With Child

With Child

Laurie R. King

Book 3 in the

Kate Martinelli

Series

By the same author

Kate Martinelli novels

TO PLAY THE FOOL

A GRAVE TALENT

Mary Russell novels

A MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN

THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE

FOR MY SISTER, LYNN DIFLEY,

AND ALL HER FAMILY

When a writer of fiction makes shameless use of actual institutions, such as the Green Tortoise bus company or the police departments of various jurisdictions, it may be necessary to point out that the actual people affiliated with them and the fictional characters presented in the story are two separate things.

The real people are much more helpful and infinitely more efficient.

A book, like any other child, is a communal project. I would like to thank the members of my community for their help with this one, particularly Barbara Kempster and Leila Lawrence.

A CONVERSATION

So it was settled: Jules would come and stay with Kate from the wedding until New Year's.

With one adjustment to the plan.

On the phone, the afternoon before the wedding, Kate talked to her partner at his house on the other side of town.

"Al, I was thinking. If it's all right with you and Jani, I thought Jules and I might go north for a few days over Christmas. Maybe as far as Washington."

"To see Lee?"

"Possibly. If we feel like it. I had a letter from her last week, asking me to come to her aunt's island for Christmas if I could get it off."

"Does she know you're on leave?"

"She doesn't know anything. I didn't tell her about the shooting, or that I got hurt. I didn't want to worry her, and once I got out of the hospital, it didn't really seem like something I could put in a letter, somehow. She did say she was sorry not to make it to your wedding, that she's writing you and sending you a present."

"Are you two about to break up?" he asked bluntly.

"Jesus, Al, you do ask some good ones, don't you? I don't know. I just don't know anymore. I don't even know if I care. I haven't even talked to her in four months, just these damn stupid cards of hers. But there won't be any scenes, if that's what you're worried about. I wouldn't take Jules into that. If we do go - and I really haven't made up my mind one way or the other - then we'd just go for the day, maybe overnight, depending on the ferry schedule, but then we'd leave and go do something else. Does Jules ski?"

"Better than I do. Which isn't saying much, I admit."

"Maybe we could go to Rainier or Hood, then. If Jani approves."

"I'll talk to her, but I doubt she'll have any problems with it. Do you want the car?"

"I'm going to take the Saab off its blocks. And if driving turns out to be a problem, we'll come home. I'm not going to risk passing out or anything while I'm driving Jules. You know that, Al. I'd never put Jules into danger. Never."

AUGUST,

SEPTEMBER

ONE

Kate came awake to a question. She lay inert for a few seconds until it was answered, by the familiar groan of the Alcatraz foghorn, seemingly a stone's throw from the foot of her bed. Home. Thank God.

Fingers of sweet sleep tugged at her, but for a moment she held herself back, mildly, dutifully curious. Funny, she thought muzzily, I wouldn't have thought that noise would wake me up. I hear it all summer, like living inside a pair of asthmatic lungs, but the only time I noticed it was when they tried replacing it with that irritating electronic whine. The telephone? Don't think it rang. If so, it's stopped now. Let them call back at a human hour. The neighbor's dog? Probably the dream, she decided, which had been stupefyingly tedious even to a sleeping mind, a cop's variation on the 'moving luggage from one place to another - Oh God, I've lost one' theme, involving the transfer of prisoners, one at a time, from cell to hallway to van to hallway to cell, each step accompanied by forms and signatures and telephone calls. Better than the hell of the last few days, she thought, but thank God I woke up before I died of boredom. Poor old gray cells too tired to come up with a decent dream. Back to sleep.

She reached up and circled her right arm around the pillow, pulled it under her with a wriggle of voluptuary delight, reached back over her shoulders for the covers and pulled them over her head, and let go, deliciously, slippery as a fish into the deep, dark, still pond of sleep.

Only to be snagged on the viciously sharp point of the doorbell and jerked rudely up into the cruel air. Her eyes flew open. Seconds later, the message reached the rest of her body. Sheets and blankets erupted, feet hit the carpeting, hand reached for dressing gown and found only the smooth wood of the closet door, reached for suitcase and found it still locked tight, reached for keys and found - she waved the search away in a gesture of futility. From behind a pair of swollen, grit-encrusted lids, her eyes steered two distant feet through the obstacles of strewn suitcases, clothing, boots, jacket, toward the stairs, and all the while she was mumbling under her breath.

"It's Al, bound to be, I'll kill him, where's my gun? Hawkin, I'm going to blow you away, you bastard, I'm not on duty 'til tonight, and here you are with your jokes and your doughnuts at dawn" - she picked up the bedside clock, put it down again - "near enough dawn. Christ, where'd I put those keys? Why'd I lock the goddamn suitcase anyway, it was only in the trunk of the car, here's my gun, I could shoot off the lock, cutesy little padlock, break it off with my teeth. Oh, the hell with it, most of me's covered, it's only Al. No, it can't be Al; he's off with Jani somewhere, that conference with the name. Not Al, must be the milkman, ha, funny girl, just as likely to be a dinosaur or a dodo or - Christ Almighty!" This last was delivered in a shout as the sleeve of a denim jacket, discarded a very few hours before in the process of unburdening herself to fall into bed, caught at her bare ankle and tried to throw her down the stairs. She deflected herself off the newel and landed on all the knobs of the chair of the electric lift, which, as her last act before leaving the house, Lee had sent back up to the top, out of the way - an action Kate had thought at the time was merely thoughtful, but which, at some point during the last few days, she had decided was symbolic. Disentangling herself from the contraption and rubbing her left thigh, Kate limped down the stairs, muttering and unkempt as a street person, a young, muscular, well-fed street person wearing nothing but a navy blue silk tank top, a pair of Campbell plaid flannel boxer shorts, and a thin gold band on the ring finger of her left hand.

She flipped on the door viewer and was surprised to see only the small porch and the street beyond. No, wait - there was a head, the top of a head of dark hair bisected by a perfect sharp part. A child. Kate reached out both hands to turn bolt and knob.

"Look, kid, if you're out here at this ungodly hour selling Girl Scout cookies, I'm going to report you to… Jules? Is that you?"

The child on her doorstep nodded, a subdued movement so unlike the daughter of Jani Cameron that Kate had to lean forward to examine her. She wore a white T-shirt with some kind of foreign writing on it, cutoff shorts, sandals, and a backpack hanging from one thin shoulder; her glossy black hair was in its usual long, tight braids, and she had a Band-Aid on her left knee and a tattoo on the right - no, not an actual tattoo, just a drawing done in blue ink, smudged and fading. Her skin was browner than when Kate had seen her last, in the winter, but it had an odd tinge to it, Kate noted, and a strange, withered sort of texture.

"What's wrong with you?" she asked sharply.

"I just needed to see you, Casey. Kate. Do you think I could come in? It's kind of cold out here."

Kate realized simultaneously that she was huddled behind the door more from self-protection than from modesty, and that the reason the child looked so gray and pinched was that she was half-frozen, shivering and damp in the dripping fog on this lovely late August morning in sunny California. Perceptive of you, Martinelli, Kate told herself as she stood back to let Jules in. Just call me Shirley Holmes.

"It was warm when I left this morning," said Jules apologetically. "I forgot about the fog you get here. It comes over the hills like a giant wave, doesn't it? A tsunami, it's called, a tidal wave. It looked like it was about to crash down and wipe out everything from Palo Alto on up. It's the heat inland that brings the fog, you know. I read an article on it; it's a cycle, a cyclical thing, heating up, the fog coming in, cooling off, and then there's a few clear days while —"

During this informative monologue, Kate led her visitor into the kitchen, switched on the electrical baseboard radiator and waved her hand at the chair nearest it, walked over to the coffee machine, abandoned that, and went out of the kitchen (Jules raised her voice but did not slow down a fraction), coming back with the tan alpaca throw rug that lived on the back of the sofa, dropped it on Jules's lap, then returned to the coffeepot, where she went like an automaton through the familiar motions of beans and grinder, filter and water before switching it on and standing, one hip against the counter and arms akimbo, completely oblivious of Jules's voice, watching with unfocused eyes as the brown liquid began to trickle out into the carafe, the gears of her mind unmeshed, idling, blessedly near to stillness, to sleep…

"Are you angry, Kate?"

Startled into awakeness, Kate turned and nearly knocked a coffee mug from the edge of the counter.

"Jules! Hi. Yes. No, I mean, I'm not angry. Why should I be angry?"

"You looked annoyed when you opened the door. I must've gotten you out of bed."

"All kinds of people get me out of bed. No, I'm not angry. Are you warmer now? Want something hot to drink? You probably don't like coffee."

"I like coffee, if you have milk and sugar."

"Sure. Ah. This milk doesn't look very nice," she noted as the watery blue blobs slid from the carton into the cup. She squinted at the due date. "Looks more like yogurt. I don't suppose you want yogurt in your coffee? Doesn't smell very nice, either."

"No, thank you," said Jules politely. "Black with sugar will be fine, but just half a cup, please."

"Fine, fine," said Kate, and nodded half a dozen times before she caught herself and took the milk carton and the mug to the sink to empty them. She rinsed the mug, dumped the milk down the drain, pushed the carton into the overflowing garbage can under the sink (hurriedly closing the door), then took out sugar, spoon, and another mug, and resumed her position in front of the gurgling, steaming coffeemaker, watching the coffee dribble slowly, hypnotically out.

"Are you all right?" interrupted the voice behind her. Kate's head snapped upright again.

"Yes, of course. Just not awake yet."

"It is nearly nine o'clock," said Jules in mild accusation.

"Yes, and I went to bed at five. I haven't been sleeping well lately. Look, Jules, are you just here for a friendly visit? Because if so, I'm not very good company."

"No. I need to talk to you. Professionally."

Oh hell. Kate scrubbed her face with both hands. A lost dog or a playground bully. The neighbor exposing himself. Do I need this?

"I wouldn't bother you if it wasn't important. Weren't. And I have tried the local police."

"Okay, Jules, I'm not going to throw you out. Just give me ten minutes to jump-start the brain and then I'll put on my cop hat for you."

"I didn't think homicide detectives wore uniforms."

"A feeble attempt at humor." She poured the coffee into two mugs and carried both of them out of the room. "There's food if you want, Jules," she called from the stairs.

A minute later, Jules heard the shower start. At twelve, she was, both by nature and through her mother's distracted style of nurturing, quite able to look after herself. She stood up and folded the alpaca throw neatly over the back of the chair, and began a systematic search of the kitchen cabinets and drawers. She found half a loaf of rock-hard French bread and some eggs in the refrigerator, a few strips of bacon in the freezer compartment, a bowl and a frying pan behind the low doors, then began with deliberate movements to assemble them into breakfast. She had to lean her entire weight against the Chinese cleaver to chop the bread into something resembling slices, and substitute frozen orange juice concentrate for the milk, but she had just decided that necessity may have given birth to an interesting invention when a ghastly noise from upstairs, half shriek and half growl, froze her arm in the motion of shaking nutmeg into the bowl. Before the noise had faded, though, she resumed, realizing that Kate was only reacting to a stream of suddenly cold water. Al made the same sorts of noises in the shower sometimes, though not quite so loud. When she had asked about it, he told her that it helped him wake up. She'd never had the nerve to try it herself, and reflected that it must be something they taught you at the Police Academy. She found a sugar bowl and added a large pinch to the beaten eggs.

Kate bounded down the stairs a few minutes later and burst into the kitchen.

"God, it smells like a Denny's in here. What have you been making?"

"There's a plate of French toast for you, if you want it, and some bacon. I couldn't find any syrup, but there's warm honey and jam and powdered sugar."

Kate swallowed five thick slices and more than her share of the bacon, stopping only because Jules ran out of bread. She ran the last corner of the eggy, buttery fried bread through the pool of liquified honey, put it into her mouth, and sighed.

"I take back the insult. It smells like heaven and tasted like paradise, and what do I have to do to pay you back for it?"

"It's your food, you don't have to pay for it."

"Wrong. Rule one of being an adult: Nothing in life is free. So, what do you want, how did you get here, and do people know where you are?"

"I took the bus and walked from the station. I actually thought I'd have more trouble, because I've only been here once, but your house is easy to find from downtown. You just walk uphill."

"Well, that answers the least of the questions, anyway. Do we need to make a phone call so somebody doesn't report you missing?"

"Not really. I left at my normal time this morning - I'm going to a summer school course at the university on writing software. It's really interesting, and I'm sorry to miss today because we work in teams, so I'm wasting my partner's time, but he's always got something of his own he can do. He's a genius - a true genius, I mean, his IQ's even higher than mine. He sold a game to Atari when he was ten, and he's working on another version of it now, so he won't worry or anything if I don't show up. In fact, he might not notice; he has a strange sense of time when he's working. Anyway, nobody expects me home until three or four. Mom arranged for me to have dinner with the family next door while she's gone, and their daughter Trini, who's only two years older than I am and a real airhead - but because she's older, they think she's somehow magically more responsible - she stays the night with me. May I use your bathroom?"

"Huh? Oh, sure, it's under the stairs there."

"I remember."

Kate, detective that she was, had caught the one relevant fact as it shot past her, that she had six hours to return this short person back to her proper place. She began to shovel the breakfast things in the musty-smelling dishwasher, pausing first to pour the last of the coffee into her cup. Not that caffeine would enable her to keep up with Jules Cameron. Cocaine, maybe. Although, come to think of it, Jules had changed in the last year. Physically, of course: She was nearly as tall as Kate now, and she wore a bra between her T-shirt and the nubs on her chest. More than that, though, was her attitude: At eleven, she had brazened out her turmoil - braces, brains, no father, and a long-distance move could not have been easy - with an almost comic maturity, even pomposity, to her speech. That seemed to have been toned down, either by design or because she'd grown out of the need. Kate hoped the latter - it would be a pity to have this little gem shove her light under a basket because of the lesser minds around her. Particularly, Kate reflected, those inhabiting male bodies. Jules must be getting to the age where these things mattered.

She finished loading the dishwasher, turned it on, and went out into the living room, where she found Jules looking out into the fog, where the neighbor's garden was beginning to materialize.

"Was it this window?" Jules asked. It took an instant to click.

"The one above you." She watched Jules step back to peer up, then retreat farther until she could see the branches that had held the SWAT marksman on a night eighteen months earlier.

"From that tree?"

"Yes."

"It wasn't Al, was it? Who shot… that man."

"Of course not."

"I didn't think so. I mean, I was young then, and I sort of imagined it was Al up in the tree, even though I knew it wasn't."

"Al doesn't climb trees. It's in his contract. So," she said sharply before Jules could inquire about contract clauses or ask to see the bloodstains that lay, all but invisible to any eyes but Kate's, three inches to the right of her foot, hidden beneath the new Tibetan carpet, "what is it you want me to do for you? 'Professionally.' "

It was a long and convoluted tale, filled with extraneous detail and looping into unnecessary excursions, speculations, and a pre-teenager's philosophical reflections, mature and mawkish by turns, but Kate was an experienced interrogator, and if she lacked Al Hawkin's natural ability to read and lead the person being questioned, she had at least learned how to keep things on track.

Jules went to a private school. To the parent of a public school child, the idea of private school evokes high academic standards and close discipline, a broad education for already bright children balanced with encouraging each student to develop his or her own interests and abilities to the fullest. This paradisaical image loses some of its solidity once inside the walls of the ivory tower ("I mean," commented Jules, "two of the high school girls got pregnant last year, how's that for brains?"), but it can be said that the teaching is no worse than that of a public school, and classes are certainly smaller. Too, a privately funded school is safe from the state's fiscal blackmailers, who had turned most of the schools in the area where Jules lived into year-round schools, with students popping in and out of one another's desks for twelve months of the year. Where parents pay the bills, parents choose the calendar, and it was no accident that many of the parents whose children went to school with Jules taught on nine-month schedules at colleges and universities. The date for the school's winter music program was always chosen with an eye to the university's exam schedule. With this groundwork out of the way, and reduced to an adult perspective, Jules's narrative amounted to the following.

Immediately after university grades had been posted the previous June, Jani Cameron had picked up her bags and her daughter and flown to Germany to examine certain manuscripts in Köln, Berlin, and Düsseldorf. Jani spent the two weeks in quiet ecstasy and filled two notebooks with references and addenda to the manuscript she was hoping to finish before October.

Her daughter was less than ecstatic. Jani had never gotten around to teaching Jules German, for one thing, and then she arbitrarily ruled that Jules could not go beyond hotel, park, or library without her mother - that is, she could not go. Kate had the strong impression that some dark unpleasantness had taken place, and her detective instincts stirred, but she was not sure how much of that impression was from Jules's dramatization of a mere argument, so she decided not to allow herself to be distracted. At the end of the two weeks, as mother and daughter packed to leave for San Francisco, Jani was brought out of her academic dream to the harsh realization that her remarkable but normally reasonable little girl was deeply entrenched in a case of the adolescent sulks.

No, Jules had not had a good time. She did not like to play in parks with children; she did not care for libraries filled with books she could not read; she did not think it unreasonable that she hadn't learned German in fourteen days. Furthermore, she did not like having been taken from her friends and from a summer school offering in computer programming that interested her, just to tag along behind her mother.

The two Cameron women fought with polite implacability all the way across the Atlantic, interrupted only by meals and the movie, which Jules watched while her mother pretended to sleep, trying desperately to absorb this radical change in her daughter. By the time the plane touched down in San Francisco, they had come to an agreement. The next morning, Jani sat down at her desk while Jules went off to talk her way into a late registration at the computer course. As they nodded off over their respective keyboards, both felt a sense of uneasy victory beneath the heavy fog of their jet lag, and a vague awareness of business unfinished.

All of which was to say that, while Jani wrote her book and edged further into her relationship with Inspector Alonzo Hawkin of the San Francisco Police Department, Jules had a great deal of time on her own. She went to school four mornings a week to fill the crevices of her voracious mind with the intricacies of RAMs and ROMs, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, but the afternoons and weekends, which normally she might have spent at home reading or floating in their apartment house's minuscule pool, she spent on her own, pointedly away from her mother's presence. Friends were thin on the ground in July and August, sprinkled across the globe from Yosemite to Tashkent, but there were enough left to keep Jules from boredom, and there was her computer partner, and there were the library and the bilingual books her mother had ordered so that she could start on German, and there was the larger swimming pool in the park, and the park itself to read in.

Which was where she had met Dio.

"It must be a nickname," said Jules. "I mean, who would name their kid God, except maybe a rock star or something? He said it was his real name, but another time he said his mother was secretly in love with some piano player named Claudio and named Dio after him. He never told me his last name."

Dio lived in the park. It was both an indication of Jules's naïveté and the unlikely surroundings that she had not believed him. She'd seen him before, a few times in early July and then more often. Finally, in the last week of July, he came and sat next to her and asked what she was reading. He seemed baffled that she would want to learn German, he was more interested in one of her other books, a novel by Anne McCaffrey, and settled down at a distance from her for the rest of the afternoon, reading. He read slowly, and asked her what a couple of words meant, but he was possessed by the book. When it was time for Jules to go home, Dio asked hesitantly if she would mind if he borrowed it. It was a paperback and belonged to her, so she let him take it, said she'd be in the park again the following afternoon. She then went home to dinner.

He was there the next day, and the next. He returned the book as if it were a precious stone, she gave him another one, and they read in odd companionship for the rest of that week.

And he was odd, she had to admit that. Or, no, not odd himself, but there was something strange about him. It was not merely that his hair was long, though clean, or that he seemed to have only two T-shirts - neither of these made him stand out even in a wealthy neighborhood. However, he seemed to have no family or friends, he never bought an ice cream or brought a snack, and he seemed uneasy at accepting anything from Jules. Then she discovered that he did not have a library card - an inconceivable impoverishment to Jules. He was vague about where he lived, what school he went to. And he wouldn't come to dinner when Jules invited him. That was the final straw.

