked at the list of fifty-eight women’s names and they seemed to stare back at him. Virgil reclined in his chair and closed his eyes.
After almost three hours work he’d managed to eliminate nine names from the original sixty-seven. That was three names an hour – another, what, twenty hours to process the rest of the list, assuming that the work proceeded on a linear scale, which it wouldn’t, and assuming that he could get all the way through the list at all, which he knew he couldn’t. When his eyes slid closed, blurred faces and illegible names swam across his mind’s eye like images in an out-of-focus dream.
“Let me go, I’m gone,” Jane/Nicole’s voice called from the black void. A moment later her face swelled up in front of him then grew transparent and faded away. Virgil smacked his lips and forced his eyes open. Yawning, he swiveled around to see Jane/Nicole sitting primly on his well-used couch.
“You’re back,” Virgil said. Tonight the drape of her hair and the edges of her jeans were softened and indistinct. Virgil blinked a few times trying to bring them into sharp focus but failed.
“I’m always here,” she said. “I’m just a phantom from inside your brain. . . . You need to get back to work,” she said a moment later when he didn’t respond.
“I was working.”
“Looking for me? That’s not work. That’s a fantasy, an obsession. That’s guilt or obstinance or competitiveness, but it’s not work.”
“You’re my daughter,” Virgil said, abandoning all pretense of dealing with an illusion created by come chemical residue infecting his brain. “I have to find you.”
“You’ll never find me, and looking for me will ruin your life. You have to let me go. Your life has to mean something. You have to go back to work.”
“What work? Finding bail jumpers in Fargo, North Dakota?”
“Finding The Limping Man before he kills again,” Jane/Nicole said with an intensity unbefitting an eleven-year-old girl.
Virgil almost laughed. “I have a better chance of finding you than The Limping Man. Who am I kidding? Pretending to look for him is just a dodge to keep my badge and a paycheck so I can go on looking for you.”
“I don’t need saving. The Limping Man’s next victims do.”
“They aren’t my children.”
“They’re somebody’s children,” Jane/Nicole said with sudden heat. “Finding me will not make the world a better place. Saving them will.”
Virgil started to open his mouth then froze when Jane/Nicole’s body flickered like a broken film.
“Nicole, don’t go!” he pleaded.
“Do the work. Find The Limping Man.”
“I can’t!”
“Then ask other people to help you find him,” Nicole said, her body fading until he could see the stains on the cushion behind her chest.
“Ask who? What people?”
“Everyone,” Nicole said, her body now as ghostly as the morning mist. “Ask everyone to look for The Limping Man.”
“Wait!” Virgil cried, but her face just slipped into that smile he remembered from so long ago, then disappeared.
“Nicole!” Virgil shouted and jerked awake. In front of him the monitor still displayed the same fifty-eight names, taunting and mysterious. Virgil spun around but no trace of Nicole’s ghost remained. Virgil stared at the empty couch for a moment then buried his face in his hands.
“I want maximum coverage,” Virgil told the Deputy Chief for Public Relations the next morning. “Michigan, Indiana and Ohio.”
Lorraine O’Neal glanced at the single page Virgil had handed her and frowned.
“This isn’t much of a description. Caucasian, between thirty and fifty? Five-feet-six to five-feet-eleven; one-hundred-fifty pounds to one-hundred-eighty pounds; black or brown hair; no facial hair or tattoos; walks with a limp? Do you have a sketch or a make and model on his car?”
“I’ve got what I’ve got,” Virgil said, pointing at the page.
O’Neal seemed unconvinced. “I don’t know if I can get the media to run this, and even if they do, I mean, what’s the point? All we’ll get is a million nut calls which we don’t have the manpower to check out.”
“Leave the manpower issues to me. You just get them to run the story.”
O’Neal frowned but even her frown was pretty. Male or female, a big part of a DCPR’s job was to look right – attractive but not superficial, strong but not threatening, articulate but not glib, more Sandra Bullock, less Megan Fox.
“Play up the mystery angle – a secret serial killer who’s been operating under the radar, but now that we know what to look for, the public can do the right thing and help us bring this dangerous criminal to justice. The message we want to send is: ‘Pay attention to your surroundings. If you see a small, middle-aged, white stranger with a limp, help the police help you and call this number.’”
O’Neal still looked skeptical, but she gave Virgil a little nod. “All right. I’ll tell them that since you led the team that got the Mad Dog Gang they should have a little faith that you know what you’re doing.”
“Thanks. They won’t be sorry,” Virgil said, all the time wondering what his chances of actually getting The Limping Man really were. Ten percent? he asked himself, but didn’t really believe it.