With Child

"Yes," Kate said with feeling. A shooting, even justified, was always a serious thing; killing a perpetrator could haunt, or end, a cop's career. To say nothing of the cop.

"Are you okay about it?"

"I don't know. I haven't thought about it. I guess so."

"You remember shooting him?"

"Oh yes. I remember shooting, anyway. I never saw him, just the gun flashes, and I aimed at them, and then the gun fell. I never saw him," she repeated. "Am I on suspension?"

"Administrative leave," Hawkin confirmed. "There'll be a hearing when you're on your feet again, but you won't have any problems. You were entirely justified. He was shooting at you, for Christ sake."

"I didn't have a warrant."

"He had no right to be there, either. I talked to the owner of the building. It'll be all right, Kate. Don't worry about it, just get better. Do you want me to call Lee?"

"No!"

Hawkin stood beside her bed and looked down at her for a long time, but in the end he did not comment, merely nodded and said good-bye. Kate was tired, but her throbbing skull kept sleep at bay for a long time - the throbbing, but also the tangled memories of Dio's sweaty face, the gun kicking in her hand, and the strangled cough of the man when her bullet hit him.

One of the things Kate hated most about being in the hospital was that people were forever coming in on her while she was asleep. Not so much the hospital personnel - she was resigned to them; after all, they were body technicians, and having them wandering around the room while she was out like a light was much the same as having a doctor doing a yearly exam, prodding and looking into areas of her body that even Lee hadn't seen much of.

It was the others who were given free rein to come in and stare at her who drove her mad. Over the next few days, especially when she was moved from the I.C.U., there was a constant stream: The man from Internal Affairs, the police psychologist, the social workers and investigators and everyone connected with the squat and its boys and the criminality of its leader - all had come in at one time or another, and most of them had caught her sleeping.

And now, yet again, five days into her stay, she was struggling up into alertness, knowing someone was standing beside her bed. Two someones, she saw, Al and a boy who was either extremely short or else sitting down, a boy with a Mayan face and long hair as black as Jules's, a boy who looked embarrassed and shy and determined.

"Kate, this is Dio," Al said.

She tried to lift herself upright, then remembered the switch and raised the head of the bed. The boy was sitting, in a wheelchair, though by the looks of him it was more due to hospital policy than need.

"Well, you're certainly looking better than when I last saw you," Kate told him, and put out her hand. He shook it with the awkwardness of someone who is more familiar with the theory of a handshake than with its practice. That seemed true of dealing with the adult world in general, as well; when he had his hand back, he didn't seem to know what to do with it, and his gaze flitted about the room, landing only briefly on Kate's face and veering away from the thick bandages around her head.

"I, um, I wanted to say thank you," he said. "They're discharging me, and I wanted to see you before I left. To say thanks."

"You're welcome," she replied, swallowing a smile. "I'm just glad I found you. You should thank Jules, and Grace Kokumah."

"Um, I - I did. I also wanted to thank you for getting the library book back to Jules."

"Library book?" She looked to Al for explanation, but he only shook his head in incomprehension.

"Yeah, the one I had in the tent. I was really worried about it," he said in a rush. "It's been bugging me ever since I left, 'cause I know how careful Jules is with books, especially library books, and I knew the tent would leak as soon as it rained."

"I see. Why didn't you give it back to her before you left?" And, she thought, why didn't you take your bits of jewelry with you?

He looked down intently at his fingers, which were plucking at a worn spot on the arm of the wheelchair. Al moved casually away to examine a wilting flower arrangement.

"I was gonna go back. I only came up here for the day, you know? There was this other kid in the park - he wanted to come up and he had a ride, so I came with him. Then we met Weldon, and it got late, so we stayed with him, and then, well, we just got busy, you know?" He looked up, and read the expression on her face as disapproval. "He always had things for us to do. And I was afraid that if I went back down, I might have problems getting up again, like if the cops - the police'd found my stuff and thought I stole it, so I just kept putting it off. But I felt really bad about that library book."

The smile tugged itself out of the corners of Kate's mouth. "You're something else, you know that, Dio?"

His head came up, looking for ridicule but looking relieved, and when he realized she meant it as a compliment, his brown skin blushed copper.

"You just stayed on in the squat because it was better than living out in the open, with winter coming on?"

"Yeah. It was an okay place. It was dry, and we had lots of blankets, and some of the other kids were cool. Weldon was a little weird sometimes, but he was good at getting food and stuff, and he knew some great stories. He used to tell us things at night. Called it 'sitting around the campfire.' " A crooked smile softened the boy's face for a minute, and then it was gone.

"How was he weird, Dio?" she asked, and when he didn't answer, she said, "I think I deserve to know. He nearly killed me, for Christ sake."

"That was Gene that hit you."

"I mean with the gun. Or didn't you know that Weldon tried to shoot me?"

"I heard, yeah." He shifted uncomfortably. "I don't know. Weldon was kind of paranoid. He used to tell us how he'd protect us against people - cops and CPS and people who'd want to break us up. He used to call us his family. He even tried to get us to call him Dad, but only a couple of the littler kids ever did." He sounded regretful, as if he had failed a friend.

"Why didn't you let Jules know you were okay? She was terribly worried."

"I know. I did write. Twice."

"What happened?"

"I gave them to Weldon to mail," he said flatly.

"And he never did."

Dio shrugged.

"What are you going to do now?" she asked.

"I'm gonna live with a family for a while. The Steiners."

"I know them. They're good people."

"I guess."

"Well, good luck to you, Dio. Stay in touch, and look, if things get rough, give me a call, okay? I might be able to help."

His eyes went to her wrapped head, and he winced, but his parting handshake was more assured than the first one had been.

Al took the chair's handles and began to push it toward the doorway, but Kate had remembered something else. "Dio - who was the woman in the picture? The snapshot I found in your tent?"

Al turned the chair around, but the boy's face was closed up and he said nothing.

"Anyway, did Jules give it back to you?" After a moment, he ducked his head. "Yeah."

"That's good. Well, take care, man. See you later, Al."

Their voices faded down the noisy hallway, and Kate lay back to await the next interruption.

She was in the hospital for a week, refused release because of occasional spikes in her temperature and a cycle of blinding headaches that entertained a series of doctors and worried the nurses. Finally, however, her fevers left, and with the possibility of an infection inside her brain out of the way, she was discharged. Even then she had to lie to the head nurse, saying that there would be someone to care for her at home, but eventually, her shaven scalp cold around the smaller bandage, she eased herself from wheelchair to Hawkin's car, and he drove her home.

She let him take the bag of accumulated possessions into the house - things he or Rosa Hidalgo or Rosalyn Hall had fetched for her - and walked cautiously through to the living room sofa. Hawkin brought her the alpaca throw blanket, turned up the heat, made her a cup of hot milk, and carried her bag upstairs. He came back with her gun in its holster.

"Where do you want this?" he asked.

"The top drawer in that table with the phone on it, thanks."

He stepped back into the hallway and she heard the squeak of the drawer.

"Can I get you anything to eat?"

"No thanks. They fed me lunch." The doctor whose approval was required before Kate could leave had been in surgery, delayed by an automobile accident and leaving Kate to sit in her room, waiting and picking at a tray of hospital food, until he swept in, still wearing his surgical booties, looked in her eyes, asked her two or three questions, and left. "What I'd really like is to be alone, if that's not too rude."

"I understand. I'll stop by on my way home, but call if you need anything. Where's the -I saw it in the kitchen." He went out again and returned with the portable telephone, checking that the batteries were charged before he put it on the table in reach of Kate's hand. "You remember my beeper number?"