"What is it with you?" she had asked irritably. "You're this big mystery man all the time. Every time I ask anything about you, you look off into space and mutter. I don't care if your father's a garbageman or something, or if you don't have one. I don't have a father, but that doesn't mean I won't go to a friend's house for dinner. I thought we were friends, anyway. Aren't we?"

Well, um, er, yes, but.

"You don't have to invite me to your house if it's dirty or something. Mom's making hamburgers, is all, and she said I could invite you."

"You told your mother about me? What did you tell her? What'd she say?"

"I told her there was a new kid I'd met in the park who liked to read, and she said, "That's nice, honey," and went back to work. She's writing a book." That distracted him.

"What kind of book?"

"Like I told you, her field is medieval German literature. This one is on marriage as a symbolic something or other. Pretty boring, really. I looked at a few pages, and even I couldn't make any sense of them. So, will you come to dinner?"

"Your mother will ask questions, and her cop boyfriend" - "Sorry, Kate, that's what he said," Jules explained - "will come looking for me."

"Why, are you some kind of criminal?"

"No! I mean, in a way. He might think I was. Thing is, Jules, I live here, in the park."

There followed a lengthy discussion with an incredulous Jules slowly being convinced that yes, a person could actually sleep here, could live in the gaps of her own staid community. Actually, Kate had to admit, the boy sounded smart, and he had found an ideal place for a residence - for the summer, at any rate. He bathed in the backyard swimming pools of dark houses; he ate from the garbage cans of the rich and the fruit trees and tomato vines of the weekend gardeners. He even earned a bit of money, posing as a neighborhood kid willing to mow lawns and do chores (of whom Kate could imagine there were few enough in that particular town). He probably did his share of trying for unlocked back doors and helping himself to small items from cars, but without a criminal brotherhood to back him up, he would have found it a problem to fence goods or sell drugs on any scale. No, he sounded like a springtime runaway who had discovered a superior resting place, an urban Huck Finn's island, until the winter drove him in, into the arms of the city's predators. Kate wished him luck, but she had seen too many of them to hold out much hope, or to feel a great urgency to action.

Jules, however, was worried. Not just because he was without a home - she, too, had read enough Mark Twain to take the edge off the reality the newspapers told her about - and not for fear of what the harder life of October would push him toward. She was worried because he had disappeared.

Kate let her talk on, half-hearing the anxious recital of her visit to the police and sheriff's office, the patrolman who had laughed at her, the park maintenance man who had told her to go home, the downstairs neighbor, Señora Hidalgo, who had thrown a fit when she heard Jules admit to speaking to a stranger and then had listened no more. Kate had known what was coming from the moment Jules had mentioned a boy in the park with an unlikely name. The only surprises were the resourcefulness of the runaway and the persistence of the girl who had befriended him. Kate also noticed, when she more or less automatically got a physical description of the boy from Jules, the complete lack of romance in the girl's words. Dio was clearly a friend, not an adolescent fantasy.

"I know that Al would help," Jules was saying, "but he and Mom won't be back until the day after tomorrow, and I would have called him and asked him to make the police listen to me, but then I remembered you, and I thought you might help me look for Dio, at least until Al gets back."

Kate felt her professional cynicism gently nudged by this declaration of faith - until she called forcefully to mind just whom she was dealing with here, stared hard into the large, innocent, barely-out-of-childhood hazel eyes before her, and saw reflected in them the dim, cool glow of a computer display. Kate, Kate, she chided herself, lack of sleep is no excuse for being taken in by the patter of a twelve-year-old con woman. The kid knew damn well that Kate would jump through flaming hoops for her. Al Hawkin was Kate's partner, but he was also her superior; Al was fighting hard to make points with Jani Cameron; the way to Jani Cameron was through her daughter; therefore, performing this small service would ultimately boost her, Kate's, position. Kate might even work harder to find Dio than Al would - but that was getting too cold-blooded, and surely the timing of Al's absence was coincidental.

"Right," she said dryly, letting Jules know that she hadn't fallen for it. Nonetheless, she would look. Sure, the boy was likely to be in Los Angeles, or working the streets closer to home, but she was not about to tell that to Jules. Not her job, thank God, to educate a privileged and protected girl about the monsters lurking in the shadows, about the parents with the moral awareness of three-year-olds who, when faced with the problems of a child, be it a crying infant or a prickly teenager, took the simple response of hitting it or getting rid of it. Disposable children, Dio and thousands like him, thrown away by his family, picked up by a pimp for a few years, and thrown away again to die of drugs and disease and the depredations of life in the streets. He had started by bathing in the swimming pools of affluent families, but that wasn't what he was doing now.

None of this to Miss Jules Cameron, however. Something prettier.

"Jules, the policeman you talked to was probably right. I know street people, and the chances are very good he just left - for a few days or weeks, or permanently. Yes, I know he wouldn't have left without telling you, but what if he had to? What if, say, his parents showed up and he didn't want to go home? Wouldn't he then just take off without a word until the coast was clear?" Kate hurried over the thin patches in this argument. "Does he know how to get in touch with you?"

"Yes. I gave him a notebook for a present, a little one, to fit in his pocket. It had a rainbow on the front. He told me he didn't know when his birthday was, which is ridiculous, of course. I still can't think why he wouldn't tell me that - you can't trace someone by his date of birth, can you? Anyway, I gave him an unbirthday party, made him some microwave brownies with candles and some ice cream, though by the time we ate it, the ice cream was melted and we had to use it like a sauce, and for his present I bought him the notebook. I wrote his name on the front page, just Dio, but in Gothic script, using a calligraphy pen, and on the second page I put my name and address and phone number. You think he's in trouble, don't you?" she said abruptly. "Kidnapped by a serial killer and tortured to death, like that one up in Seattle, or the man you and Al caught, Andrew Lewis. You just don't want to tell me."

So much for pretty deceptions. Kate ran her fingers through her still-damp hair, thinking idly that she would really have to get it cut. "That was a completely different thing, Jules, you know that."

"But there is someone killing people up in Seattle. He just goes on and on. What if he moved down here?"

"Jules," Kate said firmly, "stop trying to frighten yourself. He's killing young women, not homeless boys." Five of them so far, and granted, all were young and small and most of them had cropped hair, but still.

"You're right," Jules said, and let out a long sigh. "I always let my imagination run away with me. In fact, sometimes I —" She stopped, and looked away.

"Sometimes you what?"

"Oh, nothing. It's stupid. It's just that when I was little, I used to believe that if I could imagine something bad, it wouldn't happen to me. Childish, huh?"

"Oh, I don't know," Kate said slowly. "It's always the unexpected things that knock you for a loop."

Jules glanced at her quickly, then away again. "Yeah, well. It was probably some psychological interpretation of a statistical probability, like saying lightning won't strike the same place twice. I used to lie in bed at night trying to think of all the terrible things that might happen, and it was always a relief to come up with something really awful, because if I could imagine it clearly enough, it was as if it had actually happened, and then I would know that at least I was safe from that."

The adult vocabulary combined with the earnestness of youth made it difficult to get a grip on Jules Cameron, but for the moment Kate put aside the question of what Jules was telling her and went for the most immediate consideration.

"Jules, I truly do not think you need to worry about serial killers and torture murders. The newspapers make you think that kind of thing happens all the time, and sure, there are a lot of things someone like Dio can get into, things that are not very nice. The world isn't a good place for a kid on his own. But I think it's much more likely that, for reasons known only to himself, Dio decided suddenly to move on. And I do honestly think he may just show up again. Without more information, I can't do much for you, and of course you realize that I personally have very little authority outside of San Francisco. However, I will go and ask a few questions, see what I can find out about him, see if I can set the ball rolling. Okay?"

"Thank you." She practically whispered it, overcome by the relief of a burden handed over. For a moment, she looked very young.

"I want you to remember two things, Jules. First of all, Dio seems to be pretty resourceful at taking care of himself. Most kids end up living in boxes under an overpass and falling in with some real shit - with some really rotten characters. Your Dio sounds fairly clever, and I'd say that if he manages to avoid drugs, he has a good chance of staying on his feet."

"He hates drugs. He told me once they make him sick, and they killed his mother. It's the only time he said anything about her, when he was telling me where his name came from, and I think he meant it. Both parts of it."

Jules did not seem to have faced the implication that if the boy knew that drugs made him ill, he at least had to have tried something, but Kate was not about to point this out, either.

"I hope so. The other thing to remember is, even if he has taken off, even if, God forbid, he's dead, he had a friend - you. A lot of runaways never do make friends, not normal friends. It's something to be proud of, Jules." To Kate's horror, the child's lips began to twitch and her eyes fill. Jesus, after the last few days, all she needed was another scene. She moved to cut it off. "However, I also agree with Señora Hidalgo. Befriending some stranger in a park is a damn fool thing to do, and if I were your mother, I'd turn you over my knee."

As the words left her mouth, Kate wondered why on earth conversing with a child invariably turned her into a cliché-mouthing maiden aunt, alternately hearty and judgmental. Don't interrupt, child. It's not polite to point. Wash your mouth out with soap. However, in this case it did the trick: Jules's eyes went instantly dry, her chin rose.

"My mother never hits me. She says it's a shameful abuse of superior strength."

"So it is. But I'd still do it. However," she said, rising, "I'm not your mother, and I don't want you riding the bus home. Let me put on some shoes and I'll drive you back."

"But you have to be at work today. They told me."

"Only on call, and then not until tonight. There's loads of time."

"You should go back to sleep, then."

"I'll sleep later. Nobody dies on a Tuesday night."

"But —"

"Look, Jules, do you have some reason you don't want me to drive you home? Hiding something, maybe?"

"Of course not."

"Fine. I'll go and put on my shoes. Be back in a minute."

"Okay. And Kate? Thank you."

In the basement garage, Jules paused between the two cars. She looked at the gleaming white Saab convertible up on its blocks, and then she took in Kate's dented, scruffy Japanese model, covered with road dirt and smeared with engine grease from the recent repairs, strewn inside with debris and rubbish. She said nothing, just took an empty pretzel box from the floor and with fastidious fingernails gathered up the apple cores and grape stems and dropped them into the box along with the Styrofoam cups, empty wrappers, grease-stained paper bags, and generic garbage. She ran out of room in the pretzel box and used a McDonald's sack for the remainder, then neatly placed both box and bag on the cement floor of the garage just under the driver's door of Lee's car. She carefully gathered up all the cassette tapes from the seat before getting in, then set about matching nineteen scattered tapes to their boxes while Kate backed out of the garage and headed toward the nearest freeway entrance. By the time they had negotiated the most recent route complications, inserted themselves into the flow of determined truckers, and dodged the inevitable panic-stricken station wagons with midwestern plates that decided at the last moment that they needed to get off right now, Jules had the tapes securely boxed and arranged in their zippered pouch, the titles up and facing the same way. She placed the zip bag on the floor under her knees, put her hands in her lap, narrowed her eyes at the truck in front of them, and spoke.

"Where's Lee?"

Kate took a deep breath and flexed her hands on the wheel.

"Lee is visiting an aunt, up in Washington."

"The state?"

"Yes."

"We used to live in Seattle, when I was really small. I don't remember it. She must be feeling better, then."

"She must be." Kate felt the child's eyes on her.

"How long has she been away?"

"I just got back this morning from taking her."

"You drove her? That's a long way, isn't it? Is she phobic about flying?"

"She just finds it difficult, with her legs," said Kate evenly, giving absolutely no indication in her voice of the previous two weeks, of the nasty surprises and the queasy blend of loneliness, abandonment, sheer rage, and the dregs of the worst hangover she'd had for many years.

"I suppose she would," said Jules thoughtfully. "Planes are so crowded anyway; with crutches, they'd be awful. Or does she still use the wheelchair?"

"Sometimes, but mostly she uses arm braces."

"And didn't you have a man living in the house, too? Lee's caretaker. I met him. Jon, without the h."

"He's away for a while, too."

"So you're all alone. Do you like being alone in the house?" When Kate did not answer immediately, she continued. "I do. I like coming home to a house - or to an apartment, in my case - when you know nobody's there and nobody will be there for a while. I can't wait until Mom thinks I'm old enough to stay by myself. It's a real pain, having Trini the airhead there all the time. She's all right, but she takes up so much space, somehow, and she always has music going. I like being alone, for a while anyway. I don't know how I'd like it all the time. I guess I'd get lonely, at night especially. How long will Lee be gone?"

"I don't know." Now Kate's control was slipping, and she heard the edge in her voice. Jules looked at her again.

"How are her legs, anyway? Al said she could get around pretty well, compared with what they were expecting —"

"Let's not talk about Lee anymore," Kate said, her voice friendly but the warning signs clear. "I'm totally pissed off at her right now. Okay? Tell me, what's that say on your shirt?"

Jules dropped her chin to look at the foreign writing. "It says, "Panta hellenike estin emoi." That means, "It's all Greek to me." This guy in my programming class puts himself through college by selling T-shirts. I thought this one was kinda neat."

Kinda neat, Kate thought with a smile, and the psychological interpretations of statistical probabilities. "Tell me about your class," she suggested. The topic lasted Jules until Palo Alto, when Kate left the freeway and asked for directions to the park.

TWO

Kate satisfied herself with a slow drive-by and a pause in the parking lot, although Jules was anxious to show her around.

"No, I just wanted to see," she said firmly. "And you used to meet him under that tree? What direction did he usually come from? No, just to get an idea. Now, show me where you live. No, Jules, I'm not just going to drop you off."

Ignoring the girl's protests, Kate parked in a visitor's slot behind the large brick building and walked up the stairs behind her, feeling like a truant officer. The apartment turned out to be larger than the one Kate had seen in San Jose, where Jani and her daughter had lived two floors above a particularly vicious psychopath, but it retained the old one's personality as the lair of a distracted academic and her serious and equally intellectual daughter. The high ceilings seemed to be held up by bookshelves - no neatly arranged storage spaces, either, but depositories laden with volumes in the disarray of constant use. Some improvements had been made over the last place: the ghastly motel furniture had been left behind, the plastic and chrome dinette set traded for a wooden dining table with six matching wooden chairs, the flowered sofa replaced by a suite of comfortable-looking overstuffed chairs and sofa in corduroy the shade of cappuccino. Even the heaps of books seemed less precarious here; a few surfaces were actually free of them.

Jules picked up two mugs, one with a spoon in it, and carried them into the kitchen. Kate followed her.

"Nice place."

"I like it better than the other one. Nobody lived in that building but Yuppies, and then after… I kept thinking I saw him in the hallways." She turned away, furiously embarrassed by this admission, to thrust the mugs and a couple of other things into the dishwasher.

"Spooky," Kate agreed. "Where does Mrs Hidalgo live?"

"Oh, she won't be expecting me for hours yet. I don't get home 'til two sometimes." It had been 'three or four' earlier; Jules, among her many accomplishments, was not a practiced liar.

"I suppose you could forge a note for school," Kate said easily, looking out the window at a desk-sized balcony and a postage stamp-sized swimming pool below, "but Mrs Hidalgo would probably find out, and your mother would blow up. Best defuse the bomb before it starts spluttering."

Jules was silent; then Kate heard her sigh. "You're as bad as Al," she complained. "Okay, just let me just dump these books. You want to see my room?"

"Sure," said Kate. Jules caught up her backpack and led Kate to the other end of the very ordinary apartment. The room, as Kate had suspected, was not ordinary. It was, in fact, like no other teenage bedroom she'd ever seen, and in the course of her professional life she had seen quite a few.

To begin with, it was tidy. Not compulsively so, but beneath a minor accumulation of papers, books, and Coke cans, things were obviously in their assigned and logical places. The shelves were free of dust, and the bed had even been made.

The room was very Jules. The top end of the bed was buried under an arrangement of stuffed animals; on the foot of the bed were two books, each of them weighing at least five pounds. The one on the top was a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. A high shelf, running around three sides of the room, was solid with more toys, teddy bears in the full gamut of pastels, a grouping of stuffed cows and another of elephants, and so on through the bestiary. The shelves below that held books - paperback novels on the higher shelves, solid books lower down; tomes such as few adults had even held were down at waist level. This was a logical-enough arrangement in earthquake country - some of those books would kill a person if they fell from a height of eight feet - but she was amused to see a collection of old and obviously much loved picture books shoulder-to-shoulder with a collection of glossy coffee table art books. The cross between childhood naivete and adult sophistication extended to the walls as well: Three framed prints from the pages of Goodnight Moon were arranged on one wall, facing a poster of a Renaissance woman's face on the other, an ethereal blond portrait with the name of a German museum underneath.

Jules had dropped her backpack on the desk and gone across to open the door of a wire cage. A black-and-white rat came blinking out onto his mistress's hand, but Kate was distracted by a piece of paper that had been pinned up to the corkboard over the desk, on which was printed the word sesquipedalian.

"What's that?" she asked, pointing.

"That's my word for the day," Jules told her matter-of-factly. She had been cuddling the rat to her chin, and she now kissed his pointy nose and allowed him to scramble onto her shoulder. "It means long words. Literally, it refers to something a foot and a half long." She took a peanut from a jar and held it up to her shoulder. Kate watched the rat manipulate the nut between his delicate paws and nibble it down to nothing, and she wondered briefly how to respond to the word of the day before deciding that she didn't actually have to.

"What's his name?" she asked instead.

"Ratty."

"I loved The Wind in the Willows when I was a kid," Kate agreed.

"Actually, his full name is Ratiocinate," said Jules, putting him back in the cage with another nut. "But I call him Ratty."

Kate laughed aloud and followed Jules back to the kitchen. The girl looked into the refrigerator. "Would you like a Coke?" she offered. "Or I could make you some coffee. Mrs Hidalgo never has anything but juices to drink; she believes in healthy living." It sounded like a quote, as did many of Jules's remarks. Kate was not actually thirsty, and she didn't much like Coke either, but without knowing why, she found herself accepting the offer. She and Jules stood in the kitchen for a while, talking about the apartment and drinking from the cans, until eventually Kate suggested they should be going downstairs.

Then, on their way out of the apartment, an odd thing happened, one that would have made little impression on Kate had it not been for Jules's reaction. The telephone rang as they walked toward it, and without hesitating, almost without breaking stride, Jules simply picked up the receiver and let it drop immediately back onto the base. No, not drop: Jules slammed it down in a small burst of fury and continued on out of the apartment. Kate followed, waited while Jules dug the key from her shorts pocket and locked the door, and then spoke to the back that she was following down the hallway.

"Get a lot of wrong numbers, do you?" She was totally unprepared for the girl's reaction: Jules whipped around, long braids flying and her face frozen, as if daring Kate to push an inquiry, and then she started down the stairs at a pace so fast, it was almost running. Kate caught up with her at the downstairs neighbor's door, putting out a hand to touch the girl's arm.

"Jules, are you getting a lot of crank phone calls?"

The girl stared at the doorbell, and then the rigidity in her shoulders gave way and she exhaled.

"No, not a lot. I just had one a while back that was really weird, and I guess I'm still jumpy when the phone rings if I'm alone. Stupid to just hang up like that, isn't it? I mean, what if it was Mom?"

"Or Dio?"

She turned to stare at Kate. "God, I didn't think about that. He's never phoned me," she said doubtfully. "But he could."

"If you're having a problem, Jules, you can always have your phone number changed. Or you can arrange with the phone company —"

"No!" she said fiercely. "I don't want to change the number, and I don't want to bring the phone company into it."

