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taped outline, where the victim’s wrists and ankles had been pinned to the boards. Scattered at her feet were nails like the ones used to make the wooden road patch. When she dropped one into a hole, it was smaller than the opening.
    This killer’s murder kit had duplicated onsite materials. Obviously a cautious one, maybe he was also a long-range planner, and his plan may have begun long before the city of Chicago decided to rip up this street. So he had packed his kit with bulky plastic, heavy iron nails-and bones. How that rookie cop must have freaked to see those bones attached to a fleshed-out corpse. Now the Chicago police had a double homicide, old bones and fresh kill, one corpse short of the body count needed to call this a serial killing, yet Mallory had no trouble making that call with only the evidence laid out before her.
    She stared at the taped outline that described the arrangement of the body, an invitation to a game. It had been laid out for show with one arm extended, pointing down the road to say
Follow me
.
    A distant siren was screaming, coming closer, and yet Mallory did not hurry. When one more barricade was moved aside, she did not run-she walked back to the car, settled in behind the wheel and started up the engine. The siren was louder, almost on top of her. After depressing a button on the face of the speedometer, her trip monitor went down to zeros.
    And now it begins.
    The car rolled through the crime scene, continuing west on Adams Street for a while, nearly overshooting the turn for Ogden -just as the letter had predicted. Mallory carried no maps, only a route created from words that were written before she was born. Dropping down, southwest through Cicero, she searched for the next landmark. According to the letter,
“He’s so big, you can’t possibly miss him.”
Yet there was no sign of a giant folk hero holding a large hotdog. She retraced long stretches of Ogden on both sides of Lombard Avenue, where the fiberglass statue belonged, but it was no longer there. Her next landmark was far from here, way past the town of Joliet. She was heading toward a road by that same name and an open field that might not be there anymore. An entire town could have grown over the old baseball diamond since the first yellowed letter was written to say,
“One day you won’t be able to get here from there. This is a time as much as a place, and even the stars might be gone. That’s the problem with progress. Can’t see stars by city lights.”
    Detective Sergeant Riker
had Route 80 to himself except for the occasional freight truck. His destination was a gas station where Mallory had last used her credit card, and it was eight hundred miles from New York City.
    Flying to Chicago had never been an option, though, given his errand tonight, he might have overcome a secret terror of airplanes. However, at the other end of a flight or a train ride, the car rental companies always expected to see a valid driver’s license before they would trust him with their wheels. Years back, when faced with a choice between drinking and driving, he had given up his car. In Riker’s e x perience, rehabilitation just sucked all the charm out of life.
    Tonight he drove a Mercedes-Benz that belonged to a friend, and the gas pedal was pressed close to the floor. This fine automobile was not a model that he could ever afford or even live up to-not him-not a cop in a cut-rate suit, a man in need of a new pair of shoes and a shave. If he got stopped for speeding on this road, Riker knew he could only be taken for a car thief. A portable siren sat on the dashboard, and he was prepared to slap it on the roof at the first sight of a police cruiser, but since he had not yet crossed New Jersey, he could reasonably expect all the state troopers to be napping at the side of the road until sunrise.
    If he could only keep up this speed-nearly three times the legal limit- he would close the gap between himself and Mallory by late