"Al, I had a concussion, not a lobotomy. Go do some work. Solve a crime or something, and let me sit and be quiet."

And it was quiet, once the door had closed behind him. A light, steady rain was falling, soaking the shrubs and pots and the bricks of the patio, where the moss in the cracks rose up to drink it in. Streaks ran down the windows and the French doors, a mild gurgle came from the downspouts, an occasional seagull floated across the gray sky, and Kate slept.

It was dark outside when she woke, although a light from the kitchen gave outlines to her surroundings. She woke bit by bit, dozing warmly inside the cocoon of the soft blanket, grateful for the familiar room and the sounds of home. Hospitals were cold, clanking death traps, and she was aware, for the first time since August, of the innate goodness of life.

Easing onto her back to look at the digital clock on the video machine, she felt a twinge along the right side of her skull, but that was all. Just after eleven - she'd slept for seven hours. Gingerly she tried sitting up, then got to her feet, and other than a couple of dull thuds at each change of position, the headache remained lurking in the background - not gone, but not actively attacking, either.

Enjoying the freedom of movement, exploring how far it would stretch, Kate folded the blanket and tossed it across the back of the sofa (a brief awareness of pressure at the throwing motion, not really a pain) and went to look out the window at the night. All the lights seemed very distant, but it was a comforting sensation, not an alienating one. The wind stirred the bushes, and she wondered how long Gideon the raccoon had continued to come before deciding that she was a lost cause. Maybe she would put a handful of dog biscuits out tomorrow night, on the off chance he cruised by.

She was thirsty, and, yes, actually hungry, although there was not likely to be much that was edible in the refrigerator. She pulled the curtains against the night and went to the kitchen.

There was a vase of flowers on the table, a fresh, fragrant mixture of florist's blooms, and beside it a note, the first part of which, strangely enough, was in Al's handwriting. Surely he would have mentioned any message that afternoon? She picked it up and read:

Martinelli - I turned the ringer on your phone off and the sound down on your answering machine. Call if you need anything, otherwise, I'll drop by in the morning. The flowers are from Jules.

Al

Beneath it on the page, in the same ink but by someone with a much lighter hand, was another message:

Kate,

We didn't want to wake you, but I thought you might like some food and wouldn't feel like cooking. You can eat the soups cold or micro them for a couple of minutes, ditto the beans in the glass casserole, but don't heat the noodles - it's a salad. I'm going to be at the civic center tomorrow morning, and may stop by around noon. Oh yes, that's Maj's tiramisu in the white bowl. Take care.

Rosalyn

Kindness, the simple kindness of friends, the last thing she had expected, and it reached in through her weakness and she felt tears start up in her eyes as she sat at the table and read the words over again. On the third time through, it occurred to her that she had been driven in here by hunger, and she seemed miraculously to have at hand something more appealing and substantial than the bowl of cold cereal she had resigned herself to.

Six containers of food awaited her: two white deli cartons, two glass jars, and two ovenproof containers reminiscent of potlucks. Noodle salad with the spicy, fragrant sesame dressing Kate loved - how had Rosalyn known? One jar with a strip of masking tape labeling it mushroom soup, the other chicken vegetable. Two kinds of beans. And a large bowl of creamy white pudding, drifted with black-brown powdered chocolate. Kate reached in and began greedily to pull out containers.

At midnight, replete and much steadied, Kate turned off the kitchen light, turned on the light over the stairs, and began the climb to bed. Halfway up, she paused, then reversed her steps back into the kitchen. She found a stemmed wineglass and a pair of scissors, turned to the bouquet on the table and teased a few of the flowers from it, trimmed their stems short, and dropped them into the wineglass. She put the scissors in the drawer, ran some water into the glass, put the denuded stems into the trash, turned off the light again, and took the miniature flower arrangement up the stairs with her. The flowers sat on the table beside her bed, keeping her company while she looked at the television, and later they watched over her while she slept.

NINE

Kate was in the garden chopping weeds with a hoe when she heard the doorbell. The garden was on the north side of the house, and usually cool and shaded, but despite being mid-December, it was one of those warm winter days that explains why California is over-populated, and Kate was sweating with the effort. She straightened and, with resignation, felt the inevitable jab in her head travel on down her spine and seize her stomach, setting off the vague nausea she had come to dread.

She was by now a connoisseur of headaches, a seasoned expert in knowing just how far she could go, when to back off and fetch the dolly rather than lifting a heavy object, how a change in the weather would affect the nerve endings inside her skull. Two weeks after the injury now, and she was beginning to resign herself to a permanent degree of ache. It was bearable, however, if she took care not to push herself.

Except for the other headaches, those bolts of pain that came out of the blue like slow lightning, rippling across her brain and turning her stomach upside down. Those sent her straight for the powerful tablets the doctor had given her, left her groping up the stairs, blind and retching and seeking the dark sanctuary of the bedroom. They would pass, after four or five hours, as suddenly as they had come, although the combined dregs of pain and painkillers in her body meant that she was worth nothing for the rest of the day. Kate had had three of these since leaving the hospital, and she would have given a great deal to avoid having another one, but the doctors said there was no knowing what triggered them or how long they would be with her. What they did tell her was that she could not go back to active duty until she was free of the threat.

This headache that was now settling in seemed to be somewhere in between the basic nagging kind and the bullet-in-the-brain sort, which all in all might be a hopeful sign, Kate thought as she pulled off her muck-encrusted shoes against a boot scraper and walked through the house to the front door.

Any change was for the better, and any visitor a welcome one. Kate was thoroughly fed up with sick leave. The first two days home she had spent in front of the television, falling asleep over the large collection of unwatched videos Lee and Jon had taped for her over the months. On the third day, boredom had set in, and she found herself wandering through the house cataloging the unfinished jobs she found there, until eventually she went downstairs for a screwdriver and replaced the switch plate that had cracked back in September.

In the five days since then, interrupted only by an afternoon when she had to put on her official clothes and go in for a hearing about the shooting, she had trimmed and rehung two sticking doors, replaced the broken sash cords in the upstairs window, fixed the drip in the bathtub, finished grouting a patch of tile in the under-the-stairs bathroom that she and Lee had put up two years before, climbed a ladder to replace a cracked pane of glass and touch up the paint around it, and shifted everything in the living room to wax first one half of the inlaid wood floor and then the other.

The floor had been the worst, because having her head down made her skull pound so horribly that she could only bear an hour at a time, whereas with an upright job she could stretch it to two hours before she had to lay down her tools and take herself trembling to bed for an hour or two. On the whole, however, physical work, done with care, seemed actually to help, particularly in the fresh air. Today she had been digging and weeding for nearly three hours before the doorbell interrupted, she saw as she glanced at the clock on her way through the living room. It looked as though she was going to pay for the exertion.

Kate picked up the loose knit cap she had taken to keeping on the table in the hallway and pulled it on as she went to answer the door. At first she saw nothing through the peephole; then, with a growing and fatalistic sense of déjà vu, she looked down, and there she saw the top of a head of black hair, neatly parted. She slid the bolt and opened the door.

"Morning, Jules."

"Uh-oh, you're not feeling well."

"I'm okay."

"Are you mad at me, then?"

"Why would I be mad at you?"

"It's just that you usually say, 'Hey, J.' 'Good morning, Jules' sounds so formal."

"So I'm feeling formal. Don't I look formal?"

Jules examined her muddy, sweat-stained clothing and grubby bare legs. "No, you don't. We tried to call, but we kept getting your machine, so we thought we'd come by anyway. Can I come in?"