"Use the answering machine, then, to screen your calls."

"I do, sometimes."

"Have you told your mom, or Al?"

"It only happened once!" Jules nearly shouted. "It's not a problem."

"It sounds to me like it is."

"Really, Kate, it's not. It's just all the stuff about Dio - it's getting to me. But if whoever it is starts up again, I promise I'll ask Mom to change the number." Jules reached for the doorbell again, and this time Kate let her ring it.

The matriarch of the Hidalgo clan did not quite match the short, squat, big-bosomed surrogate-grandmother-to-the-neighborhood image Kate had formed. True, her skin was the color of an old penny, and true, the smell of something magnificent on the stove filled the stairwell; there was even the clear indication that half the children on the block had moved in. However, the good señiora had a waist slimmer than Kate's, and the jeans and scoop-necked pink T-shirt she wore covered a body taut with aerobic muscles. She also wore a small microphone clipped to the front of her shirt, like a newscaster's mike, only pointing down. She looked at her two visitors with concern.

"Julia, you are home early. Was there a problem at the school?" She gave the name a Spanish pronunciation, but her accent was mild.

"Buenos dias, Señora," said Jules carefully. "No hay problema. Este es mi amiga Kate Martinelli. Yo tengo… tiene… yo tenía una problema, y ella va a ayudarme con, er . . ."

"That was very good, Julia; you're coming along rapidly. I'm pleased to meet you, Ms Martinelli. Rosa Hidalgo." She put out her hand, which was as firm as the rest of her. "Come in. I was just finishing here. Fieldwork for my thesis in child psychology," she added, looking over her shoulder.

The room was awash with children, along with a number of maternal types planted around the edges like boulders. Rosa Hidalgo moved surely through the small multicolored heads, avoiding the clutter of blocks and toys that covered the floor like debris from a shrapnel bomb.

"That's great for today. Thank you all. How about lunch now? Eh, amigos," she said in higher tones, "you hungry? Burritos, peanut butter, tuna fish, and tell Angélica what you want to drink." She began folding away tape recorder and mike while various boulders moved forward to scoop the abandoned toys into containers and the children, all of them small, marginally verbal, but astonishingly noisy, washed off to the next room, where her daughter, a tall girl of perhaps seventeen, presided with an immense dignity over sandwiches and pitchers of drink.

"Have you eaten, Kate? Jules? There're vegetarian burritos; I hope that is all right. I use adzuki beans. Jennifer, this is Kate. Show her where things are, would you? Tami, I know you need to leave, but I must clarify something. When Tom junior was talking about the dog, was he saying—"

Although Kate was no more hungry than she had been thirsty when offered the Coke upstairs, she ate two of the superb fat burritos, which were everything their fragrance had advertised, and refused a third only at the thought of the already-straining waistband of her trousers.

"Do you have a child here, Kate?" asked the woman whom Rosa had addressed as Jennifer.

"Sorry? Oh, no. No, I don't have any children. I'm a friend of Jules, the girl over there. She lives upstairs. Do you know how much longer —"

She was interrupted by a rapid escalation of shrieks from the next room, at which point Jennifer was suddenly just not there, only her plate teetering on the edge of the sink. Kate rescued it, and was relieved when she saw that the furious quarrel at the children's table was the signal for a mass departure. Twenty minutes of potty visiting and prying toys from clenched fists later, Kate was finally alone with Rosa Hidalgo.

"Whew! Madre, I need a cup of coffee. How about you?"

Kate thought a slug of bourbon more like it, but she accepted the lesser drug with thanks. It was real coffee, from a press-filter machine, thick and gritty and exactly right.

"I thought at first you were running a nursery in here."

"Twenty three-and-a-half-year-olds, it sounds more like the monkey house in the zoo. Every six months, they come here in the mornings for a week." She paused, reviewing the syntax of the sentence. "Twice a year, I have them here, every morning for a week."

"Must seem quiet when the week is over," Kate commented.

"Madre, my ears, they sing. Next February will be the last time. I wonder if I will miss them."

"You said it was for a thesis?""

"Yes, I am tracing the development of gender characteristics, which boys play with toy cars and which girls prefer dolls, comparing them with the results of a number of other researchers doing similar studies. I have been following this group since they had one year."

"Since they were one year old, Mama," corrected her daughter, clearing dishes in the background.

"Since they were one year old. Thank you, Angél. My English suffers after one of these sessions," she remarked to Kate, her pronunciation more precise than ever. "It is a symptom of stress. Angél, go and get your suit on; we , will go for a swim. You, too, Julia. Leave those dishes; we'll do them later. Now" - she turned to Kate when the door had closed behind the girls - "you will please tell me what problem you are helping Julia with, what is troubling her, and why she did not go to her computer class today."

"I think you're aware that Jules made a friend in the park this summer, a homeless boy." Rosa Hidalgo nodded. "Well, he's disappeared, and she's concerned. She came to ask me to look into it. I'm with the police department," she added. "In San Francisco. I work with her mother's … boyfriend."

"Alonzo Hawkin, yes. And you live in San Francisco?" Kate nodded. "I see. And she went during school hours that I might not know."

"She thought you'd worry."

"She was correct. Why do the bright ones always do such awesomely stupid things?" The shake of her head was the gesture of an experienced mother rather than that of a trained psychologist. "What will you do, about the boy?"

"There isn't much I can do, to tell you the truth. Talk to the local sheriff's department, put his description out over the wire if he doesn't show up in a few days, see if he's shown up in L.A. or Tucson."

"That does not sound very hopeful."

"Juvenile runaways are nearly impossible to trace. I haven't said anything to Jules, but I think she is aware of the difficulties. She also seems aware of the dangers, though if anything, I'd say she has an overly dramatic view of the threats to the boy. AIDS and hepatitis are more likely than the murdering maniac she visualizes."

Rosa Hidalgo's gaze narrowed to attention at Kate's last words, and she spoke sharply.

"What precisely did she tell you?"

"I think she was worried about a serial killer torturing him to death. Something like that."

"Madre de Dios," she muttered, shaken.

"I told her that was completely unlikely," Kate hastened to say. "And really, it's a credit to her that she's concerned about him. It doesn't even seem to be anything romantic, just that she feels responsible for a friend she's just realized she badly misunderstood. She's a good kid. Don't come down too hard on her for lying to you."

"If 'coming down hard' means expressing anger, then no, I will not. I will, however, strongly urge her mother and Alonzo to educate her as to the dangers the world holds for young girls. Talking to a boy in a well-populated public park is one thing; taking a bus to San Francisco without telling anyone is quite another. Her mother has a strong tendency to be overly protective, and to avoid unpleasant topics with her daughter. She must be shown that it only makes the darkness beneath Julia's brilliance all the greater. I shall speak to Alonzo about it, I think. It was very perceptive of you to see beneath the armor of Julia's mind, Ms Martinelli."

For a cop, Kate supposed she meant.

"The name is Kate. Here, let me give you my phone number, in case anything else comes up. That's my number at work, and - do you have a pen? This," she continued, writing on the back of the card, "is my home number. I have to run, but would you tell Jules I'll call her tomorrow night? Maybe you'd better give me your number, too," she said, taking back the pen and writing down the number. As Rosa escorted her to the door the two girls reappeared, clutching scraps of bright nylon and brighter towels. Kate sidled past them into the hallway and, reassuring Jules that she was going to look into Dio's absence, that she would be in touch, and that she would be discreet, she made her escape.

Kate parked on the far side of the park from the swimming pool, in case Jules ended up there. Kate had no intention of allowing Jules to tag along while she followed her nose to what might turn up as a two-day-old decomposing corpse bent over a spray-paint canister. Jani - and Al - would not thank her for that.

However, a circuit of the park, which took less than half an hour, brought no whiff of the utterly unmistakable, primally unnerving smell of a rotting human being. The park was partly grass and playground, partly scrub woodland around an arroyo - masses of tick bush, madrone, live oak, and great billows of poison oak beginning to take on the spectacular red of its autumnal coloring. She went back to the car and drew out a mechanic's coverall that she kept there, more as emergency-clothing-cum-rag than because she worked on the car in it. It was made of tightly woven gabardine, and as she zipped it up, she felt as if she had stepped into a sauna. She also put on socks and running shoes and a pair of driving gloves. She thought of tying her hair in a towel, but decided that would be just too awful. She locked the car and walked along the road that wrapped the wilderness portion of the park until she found a vague deer trail, then pushed her way into the stifling, hot, dusty, fragrant brush. When that trail petered out, she reversed her steps and tried another.

Forty minutes later, she found the boy's lair. He must have been immune to poison oak, because Kate had to swim in the stuff, and twice she had gone past the low entrance before registering that one of the branches seemed even more dead than the others.

There was a tent, brown and dusty and pushed in among the bushes on all sides, carefully zipped up, but with the flaps only casually draped across the door and left down at the windows. She cleared her throat and said the boy's name loudly, but the only movement was a blue jay over her head. With a beat of apprehension she pulled up the door flap and looked through the screen into the tent, claustrophobic in its branch-crowded windows. There was no body, sprawled and swelling. There was a pair of cloth high-top tennis shoes, mostly holes, in one corner next to a neat pile of folded clothes which, she soon found, consisted of a pair of shorts and one of jeans, a T-shirt, two graying pairs of undershorts, a pair of mismatched, once-white athletic socks, and a sweatshirt. There were also half a dozen two-liter plastic soft-drink bottles filled with water that appeared dirty with the beginnings of algae; a worn beach towel; a sleeping bag with several holes and a broken zipper; and half a dozen shoe boxes in a neat pile. Some of these last were empty, others held a variety of undoubtedly scrounged treasures: two or three half-empty notepads stained with what, coffee grounds? - three pencils, two pens. Another shoe box held string, twine, elastic bands, broken shoelaces, a snarl of twist ties, and some neatly folded plastic grocery bags. Another - surprise: jewelry. Most of it was of the costume variety, but there was also a man's gold signet ring with a small diamond, the metal scratched and slightly misshapen as if it had been buried in sand, and three odd earrings for pierced ears, all of which had lost the post's anchor. One of the earrings had three gold chains, each ending in a small ruby and dangling from a center stud with a larger ruby, to Kate's eyes genuine and worth a few dollars at a pawnshop or jeweler's. She closed the shoe boxes and put them back as she had found them, then continued her search. Inside a cracked plastic file box about a foot square and with a rock on top of it, she found Dio's library, including a hardback science fiction novel from the local public library, due the following week. Checked out to Jules? After an inner battle, she removed it from the others, most of them worn paperback classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, David Copperfield, and Peter Pan. Deliberately collected, she wondered as she thumbed through them, or just what someone in the neighborhood happened to throw out? There was no rainbow notebook, no identifying papers aside from the much handled photograph of a woman with large teeth laughing into the camera on a beach. It was the only thing in the tent that she thought Dio might regret, were it to be damaged by rain, so for safekeeping she stuck it inside the library book and put that to one side.

No sign of a struggle; on the other hand, it was doubtful that he'd pack up and leave without the bits of jewelry that could buy a hungry boy several meals. But there was nothing more she could do here, except… She took one of the pads and a pencil stub out of the appropriate box and wrote her home phone number on it. Below it, she added: I'm a friend of Jules. Please call collect.

She left the pad on the sleeping bag, picked up Jules's book, and let herself out of the tent, where the close day seemed cool compared with the stifling tent. She fastened the zip and pulled the door flap across the tent, then pushed her way back out of the brush.

By the time she had gained the road, she could barely keep from ripping off the drenched and sticking coverall. She did unzip it completely, stuffing the gloves into a pocket. Oh God, she thought, I'm itching already, and scratched her head.

She had company. A sheriff's car had pulled authoritatively, if ineffectually, across the front of her car, and the two deputies were standing side by side, watching her puff up the road.

Kate knew immediately that these two would drawl, though they had probably been born in California, that they'd make some remark about her clothes, and that they would attempt to bracket her at close quarters to strut their power. Well, they'd just chosen the wrong woman on the wrong day for that little game. She walked past them without a glance, went to the trunk of her car, unlocked it, tossed in the library book, and took out two bottles of mineral water. One she drank, letting it spill down her throat. She bent over and let the other one glug across her face and into her hair. Still ignoring the two deputies, who were now standing on either side of her, she capped the bottles, tossed them into the trunk, ran her fingers through her shaggy hair to comb it roughly into place, and brought her right foot up to the bumper to untie her shoe. Only now did one of the young men speak, the one on her left.

"Afternoon there, Miss."

"Martinelli. And it's Ms."

"Why, we got us a card-carrying feminist, Randy," said the second.

"Randy," she snorted, kicking her shoe into the trunk and bending to untie the other one. "And I suppose your partner's name is Dick." Before he could figure it out, she distracted him by shrugging out of the coverall and tossing the filthy garment in after the shoes and socks, then reaching in for a pair of rubber thongs, dropping them to the ground, and slipping her feet into them. "You drive that car?" she asked.

Totally disconcerted, he actually answered.

"Yeah, I drive it."

"Well, don't worry, parking gets easier as you gain experience. Now if you'll pardon me, boys, I've got things to do." She thrust a hand into the pocket of her running shorts and when she looked up, she found herself staring into the ends of a matched pair of 9-mm automatics.

Afterward, she thought it amazing that she hadn't been frozen with terror, in the sights of two small cannons manned by lunatics, but at the time all she felt was incredulity. She slowly stretched out her arm and let the key chain dangle from her fingers, and the two sheriff's deputies straightened up, beginning to look sickly.

"You stupid shits," she said conversationally. "How long have you two bozos been out of the Academy? A week? You don't go waving your gun around unless you're prepared to use it, and you don't use it unless you're prepared to spend six months filling out the goddamn forms. For Christ's sake, can you possibly think that a person dressed like this could conceal anything bigger than a Swiss army knife?"

She gestured at herself, and the two louts looked again at the nylon running shorts and the damp and clinging tank top, then finished bolstering their guns.

"We had a report, ma'am…" began the shorter one, the driver, with no trace now of a drawl.

"Some old lady in one of those houses over there no doubt, who saw me poking around and took me for a mad bomber. And now she's watching you making asses of yourselves."

"Yes, ma'am. But do you mind telling us what you were doing?"

"This is a public park."

"Now, look you —"

"Shut up, Randy," hissed the driver.

"But Nelson —"

"Nelson?" snorted Kate. No wonder he had a chip on his shoulder. She stood and waited for further grumbles of authority, but there was more apprehension than aggression in their faces.

"No, I'm not going to file a complaint. But you two better think three times before you pull that kind of damn fool stunt again. I don't expect to have to ID myself every time I go for my keys, and it's too damn hot to wear a uniform."

Kate waited an instant before this penny dropped, and she was suddenly aware that she felt better than she had in a long time. Happy, even. She stepped forward and held out her hand to Nelson.

"Inspector Kate Martinelli, SFPD. Homicide."

She was still feeling marvelously cheerful as she pulled her car in beside Nelson and Randy's black-and-white in the parking lot of a nearby hamburger joint, and she could feel the bounce in her steps as she accompanied the two looming uniforms inside. She ordered a large iced tea, excused herself to scrub her face and hands in the rest room, and then joined the men at the table, where she flipped her ID onto the table and sat down.

"Okay," she said without preamble. "What I was doing there in that weird outfit was looking for a boy. Friend of mine met him in the park a few times; he disappeared five days ago. He told her that he lived there, in the park, so I thought I'd have a look. He was telling the truth, but he's not there now, hasn't been for a few days, by the look of it, left behind some things of value - a ring, a couple of odd earrings, pair of shoes. He's a light-skinned Hispanic male, age maybe fourteen or fifteen, five seven, slim, no distinguishing marks except for a chip on the top right incisor, calls himself Dio and his name may be Claudio, hung around the park a lot. Any bells?"

"Sounds like half the kids in the park, come summer," Nelson said, all business now and damned glad if nobody referred to that little episode earlier.

"This one was a loner, would've avoided group activities, didn't use the pool or take classes, just drifted. Talked to a young girl a lot; she's twelve, five four, black braids, hazel eyes, slightly Oriental-looking. Pretty, acts older than her age."

"She sounds familiar. Reads a lot?"

"That's her."

"I remember a boy," said Nelson. "Never talked to him, though."

"I'd appreciate it if you'd keep an eye out for him. He hasn't done anything, not that I know of, and he sounds the kind of kid who, if he's been pulled into the game or onto the needle, might cut all ties."

"Some self-respect, you mean?" asked Nelson. He wasn't a total loss, then, in the brains department.

"Might be salvaged," she agreed. "Well, gentlemen, it's been real. When you find out who made the call about that dangerous madwoman in the bushes, you might ask her if she's seen our young man. Here's my card, and my home number." (Handing out a lot of these lately, she reflected.) "Give me a ring if you get anything. Thanks for the drink."

Kate drove the thirty miles home without thinking of much of anything, parked on the street in front of the house, and let herself in the front door. When she closed the door behind her, she was hit by the miasma of a house that was not merely empty but abandoned. She stood in the hallway of the house and heard its silence, smelled the staleness beneath the remnants of the breakfast Jules had cooked, and thought how happy she had once been to come home to this place; remembered how she and Lee had loved and labored to free it of its decades of neglect, remembered how she and Lee had loved. It had been their joy and their delight, and now its walls rang with emptiness: no Lee upstairs or in the consulting rooms on Kate's right, no Jon making magic in the kitchen or down in the basement apartment listening to his peculiar modern music, none of Lee's clients, none of Jon's impossible friends, no nothing, just the ache of its emptiness and Kate, standing in the hall.

She poured herself a glass of wine, ignoring the clock, and trudged up the stairs. At the top, not meaning to, she found herself in Lee's study, standing at Lee's desk, opening its right-hand drawer, and taking out the letter from Lee's mad aunt that had begun all this:

My dear niece,

We have only met twice during your life, and as during our brief second meeting you were clad only in a pair of wet diapers, you probably do not remember me. I trust that you are at least aware that your father had a sister. If not, then I imagine this will come as a considerable surprise. Nonetheless, he had, and I am she. Hard to think of my brother - young enough to have been my own baby, come to think of it - as a man of fifty, but as I turn sixty-eight this year, that would have been the case. Except that he died in uniform, you never saw him, and I was kept from you by your mother, because I reminded her of her great loss, or so she said.

I returned to this country a year ago, taking up residence on an island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca that has no electricity and virtually no neighbors. I find it a delightful contrast to Calcutta, and is not contrast the spice of life? Upon my return, I instructed my lawyer to find what he could about my family members, which may explain why I am writing to you now. He seems to have employed a private investigator - a curious thought - who charged what seemed to me an excessive amount of money for a folder full of newspaper clippings. I apologize for inadvertently trespassing upon your privacy, had I known that I was doing so, I would have instructed the man to desist.

Thus I have learned of your injury, and although I was certainly distressed to hear of it, I understand that you are progressing rapidly, and as, after all, you could hardly stagger about when last I saw you, I suppose one could say that from my viewpoint there has been little change.

Which brings me to my purpose in writing, other than to arrange for an annual exchange of Christmas cards and other nonsense. If you are ever wishing a period in an extremely rustic retreat with an ill-tempered old woman who has no time for sympathy and no craving for service, my island is at your disposal. It is not set up for a disabled person, but then neither is it set up for a sixty-eight-year-old woman with malaria, so we would be evenly matched, and no doubt would cope.

I realize you may be feeling perfectly horrified at the idea, in which case toss these pages into the bin and don't give me another thought. I write only as a gesture to my brother, of whom I was very fond and whom I still miss daily. If something of him has surfaced in you, and particularly if that element makes the proposal of an island sojourn appealing, please write to tell me when you wish to arrive.

