Chapter 35: The Composite Goes Public

[This summary reveals significant plot details. Read on only after you’ve finished the chapter.]

Summary

The chapter opens with a distraught mother retrieving a baby’s cradle from a mesquite tree. She takes the brown blanket and wanders to a cottonwood grove, where she hears a faint infant voice and spies another cradle. When she seizes it, the cradle disintegrates—mere dead leaves suspended on a spider’s web. She drops her own blanket and is left with only the sound of water.

By 8:45 a.m., Dan Pardee waits to board his Phoenix flight. His supervisor Anna Rae Green calls with urgent news: Parabon has already delivered a DNA-based composite image of the serial killer, a white man around sixty with white hair and blue eyes. Anna Rae has arranged national press coverage plus targeted television interviews in Phoenix and Tucson. A media escort named Nancy Stuebe will meet Dan at Sky Harbor. Anna Rae wants every outlet to mention the rodeo connection and the anonymous tip line, hoping the avalanche of tips will yield a solid lead and spook the suspect into a mistake.

Dan calls his wife Lani to adjust child-care plans. She is preparing to confront her mother about an assisted-living arrangement, and Dan encourages her. During the two-hour flight he rehearses his remarks. Nancy—an assertive, warmly professional escort—ferries him efficiently from one brief live interview to the next. After four studio stops, Dan is hungry and mildly skeptical about the reach of two-minute spots, but Nancy reassures him that the composite is being seen far more widely than he imagines. She drives him to La Piñata for Mexican food, fulfilling the escort’s secondary duty of keeping a client alive.