"Who's 'we'?"

"Al." Jules turned and waved at the road. Kate bent to look and saw Al's car pull out from the curb and drive away. She cursed under her breath as Jules continued. "He has to pick something up from the office. I wonder why you call it an office when it's just that big room you guys share. Anyway, I wanted to say hi, so he said he'd drop me and come back. He won't be long. Are you sure you're feeling okay? You don't look like it."

"I'm fine. Come on in, Jules."

"I like that hat," Jules said, looking over her shoulder as she headed for the kitchen. "Where did you get it?"

"A friend made it for me. It hides the stubble."

"Can I see?" Jules asked, turning to face her, going suddenly serious.

"Not much to see," Kate said, but she pulled the cap off anyway and dropped it on the table. Rosalyn's partner, Maj, a woman of many talents and with a recipe for killer tiramisu, had come by the house with it and a pair of electrical clippers the week before. The resulting haircut was not all that much shorter than Kate's last one, though slightly lopsided, but it necessarily revealed too much of the still-clear lines where the surgeons had cut a flap in the skin to give access to the bone below. Maj's hat was pretty, but there was angora in it, and the damn thing itched. She pretended not to feel the girl's eyes on her as she reached for two glasses and took a bottle of juice from the refrigerator.

"You like cherry cider?" she asked.

"Sure, I guess. They didn't have to put a metal plate in your head, did they?" Jules demanded.

"No. They thought they might, but it wasn't that bad."

"That's good. A friend of mine has an uncle with a big plate in his skull. He has to carry a letter from his doctor around with him, because he sets off metal detectors."

Kate came near to laughing at the thought of the number of detectors she went through in the course of a week, all of them going off madly in her wake.

Jules absently accepted the glass of cider that Kate handed her, but her mind was still on the topic of the consequences of metal plates. "That must be a real pain," she reflected.

"It must be," Kate agreed seriously, and sat down. "It's good to see you. How've you been? How's Josh? Have you seen Dio since he got out of the hospital? And why aren't you in school?"

"It's a half day, for finals week. Dio's fine. And I haven't seen Josh in a while, except in school, of course. He has a girlfriend." She sounded disgusted.

"I thought you were a girlfriend."

"I was a friend. Am a friend still, but he's busy. He'll get over it," she said, as if talking about the flu, which Kate thought reasonable enough.

"What's your shirt say today?" Kate asked. Jules held the lapels of her windbreaker open so Kate could see the writing, and when she saw the words, she began to laugh.

"Good, huh?"

"It's great." Kate did not tell her she had seen it before, worn by women who intended a rather different take on the message, but it was still a fine shirt: A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE.

Kate was about to ask about the word for the day when the girl blurted out, "Can I come and stay with you when Mom and Al go on their honeymoon?"

Kate opened her mouth, then shut it again.

"They were going to take me with them to Baja, and at first I thought it sounded great, but then I realized it was impossible. Talk about spare wheels." Kate wondered if she was hearing the voice of a friend behind the girl's words, that devastating peer criticism that could reduce even a self-contained person like Jules to a quivering mass. "Taking the kid along on a honeymoon," Jules said dismissively, her demeanor cool but with a clear thread of discomfort through it, and Kate stood up to take a random plate of food from the refrigerator in order to hide her smile. Jules, she guessed, had belatedly connected the traditional activities of a honeymoon couple with her mother and the amiable cop she was marrying; the mortification when her friends pointed this out must have been extreme.

Still. "I don't know when I'll be going back to work, Jules. I couldn't have you here alone while I'm out. They can be long days."

"Do you know when you'll be going back?"

"I see the doctor tomorrow afternoon. What were you planning on doing if I wasn't available?"

"Staying with Rosa, I guess."

"Or have Trini the airhead stay with you?"

"Not her. She's in trouble. She got caught shoplifting the day after Thanksgiving, and Mom won't have her in the house."

"Don't you have any family?" Kate hoped she hadn't sounded too plaintive, but Jules seemed not to have noticed.

"Mom has some relatives in Hong Kong, but nobody here. My father's dead," she said in a tight voice. "I don't know if there's anyone on his side, but Mom says they all hated her. Anyway, there's nobody to stay with."

"Have you met Al's kids? Not to stay with. I just wondered if you'd met them."

Jules relaxed suddenly and grinned. "You mean my sister- and brother-to-be? I met her - she's really cool. Him - Sean - I'll meet this weekend."

"They're coming up for the wedding?"

"Sure."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"It's important to Al, I know. Kate, do you think I should keep calling him Al if he's my mother's husband? I don't know if I could call him Daddy."

"Give it time," Kate suggested mildly. "Dad may feel comfortable after a while."

"I guess. Maybe he'd rather be just Al."

"I think, if you're asking me, that Al Hawkin would burst with pride if you took to calling him Dad, but I'm also sure he wouldn't want to push it. He loves you very much."

Jules became very interested in the trace of cider in the bottom of her glass. "He must be nuts," she muttered.

"Nuts because he loves you? Jules, you're one of the greatest people I've ever met."

"You don't know me," the girl said darkly.

"I know you better than you think I do." At this, Jules shot her a hard look composed of equal parts suspicion and apprehension, with a dash of hope thrown in. However, Kate had done about all she could just then. All the time she had sat talking, the ache in her head continued to build, until it could not be ignored. Hating the display of weakness, she went to the cupboard and took out the pill bottle, shook a tablet out onto her palm, and swallowed it with the last of the juice in her glass.

"You aren't okay," Jules said with concern.

"I have a perpetual headache. I'll live."

"I should go." Jules stood up.

"Not until Al comes back."

"I'm sorry, Kate, I shouldn't have bothered you with all this."

"I'm glad you came. Did I ever thank you for the flowers, by the way?"

"Yes. Twice."

"Good. Those tiny white ones - what are they called? Baby's breath, I think. They dry well - did you know that? I have a sprig of them upstairs." Jules began to look positively alarmed at this uncharacteristic show of sentimentality, and Kate, peering at her through the distance of the headache and the onset of the painkiller, would have laughed if she hadn't known how much it would hurt. "It's okay, Jules, I'll go to bed and sleep it off. It comes and goes. You stay here until Al comes. Promise?" And what was it Jules had come here for? Oh, yes. "And I'll talk to him tomorrow, when my head is straight, about having you here. Bye, girl. Take care."

She did not hear Hawkin come, but when she woke five hours later, refreshed and ready to start the next cycle, the house was empty. Whistling tunelessly, she went to put in another hour with the hoe before dark.

TEN

"So what do you think, Al?" Kate was on the phone to her partner, the following evening.

"You're on workman's comp now?"

"Sick leave is just as boring as suspension."

"Must've been a relief, though, to be cleared."

"God, yes."

"Pretty hairy?"

"Oh, not really. The worst part was anticipating it. Have you ever…?"

"No. I fired my gun once, though I didn't hit him, but that was in the old days, not even forms to fill out. But about Jules; you'll be out for another couple of weeks, you said?"

"At least that. The doctor wants to see me then, before he approves me for even light duty."

"You sure you want her? It's a long time, when you're not used to having a teenager around."

"Two weeks is nothing. We'll go sit on Santa's lap, have turkey with all the trimmings while you and Jani are so sunburned that you can't touch each other and have the squits from drinking ice in your margaritas."

"God, you're such a romantic."

"It's a talent. Jules and I will have a good time. If anything comes up, I'll call Rosa, have her come and pick Jules up."