Agatha Cooper

And to think, Kate reflected, that my first reaction was to laugh in delight at its absurdity. The memory made her feel ill, because in reality Lee's aunt had spoken, and Lee had answered, and now Kate was alone in the big house. She put the letter away and went into the hallway, where she gathered the shed clothes from the night before and took them not into their bedroom, but down to the small guest room at the end of the upstairs hall. She hung the denim jacket in the closet, stripped off her tank top and shorts and threw them along with the other dirty clothes into the guest hamper, and walked nude up the carpeted hall to get her work clothes out of the big bedroom. At the mirrored closet, she paused and eyed her reflection sourly. She wouldn't be surprised to find two more pounds on the scale: Long drives and comfort eating were killers. She looked pale, restless; her hair was nearly in her eyes. Even her fingernails were dirty and overlong.

"Christ, you're a mess," she said to her reflected self, and went to take a long shower with a great deal of soap.

She did not consult the scales; she did cut her fingernails.

Going back downstairs, she checked a second time, but the answering machine was still obstinately free of messages, not a red light to be seen. She even pushed the playback button, rationalizing that the light could be broken, but it merely clunked and beeped at her and was silent. She decided to go in to work after all, although she was only on call.

After the brooding quiet of the house, the gritty chaos of the Department of Justice was almost a balm to Kate's spirit. She had been away for little more than a week, but it might have been a few minutes. Kitagawa nodded as he passed her, deep in conversation with a man in the garish uniform of a doorman. Tom Boyle raised a finger in greeting but did not take the phone from his ear. She went to her desk, stowed her gun and a thermos of coffee in the bottom drawer, and sat in her chair: home again.

Dellamonica had a new tie. April Robinette had spilled something on her skirt. Gomes came through cursing furiously and carrying a massive electronic typewriter under his arm. There was another new plant on Al Hawkin's desk, already looking resigned to a lingering death. The top of Kate's desk was covered with scribbled messages that would take most of the day to decipher and deal with. Among them she found a flyer with the grainy photograph of a young girl with short hair, and she did not need to read the description of the missing girl to know that the police in Washington - no, she corrected herself, this one was from Oregon - were afraid that the so-called Snoqualmie Strangler had claimed a sixth victim. It had been several days since Kate had heard or read any news, but Jules was no doubt more up to date: This was the maniac who worried Jules, although there was no boy among his victims. Kate thought briefly of the girl's apprehension - no, her fear - that the telephone call had caused, and then her own phone rang.

Despite what she had told Jules, people did die in San Francisco on a Tuesday afternoon. In this case it was a drive-by shooting, in broad daylight, in the Castro district, with three dozen eager and contradictory witnesses to sort out; she would not have much opportunity to doze off over her files that night.

Dropping the flyer into her wastebasket, Kate retrieved her gun and her thermos, and went out to do her job.

THREE

With September began the phone calls from Jules. In the first week, the girl called twice, to check on the search for Dio. They were brief calls, depressing for both of them. Kate was, in fact, looking for him, even after Al Hawkin had returned, because although Al had told Kate to concentrate on her own work, not sweat over some kid Jules shouldn't have been talking to in the first place, Kate could hear the pride and the loneliness in Jules's voice, and she remembered what it was like to feel abandoned by the adults you loved. Jules was going through a bad patch, and Kate could justify only just so many hours at work, so anything that filled the hours at home was all right with her - even talking to an angry twelve-year-old.

The tone of these telephone conversations evolved rapidly under the pressures from both sides. After the brief, uncomfortable calls of the first week, Kate half-expected that Jules would not try again; instead, the calls began hesitantly to take on a life of their own. Under the impetus of her summer experience, Jules's inevitable back-to-school essay of "What I Did During Vacation" evolved into a major project on homelessness, with Kate as her primary resource.

Even after the paper had been turned in to the astonished but pleased teacher, the phone calls continued, always beginning with the ritual "Anything about Dio?" before wandering off into twenty, even thirty minutes of discussion about homelessness; the ethics of capitalism; the lack of good teachers in the universe; her word for the day (meniscus, braggadocio, and haruspex were among the sesquipedalian ones, but the shorter mensch, spirit, and vagrant interested her, as well); the difficulties of getting a good education when surrounded by fools who were obsessed with clothing, hair, and boys; the psychological need for a peer group; the homeless again, and what they did for companionship; the friends Jules had made in her new home; the difference between a boyfriend and a boy friend; clothing, hair, and boys; the politics of clothing, hair, and boys; the pros and cons of short versus long hair; a boy friend called Josh; Kate's work; life in general; life in particular. To her surprise, Kate found herself patient with these adolescent maunderings, and, more than that, positively missing them when three or four days passed without a phone call.

The truth was, the house on Russian Hill was too damn big and too damn quiet. One night, she came home and found a message on the answering machine: Jon was thinking of hopping over to London, since Lee was not there to need his assistance; he would ring when he got back to Boston. "Cheerio, ducks." He did not explain how he knew that Lee was still away. Pride kept Kate from calling him back on the number he had left, but the inevitable conclusion that Lee and Jon had been in communication made the house ring with silence. She tried leaving the radio on, to defuse that first awful minute of coming home to rooms that had not breathed since she left, but the ruse did not work.

One day in mid-September, unpacking the bags after a desultory trip through the aisles of the supermarket, Kate discovered a box of cat kibbles in a bag between the packages of dried pasta and a jug of red wine. She held it up, a totally unfamiliar box she could have sworn she'd never touched before. The orange cat on the front of it grinned at her.

"My subconscious wants me to get a cat," she said aloud in disgust. She took the kibbles to the back door, poured half of them onto the brick patio for the birds, and left the box next to the door. No damn cat.

The next night, late, she was getting into bed when she heard a strange slapping noise down on the patio. Cautiously, she looked over the upstairs balcony and into the face of an obese and disgusted raccoon, who all but shook the empty box at her and tapped its foot. On her way home from work the following day, she stopped at the local corner store and bought five boxes of bone-shaped dog biscuits. The Vietnamese man who ran the cash register looked at her in surprise.

"You have dog now, Miss?"

"No, it's a payoff to the neighborhood protection racket, so they won't turn over my garbage cans."

The man smiled his polite incomprehension and gingerly held out her change.

In one of her long letters north, she told Lee about the raccoon, whom she called Gideon ("Rocky's friend," she wrote in explanation). She also told Lee about work, the neighbors' building project that filled the street with pickup trucks, Dumpsters, and lumber deliveries, the new owners of the exercise club, a rumor that the restaurant at the base of the hill was about to reopen, a phone call from a client of Lee's who had wanted to tell her that his HIV test was blessedly negative, about Al and Jani and Jules and a few mutual friends. She received a handful of brief notes in return.

She did not tell Lee everything - not how she hated opening the door when she came home, nor how she'd taken to sleeping in the guest room or on the sofa. She did not write Lee about her fruitless search for Dio through the shelters and the streets, the hot lines and church soup kitchens and crack houses, the continual rounds of her informants. She did not write Lee about the brief, bloody spasm of gang killings in late September, set off by a theft from a high school locker, that left three kids dead and four bleeding in the space of a few days. She did not write to Lee about these shootings because they proved to be the shock needed to begin the process of corning out of the drifting malaise she had been subject to since driving Lee north in August.

The youngest of the three students to be killed was a slight thirteen-year-old girl with a plait of long black hair that curved down her thin backbone and across the rucked-up remains of what had been a white blouse. When Kate arrived on the scene and pulled back the blood-soaked flowered bedsheet that someone had covered her with, her heart thudded painfully for two fast beats: Her eyes had seen the body as that of Jules Cameron, lying in a pool of crimson agony on the weed-choked sidewalk.

She went on with her job; she took her statements and began her paperwork for the case, forgetting that moment of shock in the familiar routine. She went home and had her dinner and put out the dog biscuits for the raccoon; she ran a hasty vacuum cleaner over the floor and bathed and went to bed half-drunk, and toward morning she dreamed. It was not a particularly nasty dream, just wistful, and in it she was talking to the kid sister who had been killed by an automobile when Kate was in college many years before. They talked about a book and a baseball game, and when the conversation ended and Kate was beginning to wake, she saw that the person she had been talking to was actually Jules.

She came fully awake with a wry smile on her face. For some people, messages from the unconscious mind needed to be pretty blatant. Kate got the point.

When the sun was a bit farther up, she phoned Jules. Jani answered, a lovely, low voice with a lilt of accent.

"Good morning, Kate. Are you looking for Al?"

"Er, well, no, actually. I was hoping to catch Jules before she left for school."

"She is still here. Just one moment." Kate heard the muffling distortions of receiver against hand as Jani called, "Jules!" and then, again to Kate, "She will be here in a moment. How are you, Kate?"

"Fine. Just fine."

"And Lee, how is she progressing?"

"Lee's fine."

"Will you come to dinner soon? Both of you?"

"Well, that might be difficult."

"I understand," she sympathized, not understanding in the least. "But as soon as it is possible. Here is Jules."

"Kate?"

"Hey, J. How're you doing?"

"Did you find him?"

"Find… Oh, Dio. No, I'm sorry, nothing's come in. I was calling to see if you'd like to go and do something this weekend. I'm supposed to be off, unless something comes up, and I thought you might like to spend Saturday in riotous living. If it's okay with your mother," she added, belatedly aware that she sounded like an acned teenage boy with sweating palms, asking for a date.

"What would we do?"

"Whatever you like. Movie, the beach. Shopping," she suggested desperately. What do girls like Jules do in their spare time, anyway? Go to the library? Maybe this wasn't such a great idea.

"I'd like that. Let me ask Mom." Again the muffled sounds, the occasional mutter and word of a brief conversation. "Kate? She says fine, what time, and do you want to come back here for dinner?"

"Ten too early for you? And if you want, we could stay out, have a hamburger or some Chinese. Cruise the bars, look for some action?"

That raised a giggle, unexpected from that particular set of vocal cords.

"Ten is fine. Thank you."

Twenty minutes later, the telephone pulled Kate out of the shower, where she'd been berating herself for such a dumb commitment, picturing herself locked up in the car with Jules, driving up and down mumbling, So, what do you wanna do? and Jules answering, I dunno, what do you wanna do?

"Hello?"

"Kate? It's Jules," the girl said, sounding oddly furtive. "There's something I would like to do on Saturday, if it's okay with you."

"Is it legal?" Kate asked warily.

"I think so. If it isn't, don't worry - it was just an idea."

"What is it?" Kate wiped a dribble of shampoo away from her eye with the edge of the towel.

"I'd like to try shooting a gun somewhere."

Probably the very last thing Kate had expected.

"Sure. What kind of gun?"

"What do you mean?"

"Pistol? Rifle? Machine gun? Grenade launcher?"

"Just the pistol, I guess."

"Fine, if your mom doesn't object." Silence. "You think she would?"

"Probably," she said darkly.

"I really couldn't take you if she didn't approve. Ask Al to convince her."

"She doesn't like guns."

"I'm not crazy about them myself. They make a lot of work for me," she said darkly, Lee and the murdered Jules-like girl very much on her mind. "Ask Al."

"Okay."

Kate returned to her shower in a better frame of mind.

Nothing came up to keep Kate from her appointment with Jules, and on a gorgeous crisp autumnal morning, she drove down the peninsula and parked outside the apartment building. She was buzzed in, took the elevator up, and Al opened the door, unshaven and in a dressing gown and slippers. He nodded Kate in. She looked everywhere but at the partner who was in fact her superior officer. He did not seem to notice.

"Coffee?" he asked, holding out his own cup.

"Not if you made it, thanks."

"I think Jules did." She followed him to the kitchen and they examined the glass carafe. The coffee was still more brown than green. "Not too old."

"Yes, then I will have a cup."

"Taking her to the range, then?"

"If it's all right with Jani."

"Jani connects guns with some unpleasant things in her past, but she agrees that Jules has the right to an education."

"I don't want to create a problem here."

"You're not creating it. Ah, here's the Juice now."

"The name is Jules, Alhambra," she growled in the mock disgust of a long-standing joke, and in an aside added, "Good morning, Kate."

Today's T-shirt read, in delicate gold writing: WHEN GOD CREATED MAN, SHE WAS ONLY JOKING. Kate grinned.

"Hey, J, like the shirt. Ready to go? Oh, hi, Jani."

Jani came into the room, dressed more casually than Kate had ever seen her (though rumor had it that when Al Hawkin had first met her, she'd been wearing nothing but a towel, no doubt an exaggeration) - in yellow-orange cotton shorts and a loose white blouse, both crisply ironed. There were also sandals on her feet, two pencils through the heavy bun she wore her gorgeous black hair in, and a pair of reading glasses in one hand. When she entered the room, her daughter immediately stiffened and looked out of the window.

"Hello, Kate. Have you been offered anything to drink?"

"I've got coffee, thanks."

"And you, Jules, did you eat breakfast?"

"I'm not hungry, Mother."

Ah, said Kate to herself, so that's how it is.

What a world lay in those four words, a minor salvo in the bitter civil war between mother and daughter, a family of two turned in on itself in dependency, infuriated at itself. The four words brought with them a flood of memories, of battles and uneasy peace treaties made all the more terrible by the love that lay beneath. Kate drained her coffee cup, still standing, and held it out to her partner with a smile that felt pasted on.

"Thanks, Al, that was great." He handed it to Jules.

"Put it in the sink, would you, Jujube?"

"Anything you say, Altercation."

When the child had left the room, Jani spoke quietly, with surface nonchalance. "Before I forget, Kate, Rosa Hidalgo would appreciate it if you could stop by before you leave today. Nothing terribly urgent, merely a question that arose concerning one of her young clients."

"But what —" Kate stopped, surprised at the stillness in Jani's posture, the urgency in her eyes. "Sure, be glad to," she said easily, and Jani relaxed and held Kate's eyes for a split instant longer, in warning, before nodding her head in an informal leave-taking and disappearing back into her study. Jules stood in the doorway and watched her mother's retreating back, glowering with suspicion.

"Shall we go?" Kate suggested.

"Have a good time, Emerald," Al said. Jules roused herself.

"I'll try, Allegheny."

"Be home by midnight, Pearl." He stifled a yawn.

"Or you'll turn into a pumpkin, right, Alcatraz? And by the way," she said as a parting shot, "I don't think pearls qualify as jewels."

He laughed and closed the apartment door behind them. On the stairs, Jules dropped the joking attitude as if it had never been and turned to Kate.

"What did she want?"

"Who, your mother? Oh, at the end there. She didn't want anything," Kate said easily. "Had a message from Rosa downstairs, probably about a case she asked me about a while back. Why?"

"She's always talking about me to people."

"That's hardly surprising; you're an important part of her life. It would be a bit strange never to mention you, don't you think?" Kate knew that her face gave away nothing - there were too many hours of interrogation behind her to let her thoughts be read by a twelve-year-old. Even this twelve-year-old.

"That's not what I mean."

"No? Well, in this case, I don't think your suspicions are justified. Your mom probably just thought it was a private message, that's all."

In silence, Kate and Jules walked down the two flights of stairs, Kate feeling absurdly on trial, as aware of the child's inner turmoil as if she could see it on a screen: Which side was Kate on? Kate wondered if it mattered, knew that it did, knew furthermore that she wanted Jules to trust her loyalty, and realized that she'd be a damned fool to get herself between child and mother, with Al Hawkin standing over it all. Have to watch your step, Kate.

Still in silence, she started the car and drove the half mile or so to the park with the swimming pool. Jules walked away onto the grass, and Kate trailed after, to the shade of a tree on a low rise. Jules settled down as if sitting in a familiar chair. Kate sat down beside her.

"This is where you used to meet him, you said?" she asked after a couple of minutes.

"His father used to beat him. Did I tell you that?"

"No, you didn't, but it doesn't surprise me. A lot of runaways come from abusive families."

"He's dead, isn't he?"

"He may be. But in all honesty, Jules, I think the odds that he's alive somewhere are considerably higher."

"Did you ever read Peter Pan?" Jules asked abruptly.

"Peter Pan?" Kate wondered where this was going. "Not in a very long time."

"I hate that book. It's detestable. I read it again last week, because I was thinking about something Dio said, and when you take away all that cute, cheerful stuff they put in the movies, you see it's about a bunch of boys whose parents throw them away, or anyway don't care enough to bother looking for them when they get lost, who get together to try and take care of each other, only to have another group of grown-ups try to kill them all. What's the difference between a pirate and a serial killer, or a drug pusher, or a… a pimp, I ask you?"

Kate was shocked, though whether by the words or the ferociously dry eyes, she could not have said.

"Um, what makes you think —"

"Oh, get real, Kate. I'm not stupid, you know. I do read." She jumped up and stalked off to the chain-link fence around the swimming pool and stood with her fingers hooked into the wire, staring at the lesson going on in the water. Kate followed her slowly, then leaned with her back against the fence, facing the opposite direction.

"You having problems with your mom?"

"I suppose."

"Most people do, at one time or another. She loves you."

"I know. And she has problems. God, who doesn't?" she said with a bitterness beyond her years.

"We don't," said Kate lightly. "Not today. Today is not for problems. Come on."

They spent the next few hours at the shooting range, and Kate considered that she had done the job well, acquainting Jules with the intricacies of the handgun (a borrowed .22 and Kate's own heavier .38) to the point that Jules could hit the target a respectable number of times, and further, she kept the girl at it until she began to show signs of boredom with this, her mother's bugbear. Ravenous, they ate hamburgers, went to an early movie, ended up, of all places, at a bowling alley, and arrived back at the apartment at 10:30 that night, disheveled, exhausted, and reeking of gunpowder, sweat, hamburger grease, popcorn, and the cigarette smoke of the alley. Jules jabbered maniacally for twenty minutes before she began to flag, and then was dispatched to bed. Jani went to make coffee.

"You gave her a good time," said Al, approving and amused.

"She's a nice kid. And tell Jani I think the fascination with guns will fade, now she knows they're just noise and stink."

"How's Lee? Do you need to call to tell her you'll be late?" Hawkin knew the routine as well as Kate did: Call in whenever you're away.

"No, I don't. She's… she isn't there."

Hawkin looked up quickly. "Not in the hospital again?"

"Oh, no, she's doing fine. Or I guess she is. She's up at her aunt's."

"Still? It's been weeks."

"Five weeks, not that long. She writes. She's okay, getting her head straight." That she could admit this much to Al Hawkin was an indication of how very far she'd come since they first began to work together. However she added, "Don't say anything, around the department."

"No," he said, but he watched her closely-for a long minute before he stood up to get himself a drink. Kate thought vaguely of leaving.

"I've asked Jani to marry me," he said abruptly. "She said yes."

"I did wonder." She grinned. "I'm very happy for you, Al. For both of you."

Al Hawkin and Jani Cameron had met a year and a half ago, only days before Lee had been shot in the culmination of the same case that brought him to the Cameron door. Since then, Al had paid court to this woman with all his might and every wile at his command. "Laid siege" would describe it more accurately, Kate had occasionally thought over the months. A very polite and solicitous siege, true, but for all the chivalry, there was an underlying single-minded determination that made the final result inescapable.

Jani, coming in with a tray of coffee, was also happy. At any rate, there was a softness in her that had not been there before, and conversely, her spine was straighter. Al had won her, and she was freed from solitude, and Kate heard the heavy footsteps of returning melancholia as she sat on the comfortable ugly sofa and drank coffee with these two friends who had obviously spent this gift of an unexpected free day mostly in bed. She drained her mug, took her leave of them, and drove home to her empty house on Russian Hill. She looked at the keyhole with loathing, opened the door. No lights, no warmth, no smells, the only noise the sharp echo of the door closing. The only life here was an importunate raccoon.