"If you're not up to it, dump her. Promise? It's her own damn fault she's not going. The reason we chose this date in the first place was that she's off school for the holidays, and then she says she'd rather stay home."

"She wants to give you two some privacy, Al."

The phone was silent for a long time.

"Did she tell you that?" he said at last.

"More or less."

"God, I can be a damned fool sometimes. Why didn't I think of that, instead of assuming she was just being — What a sweetheart. She's nuts, of course. This is a vacation, not a honeymoon. I'll talk to her, see if I can get the other room back at the hotel."

"Al? Don't. Just leave it."

"But —"

"Jani might prefer it this way, and I know Jules will. Baja will be there next year. You two go away and relax; Jules and I will stay here and wrap presents."

"If you're sure."

"I'm sure, Al. So, how are the wedding preparations coming along?"

"Why didn't we elope to Vegas?" He groaned. She laughed.

"Let me know if I can do anything. Otherwise, I'll see you at the church on Sunday, and I'll bring Jules home with me then. I won't be on the bike," she reassured him.

"You're okay for driving?"

"No problem. There's no danger of blackouts or blurred vision, just these migraines; they don't know what's causing them or when they'll stop. But I will say, I'm getting a hell of a lot done on the house."

The next interruption caught her again working outside, two days after Jules's visit. She was in the bottom of the garden, a place nothing human had ventured into for at least two years, and she seriously thought of ignoring the doorbell. However, she was thirsty, and the compulsive rooting out of brambles would be waiting for her anytime. She dropped her tools on the patio, pulled her rubber boots off against the scraper, and went to answer the door.

This time, it was Rosa Hidalgo, looking cool and neat in linen pants and blouse, every hair in its place. She looked startled at the apparition in front of her, and Kate looked down at herself: tank top and running shorts dark with sweat, ingrained dirt to the wrists and in a line above where the rubber boots had covered her calves, and red welts, some of them dotted with dried blood, where first the roses and then the blackberries had had at her.

"I was gardening," she said in explanation.

"I see."

"Come in." She gestured down the hallway toward the living room and followed her guest through the house. "I don't know if you can call it gardening, really. "Gardening" always makes me think of Vita Sackville-West in her jodhpurs and floppy hat. What I was doing was committing assault on the weeds. What would you like to drink?"

"Whatever you're having."

They took their tall glasses of iced tea onto the brick patio, which was cool and would allow the earthy fragrance Kate knew she was exuding to dissipate in the open air.

"I never really thanked you for everything you did for me when I was in the hospital," she told Rosa.

"You did thank me, and it was nothing."

"How've you been? How are the herds of small children?"

"One at a time, they are very appealing," she answered brightly, swirling the ice around in her glass.

"And Angelica, how is she?"

"Angél is fine, thank you."

Shallow conversation was tiring, Kate reflected. "Was there anything I could do for you, or did you just stop by to say hello?" she asked, knowing full well it was not the latter. Saying hello did not cause women like Rosa Hidalgo to be nervous.

"Ah, yes, I did have a reason to talk to you. Actually, Jani and Al asked me to come."

"This is about Jules, isn't it?"

"It is. There are some things they thought you ought to know, before you have her under your care for a number of days." Her accent was back.

"I told Al I didn't want to know. More than that, I think it's a bad idea."

"I know that is what you think. I presumed that was why you did not return the call I made a few months ago."

"Jules thinks of me as a friend, not a therapist, not an authority figure."

"I am aware of her feelings for you."

"Then, pardon my rudeness, but why are you here?"

"I am here because you are nearly the age of Jules's mother, and because Jules has chosen you, her soon-to-be stepfather's partner, to confide in, and because I feel I can trust you to use your knowledge of the child's past with care."

"I don't want to know," Kate said forcibly.

"Of course you don't. But you must. Because you won't know Jules unless I tell you about her."

Kate put her face in her hands. The woman was not going to leave without telling her what she thought Kate had to know. Kate might forcibly eject her, or lock herself in the bedroom until the woman went away, or plug her fingers into her ears and hum loudly, but by this time she was undeniably curious. She was, after all, a policewoman, to whom curiosity - nosiness - was both nature and training.

"Okay. All right. If you have to, then let's get on with it." Kate sat back in the chair and crossed her grubby legs in the woman's face. The body language of noncooperation, she thought with an inner smile.

"It begins a number of years ago. In the years after the revolution in Russia. To put it simply, Jules's mother and her grandmother were both born as the result of rape."

Kate's crossed leg came down.

"Both of them?"

"Jani's mother was born in Shanghai in 1935, of a Russian Jewish mother raped by a soldier, either Japanese or Indian. Twenty years later, the child of that event was caught up in a riot in Hong Kong, and she, too, was raped. Jani was born nine months later. When Jani was three months old, her mother took her to the local Christian missionaries, then went home and committed suicide."

"Good… heavens," said Kate weakly.

"Jani became the brightest student the missionary school had seen in a long time. She received a scholarship, then came to this country to go to university. She was a sheltered young woman who was nonetheless aware of her past, and it was an almost textbook example of the cyclical nature of abuse when she met and married a young man who loved her extravagantly, wanted desperately to protect her delicate person, and turned on her whenever she stepped outside the guidelines he set. He began to beat her. And although it was not at the time legally recognized that a husband forcing himself on his wife is rape, that is what it was.

"However, Jani was not living in a war-torn city, and she had a few friends and some very employable skills. She left him, and she saw a lawyer. A restraining order was granted, he violated it, and when they came to arrest him, he had a gun and he used it against one of the policemen, who fortunately was not killed. Jani was there when it happened, and Jules, who was about six months old, was sleeping in the next room. He was, somehow, granted bail, but when he came, inevitably, to look for her, she was already gone. She divorced him while he was in jail. He was killed a few months after the divorce was finalized, apparently in a prison brawl, but Jani had the satisfaction of knowing that she had broken free, that she, of her own will, had saved both herself and her daughter.

"You will understand now why it took her so long to accept Al."

"Does he know all this?"

"Of course."

"And Jules?"

"Jani told her the bones of it last summer, just after school was out. Not the details, not the extent of his violence nor that he had threatened Jani with a gun, just that he'd threatened her, she had divorced him, and he was later killed."

"Last summer, huh?"

"The incident in Germany becomes more explicable, does it not?"

"What incident in Germany?" Kate asked, then kicked herself. She didn't want to know.

"Of course. Why should I think you knew about that? Curious. When they were in Köln, Jules disappeared from the hotel one morning, after what was apparently a mild argument with her mother. When she didn't come back by noon, Jani called the police. They found her just before midnight, coming out of a movie theater. Jules said that she'd spent the first part of the day in the park, and the evening in the theater, which was playing an American movie dubbed into German. Jules said she'd sat through it three times. She was trying to teach herself the language,she claimed, and chose the movie because she had seen it already in English."

Kate had to laugh. "You know, that sounds like Jules."

"It's possible. Nonetheless, Jani was insane with worry."

"Who wouldn't be? I'm not saying it excuses Jules, but it does sound like something a kid would do. A kid like Jules, anyway."

"And would a kid like Jules have screaming nightmares regularly every four or five days? You need to be prepared for those, Kate. And would that kid attack a teacher the first week of school, following a writing assignment to describe one's family history?"

"Attack? Al told me there had been some trouble, but he didn't say she'd attacked anyone. Physically, you mean?"

"Verbally. The woman was in tears, shamed before the class. Young and inexperienced, she could have used a greater degree of tact in the assignment - after all, many children come from broken homes, and at that age they are going to be sensitive about it. Still, the degree of hostility shown by Jules was extraordinary. And quite devastating."