"You miserable house," she said loudly, and went to feed Gideon his dinner.

FOUR

Kate woke early after a night of fitful sleep, and she decided the time had come to find her running shoes again. It took her a while, but she uncovered them at last in a box on a shelf in what she had begun thinking of as Lee's closet, where Jon must have put them some months before in one of his fits of tidying. They were old friends on her feet, and she did a careful round of stretches before letting herself out into the gray half rain of an early, foggy morning.

By the base of the hill, her calf muscles were quivering, and the intended easy run of two miles was whittled down still further. At the end of the short circuit, she returned up Russian Hill, walking, and slowly at that, with a red face and heaving lungs. Inside the house, the red dot on the answering machine was glowing, an excuse to sit down on the carpeted stairway to listen to the message - three messages, it turned out; the telephone must have rung the whole time she was out. The first one was from Jon, his voice sounding distant, exaggerated: defensive.

"Katarina, dearest, why do I always get the machine? Are you never at home? I do hope you're getting these messages; I'll feel terrible if you haven't been. Anyway, I'm back in Boston, but only for a few days. A friend wants me to go to his place in Cancun, and you know how I adore Mexico. Just for a week or two, maybe a bit more, I don't know. I may be back in the City first, but if not, I'll drop you a line and let you know just where I am, exactly. If you really have to get ahold of me, that same number in Boston will do; they'll know where I am. Did you get my postcard from London? Don't you think those helmets the bobbies wear are just so adorable? Why don't our boys wear them? Couldn't you suggest it to the police commissioner or whoever is in charge of the uniforms? Ah well, enough of this, I'll use up the whole tape. Toodle-oo now, Kate, as they say in jolly old. I hope you're well. I'll be in touch soon."

The next message was a brief one from Rosa Hidalgo, who said, "Kate, I just wanted to tell you that if there's anything I can do to help you with Jules, just call me. She's a real sweetheart, but she can be a handful, and I'm happy to offer advice." Kate stared at the machine, wondering what on earth the woman was talking about. She shook her head at the neighborhood busybody and dismissed her from her mind.

Fortunately, the third message was from Jules.

"Hi, Kate. I, um, I suppose you're asleep, and don't bother calling me back. I just wanted to say thanks for yesterday; I really enjoyed it. Especially when that guy in the next lane who was giving you a hard time turned around and dropped the ball on his foot. God, that was funny. Anyway, thanks, I really had a great time, and, if you ever want to do it again, I'd love to. I mean, not just the same things, but anything. Oh, this is Jules - I forgot to say. As if you wouldn't have guessed by now, duh. Gotta run - the French club's going to the beach. Bye, Kate. And thanks again. Bye."

Kate was grinning when the tape clucked to itself, and she pushed herself off the stairs to go shower.

The message from Jules was to prove the high point of a very long and very trying week, a week designed by malevolent fate to push the most phlegmatic of detectives over the edge. Kate was not exactly riding the most even of keels to begin with.

Monday her car would not start.

Cable car and bus got her to work late, irritable, and with leg muscles still quivering from Sunday's run, to find that Al Hawkin was out with the flu and she had been paired with Sammy Calvo, easily the most abrasive and inefficient detective in the city. And of course they caught a call first thing, so she had the pleasure of listening to his offensive jokes - told in all innocence; he truly could not comprehend why a woman might not think a rape joke funny - and going back over his interviews to see what he had left out.

Tuesday, the tow truck was delayed, so she was late a second time. She was further irritated by the truck driver's friendly offer to take Lee's Saab down from its blocks so Kate could drive it - because the thought had already occurred to her and been squelched by the need to reinstate its insurance at a moment's notice, by the knowledge of the comments a Saab convertible would stir up when she climbed out of it at a crime scene in one of the more unsavory parts of town, but mostly by pride. The car was Lee's; Kate would have nothing to do with it.

Wednesday, she sat in the department's unmarked car and had a shouting match with Sammy Calvo over his treatment of a witness, the fifteen-year-old mother of the child whose death they were investigating. His final querulous remark made her blood pressure soar: "I don't understand why you're so hot about this, Katy. I just asked her if she'd ever heard of the Pill." Although sorely tempted to whack him over the head with the clipboard he invariably carried, she satisfied herself with snarling, "It's because you're an insensitive jerk, Sammy. And for Christ's sake, don't call me Katy." She slammed the door of the car behind her and went back into the house to calm the teary young mother and her angry family, finally retrieving some of the answers she needed.

It was a long time until night, and longer still before she came through the door of the house, her very skin aching with the stress and frustrations of a fourteen-hour day, aching for a friendly voice, aching for Lee, aching, most of all, for a drink, many drinks; craving alcohol like a drowning person craves air, she yearned for the world's oldest painkiller to knock the edges off the intolerable day. She heaved her things onto the kitchen table, plucked a bottle of wine from the rack without looking to see what kind it was, took it over to the drawer to get the corkscrew, and then stood with the corkscrew in one hand as a strong and distressing thought intruded itself into her actions.

How long has it been since you did not finish off the better part of a bottle of wine at night? Since the middle of August, maybe?

Oh God - she shook her head - not tonight, no guilt tonight. It's been a hell of a day.

What day isn't? If not tonight, when?

Fuck off; it's only wine.

Only…?

I want a drink.

Or six.

She stood there for a very long time, aching and frightened and knowing at last, on this gray and dreary night, that she was walking on the edge of a precipice, the one that began with just a bit of letting go and ended up with a few shortcuts and reassuring herself that nobody would notice, until finally she would be just another cop who gave up the fight, a woman who couldn't cut it with the big boys, a lesbian who wasn't as good as she thought. And no, she was not exaggerating the importance of this night's bottle of wine that she held in her hands, because she had at last admitted that if she opened it, the wine would be drinking her, not she it, and if knowing that, she went ahead, then she was also being consumed by tomorrow's bottle, and Friday's…

And oh God, who would care? She put the point of the corkscrew to the foil over the cork, and no further.

It was, oddly enough, Jules who pulled her back from the edge, that annoying young reminder of yet another responsibility unmet. The thought of Jules was bracing. Maddening, but bracing, like a slap in the face. She put the bottle away and made herself a cup of hot milk in the microwave, then sat with it at the kitchen table while she sorted through the mail.

Junk mail, bills, catalogs, Psychology Today and the Disability Rag for Lee (at least she hasn't changed the addresses on her subscriptions, Kate thought with black humor), and two letters - one for Lee, one from Lee.

She put everything but this last in a precise stack, largest on the bottom and smallest on top, the lower left corners aligned. She leaned the cheap envelope addressed to her in Lee's heavy black pen against the saltcellar, then took a swig from her mug, grimaced, got up and found an apple and a piece of leathery pizza in the refrigerator, and ate them standing at the sink. Then she took a can of split pea soup from the cupboard and two slices of bread from the refrigerator, opened the can, put half of the soup into a bowl and put that in the microwave oven, dropped the bread into the toaster, ate the soup, ate one slice of toast plain and the other with a sprinkling from the clotted shaker of cinnamon sugar, reached into the cupboard for the bag of coffee beans and then put them down on the sink and turned and took three steps to the table and ran a finger under the flap of the envelope and pulled the slip of paper out and smoothed it open on top of the table with one rapid hand before it could burn her. Then, because it lay open before her, Kate read Lee's brief letter.

"Dearest Kate," it began. That was something, anyway. Doing well, getting stronger. Learning to use a hatchet, could Kate believe that? Wearing one of Agatha's flannel shirts and a down vest, cold mornings. Beautiful trees. Strong hills on wise islands. Pods of orcas in the Sound. All of burgeoning nature helping her to find herself, transferring the energy of the hills into her body. Still confused, though, and sorry, so very, abjectly sorry, to be putting Kate through this, but…

But she couldn't say when she would be home. But Kate couldn't come to visit. But she couldn't tell Kate what to say to her clients, her friends. But as soon as she had her head together, Kate would be the first to know, be patient. "Love, Lee."

Kate looked down at her hand on the table. She had clawed the page together into her fist and it lay there now in a tight wad. She opened her hand, picked at the edges of the letter, smoothed it onto the tabletop with long movements of her hand as if trying to bond it to the wood of the table. She leaned forward, stood, pushing the chair away with the backs of her knees, and turned away.

Beaten, flayed, and too weary to weep, Kate went upstairs to bed.

Thursday's brightest spot came early, when Kate succeeded in running two miles and still managed a (very slow) near jog coming back up the hill. The rest of the day went downhill fast.

On Friday, Hawkin was back, and she and Calvo went out to the Sunset and arrested the dead child's father, a pleasant, rather stupid, frightened, unemployed eighth-grade dropout who had been abused himself as a child and who sobbed uncontrollably when Kate read him his rights, then - sure sign they had arrested the right man - fell asleep in the squad car from sheer relief.

His interview and confession brought no satisfaction. He was only a cog in a deadly mechanism, grinding on to produce yet more poverty and brutality. He was no killer, yet he killed, unforgivably, his own child.

Al Hawkin was near the interview room when Kate came out. Waiting for her? He dropped in beside her as she marched away.

"Al, good to see you. You should be home; you look like hell."

"How'd it go?"

"We got a confession."

"And?"

"And what? He'll go to prison and get himself a fine set of muscles in the weight room, and when he gets out, he'll find his girlfriend has two more kids by two other men, and everyone will go on beating everyone else, happily ever after."

"One of those days, I see."

"Do you ever think, Al, that maybe someone should just sterilize the whole goddamn human race, admit that it was a mistake, leave the planet to the dolphins and the cockroaches?"

"Often. Let's go get some dinner."

"I can't, Al. I have to see a man about a car."

"What kind of car?"

"A piece of junk, by the sound of it, but cheap."

"Oh, right. Tony said you'd been having car problems."

"I don't have a problem now. I just don't have a car. Three thousand dollars to fix it so it won't quit on me - I don't have the money."

"What's wrong with Lee's?"

"Nothing. Everything. It's too complicated to go into, Al. And Jon lent his to a friend while he's away."

"So where's the car you're looking at?"

"It's just up Van Ness."

"I'll take you; then we can have dinner."

"If I'm buying, it's a deal."

The car proved impossible, too big to park, too shaky to corner, and probably had had its odometer turned back at some point. They went to a Greek pizza house to eat a feta and pesto pizza, and at 9:30 Hawkin pulled up in front of her empty house and turned off the engine.

"Lee's not back yet," he said after a glance at the windows.

"Nope."

"You heard from her?"

"Short letters. They're in her handwriting, but they're not Lee."

"What's going on?"

"Ah, shit, Al, I wish I knew." When he continued to study the side of her face, she sighed and squinted at the house. "She's been getting flaky over the last few months. She said she wants —" She stopped, realizing that she really didn't want to go into Lee's fantasies and desires, not even with Al. "She wants all kinds of things she can't have, in the shape she's in. And she's become secretive. She's never been one to hide anything, but suddenly there were all these things she wouldn't talk to me about - Lee the therapist's therapist, who's always talked over every little nuance, suddenly there were these areas she'd go silent about."

"Any pattern to them?" asked Hawkin the detective.

"Any discussion about the future was off-limits. Her future, our future."

"You think she wants out?" he asked bluntly.

"I did finally ask her that; she seemed, I don't know, shocked. Desperately unhappy that I'd think it. She's just going through a lot of stuff, I think," Kate said weakly. "Part of it has to do with her job - you know she's dropped most of the AIDS therapy? She hated to give it up, but it was too much for her, after the shooting. She doesn't have any stamina. She's seeing a lot more women now, and kids. I thought it might be money that was bugging her, because we still have heavy bills and she's not earning much, but when I suggested we move, she got really upset. I mean, look at this place. The taxes are unbelievable. She could retire on what it would bring, but she wouldn't hear of selling it - 'Not yet,' she said."

"It is a beautiful house."

"I'm beginning to hate it. It's like living in a mausoleum. And that car of hers in the garage - she'll never drive it; she could sell it and buy something with manual controls and still have money left over, but she won't hear of it. Won't even say why, just refuses to talk about it."

They sat in the cooling car, neither of them making a move to go. Hawkin finally spoke.

"She may be finding it difficult to choose a future, having so very nearly had none, and then for a long time able to see only an intolerable future. Choices must be… painful. I just hope for your sake this phase doesn't go on too long."

"I think that's part of it," Kate surprised herself by saying. "I think she's testing me. Seeing just how long my patience will last. Seeing if I still love her."

"Or maybe —"

"Maybe what?"

"Hell, Kate, I'm no marriage counselor. I screwed up my own marriage thoroughly, too, so I'm no one to talk."

"Just tell me. I'm a big girl."

"Well, maybe what Lee needs to know is not how long you'll continue to be patient, but how long it will be before you get your own feet back under you, the way she's done."

"What do you mean?"

"The Lee Cooper I knew before she took a bullet in the spine, which I admit was not long, would have hated the thought of being in an unequal, dependent relationship."

"But I've been so careful to maintain her independence. Jon and I have sweated to let her be strong."

"I don't mean Lee has been dependent. I mean you."

"What are you talking about?" Kate asked testily.

"Caring for an invalid can be addictive," Hawkin said simply, and Kate felt as if the air had been thumped from her lungs. "I'm not saying it's the case, but I'm wondering if Lee might have thought you were becoming dependent - on her dependence, if that makes sense."

Kate sat there, struck dumb by the bolt of his perception. She remembered Lee saying it wasn't her legs not working that made her a cripple. "I'm a cripple because I can't stand alone," Lee had said, "I can't stand alone when I'm surrounded by people who want to protect me."

"Kate," Al was saying, "listen, don't take my amateur psychologizing to heart. I think you should go talk to one of the department's shrinks. You got along well with Mosley last year, didn't you? Go see him again. I mean that, Kate."

"Yes, I hear you. I think you're right, Al - not just about that, though I suppose I should go and have a talk with him, but about the other, as well. I must have been smothering her. No wonder she went off with Aunt Agatha."

"Is that the name?"

"You haven't met her. A rare treat," she said bitterly.

"Kate," he said, in a voice almost soft with affection, "just forget it all for the weekend, get some rest."

"I'll try to forget it, but I won't get much rest, not if I'm hunting down a car."

"And you told Jules you'd do something with her Sunday, didn't you? I'll warn her you may have to back out."

"Don't do that. I'll make it somehow."

"You don't have to."

"I want to."

"You're good for her, Kate," he said unexpectedly. "It does her good to be around someone like you. Her mother…" He paused, drumming his fingers on the bottom of the steering wheel. "Jani is a remarkable woman who has come through more than her fair share of hell. She's a strong woman, but only in some areas, and I'm afraid she's most unsure about herself in just those places that Jules needs her to be strong. I don't suppose I'm making much sense, but it's a long and ugly story and not for tonight. I just wanted to say that we both appreciate the efforts you've gone to for Jules."

"It's not an effort, Al. I like Jules."

"I like her, too. I love the girl. But I sometimes wonder just what the hell I was thinking, volunteering to go through the whole teenage thing all over again with a kid who makes my first two look like saints."

"Oh, come on, Al, you must be getting old. I know she and Jani are having a rough time, but I got the strong impression that she feels comfortable with you."

"Thank God for that," he said under his breath.

"You're not telling me that there's some real problem with Jules, are you?" Belatedly, she remembered Rosa Hidalgo's peculiar message on the answering machine.

"Jules was very nearly expelled from her school last month - the very first week of classes."

"Jules?" Kate said incredulously. "What on earth for?"

"She had her English teacher in tears and then said some inexcusable things to the principal. We had to promise to get her into therapy before they would let her back in."

"I can't believe it."

"Believe it."

"But why? She seems so… together. Balanced."

"She did to me, too, until suddenly in the last few months… I have an idea of what set her off, but she won't talk about it. It's basically an accumulation of things: her brains, her history, her mother, her mother's history, puberty - like I said, I can't get into it now, even if I had Jani's permission. Let's just say there's a big head of pressure inside Jules, and some of it finds its way out in anger. Being with you seems to help her a lot, though. She becomes almost herself again for a while."

Kate stared out the window, then shook her head slowly. "I wish you hadn't told me."

"You'd have to know sooner or later. In fact, the psychologist Jules is going to wants to see you."

"No."

"Why not?"

It had been an instinctive response, and Kate searched for the reasons behind it. After a minute, she said hesitantly, "I think it might be a mistake to identify me with all the other adults in her life. If I am important to Jules, as you seem to think, it's because I'm an outsider. Kids her age think in terms of 'them' and 'us'. You wouldn't gain anything by making me one of her 'thems'." And, she added to herself, I could lose the friendship of someone I've grown surprisingly fond of.

"You could be right."

"I'm always right, Al. High time you recognized that." She put on a smile and turned it toward him.

"I'll keep it in mind," he said, matching her light tone.

"I've got to go, Al," she said. "There's a raccoon who comes by to pick up his hush money about now, and if I don't give it to him, he starts pulling shingles off the house. See you Sunday."

Even in the dim light, Kate could see her partner waver, then decide not to ask what she was talking about. Instead, he just said, "Good. And don't worry if you haven't got a car sorted out by then; you're welcome to use Jani's or mine."

"Thanks. Good night."

"Night, Kate. Thanks for the pizza."

She stood and watched him drive cautiously down Green Street; then his left signal went on and he turned south toward his own, increasingly seldom-used house in the Sunset district. She lifted her head to the sky, where no stars were visible, and then turned and dug around for her key. Damn and blast, she thought; the one thing in my life just now that I thought was uncomplicated turns out to be on the edge of an explosion. Jules, what the hell is up?

Gideon was prowling about the edge of the patio and heard her come in. When she crossed the living room to the glass doors, he was staring in at her, nose against the glass, his small eyes glittering malevolently from the burglar's mask of his markings. She cracked open the door, tossed out a handful of the multicolored dog biscuits, and watched him waddle over and choose one. He sat with his back to her and crunched his way through one after another, then hoisted himself up and stalked away into the shrubbery. The small dog next door barked hysterically until the neighbor cursed and a door slammed. Silence descended. Kate locked the door and went sober to bed, and it was not until her head was on the pillow that she remembered Al Hawkin's earlier little torpedo, before the revelation about Jules and her problems.

Jesus, she thought, staring up at the pattern of lights on the ceiling, Lee left because I was smothering her, and now Al says I'm still smothering her from a thousand miles away. It's not enough that I nearly killed her; I have to suffocate her, as well.

Nineteen months before, Kate had nearly been the death of Lee. It was Kate's job that gave Lee a bullet in the spine, and the fact that she was against Lee's involvement in the case from the beginning had nothing to do with it. She should have insisted.

But she had not, and Lee had nearly died. The doctors had told Kate that Lee probably would die, but she had not. They had told Lee she was almost certainly a paraplegic, but she regained the use of her feet. Then they warned her that she was about at the limits of what could reasonably be expected in the way of recovery, but Lee no longer listened to doctors. She no longer listened to anyone, for that matter; certainly not to Kate.

The months since the shooting had been a constant round of adjusting to Lee's varying needs. When Lee was feeling strong, Kate would back off; when Lee was immersed in despair, Kate was a bastion of encouragement. A year and a half of guilt and struggle and financial problems, week after week of Lee's agonizingly slow progress, losing ground and clawing back, all of Kate's existence, even at work, geared to her lover's ever-changing needs, her physical suffering and her blind determination and those odd pockets of cold air that appeared without warning, unexpected areas of extreme sensitivity such as Lee's Saab: symbolic, emotionally charged, tabu.