Kate sat and listened to the silence for several minutes, then stirred.

"What else? Any attempts at suicide, or threats?"

"Strangely enough, no. I agree, it might have been expected."

"Drugs? No, I would have noticed that. Tattoos? Body piercing? Shoplifting, for Christ's sake?"

"Nothing. She seems instead to have befriended a cop."

Kate thought about this statement for a few seconds, then decided that although the woman had not actually meant to rank friendship with a cop alongside bodily mutilation, a degree of irritation, if not anger, might be allowed nonetheless.

"Mrs Hidalgo, I haven't heard —"

"Rosa, please."

"I haven't heard anything that would even begin to justify your presence here." Kate was surprised to find that the spark of irritation was actually something that burned hotter, and she gave in to it: straight for the woman's professional pride. "Frankly, I don't think you had any right to tell me. I think that if Jules had wanted me to know, she'd have found a way of telling me herself. She's a tough young lady, and I don't know that you or her mother give her credit for that. Personally, I think she's coping very well with what must have been devastating news: some nightmares and a tantrum against a teacher who probably deserved it strike me as a damned healthy way to react. If anything, she seems in better shape now than she did a year ago." Kate was working herself into a fine old rage, and enjoying every second of it. "When I first met Jules, she talked like an eleven-year-old college sophomore. I'll bet she didn't have a single friend her own age. She was a prig with a big vocabulary, and if that isn't a defense mechanism to rival a brick wall, I don't know what is."

"I didn't mean to —" Rosa Hidalgo tried to interject, but Kate plowed on.

"Now she's a human being, as close to being a normal kid as you can get with a brain like hers. She's got friends - kids her own age, not just one inappropriate friendship with a cop." She put an ironic bite on the word cop, and again ignored the other woman's protests. "I know you people live in a hothouse down there, and I can see that Jani has a load of problems of her own, but I really think you'd be doing Jules a great service if you'd just back off and let her find her own way. Stop coddling her on the one hand and watching her like a hawk on the other, waiting for signs of mental and emotional problems. Give her a chance, for God's sake. Try trusting her."

The final exhortation came out more as a whine than as a command: Kate's rage had deflated as quickly as it had grown, leaving her with a bad taste in her mouth and no choice but to sit while the woman across from her earnestly explained the need for therapy and guidance and supervision. By the time she got rid of Rosa Hidalgo, Kate was feeling like a sullen teenager herself, more firmly convinced than ever that Jules was on the rightest possible road.

But, oh my, she thought as she climbed back into the muddy rubber boots, it was fun to get mad.

Kate half-expected that after Rosa reported back on their interview, permission for Jules's plans would be withdrawn. However, the rest of that day and all the next went by with nothing said, so it appeared to be settled: Jules would come and stay with her from the wedding until New Year's.

With one adjustment to the plan.

On the phone, the afternoon before the wedding, Kate talked to Al, who was at his own place 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 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. I really haven't made up my mind one way or another. I just wrote and told Lee that I'd leave a message at the post office by the twenty-third if I decided to come - but if we do, it'd just be for the day, or 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."

Al talked to Jani, Jani talked to Kate, Kate talked to Al again, and after that, she called the car insurance company, and finally went downstairs to see if she could get the Saab down from its blocks and running.

Half the department seemed to be in the church, from the brass to the foot patrols, contrasting oddly with the ethereal academics Jani had invited. It was an afternoon affair with an informal potluck-style meal afterward in the church hall, when the motley friends rubbed shoulders and piled their rented plates high with dishes ranging from tamale pie and Jell-O salad to spanakopita, vegetarian spring rolls, and hummus.

But the real surprise of the day was not the sweet, honest innocence of the ceremony, nor seeing an SFPD lieutenant talking football with a Chinese professor of mathematics and a black lecturer in women's studies, nor even the quartet of two cops, a graduate student in history, and a technical writer singing dirty rugby songs. The real shock was the newlywed couple's daughter: Jules had a new image. With a vengeance.

Her waist-length braids were gone overnight. In their place stood a cropped black bristle nearly as short as Kate's, with a longer mop on the top held in place with a thick application of gel. Her makeup, though admirably restrained, added five years to her age, and the short jacket, short skirt, and short heels she wore made it equally apparent that this was not a child, but a young woman. Jani could barely bring herself to look at her daughter, merely shooting agonized glances at her from time to time, but Al seemed for the most part amused, even proud, at the transformation. The younger males present were attentive; Jules was aware of them, as well.

When the wine had begun to flow and the conversations flourish, Kate found herself standing next to Al over a platter of barbecued chicken wings. He was looking over to the other side of the room, where Jules in all her self-conscious punk splendor was talking animatedly with her new stepbrother, Sean, a serious, handsome young man a head taller than his father. Kate leaned over to speak in her partner's ear. "Quite a family you've got there, Al."

"Isn't Jules something else? The fledgling takes on her adult plumage. God, I thought Jani was going to die when Jules came home looking like that on Friday. She'll settle down."

"Jules? Or Jani?"

"Both."

The noise in the hall rose higher, and Kate escaped for an hour, to sit in the Saab under the shade of a tree and drift in and out of sleep. When she felt restored, she went back into the hall, to find that an impromptu dance had started up in one corner with a portable tape player. She found a chair in a corner, talked to various colleagues, then Jani, and then Al's daughter, until eventually the tables of food had been reduced to a shambles of scraps and crumbs, the new couple fled out the door, suddenly realizing that they were going to be late for their plane, and the life began to seep out of the party. Jules, flushed with exuberance and reluctant to let go of her triumphal entry into maturity, eventually remembered the shaky state of her guardian and pulled herself away from the nineteen-year-old premed student she was dancing with. Kate drove first to the Cameron apartment so Jules could fetch the bags she had packed earlier and to empty the refrigerator, and then to the house on Russian Hill. They stayed the night in San Francisco, and on Monday morning, they emptied Kate's refrigerator, as well.

After that, the girls were on the road.

ELEVEN

Fragments of conversation from the road north:

"Oh hell. I don't think I turned off the coffeemaker."

"You did."

"You're sure?"

"Positive. And you locked the back door and turned off the oven and checked that the upstairs toilet wasn't running."

"Thank God for your brain, girl. So, I thought we'd stop in Berkeley on the way. I need a raincoat and there's a good outdoor store there."

"I wonder if they have boots."

"I wasn't going to say anything, but those shoes you're wearing aren't going to do it. Athletic shoes are great for California, but the rest of the world is a little tougher."

"It'll be wet up there, won't it? And we may be in the snow."

"Count on it."

"God, Kate, this is going to be so great. I love snow."

"Let's look at boots, then. Or heavier shoes, anyway. And we'll stop in Sacramento tonight, to get your school project out of the way."

"You sure you don't mind?"

"Not at all. The last time I went to the capitol building was when I was your age. I wonder if it's changed."

"You don't think I should have gotten those heavier boots?"

"These will be much more useful. And they really are waterproof."

"I like your hat."

"At least this one doesn't itch."

"What a boring thing it must be, to be a state legislator."

"One more career option to cross off your list, eh?"

"I'd rather teach kindergarten, or be a garbage collector. Or a cop."

"Thanks a lot."

"No offense."

"Is anything wrong, Jules?"

"No. Not at all. Why?"

"I thought you were going to fall out the window looking at those soldiers, and they weren't even very cute."

"I wasn't looking at them. I mean, I was, but not at them in particular. I was just thinking the other day that I didn't really know any soldiers; I don't know anything about them. When you were growing up, you must have had a lot of friends who went to Vietnam."