After all these months, Kate no longer paused to think, just reacted automatically in her role as counterpoise, shifting as required, making all the minute adjustments that kept the marriage balanced, because the one thing that could not be allowed, that must not happen no matter the cost, was that the balance collapse. The end of the marriage was the end of everything.

But now, there was no weight to balance. Caring for an invalid might not be addictive, but it was clearly habit-forming. She had to admit that she'd been sent sprawling when her burden was removed; it was time now to adjust, she told herself. Get used to an empty house. There might even be a degree of satisfaction to be found in having only her own wants and needs to take into account.

She lay there, considering Al's brutally honest judgment, running her mind over the texture of her relationship with Lee, becoming more and more convinced that he was right. She was smothering Lee. She would stop it. She contemplated how she would go about freeing Lee and herself, and as she lay there, she grew more awake every minute, until she was twitching as if she'd had two or three double espressos rather than a cup of weak decaffeinated coffee. Finally, she threw off the covers, went into Lee's study, and began to write a letter.

It was a long letter, full of love and understanding, of apology and the commitment to change for the better. The phrases flowed, two pages filled, three: "Lee," she wrote, "I am so grateful to Al for pointing out what I was doing; it must have been intolerable to you, even though you knew I was only trying to help. But I'm aware of it now, and I promise to keep hands off your life. I'll let you walk through the SoMa district at midnight if you want; I'll —"

She stood up so rapidly, the chair fell over backward, and she hurled the pen across the room and took the letter and tore it down the middle, then again, and a third time. She walked out of the study, turning off the lights behind her, then, picking up a warm blanket from her bed, went out onto the balcony. There she sat, bundled up, looking out across the northern edges of the city at the waters of the Golden Gate, reflected in lights from shore and ship and the island opposite.

Yes, Al, I'm terrified. I'm so angry at her, I never want to see her again, but if she doesn't come back, I don't know what I'll do. I can't imagine life without her; it would be like imagining life without air. I love her and I hate her and I'm lost, completely lost without her, and all I can do is wait for her to tell me what she is going to do with me.

She slept, finally, and woke in the deck chair, with a mocking-bird singing and Saturday's sun coming up. She watched the dawn, and as the sky lightened, her inner decision dawned as well, until, with a peculiar mixture of bitter satisfaction and gleeful mischief, she knew what she was going to do.

Sunday morning, Al Hawkin pulled open the door of his fiancée's apartment and stood blinking at the apparition in the hallway. He had reassured himself through the peephole that the unidentifiable figure had no visible weapon, and now he pulled the belt of his robe a bit tighter and ran a hand across his grizzled hair.

"Can I help you with something, er, ma'am?" he asked uncertainly. "What apartment number were you —' The figure before him reached a gloved hand up to the helmet strap, bent over to remove it, and straightened up, shaking her hair out of her face. Even then, for a split second he failed to recognize her; she had more life in her face than he'd ever seen there.

"Kate!" She grinned at him, glowing with enthusiasm and exuding waves of fresh air. He ran an eye over her, new boots, new gloves, old leather bomber jacket a bit snug around the waist, the massive new helmet under one arm. "Let me guess," he said, stepping back to let her in. "You bought your new car. What kind?"

Jules came out of the kitchen behind him and stopped dead. "Why are you wearing that outfit, Kate?" she asked, but Kate answered her partner.

"A Kawasaki."

"Kawasaki doesn't make an automobile," he said, studying her leather jacket.

"By God, the man's a detective."

"You're not thinking of taking Jules out on it?"

A cry of protest rose from the kitchen door, but Kate ignored it. "Of course not," she said, and her grin became even wider. "Can I borrow the car keys, Dad?"

OCTOBER,

NOVEMBER

FIVE

October came. Jon arrived back from Boston and London, flitted around the edge of Kate's vision for a few days, and, before she could catch hold of him, was off to Mexico with his friend. Short letters from Lee: She was well, getting stronger. Yesterday she'd dug clams for dinner; had cut a cord of stove wood already, could Kate believe that? And the trees were so beautiful, so calming. Finding herself, yet still filled with confusion, and sorry, so very sorry, to be putting Kate through all this, but…

But she still couldn't say when she'd be home.

In October, Kate's baffled anguish began to turn, to harden. Her letters north became shorter, sharper. She bruised her thigh once too often on Lee's chair lift at the top of the stairs, and in a fury at two o'clock one morning she took a wrench to it, dismantled it, and heaved the seat, followed by the wrench, into Lee's room, the room that had once been theirs. The next things to go were Lee's books in the dining room, again into Lee's room. She began deliberately to leave the dishes in the sink overnight, for two nights, a thing neither Lee nor Jon could have tolerated. She even began to leave the bed unmade and the cap off the toothpaste.

October settled into a pattern of work and home. Her new form of transport set off another flurry of raucous comments and irritating harassments from her co-workers, and she lost count of the number of Xeroxed articles about Dykes on Bikes she had found on her desk or tucked into the cycle, but she had, after all, expected something of the sort, and if her teeth ached from being gritted, at least she did not show that any of it bothered her.

She told herself that it would pass, and concentrated on the pleasures of a motorcycle in California. The fall weather held, a whole month of Indian summer, and she took long rides north into the wine country and the mountainous land behind it, glorying in the nearly forgotten freedom and sweet spark of risk that two wheels brought. When she needed four wheels, she hired the neighbor with his immaculately restored 1948 Chevy pickup, or she used Al's car. Even the house on Russian Hill did not seem quite so aggressively empty as it had; merely quiescent.

By the end of the month, the pleasure of her minor rebellions against the absent householders began to wane, when she found an unmade pile of sheets and blankets an unbearably slovenly greeting at the end of a long day, and found, too, that leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube made the contents go hard and stale. Still, she allowed the dishes to accumulate until she had no clean ones, vacuumed and swept only when her feet began to notice the grit, and ate when and what she felt like, rediscovering the illicit joys of pizza for breakfast and cereal with ice cream on top for dinner. She ran every morning, got the weights out of storage and set them up in Lee's consultation rooms, and began to sleep more soundly.

Other pleasures slowly began to reemerge into her life, as well. Before the shooting, she and Lee had had a few friends - not many, but good people, mostly women. Then for the long months of Lee's recovery, Lee had possessed friendly helpers, and Kate had had her work.

Now, in her solitary life, the arid landscape showed signs of softening. Rosalyn Hall, a minister in the gay community, invited her to help at the church's annual Halloween bash for the neighborhood kids. Kate dutifully went, a cop doing a community service, but long after the neighborhood had retrieved its well-sugared offspring, and even after the minister's adopted daughter had been put to bed for the fourth and final time, Kate was still there, sitting and talking and drinking beer with Rosalyn and her partner, Maj.

"Do you know the word for that shape of a liquid when it sticks up over the top of a glass?" she asked, examining her freshly filled glass with a somewhat owlish seriousness. The two women shook their heads in equally inebriated interest. "It's called meniscus." Kate had finally found a use for a "word of the day." The word, and the evening, were successes, and when the two women asked her for Thanksgiving dinner, she went, not as a cop, but a family member.

She even had a single, sort of, almost date, when a woman she knew in the DA's office called and asked if Kate wanted to use a theater ticket intended for a friend, who was sick with the flu. Before leaving the house, Kate contemplated the thin gold band on her left hand. She even pulled it off, briefly, but in the end it stayed on her hand for the world to see, and the evening remained merely friendly. Which, she decided later, was much the better. The last thing she needed was another complication in her life.

As Kate's muscles toughened along with her attitude, other physical pleasures took the place of the one. She found she enjoyed the sensation of wearing her leathers and her cycle boots. She rediscovered the joys of growing physical strength and ability, and she thought about rejoining a martial art group.

But the true high point in the month was Jules's thirteenth birthday. Following a lengthy consultation with Al and Jani, Kate arrived at the Cameron apartment on the Saturday following the actual day, in her full cycle regalia and carrying a box under one arm. That afternoon, Jules rode behind her on the cycle, wearing the new (secondhand) leather jacket and the helmet that Kate had bought for the back of the Kawasaki.

They went to San Francisco, at Jules's request. They cruised the streets, circling the tourist sites and through Chinatown, up the steep hills and down the drop-offs. Toward the end of the day, Jules decided that she wanted to parade through the Hall of Justice to show off her finery. Kate told her that few of Hawkin's colleagues would be in, but Jules wanted to go, so to the Hall of Justice they went, with Jules swaggering through the corridors in Kate's wake.

It wasn't until they reached the Homicide Department that Kate began to realize that this wasn't such a hot idea, but by then it was too late. When they stepped out of the elevator, two men she knew slightly were getting on, and as Kate paused to exchange a word with one of them, the other looked at Jules's retreating back, glanced at Kate, and then in a loud and jovial voice said, "Isn't she kind of young for you, Martinelli?"

Kate whipped around to find Jules, but the girl had already cleared the corner. When she looked back at the man, the elevator door was closing, but she heard the other man saying, "Jesus, Mark, put your foot in it, why don't you? That was the daughter of Al Hawkin's —' The door closed on the rest of it.

It had probably not been meant cruelly, or even crudely; the man Mark was simply one of those who thought that the way to demonstrate tolerance for gay women was to treat them as one of the boys. Still, when Kate caught up with Jules, she looked closely for red ears or other signs of discomfort, and was relieved when she found it obvious that the girl had not heard him. Kate got her out of there as soon as she could, infinitely grateful that the bad taste was only in her own mouth.

And still, all that fall, she looked for Dio. Once a week, she made the rounds of the homeless, asking about him. Always she asked among her network of informants, the dealers and hookers and petty thieves, whenever she saw one of them, and invariably received a shake of the head. Twice she heard rumors of him, once at a house for runaway teenagers, where one of the current residents had a friend who had met a boy of his description, over on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, or it might have been College Avenue, though it might have been Dion instead of Dio; and a second time, when one of her informants told her there was a boy-toy of that name in a house used by pederasts over near the marina. She phoned a couple of old friends in the Berkeley and Oakland departments to ask them to keep an ear out, and she arranged to be in on the raid of the marina house, but neither came up with anything more substantial than the ghost she already had. She doubted he was in the Bay Area, and told Jules that, but she also kept looking.

That autumn, in one of those flukes that even the statistician will admit happens occasionally, it seemed for a while that every case the Homicide Department handled involved kids, either as victim or perpetrator, or both. A two-year-old with old scars on his back and broken bones in various states of mending died in an emergency room from having been shaken violently by his eighteen-year-old mother. Three boys aged sixteen to twenty died from gunshot wounds in less than a month. Four bright seventeen-year-old students in a private school did a research project on explosives, using the public library, and sent a very effective pipe bomb to a hated teacher. It failed, but only because the man was as paranoid as he was infuriating, and had called the police before he touched the parcel; the four were charged with conspiracy and attempted murder, and might well be tried as adults. A seven-year-old in a pirate costume was separated from his friends on Halloween; he was found the next morning, raped and bludgeoned to death; the investigation was pointing toward a trio of boys only four years older. Kate saw two of her colleagues in tears within ten days, one of them a tough, experienced beat cop who had seen everything but still couldn't bring himself to look again at the baby in the cot. The detectives on the fourth floor of the Department of Justice made morbid jokes about it being the Year of the Child, and they either answered the phone gingerly or with a snarl, according to their personalities.

NOVEMBER,

DECEMBER

SIX

The end of November drew near.

Christmas lights went up in celebration of the feast of Thanksgiving, and the following morning, still bloated from her dinner at the house of Rosalyn and Maj, Kate rode around Union Square on her way to the Hall of Justice, just to look at the windows of the big stores, filled with lace and gilt, velvet and silks, sprinkled with white flakes to evoke the wintery stuff seen in San Francisco perhaps twice in a century, set up to attract throngs of shoppers anxious to recapture the fantasies of a Victorian childhood, no matter the cost. The pickpockets and car thieves had a merry season, a coke dealer in the Tenderloin took to wrapping his packets in shiny red and green foil, Al and Jani set their date for the eighteenth of December, and people went on killing one another.

It was wet and miserable outside three days later, on the last Monday of November - a fact Kate could well attest to, as she'd been out in it a fair part of the day, following up witnesses to a domestic shooting in Chinatown. She had used departmental vehicles for the trips out, but she was now faced with either climbing into her damp moon-walk outfit, which would keep her mostly dry on the motorcycle, or getting a ride up the hill and having to cope with public transport in the morning.

The phone on her desk rang. She eyed it sourly, making no move to answer it. At the fourth ring, the man at the next desk looked up.

"Hey, Martinelli," he called. "That thing's called a tel-uh-phone. You pick it up and talk into one end, voices come from the other. Really fun, you should try it."

"Gee, thanks, Tommy boy. Thing is, my psychic reader told me never to answer any call that comes two minutes before I want to leave - it's sure to be a bad omen."

They both sat and watched it ring.

"Who's on call?" he asked.

"Calvo." There was no need to say more: They both knew he would be late. He was always late.

"Could be the lottery," he suggested.

"I never buy lottery tickets."

It rang on.

"You answer it, Tommy."

"It's my wife's birthday tonight; she'd kill me if I was late."

Ring. Ring.

"If you wait long enough, the shift will be over and you can leave."

Ring.

"Sounds pretty determined," he commented.

Kate stretched out a hand and picked up the instrument. "Inspector Martinelli."

"Kate? I thought I had missed you. This is Grace Kokumah, over at the Haight/Love Shelter. We talked, three, four weeks ago?" Her voice added a slight question mark at the end of the sentence, but Kate knew her instantly: a big, dignified black-black African woman with the flavor of her native Uganda rich in her voice and her hair in a zillion tiny glossy braids that ended in orange beads. Kate had met her three years before, when Lee had worked with her on the case of a fourteen-year-old boy with AIDS.

"Yes, Grace, how are you? Enjoying the rain?" Too many years of drought made rain the central topic of most winter conversations.

"We have many holes in our roof, Kate Martinelli, so I do not enjoy the rain, no. We have run out of buckets. The entire neighborhood has run out of buckets. We are making soup in roasting pans because our pots are busy catching drips. Kate, are you still interested in a boy called Dio?"

Thoughts of time clocks and home vanished.

"Do you have him there?"

"I do not have him, no. But one of my girls, who heard from a friend of a friend… You know?"

"Is she there? Will she talk to me?"

"To the famous Inspector Casey Martinelli? Yes."

Kate made a face at the receiver.

"I think it is better for you to come here," Grace suggested. "Tonight?"

"I can be there in half an hour, less if the traffic's clear."

"We will be very busy for the next hour, Kate. We are just serving dinner. Best you come a little later, when we have finished with the dishes. Then Kitty will be free to talk with you."

"If I come now, can you use a hand, with serving or washing?"

Grace's laugh was rich and deep. "Now I think you know that to be one stupid question, Inspector Martinelli."

"Fine, see you soon." She dropped the phone onto its hook and started to gather up her papers.

"Sounds like a hot date there, Martinelli."

"Sure you don't want to bring your wife? Dinner at the soup kitchen, give her a slice of life for her birthday present?"

"It's not my wife's birthday. What gave you that crazy idea?"

"I can't think. G'night, Tommy."

"Stay dry. So much for your psychic reader."

Kate's steps faltered briefly as his words triggered a vivid memory: Jules, speaking with such seriousness about her long-past childhood, when she lay in bed inventing horrors as a talisman to keep the real ones at bay. Anything that can be imagined won't happen.

Now why should I think of that? Kate asked herself as she waited for the elevator. Dio, I guess, and Jules, and meeting Dio at last and what I will see in his eyes and his nose and his skin, how far gone he'll be.

The serving was over and the nonresident recipients were reluctantly scattering for their beds in doorways and Dumpsters and the bushes of Golden Gate Park when Kate blew into the Haight/Love Shelter. Grace Kokumah stood with her hands in the pockets of her sagging purple cardigan and watched without expression as Kate came to a halt next to the thin and already-yellowing Christmas tree and dropped her burden with a clatter before beginning to strip off the astronaut helmet, the dripping and voluminous orange neck-to-ankle waterproof jumpsuit, and the padded gloves. When Kate had popped open the snaps on her leather jacket and run a hand through her brief hair, the woman shook her beads.

"The city's finest, a vision to behold."

"Do you want the buckets or don't you?" Kate growled.

"Where did you find them?" She studied the waist-high stack, no doubt wondering instead how Kate had managed to transport them without being lifted up, cycle and all, by their wind resistance and dropped into the San Francisco Bay.

"Stole them from the morgue; they use them for the scraps. Joke! That was a joke!" she said to the horrified young people at Grace's back. "Macabre cop humor, you've heard of that. The cleaners buy soap in them, nothing worse than that. Do you have anything to eat? I'm starving."

"This is a soup kitchen, despite the temporary absence of stockpots. We have bean soup tonight, which has had a dry ham bone waved through it, we have white bread with margarine, and we have weak orange drink."

"The season of plenty, I see. Do I have to wash dishes first?"

"A person who brings us eight five-gallon buckets is permitted to eat before she labors. Kitty, would you please show Kate where to wash her hands, and then give her a bowl of soup?"

Once in the cramped corridor that wrapped around the kitchen, Kate touched the girl's arm.

"Grace tells me you might help me find a boy named Dio."

The girl cringed and fluttered her hands to shush Kate. "Not here. Later. I'll come to Grace's room." She scurried off.

So, Kate thought, I wash dishes after all.

After bean soup, and after a largely symbolic contribution to the piles of dirty dishes, Grace rescued her and sent her off to the room she used as counseling center, doctor's examining room, office, and, occasionally, extra bedroom. Within five minutes Kitty skulked in, shutting the door noiselessly behind her. She wasted no time with small talk.

"You're lookin' for a guy named Dio?"

"That's what he called himself last summer, yes."

"What do you want him for?"

"I don't, particularly. Why don't you sit down, Kitty?"

"God, I don't know if I should do this. I mean, I don't know you."

Kate reached into the pocket she'd taken to using instead of the awkward handbag and held out her identification folder between two fingers, mostly as a means of keeping the girl from bolting. Kitty took it, looked at it curiously, handed it back. She sat down and studied Kate's tired face, recently cropped hair, and biker's leathers.

"You look different."

Kate snapped shut the picture of the good Italian girl with the soft hair and the wary smile without glancing at it.

"Don't we all."

"You are that dyke cop whose girlfriend got shot?" she asked uncertainly. Kate did not wince, did not even pause in the motion of putting the ID back into her pocket.

"Yep. Now, tell me, how did you hear I was looking for Dio?"

"Grace put it on the notice board. Course, I don't know if it's the same guy, but it's not like a common name, is it?"

"She posted a notice that I was looking for Dio?"

"Not you. Just that there's word for him. You haven't seen the board? It's in the dining hall, just a bunch of those really ugly black cork squares Grace glued up and sticks notices on, like if someone calls her from Arkansas or something saying, "Have you seen my little girl? Tell her to call Mummy." There's just his name and a note to see Grace. Lots of them have that. She talks to kids and tries to convince them to call home, once they know someone's interested." From the way she spoke, nobody at home had expressed any interest in Kitty for some time.

"So you met Dio."

"Not me. A friend. No, really," she said, seeing Kate's skeptical look. "This guy I met walking down the Panhandle, you know? He gave me a cigarette - and honest, it was just a cigarette. Grace throws you out if she smells weed on you. Anyway, we got to talking about, well, things, you know? And he came back here for dinner and to look at the board and see if maybe… Well, there wasn't nothing for him on it, but then he sees the name Dio and acts kind of surprised, and he goes, "I thought Dio was an orphan," and I go, "You should tell Dio his name is up" - I mean, not like anyone wants to go home, you know, but still, it doesn't hurt to make a-phone call, does it, and they might send some money or something. Well, anyway, he said he'd tell Dio if he saw him."

"When was this?"

"Last week. Friday maybe. Thursday? No, I remember, it was Friday because we had a tuna casserole and we talked about Catholics and that fish thing they used to have."

"Have you seen him since then?"

"Well, yeah, I mean, that's why I talked to Grace, isn't it, "cause Bo - because my friend asked me to. He came here this afternoon. Well, really this morning, but I wasn't here, so he came back. He said he found Dio, and he's really sick - Dio is, I mean - and a couple of Dio's friends are really worried about him."

"Sick how? OD?" If so, he'd be long dead.

"I don't think so. Bo - my friend said he was coughing real bad, for the last week or so."

"Why didn't his friends take him to the emergency room? Or the free clinic?"

"Well, that part I didn't really understand. There's something about this guy Dio lives with, him and a bunch of other kids, all of them guys, I think. Anyway, there's this old guy who kind of heads up the place they're living in. It's a squat in a warehouse the other side of Market, down where the docks are? Anyway he - the old guy - doesn't like outsiders, like doctors."

I'll bet he doesn't, Kate thought bleakly. "I'd like to talk to your friend about this."

"He said no, he doesn't want nothing to do with it. He's just worried about Dio and thinks somebody should take him out of there before he dies or something. He'd probably freak if he knew I was talking to a cop about it. He said he doesn't want the old guy to know, 'cause he makes my friend nervous. Oh, there's nothing wrong with him. I mean, he takes care of the kids and doesn't feel them up or anything, but he's just… weird. That's what Bo says, anyway. Bo's my friend."

Secondhand and from a limited vocabulary like Kitty's, "weird" could mean anything from a drooling madman to an Oxbridgian with a plummy accent and boutonniere.

"Okay, I'll go see him. And I won't tell how I knew he was there. What's the address?"

Kitty had to stand up to get her hand into the pockets of her skintight jeans. She pulled out a grubby scrap of paper folded multiple times into a wad. Kate unfolded it, saw that the address was clear enough, and put it into her own pocket.

"Thanks, Kitty. I'll do what I can. It was good of you to take the chance, talking to me."

"Yeah, well. If us kids on the street don't look after each other, who will?"

The rain was taking a break when Kate left the center, and the wind had dropped below gale force, so she decided to go by the address on the scrap of paper Kitty had given her. She was almost surprised to find, when she got there, that it actually existed. It proved to be a deserted three-story warehouse with plywood sheets nailed up across all the ground-floor windows, in an area slated for redevelopment. Kate went past it slowly, continued on a couple of blocks, and then doubled back, blessing the Kawasaki's efficient muffler system. Pushing the big machine into a recessed entranceway that stank of urine but was at the moment unoccupied, she climbed out of the bright orange jumpsuit, opened the storage box, took out a long flashlight and shoved in the wet jumpsuit, closed and locked the top, and clamped her helmet onto the bike with the rigid lock. She thrust the flashlight into the deep front pocket of her leather jacket and cautiously approached the building.

The front was, predictably, padlocked. She found the entrance currently in use down an alleyway on the side of the building, covered by a sheet of corrugated metal that screeched loudly when she pulled it aside. Over the noise of the wind and the occasional heavy drops, she could not tell if there was any movement inside the building. Trying to reassure herself that this really wasn't so stupid, that even though she felt like an empty-headed female on a late-night movie investigating attic noises with a candle in her hand, she actually was an armed cop (admittedly, with no official reason for being here, far less a search warrant), she stepped through the gap.

She had fully intended to make her presence known in a straightforward manner. After all, she hardly looked like a police officer, and she only wanted a chance to talk with the boy Dio. She even had her mouth open to call a placatory greeting when it began, the cold ripple of the skin up along the back of her hand, over her wrists, and up her forearms to her shoulders and the nape of her neck, the creepy-crawlies that told her something really bad was about to go down. She hadn't expected this, had only planned on talking with some unwashed boys in a squat, had arranged no backup, but the moment it started, she didn't stop to think, only reacted.

Gun up in both hands and ready, back against the wall, every hair alert, and… nothing. Nothing.

There were people in the building, though, she would swear to it, could feel them over her head, silently waiting for - what?

She, too, waited in the darkness, long minutes straining to hear, see, anything, tried to make herself open her mouth and call a friendly "Hello, anyone there?" but the ghostly touch along the tops of her arms did not go away. Finally, moving as stealthily as her heavy boots would allow, she sidled back through the gap, trotted down the alley (keeping a wary eye overhead) for a quick glance at the rear of the building, and then made her way back up the alleyway and through the shadows to the cycle, where she unlocked the storage compartment again and took out her mobile radio. She turned the volume right down and spoke in a mutter.

The marked unit arrived within three minutes, drifting to a stop with its headlights out. The dome light did not go on when the two men opened their doors with gentle clicks, and neither of them slammed his door. Kate was relieved; they knew their business. She cleared her throat quietly and walked over to them.

"Kate Maninelli, Homicide," she identified herself. "What do you know about that three-story building just this side of the garage?"

"It's been a squat for a couple of months now. No problems," said the older one. "We reported it, but the attitude this time of year is, if it stays quiet, let it go. There aren't enough beds for them, in the shelters, anyway," he added defensively.

"I know. But it's been quiet? No sign of Johns, not a crack house, shooting gallery, anything like that?"

"No customers of any kind. Why?"

"I don't have a warrant. I'm just looking for a boy, was told he was in there sick. I went in, but I… I don't like the way it feels inside. Wanted some backup." The younger man looked at her sideways, but the older one just nodded.

"I know what you mean. I'll go in with you," he offered. His voice sounded familiar. Kate looked more closely.

"Tom Rawlins, isn't it? Rawlings?" He seemed pleased to be recognized. "Thanks, but I think I'd better go in alone, I don't want to scare them off. Just watch my back? And maybe your partner here —"

"Ash Jordan," he said, introducing himself.

"Maybe Ash can watch around in back? There's a fire escape."

"Fine."

"What's he done?"

"As far as I know, he's only a status offender - assuming that I have his age right. I'm trying to track him down as a favor to a friend."

The men both accepted this, understanding the language of favors and friends and the problems of runaways.

"He calls himself Dio, light-skinned Hispanic, five seven, skinny, looks about fourteen."

"If he comes out, we'll just sit on him for a while," Rawlings assured her.

"That's great, thanks. This shouldn't take more than a few minutes."

She went back through the hole behind the metal sheet with the reassuring feeling of a brother cop at her back, and it made all the difference. She made her way cautiously, although not afraid, and found herself in a warren of what had once been offices and a showroom, empty now of stock but in an appalling state of dilapidation, Sheetrock drooping off the walls, ceiling joists exposed, filthy beyond belief. If there was a group of boys in the building, she decided after a quick search, they did not live down here.

Her flashlight found the stairs, stripped of the rotted carpeting, which had been left in a heap in one of the offices. They were firm, although they squeaked here and there as she started upward. She held the gun in one hand, the light in the other, and though her flesh still crawled, there was no turning back now.

At the top of the stairs, she stood just outside the door and stuck the flashlight and one eye around the corner, and here she found the boys' living quarters. It was a big room, one single space with a heavy freight elevator on one end, frozen with its floor two feet beneath the ceiling. Ropes of dust-clogged cobwebs dangled from the steel beams fifteen feet overhead, but on closer observation, she noticed there had been some effort to clean the floor, which lacked the jumble of bottles, needles, glue tubes, paint cans, used condoms, and general squalor that these places usually held. In the middle were a rough circle of chairs and milk crates on top of a frayed circular rug, pillows on some of the crates, one of them upended with a camping lantern set on top. Around the edges, against two of the walls, there seemed actually to have been an attempt at marking out eight or ten separate quarters with a hodgepodge of crates, cardboard boxes, and bits of wood draped with pieces of incongruous fabric, from flowered bedspreads to ancient paint-splattered tarps. Keeping well out in the center of the room, her ears straining for the least sound, Kate began to circle the floor. She probed each of the quarters with the beam of her flashlight, finding the same semblance of order that the circle of chairs showed. Some of the mattresses even had their rough covers pulled neatly up, though others…

She paused, went back to one Spartan and tidy cell, and ran the flashlight beam over the heap of - well, for lack of a better word, bedding. Yes, that was indeed a foot that she had seen protruding from the pile, enclosed in at least two layers of frayed sock. And now that she was closer, she could hear the sound of labored breathing above the slap of heavy raindrops against the black plastic someone had nailed up against the broken windows. She slid her gun back under her arm, transferred the light to her right hand, squatted down, and reached out gingerly for the covering layers at the opposite end of the mattress from the exposed sock. Black hair, long and greasy and soaked with sweat, straggled across a flushed face that had the high, broad cheekbones of a Mayan statue. His breathing sounded like a pair of wet sponges struggling to absorb a bit of air - it hurt Kate's chest just to listen to it. The boy's forehead was burning, and she pulled the covers back up around his neck. Somehow she was not surprised to see a neat stack of shoe boxes, two wide and three high, next to his mattress. On top of them lay a small, grubby notebook: There was a rainbow on its cover.

"Hello, Dio," she said quietly. She stood up, took the radio from the pocket of her leather jacket, spoke into it, and had gotten as far as "We've got a sick boy here at —" when all hell broke loose.

With a distant thunk, the overhead lights went on, and Kate's body was already automatically moving down and back when the gun started roaring at her from the freight elevator. She dove into the base of the makeshift walls, sending boxes and wood scraps flying and keeping just ahead of the terrifying slaps at her heels, until finally she had her own beautiful piece of metal in her hand. From the spurious protection of a packing crate, she aimed her gun at the source of the murderous fire. Her fifth bullet hit something.

A noise came, half yelp, half cough, followed immediately by a sharp clatter of metal dropping into metal.

"Police!" bellowed Kate at the top of her adrenaline-charged lungs. "Anyone reaching for that gun, I'll shoot!"

She heard voices, then panicking shouts, and a number of feet on the floor overhead broke into a run, heading for the back of the warehouse. At the same time, one pair of feet came pounding up the stairs toward her, stopping just outside the door.

"Police!" he shouted, then said, "Inspector Martinelli you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. There was a single gun from the freight elevator; doesn't seem to be another. I hit him and he dropped it. See it? Hanging just under that strut?" She narrowed the beam on her flashlight to illuminate the spot.

"No, I - yes, got it."

"Keep an eye on it; I'm going up."

"Wait —"

"No. Is your partner around back?"

"Yes."

"Hope he stayed there - I don't want these kids to get away. I'll clear the elevator and then call you up. Oh, and the one I was looking for is down at the other end. I was just in the middle of calling for an ambulance - it sounds like pneumonia."

Kate had lost her radio in her rapid trip through the walls but had miraculously retained her flashlight, which even more miraculously still functioned. As Rawlings spoke into his own radio, giving rapid requests for backup and ambulance, she took off across the dusty wooden floor at a fast, low crouch, hit the now-well-lit stairs at a run, and, at the top landing, seeing no switch, put her leather-clad arm up across her face and then reached up in passing to swipe at the hanging bulb with the butt end of the heavy flashlight. Safe now in the concealing darkness, she pushed the flashlight into her pocket, took up a position to one side of the door to the third floor, turned the handle, and pushed it open. Nothing. Silence came through the doorway at her, but for the wind and the raindrops, and the only light was the dim illumination creeping in through the windows and up the elevator shaft. Gun at the ready, she slipped inside; there were raised voices outside and three floors down - Rawlings's partner, Jordan, had indeed stayed in his place. And then the most beautiful sound in the world: sirens, from several directions at once, getting louder every second. Beneath them, half-heard, came a low groaning sound from the direction of the freight elevator. Out came the flashlight again, and, holding it well to the side of her body, she flicked it on. The room was open and empty of anything large enough to hide a person. Just a matter of making sure the shooter couldn't retrieve his gun. Kate took two steps away from the wall, and no more.

There was no pain, no burst of light, no time for fear, much less anger, just the beginning awareness of movement above and behind her, a faint swishing noise registering in her ears, and then Kate was gone.

SEVEN

Somewhere, deep down, she was aware. Some part of her concussed and swelling brain smelled the dust on the floor beneath her, heard the boots running toward her and the sirens cutting off, one by one, somewhere below, felt the hands and cushions and neck brace, dimly knew that she was being lifted and carried, that there was rain in her face and blue strobing lights and then the harsh flat surfaces of the hospital. A buzzing as her hair was shaved, a cold wash against the scalp, and eventually a mask on her face.

She knew all these things as textures and tastes: velvet soft black night studded by hard, sharp blue beads; the hospital as slick and cold as tile but overlaid with the warm, soft touch of a nurse whose words wrapped around her, incomprehensible but as comforting as a fur blanket. Cops like pillars, doctors like whips, these sensations washed over her while she lay stunned and unmoving, imprinting their textures on her battered brain, to appear in later life - never while she was conscious, but as dream images: fellow cops who smelled of dust, a nurse covered with luscious warm fur, words that tasted like broken glass.

And there were memories, drifting in and out as she lay in her hospital bed in the intensive care unit: moments of fear, times of great pleasure. Memories of Lee. Mostly, during the following days, she was back in August.

A letter.

It had begun with a letter, and now Kate lay in her hospital bed and remembered—

—a day in early August. San Francisco had sweltered for ten days, longer, everyone complained, the weatherman explained, with his highs and lows - until finally that afternoon at three o'clock the people on the sidewalks at Fishermen's Wharf had felt the first damp fingers of fog on their sunburned faces, and by five o'clock the city was cool and cocooned.

The house on Russian Hill retained the day's heat, but the food on the stove smelled good, appetizing after a week of cold salads and refrigerated soups. "That smells great, Jon," she said, greeting him from the hallway. She poked her head into the kitchen. "Hi."

"Hello, Kate, isn't it lovely to be cool again? I've been waiting for weeks to try this Ethiopian meat thing."

"Smells incredible." She turned to the closet and peeled off her windbreaker and shoulder holster, kicked off her shoes, stowed her briefcase on the floor, then put her head around the door to the living room, saw it was empty, and went back to the kitchen. "I know what you mean. I haven't felt like eating in days."

He looked up from the cutting board, his thinning hair in damp disarray. "Then the mice are getting pretty pushy, taking plates of food from the fridge."

"Squeak," she admitted. "Want a glass?" At his nod, she poured him some, and then filled a third glass. Pushing one toward him and picking up the other two, she asked, "Is Lee upstairs?"

"She is. The new physiotherapist was by this morning, seemed impressed," he reported. "And she had a couple of letters. One of them seemed to upset her."

"Upset her? How?"

"Maybe upset isn't the right word." He paused, one hand on his hip, the other flung back with a sauce-coated spoon in it. He'd dropped most of his limp-wrist caricatures in the last year, thank God, but tended to strike poses when distracted and mince his words when uncomfortable. "Excited, maybe? Like a child with a secret, or a present. She said it was from her aunt." He shrugged and went back to his fragrant alchemy. Kate did not tell him that, as far as she knew, Lee had only one aunt, and she had died years ago.

"Everything else okay?"

"Fine. Dinner in twenty minutes," he said, dismissing her. She paused in the hallway to leaf through the mail on the table, seeing only bills and circulars, then carried the wine upstairs, where she found Lee in her study, reading something at the desk.

"Howdy, stranger," Kate said. Lee started violently, dropping the letter, and swung her chair around sharply. "Sorry, hon," Kate apologized, "I thought you heard me coming." She placed a glass on Lee's desk, kissed her, and dropped into the armchair with her own glass.

Lee looked flushed, but not with exertion, and it was cool up here. Excitement? Embarrassment? Kate's eyes flicked to the letter and away. She would not ask - Lee had little enough privacy, though Kate tried hard to give her as much as she could.

"Glad you could stop by," Lee said, regaining her calm. "Are you here or just passing through?"

"Here. And tomorrow off."

"You caught your baddie?"

"We did that, and a right little shit he is, too." Most murderers were someone close to the victim, family or friend, who lost control for a brief, fatal minute - not villainous, not particularly bright, and soon apprehended. Bread and butter for a homicide detective, but there was no denying the hard satisfaction of putting cuffs on someone to whom murder was more than an accident of chance.

They talked for a few minutes of this and that and nothing in particular; then Kate said, "Jon said you had some letters."

Was Lee's evasive glance so obvious, or was the professional habit of interrogation so strong that she read guilt where there was none? 'A postcard from Vaun Adams," Lee said. "From Spain. Where did I put it? Here." A photograph of Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia church, and in Vaun's neat handwriting:

Architecture like this makes a person feel that human beings ought to be a different shape - Ray Bradbury hiring Frank Lloyd Wright to build a house on Mars. Head nearly full, be home soon. Gerry and his wife send greetings.

Love, V.

"The last one was from Kenya, wasn't it?"

"Egypt, and before that, Kenya. She's getting around."

"Nothing else exciting?"

"Couple of things, nothing thrilling."

"Fine," Kate said easily. "Do you feel like going down to dinner, or shall we eat up here? Jon's cooking up a storm."

"I've been smelling it all afternoon, drooling on the rug. I'll go down."

"Need a hand?"

"Carry the wine, please."

Lee rolled her chair over to the stair lift, maneuvered herself from one seat onto the other while Kate stood by making trivial talk and being unobtrusively ready to catch her. At the bottom, she checked that the walker was where Lee could reach it, then walked away, leaving her to it. She washed the grime of the day from her face and hands, then got to the table in time to hold the chair for Lee to lower herself into. Food, talk, paperwork, bed: just a day like any other.

Later that night, cuddling close for the first time since the heat wave had begun, Kate spoke into Lee's ear.

"You don't have to tell me whom you got a letter from."

"Don't I?"

"Of course not. It's your perfect right to have secrets, nasty, horrid secrets, secret lovers probably - I don't mind." Here she began to nibble down the back of Lee's neck while her fingertips sought out the sensitive areas along Lee's ribs. "I'll just tickle you until you tell, but I don't mind if you don't tell me. I can lie here all night tickling you, until you fall out of bed and have to sleep on the floor and —" Lee began to giggle and writhe away from Kate's hands and teeth, and the two of them wrestled until Lee, whose upper-body strength after months in the wheelchair was greater than Kate's, succeeded in pinning down Kate, who was not really trying very hard. Panting, Lee looked down into Kate's dark and astonished eyes.

"You sure you feel like just lying there all night?" she demanded in a husky voice, and put her mouth to Kate's.

It was the closest they had come to a normal night in a long, long time.

Much later, Kate muttered into Lee's shoulder, "Don't you think that will get you out of telling me about the letter."

"Tomorrow, my sweet Kate. Tomorrow."

"It was from my aunt," Lee said, when tomorrow had come and they were still in bed, drinking coffee.

"But your aunt died." Lee's mother's sister had been a real terror, the sort of ramrod-spined old lady who regarded fitted bedsheets as a sure sign of the country's moral decay, who had left a clause in her will making it quite clear that Lee was to get not one cent to support her abominable lifestyle. "Don't tell me her will included posthumous letters."

"No, this is my father's older sister."

"I didn't know your father had a sister."

"Neither did I. Well, I knew he had one, but she disappeared so long ago, everyone assumed she was dead. You can read the letter if you want to. It's in the top right-hand drawer of my desk."

Kate padded down the hallway and brought it back, three pages of cotton bond covered with strong, thick writing. What would a handwriting analyst make of that hand? she thought idly, and sat down on the edge of the bed to read it.