"I was a little young. I had a friend whose older brother was killed over there, but that was before I knew her. Why do you ask?"

"I don't know, just curious. Wearing camouflage clothes in a city seems kind of… incongruous, I suppose. And having to keep their hair so short, and wear those heavy boots and… well, the dog tags."

"Dog tags."

"Yes, the identification tags they wear."

"I know what dog tags are. Why are you so interested in dog tags?"

"I'm not."

"You sound like you are."

"They're just kind of strange, that's all."

"How so?"

"Well, what do they do with them when a soldier dies? And could they be faked? How can you check up to see if the number is real? Do they keep records?"

"Um, yes, they certainly do. The Veterans Administration could tell you about that, although they have to preserve confidentiality. I suppose a set of dog tags could be faked - they're only pieces of metal - although the number would have to be backed up by actual identification - for example, if the vet were trying to apply for benefits. They're not like a driver's license. And as for what they do with them, I've always assumed they send them to the next of kin. Why are you interested?"

"I just am, all right? Can't a person be curious? God, you sound like a cop."

"I am a cop, for heaven's sake."

"Yeah, well, don't act like one all the time, okay?"

"Sorry," Kate said to the back of Jules's head.

"Why did you become a cop, Kate?" This time, they were not in the car, but in a pizza parlor near their motel north of Sacramento.

"I thought I could do some good. And I guess… I don't know, I suppose the tight structure of it appealed to me. It does to a lot of the people who join the police. You know where you stand, and who stands with you. At first, anyway; it gets more complicated as time goes on."

"Sounds like a family."

"It is, a bit. Tight-knit and squabbling."

"It's my word for the day."

"What is, family?"

"You sound surprised."

"Most of your words for the day are more complicated than that."

"I'm beginning to think that some of the most basic words are the most difficult. You know what family comes from? The Latin famulus, which means "servant." It meant all the relations and servants who lived together under one roof. In my dictionary, it's only the fifth definition that gets around to describing a family as two adults and their kids."

"Really?"

"Yes. Which would make you and Lee and Jon a family. When you're all together, I mean."

"That's a terrifying thought, being related to Jon."

"Ashley Montague says that the mother and child constitute the basic family unit."

"Well, I'm safe, then. You want that last piece?"

"Can I have the pepperoni off the top?"

"Sure."

"Dio's family sounds pretty awful, doesn't it?"

"Has he told you anything about them?"

"Just little things, here and there. It's what he doesn't say that makes me think it was pretty bad."

"You're probably right."

"You must see a lot of that kind of thing."

"Too much."

"Why do parents do that to their kids - ignore them and hurt them and push them out?"

"A lot of them never learned how to be parents. Their own parents abused them, so they never learned the skills, and never had the self-confidence to make their own way."

"Sounds like those experiments on animals, when they take baby monkeys away from their mothers. It's so sad."

"It is. But it doesn't excuse them."

"It explains them."

"To some degree."

"Yes."

"What is your father like?" Jules asked.

"My dad? Oh, he's been dead for ten, eleven years now. He was a good man, honest, hardworking. He ran a store that sold fresh fish and seafood. My grandfather - his father - had a fishing boat out of San Diego, and Dad had all sorts of cousins and uncles who let him have the pick of their catch."

"He sounds… well, ordinary."

"He was, I suppose. What they call 'the salt of the earth.' "

"I wonder what that means? I'll have to look it up when I get home." She took out a slim book with a sunflower on the cover and made a note.

"Do you write everything in your diary?" Kate asked.

"I write a lot. My words for the day, things to remember, ideas."

"Not so much daily happenings?"

"Sometimes, if I think they're the kinds of things that will interest me in ten years."

"Ten years, huh?"

"Did you keep a diary?"

"For a while. Just daily things - who did what to whom, tests, teachers. Dull stuff."

"I like keeping a diary. It helps me think about things."

"What kind of things?"

"Just… things."

"You want me to put on a tape?" Jules offered.

"Sure."

"You have some great music, but some of these people I've never heard of. Who's Bessie Smith?"

"Old-time blues, real old-time."

"Janis Joplin I know; Al has a couple of her tapes. She's incredible."

"The woman sings straight from her - she sings with feeling."

"What were you going to say?"

"A word your mother wouldn't want me to use. I'm afraid I'm not a good influence on you, Jules."

"I know all the words."

"I'm sure you do. And their derivation from the original Anglo-Saxon, no doubt."

"I'm sorry. I must've been showing off again."

"Showing off? Hell no, I get a kick out of the sorts of things you know."

There was a brief silence as Jules went through a shoe box full of cassettes.

"Do you want k.d. lang or Bessie Smith?"

"Bessie Smith is a little hard on the ears. Put on k.d."

"She's supposed to be gay, isn't she?" Jules slid the tape into the player and adjusted the volume.

"So I heard."

"Did you know you were gay, when you were a kid?"

"No."

"Sorry. Do you mind talking about it?"

"No, not really."

"Meaning you do."

"Meaning I don't. What did you want to know?"

"Just if someone always knows their orientation."

"Some part of you knows from the beginning. Lee knew from the time she was eight or ten. I was in denial for years."

"Until you met Lee?"

"Until long after I met her."

"Did your family think she had made you into a lesbian?"

"Good heavens. How did you guess that?"

"It was in a story I read one time. Actually, being gay or straight seems to be inborn, doesn't it?"

"About the same percentage of the population is born gay as is born left-handed. Left-handedness used to be seen as a moral flaw, too."

"Are you serious?"

"The word sinister refers to the left hand."

"God, you're right."

"And you can force a leftie to write with the right hand, just as you can force a lesbian to act straight. With much the same damage to their psyche."

"Do you think I might be a lesbian?"

"Frankly, no. Do you?"

Jules sighed. "I'm afraid not."

Kate began to laugh. "Being straight is nothing to mourn over, Jules."

"I know, but I always wanted to be left-handed."

"Are you sorry you didn't go to Mexico with your mom and Al?"

"No. Not at all."

"You just seem distracted."

"Tired, I guess. It's been a really busy fall term."

"You're sure that's all?"

"Yes."

"Jules, why did you cut your hair off?"

"I just wanted a change."

"You sure it wasn't out of solidarity with my bald head?"

"No. I think I cut it because my mother didn't want me to." Silence followed this admission. Then she said, "Guess it's kind of a stupid reason."

"Hey, if you can't use that reason when you're thirteen, when can you?"

"Oh well. It'll always grow back."

TWELVE

Another rest stop on the same freeway, but this one was more of a park than a mere parking lot with toilets, and this time, without Lee, Kate did not have to take the closest possible spot to the block of rest rooms. Instead, she drove past the center of activity, past the RVs and dogs and cranky children, around the van giving free coffee and brochures about the dangers of drunk driving, to pull the Saab into the farthest parking spot. Silence descended. Kate reached back for her jacket, and handed Jules hers.

Outside, on the tarmac, it was cold, but a bleak afternoon sun struggled for an illusion of warmth. Jules walked off to the toilets, and Kate left the parking area to stroll up a small rise of scruffy lawn. There was a river on the other side of the grass, fast and full and gray and cold, although, when she had scrambled cautiously up onto the boulders that formed the banks, Kate could see a lone fisherman downstream near the freeway bridge. She chose a flat rock on the top of the ridge, pulled her hat down over her ears and her coat down as far as she could, and she sat, watching the water go past.

Jules came after a while, stood and looked; then she, too, sat. Her hand came up to brush at the cropped hair on the back of her head.

"Still feels funny?" Kate asked.

"I'm getting more used to it. I don't feel so… naked anymore."

"You sorry you did it?"

"No, I like it. It feels… How does it feel? Unprotected. Risky. Daring."

"Freedom is always a risky business," Kate intoned.

"Philosopher cop," Jules jeered. "But I don't think I'd go as far as Sinead O'Connor. I'd get frostbite of the scalp."

"She probably wears hats a lot, in Ireland."

"I want a hat like yours - a nice warm hat." Jules pulled her collar up around her unprotected ears and pushed her bare hands into her pockets. "I wonder where fishermen get their clothes," she said after a while. "That water must be freezing." They watched the still figure, totally swathed in hat, coat, gloves, and hip waders, standing in the water. The only bits of human being actually showing were the circles of wrinkled skin around his eyes and nose - which were surrounded by the balaclava hat - wisps of white hair straggling from underneath, and the very tips of his fingers. He noticed them watching him, and raised one hand slightly. They waved back at him. "Those are cool gloves," Jules said, the final word accompanied by a shiver. Kate stood up. Her head was clear now, but it was beginning to ache from the cold. She handed Jules the keys.

"You get in the car; I'll just be a minute." Kate walked across the vacant portion of parking lot toward the ugly green cement-block building, where she gingerly eased her bare skin onto the icy toilet seat, washed her hands in water from a glacier, and walked out of the open doorway into an arctic blast and what at first glance appeared to be a tribe of Afghan gypsies with Frisbees. At least twenty college-aged kids, swathed in layers of colorful ethnic garments, had emerged from a resigned-looking bus and were spilling out across the pavement in chattering confusion. Three neon green plastic disks sailed back and forth between gloved hands while sandwiches, plastic food containers, and thermoses were pulled from nylon backpacks. The odors of damp wool, cigarettes, curry, and stale dope hit Kate's frozen nose, and she paused to absorb the spectacle. She had been too young for the first onslaught of the true hippie movement, but each generation of university students seemed to discover it anew. Once, her second year at UC Berkeley, she had taken a trip like this, with half a dozen others to New Mexico during the winter break…

A trio of nearly identical twenty-year-olds pushed unseeing past her, three lithe bodies in boots and jeans and Mexican sweaters, carrying on a high-speed conversation.

"- think they'd have a microwave or something. My uncle has one you can plug into the cigarette lighter -"

"Yeah I mean, cold lentils are pretty gross."

"That sauna we stopped at was pretty cool, though."

"I don't think that bus has a cigarette lighter —"

"Why couldn't they put them in these rest stops? I mean, they have those hand dryers, so why not a microwave?"

"Yeah, like you could put a dime in for thirty seconds —"

"Like for a Tampax or something."

"Why not? It'd be a public serv - Oh God!"

"Oh shit, that's cold!"

"Jesus Christ!"

"Why can't they heat these goddamn toilets?"

"I'd pay a dime for —"

"— Stand up on the seat like they do in —"

"God, I wish I was a man!"

Grinning hugely, Kate tucked her hands under her armpits and walked back to the Saab. Another group of refugees from middle-class America were on the ridge overlooking the river, one of the girls looking like a sheep with a camera. She waved her furry arms to arrange her victims, two boys and a girl wearing a glorious coat, into a pose of buffoonery, and when she was satisfied, she snapped two pictures, took one of the frozen fisherman, and turned to take two or three more of her companions below, arrayed around the sides of the bus. Jules was still standing outside the car, shivering and watching the activity with the half-envious interest of a younger generation. Kate shook her head at lost youth, got in behind the wheel, and started the car. They drove off beneath a shower of Frisbees.

The car warmed up rapidly, as did they. Kate's cold-induced headache did not fade, however, and she was torn between the desire for fresh air and the soothing stuffiness of the heaters. Then, when half an hour later Jules suggested they stop for dinner early, her stomach gave a lurch at the thought of food, and her heart sank.

"Well," she said in resignation, aware now that she really was beginning to feel ill, "I had thought we'd make it to Portland tonight."

"That's okay then," Jules said. "I'm not starving."

"No, I mean I don't think we'll make it. I'm afraid we're going to have to stop, anyway."

Through the incipient nausea and the tightening throb of her peripheral vision, Kate saw Jules look at her quickly.

"Your head?"

"I'm afraid so. I haven't had one for nearly a week; I thought they were over. Sorry."

"Oh God, Kate, don't apologize. Just stop."

"I could go on for another hour, I think."

"Why?"

Why indeed?

"We can't just stop. It'll have to be a place for the night, so I can go to bed. I'll be fine in the morning," she lied. She would be shaky and distant tomorrow, but functional.

"There're a couple of motels and restaurants two exits from now - that's what made me mention dinner. The sign said five miles."

"Would that suit you?"

"Sure. I have a book."

"I'm really sorry about this."

"Oh hey, it's a real hardship, stopping at four o'clock instead of seven. Like, major downer, man, I just can't stand it; I'll have to walk to Portland without you."

"Is downer back in? I've heard cool and even bummer, which was out of it by the time I was growing up. Bad trip will be revived next." Kate was trying, but it was getting bad fast.

"Cool is cool, but out of it is out of it," Jules informed her.

"Wouldn't you know?" she said lightly, and in a few minutes, she asked, "Which do you want, Best Western, Motel Six, or TraveLodge?"

"Which one has cable? This one says it does, but that one is farther from the freeway, so it'd be quieter."

"Jules, choose. Now."

"Turn right."

Kate signed the register with unsteady hands, one small and fading part of her carrying on in the onslaught inside her tender skull, arranging cable for Jules's room, arranging meals on the bill, taking the keys, aware of Jules, solicitous and worried at her elbow, practically guiding Kate up the stairs and dumping Kate's bag on the chair.

"Can I do anything for you?"

"Pull the curtains shut, would you? That's better."

"Do you want a doctor or something?"

"Jules, please, I just need to be alone and quiet." She squinted across the room at the girl and saw the fear in her eyes. "Jules, I promise you, I'm okay. It's just a kind of spasm that happens. I've had them before, and I'll probably have them again. They're" - she had to hunt for the word -"temporary. In the morning, I will be fine. Now, you go have some dinner." The lurch of her stomach was almost uncontrollable this time, and she swallowed the rush of saliva in her mouth. "Watch MTV until midnight, and I'll see you tomorrow. Did I give you the car key?"

"Yes. I have it. And should I take your room-key, just in case…?"

"I really don't want you to come over, Jules, but if it makes you feel better, take it." And go! she wanted to shriek. Jules either saw the thought or sensed it, because she picked up Kate's room key and went to the door.

"Jules, I'm really sorry."

"Don't worry, Kate. I hope you sleep well."

"G'night." The door started to close, but one last stir of her carrying-on self urged Kate to say, "Jules?" and the girl stuck her head back in. "Don't go anywhere, will you? Other than the restaurant."

"Of course not," the girl said, and closed the door firmly behind her.

Kate took six rapid steps to the toilet, where she was comprehensively sick. Afterward, she washed her face with tender care, brought each shoe up to untie the laces before stepping on the heels to pull them off, and then slid gratefully between the stiff, sterile sheets. And slept and slept.

In the morning when she woke, Jules was missing.