"My dear niece," it began. By the middle of the second page, Kate's face was crinkled up in amusement, and when she came to the end, she laughed aloud. She took a moment to look back over the peculiar document. "A twenty-four-karat loony, isn't she?" she said with a chuckle. "As if you'd jump at the chance to join an old lady you've never met out in the sticks. You could borrow one of Jon's flannel shirts to chop firewood in. That is a truly great letter - I especially like the idea of hiring a PI to gather information about a niece. The throwaway line about malaria is good, too." She retrieved her cold coffee and took a swallow.

"I'm going, Kate."

Kate looked at her for a long minute. "That isn't very funny, Lee."

"No joke. I decided last night."

"You decided last night. When last night?"

"Kate —"

"When? Was it before you decided to give me a taste of what it used to be like? Or after you found you could do it?"

"Don't, Kate."

"Don't what? Don't point out to you that insanity seems to run in your family? How can you even think about it?"

"It's what I need, Kate. I knew it as soon as I read the letter."

"Right, fine, next summer we'll go and visit your loony aunt Agatha, up on her island without any electricity. Next summer, when you can walk and climb stairs and drive the car."

"I need it now, Kate, not a year from now. Sweetheart, I know you don't understand, but I'm asking you to trust me. I need this. I'm suffocating, Kate." She was pleading now, this strong woman who hated to ask for anything. She even put out a hand to Kate's arm. "Kate, please try to understand. I just need to be on my own for a while."

Kate made a huge effort. "Lee, look. I realize progress is slow, and God knows how frustrating you must find it, but throwing up your hands and doing something crazy isn't the answer. If you think you're ready to be on your own, then okay, go on a retreat, hire a cabin in Carmel, or what about that place in Point Reyes where you had that workshop? You've had to learn to walk all over again, one small step at a time. Regaining your independence is the same thing: one step at a time, not jumping off a cliff. Write your aunt, tell her to bring her malaria down for a visit, and then when you've had a few tries at roughing it, go and visit her."

"That makes a lot of sense."

"Good."

"But I'm going now."

"Jesus Christ!" Kate shouted, and slammed her mug down on the bedside table so hard, it dented the wood and sent a spray of coffee to the ceiling. "What the hell kind of game are you playing here? It isn't like you to be so completely pigheaded. You're acting like a child."

"Okay, I'm a child, I'm crazy. While you're name-calling, don't forget 'cripple'. I'm a cripple, right? And I am, but not because my legs don't work and I sometimes pee my pants. I'm a cripple because I can't stand alone. Kate, your life has gone on, but you forget that I had plans for my life, too, plans that all depend on my being able to take care of myself. If I can't take care of myself, how could I —" She broke off, but Kate was too upset to pursue Lee's train of thought.

"Take care of yourself, then. Start cooking again. See more clients. Get back on track. But this…"

"I cannot stand by myself when I'm surrounded by people who want to protect me," Lee cried. "I have to be around someone hard, like Aunt Agatha seems to be. Someone who doesn't love me. I know it's crazy, Kate, but it's something I have to do. I have to try at least. I may only be able to stand it for two days and then scream for help, but I am going to try.

"Kate, don't you see? I want to have a life again. I want to have my independence. I want to have…" She threw back her head and looked defiantly at Kate. "I want to have a baby."

Kate sat stunned. They had talked about it, of course, before the shooting, it was a natural concern of any permanent couple. But Kate had never had any wish to bear a child, and Lee in a wheelchair - well, she hadn't thought…

"Is that what all this is about?"

"All what?"

Kate shrank back from Lee's dry-eyed glare. "I'm sorry, love, I didn't know you were still… interested."

"Because I'm in a wheelchair all my instincts have atrophied, all my desires and drives just vanished, is that it?"

"I didn't mean that, Lee."

"And you don't even get mad at me. Do you know how long it's been since you shouted at me? Eighteen months, that's how long. You pussyfoot around like I'm about to break, you and Jon. I can't breathe!" Her voice climbed until it tore at her throat and at Kate's heart. "I have to get out of here. I have to have some air, or I'm going to suffocate."

And so Kate traded leave days and indebted herself to her colleagues, and drove Lee north to Agatha's. She really had no choice, since she knew that if she refused, Lee would ask Jon. Or hitchhike.

She anticipated a long, tense journey, but to her surprise, as soon as the decision had been reached, Lee seemed to relax.

In the hospital bed, Kate's body, which had begun to worry the ICU nurse with its raised pulse, also relaxed as Kate relived the good part of the trip.

They drove north on the coastal highway, slow but beautiful, reaching the redwoods by the afternoon. They dutifully made the rounds of the memorial groves, oohing at the height of the trees, admiring the immense cross sections with their little flags to mark the birth of Julius Caesar and the crossing of the Mayflower, and wondering at the enormous bearlike figures carved out of redwood with chain saws, which loomed up at the side of the road with a myriad of other beasts and cowboys and figures of St. Francis around their knees. SASQUATCH COUNTRY proclaimed one of them, and BIGFOOT LIVES HERE read another.

They stayed the night in a run-down cabin surrounded by the ageless hush of Sequoia sempervirens, a quiet broken only by the fluting voices of children coming home from the nearby state park's campftre program and later by the huge juddering roars of the logging trucks gearing down two hundred feet from their pillows. At one in the morning, when Lee announced that she had counted forty-three of them since they turned off their lights, and expressed some concern that there might be no trees left if they didn't get an early start the next morning, Kate reassured her that the noise wasn't logging trucks, it was a Sasquatch with digestive problems, and Lee got the giggles and began to sputter childish jokes about Bigfart, and on that high note they fell asleep.

In her damaged sleep, Kate's mouth curved into a smile.

The next afternoon, Kate's car, veteran of many wars, broke down in Reedsport, a town on the Oregon coast not exactly bursting with rental agencies, but even then, Kate managed to salvage the trip and divert the underlying tension by bullying the mechanic into lending them (for a price) his wife's two-year-old Ford. When it was loaded with their things, they shifted to the bigger, and faster, interstate highway and continued their way north.

Lee, reading the map, discovered a town with the unlikely name of Drain. She then began to search for further oddities, coming up with Hoquaim, Enumclaw, Pe Ell, and finally let out a cry of triumph.

"My God, Kate, there's a town in Washington called -are you ready? - Sappho."

Kate took her eyes off the road. "No, I won't believe that. You're making it up."

"I swear it! Look," she said, thrusting the map under Kate's nose.

"It has to be a misprint."

"I must go to Sappho," Lee declared.

Kate grinned, picked up Lee's left hand and kissed the ring she wore there, and managed to convince herself that everything was all right.

And on one level, it was. They drove through Oregon's lush Willamette Valley, two women in a foreign and well-watered land, where massive sprinklers hurled sparkling jets of water hundreds of feet through the air. They found two lakes to swim in, one noisy and crowded, the other newly opened and pristine. They stopped at two Pioneer Days museums to look over the rusty plows and make the requisite comment that women must have been tiny in those days, or else the leather of those shoes must have shrunk considerably in a century.

Kate, desperate to believe that all was well, saw only the sunshine, heard only Lee's laughter in the water and her shriek when the tiny fish nibbled her leg. She did not see that Lee's smiles were occasionally just a bit forced, she closed her ears to the long silences, put a succession of tapes in the Ford's player, talked a lot to herself.

She did not take conscious notice of the fact that Lee had not touched the wheelchair since they had left San Francisco. When Lee had Kate stop at a drug store so she could go in and buy some aspirin, the fact that Lee was chewing the things like peanuts was miraculously hidden behind the surface irritation that Lee had not asked Kate to go in for her. Bit by bit, as the miles passed, Lee became less and less willing to acknowledge her disabilities. They spent more than an hour every day at rest stops, Kate walking up and down the cement paths between the summer-worn lawns and the crowded parking strips while Lee hobbled, sweating and determined, to the toilets, refusing the wheelchair, ignoring the wide-doored handicapped stalls, feeling the eyes on her like so many burning coals, ready to snarl at Kate should she dare offer help or to stab a stranger's hand with icy politeness: Thank you, I can manage.

Outside the yellow rest rooms, cars came and went, truckers parked and used the toilets and rolled away, picnics were packed away and others spread out, and finally Lee emerged, one aluminum prop after the other, and made her way, three inches at a step, to the car. She would not allow Kate to park in the handicapped slots, would coldly rage and spit and wound if Kate tried to save her some steps, made it easier, acknowledged Lee's limitations. It was painful to stand by helplessly as Lee drove her legs to take one step, then another, excruciating to witness the effort Lee went through that Kate could so easily save her, agony to stand and watch as Lee battled furiously to compel her body to obey her will.

A six-month-old golden retriever flew past Lee, trailing its leash and its indignant, laughing owner. Lee teetered, leaned into the arm braces, stayed upright, and Kate began to breathe again. A fall, every fall, meant either long minutes of wracking effort or an assistance from Kate, followed by hours of bitter silence and (until recently, when Lee had renounced them) a surreptitious pain pill at night. No fall this time, not even descending the Everest of the four-inch curb. She had not even noticed that Kate had moved the car one space closer, six precious feet, or at any rate, she said nothing. Perhaps this will be a good day after all, Kate thought, starting the engine and putting the car into reverse.

The next day, they reached Puget Sound, and the following morning set out for the ferry to Aunt Agatha's island. Through the foggy, low-lying pastureland, around the northern end of Fidalgo Island to Anacortes, Kate followed the signs, finally steering down into a huge parking lot next to the water, where they were directed into a loading lane. She cut the engine and opened her door to go and buy their tickets, but she stopped at the touch of Lee's hand on her arm and Lee's first word since they had left the motel.

"No."

"I was just going to buy the tickets. I'll be back in a minute."

"No, don't."

"I think we have to buy them before they let us on."

"Not now," Lee ordered sharply, and Kate stared at her profile, feeling uneasy now. Lee was getting terribly worked up about something. Kate knew that Lee had a lot of unresolved and probably unresolvable feelings toward the father she had never known, but Kate had had no indication before this that she was transferring those feelings to the man's sister. This is not good, she thought unhappily, but she pulled her door shut, and felt Lee relax a shade beside her.

Long minutes passed. A ferry appeared through the thinning fog. It docked, then began to spew forth a stream of speeding cars and trucks, like a shark spawning, with a smaller but no less determined string of pedestrians appearing along the other side of the waiting area. She'll be one of those, thought Kate, there's no point in paying to drive a car across if the people you're meeting have one. An older woman came into sight - no, too young. There was another, looking more likely. Kate leaned over the seat and began to pull the bits and pieces over to one side, and suddenly Lee made a noise in the back of her throat, flinging open her door to heave her clumsy legs laboriously out onto the pavement and begin hauling herself upright against the car.

Kate stopped her clearing activities and opened her own door. She stood out on the asphalt, looking toward the off-loading pedestrians for a straggling senior citizen, and then she realized that Lee was looking in the other direction, the direction they had come from. Kate looked, but she saw only the latecomers being directed into their lines - cars, campers, and a flashy red motorcycle weaving between the others. Lee waved her hand wildly, and Kate looked more closely. Could it be - yes, it was the motorcycle that had attracted Lee's interest. A messenger from Aunt Agatha? But how could Lee know? Suspicion began to blossom in Kate's mind, and she looked at Lee over the top of the car until, reluctantly, Lee answered the pressure of Kate's gaze and looked back, and Kate, seeing the same wrenching mixture of excitement and guilt and fear and defiance that she had seen there the day Aunt Agatha's letter arrived, only ten times stronger, knew instantly what it meant, knew why Lee had been silent and why she'd stopped Kate from buying the tickets. The truth was so devastating, so utterly appalling, she could feel nothing else, not even the anger that Lee was obviously expecting from her. She just stared, at Lee and then at the motorcyclist, who was somehow now standing in front of Lee.

The small figure in the bright red leathers with a zigzag of purple down each arm bent over in a deep bow, pulled off the purple helmet, and straightened up, shaking out a head of pure white curls. She held out a hand to Lee.

"You're Lee," she stated. "You look like your father."

"Aunt Agatha," Lee answered, with an uneasy sidelong glance at Kate. The woman followed her glance, then stretched her hand over the roof of the car to Kate.

"And you must be Kate."

Kate looked at the small brown hand, the wrinkled little face, sallow beneath a deep tan, the sparkling blue eyes that looked like Lee's, but she did not see them, saw only, clear before her, the evidence that Lee had made a great number of plans that patently did not include her. There had been nothing at all vague about this arrangement, how she intended to meet Aunt Agatha. Kate looked away from the older woman, back to her beloved.

"What has happened to you, Lee?" she whispered hoarsely. "This is… it's foul. Deceitful. You never intended me to go to the island, did you?"

"Oh dear," said Aunt Agatha with a sigh, and stood back.

"Kate, I never meant —"

"Oh Christ, Lee, don't make it worse." Kate found herself shouting, and she did not care. "You manipulated me to get you up here and now you want me to leave you alone. It's a shitty thing to do, and I'd never have believed it of you. You may not love me, but I thought at least you had some self-respect. Obviously I don't know you, not at all, not anymore. Well, fine, you're here, your aunt's here, and you don't need me." She yanked the back door open and began to heave Lee's possessions out onto the blacktop, beginning with the wheelchair. Lee, babbling incoherently and with tears on her face, began to inch her way around the car, leaning her full weight on the dusty hood. Her aunt followed - making no move to interfere, just shadowing this unknown crippled niece of hers. Kate finished in the backseat and turned to the trunk. She dropped a carton to the ground, sending books spilling out under the front of the car behind them, which for some reason had its engine running. A number of cars had started up, she noticed. The ferry was boarding, and the car was now empty of Lee's things except - Kate slammed the trunk shut and continued around to the passenger side, where she leaned in, pulled out Lee's arm braces and the waist pack she used as a purse, plucked a pair of sunglasses from the dashboard and a paperback from the door pocket and threw them onto the ground, slammed the door (Lee had reached the trunk by this time), and walked forward again around the front of the car and back to the driver's door. Lee, too, was back where she had started from, looking across the Ford's roof at Kate, protesting, crying, reaching, and cars were driving past, the passengers staring with greedy curiosity at the scene. A horn sounded. Kate opened her door, pausing before getting in.

"Do you want me out of the house when you get back?"

"NO! Oh God, Kate, if you'd just listen, you don't understand —"

"No, I don't. I don't understand anything. Let me know when you're coming home," she said. She got into the car, turned the key, put it into gear, and drove away, leaving Lee staggering at the sudden loss of support. She would have fallen but for Agatha. Kate drove between the white lines that led down the loading area toward the ferry, then cut back in the opposite direction to the empty off-loading lane. As she passed the two figures with their piles of luggage and the gaudy motorcycle, she heard Agatha Cooper's penetrating voice asking, "Can you ride on the back of a motorcycle, Lee?" She could not help looking back in the rearview mirror. Her last view of Lee for many months was of Lee watching her, but also of Lee beginning to straighten up and formulate the answer, a determined "Yes."

Kate had not even stayed to watch the ferry depart, had not even hoped that Lee might change her mind at the last moment. Instead, she drove up the hill, away from the sea and around the corner from the ferry terminal, where she pulled over into a wide spot, put her arms on the top of the steering wheel, and began to weep.

When she was empty and exhausted from the effort of tears and her eyes and head ached and throbbed, she drove on, somehow missing the way back to Seattle and ending up instead on the next island, where a cluster of motels and bars had sprung up around a military base. She checked into a motel, walked to the next-door bar for a drink, and woke up two days later, sick and wretched and wishing she were as dead as she felt.

She did not die, instead, she drove her hungover body out to the shore and sat watching the waters ebb out of the Sound, toward the sea, and then turn and push their way back in. The next morning, she checked out of the cigarette-permeated motel room and drove to Reedsport, where her car was still not ready. She walked far up and down the hard wet sand of the Oregon beaches all the following day, until finally, barely twenty-four hours before she was due back at work, the car was running. She drove back to the City, fueled by coffee and kept awake by food, to arrive home at five in the morning. And four hours after that, she was awakened by Jules, leaning on her doorbell.

The memories faded; Kate's body quieted, and then she slept.

EIGHT

Was it still August? There was a man in the bar, she remembered, a small man in a shiny suit; that was why she'd bought herself a bottle to take back to the hotel room, to get away from him.

No, it was December now, although inexplicably August's hangover was still with her - a head so fragile that if her queasy stomach did what it wanted to, her skull was sure to split right down the middle. Someone groaned, she thought, and grinned like a skull.

"Kate?" said an unfamiliar voice. "Katarina Martinelli? Are you awake?"

She worked her throat a bit, swallowed, cleared it gingerly. Her head didn't split, although she thought it might be a good idea to keep her eyes shut.

"Somebody had a headache," she muttered.

"What did she say?" said the voice.

"She seems to be disassociating herself from her experience," said another woman. Something familiar about this second voice. "How interesting."

"Not," began Kate, and then thought, The hell with it. Let them be interested.

"Not what, Kate?" said the second voice, the one with the mild accent, and when Kate didn't answer, she continued, "Do you know where you are?"

"Hospital," Kate answered immediately. She knew these smells and noises even with her eyes shut and a hangover thudding through her. She'd know them even if she lay here dead.

"Do you know how you got here?"

Kate had no immediate answer for that one.

"Who had a headache?" voice two persisted.

"Joke," said Kate to shut her up, but the word set off an echo and bits of memory began to flake off and fall down where Kate could gather them up. Joke (joke/buckets from the morgue catching scraps - no, drops, drops of rain/macabre cop humor, sorry, Grace/ is he with you?/ you're looking for a boy called —)

"Dio," she croaked, and opened her eyes into those of Rosa Hidalgo. "Dio. Is he alive?"

"The boy? The doctors say he's responding well, he'll be fine. You know how you got here, then?"

"I was in the squat, with, um. Rawlins. Rawlings," she corrected herself. "Did I get shot?"

"You were hit, with a piece of pipe. You were lucky, it seems, that God has blessed you with a thick skull."

"Thank you, God. How long was I out?" Kate was aware that the other woman was fussing with vital signs, her hand on Kate's wrist, but she ignored her.

"You were hit the day before yesterday, so it is about forty-three hours. And if you are wondering why I am here, I am acting as Jules's representative. Hospital policy does not allow children in the I.C.U.," she added with amusement, "and Jani has a lecture this afternoon."

"I can imagine Jules had words about hospital policy," Kate said, and closed her eyes.

When she next woke, Hawkin was there, and a different nurse. Before she could speak, the nurse shoved a thermometer into her mouth, and everything waited until pulse and blood pressure had been taken and the high-tech thermometer beeped.

"How's the boy?" Kate asked as soon as her mouth was clear.

"He'll do. He's still on a drip but his fever's down. I talked with him just before I came here."

"Has anyone come for him yet?"

"He won't give us his last name, where he's from, anything."

"You might ask Grace Kokumah to come and talk with him. You know her?"

"Of course. I'll do that, when he's better. How are you doing?"

"I feel like hell, but everything seems to be in the right place. I haven't seen a doctor yet, not to talk to."

"I'll try and find one for you. You owe Rawlings, by the way. He managed to be in the way when they were moving you into the ambulance, so the papers didn't have any pictures of you this time. They had to make do with Reynolds."

"Who's Reynolds?"

"Sorry. Weldon Reynolds, the guy you shot. He has a record, but only small things, creating a disturbance, selling grass and mushrooms, resisting arrest. Not a sexual offender, as far as we can find out, and none of the other boys in the squat accused him. Looks like he had a fantasy of creating a society of outcasts, petty thievery and selling joints, with the profits coming to him, of course."

"Dickens," Kate commented.

"Fagin," agreed Hawkin. "He'll be okay, by the way. Your bullet caught him at a funny angle, probably bounced off one of the struts in that elevator, traveled up through a couple of ribs and collapsed a lung, but it didn't reach the heart. You were lucky."