THIRTEEN

It did not help, being a cop. There was no armor against this, no reserves of professional impersonality to draw from, no protection. If anything, being a cop only intensified the horror, because she knew the dangers all too intimately. Kate had a full portfolio of images to draw from, all the dead and mangled innocents she had seen in her job, feeding into the standard reactions of any adult whose beloved child has disappeared: the rising tide of panic when there was no response next door and no familiar butch haircut in the restaurant, the muttered fury of just what she would do to the child when it turned out to be a false alarm - how could she put Kate through this routine, she who had always seemed so responsible? Why didn't she leave a note, a message? And by God, if she was in the shower all this time, oblivious to the pounding and shouting - The only way to keep from losing it, Kate's only hope against the almost overpowering urge just to bash her aching skull against the metal post that held up the overhang on the walkway, was to find the armor of Police Officer, buckle it on, and cope.

She tried very hard, but it would not stay in place. "Yes, of course I looked in the restaurant. I looked in all three restaurants," she told the man at the reception desk, a different man from the sharp-eyed Middle Easterner who had been there the night before, though like enough to be a brother or cousin. But stupid. "Nobody saw her since last night. I just want the key. Yes, I know it's not on the hook - the man who was on duty yesterday gave it to us but the girl in that room took it, and I can't find her. Just let me borrow your master key; I'll bring it right back. Oh, surely you can leave the desk for two minutes." The armor slipped, and the elemental and terrified Kate looked out. She leaned forward and snarled into the clerk's face, "I'm a police officer, and I'll have your balls in jail if you don't have that room open in thirty seconds."

It was not until Kate stood in the doorway of the empty room and saw the bed and the three keys on the table - one for the car and two for their rooms - that the cold precision of routine slid into place. The coverlet was wrinkled, the pillows piled against the head-board, a black remote-control device lying to one side: the bed had not been slept in. The television at the foot of the bed was on, showing the menu screen and giving out no sound.

Kate's hands went automatically into her pockets, her ingrained response to avoid contamination of a crime scene. The clerk was peering over her shoulder, but Kate did not move from the doorway. "Go and call the police," she told him, her voice impossibly level. "Tell them there may have been a kidnapping." How can I be saying those words? her brain yammered. I'm the one who answers the call, not the one who makes it.

"There is a telephone just there," the clerk said.

"Call from the office." When he did not move, she snapped, "Sir, now. Please."

He left. She stepped into the room, her eyes darting across every bit of floor and surface. At the door to the bathroom, she took her right hand from her pocket and, using the backs of her fingernails, pushed the door open. The toilet had been used but not flushed (a true child of California's perpetual drought, Kate thought absently), one glass had been unwrapped, and there was a crumpled hand towel on the fake marble of the sink. Beside the towel lay the new zip bag Jules had bought on the shopping trip in Berkeley, filled with the new cosmetics she had bought in the drugstore in Sacramento, but Kate could see no sign of a toothbrush or hairbrush, and she did not want to disturb the bag to look. Back out in the room, Kate checked the closet: empty, though one hanger had been pulled out from the cluster that was pushed against the end. She felt in her pocket, pulled out a pen, and used it to open the drawers: empty, all of them, but for one that held stationery and a Gideon Bible. She closed the drawers and went out of the room just as the excited clerk came back up the stairs. She put the key that he had given her into her pocket and asked him, "When does your cleaner come?" His face was avid, greedy as a panhandling drug addict, and she had to push down a surge of pure hatred.

"She's down at the other end, downstairs. She works her way up here by about ten or so - another hour at least."

"She mustn't go in. No one can go in there. Tell her."

"But what happened?"

"I don't know. Go back to your desk. And don't go off duty without permission."

"Whose permission? Look, I must be somewhere at noon —" But Kate turned her back on him, and he went off reluctantly to deal with the checking-out guests.

The vehicles of officialdom drifted in one at a time, the local police in a marked car, a curious sheriff's deputy and an equally bored highway patrol officer, on his breakfast break, followed by an unmarked police car. With each of them, she found herself answering familiar questions, could hear herself sounding like every adult she had ever questioned regarding a missing child, panicky and guilty and under thin control. The sense of unreality that always followed one of the bad headaches increased until she felt as if she were taking part in a dream.

At about this point, a middle-aged detective who reminded her of a rural Al Hawkin stopped the series of questions he was asking and looked at her closely.

"Are you all right, Inspector?"

Kate took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of her nose. "No, I'm not all right," she said aggressively. "These goddamn headaches leave me feeling like a zombie."

"Migraines?"

"Not exactly, but close enough. They're the tail end of an injury."

"Car accident?"

"What the hell does it matter?" she snapped, and then immediately said, "Sorry. No, I got hit in the head with a piece of galvanized pipe. Stupid. I was going in after a perp I'd wounded and one of his friends was waiting for me. I forgot to duck. My own damn fault."

As soon as she looked back at him, she knew that she had inadvertently said the right thing. The half-suspicious expression that had dogged his features miraculously cleared, and she could almost see the man recognize her, not as the butch-looking San Francisco cop, one of those affirmative-action females who would fret over a broken fingernail and be unreliable in a tight place, but, rather, as "one of us." A real cop. Oh well, she thought. Anything that helps.

"When did you eat last?" he said abruptly.

"I don't know. I'm not hungry."

He got up and went to the door of her motel room, which had been left open a crack despite the cold.

"Hank, go grab us some sandwiches. You want a beer, glass of wine, something?" he asked Kate, who became dimly aware that it must be closer to noon than morning.

"Alcohol's not a good idea just now. A Coke is fine, or coffee."

The food, she had to admit, had been a good idea. Reality approached a few steps when the sandwiches had hit her system, and her mind started to work again.

"I'm sorry, what did you say your name was?"

"Hank Randel."

"Hank. What have we got so far?"

A deep, melodious, and sardonic voice cut across any answer Hank Randel might have made. "Sergeant, I'm sure you weren't going to answer that, so I'll save you the embarrassment of having to refuse."

Kate had been a police officer long enough to know the voice of authority when she heard it. She stifled an impulse to stand to attention and instead turned to look at the figure that now filled the doorway.

"Inspector Martinelli," said the man, coming into the room. "Lt. Florey D'Amico." He was a huge man with a quiet voice, and his hand as it shook hers was cautious with its strength. He was a foot taller than Kate and weighed two of her. She felt like a child, or a doll, in front of him as he took off his hat, shook the rain from it, and examined her thoughtfully. "I'm sorry this has happened, Inspector Martinelli. The child, she isn't yours I was told."

"No, she's… a sort of goddaughter. A friend. She's my partner's stepdaughter."

"I see. Well, what say we leave these gentlemen to get on with their work and you come back with me to the office."

Kate dug in her heels. She had no standing here to speak of, but she could be an obnoxiously well-informed private citizen, with rights.

"I want to know what you are doing about locating Jules."

He inclined his head to the door in invitation. She thought he was merely ignoring her demand, and she considered fighting him, then decided that she probably could do it better in front of witnesses. She picked up her coat and went to the door she had not been out of in nearly two hours, and when she stepped out onto the walkway, she felt her jaw drop. The motel parking lot was a writhing hive of police activity: a dozen marked cars and as many more distinctively dull sedans, uniformed officers and plainclothesmen in all directions, even a mobile command post in the process of being set up. Civilians were lined up outside half a mile of yellow tape, and she knew were she down there, she would hear the sound of news cameras and shouted questions. Voices from the room Jules had occupied drew her, and she looked in, seeing the final stages of the Crime Scene technicians' activities.

Kate was completely bewildered at the intensity of response to a missing girl. Portland was quieter than San Francisco, granted, but this? There were even television news vans, for God's sake. She looked up into D'Amico's face.

"I don't understand," she said.

"Ah. I wondered. Well, Inspector Martinelli, you obviously did not think of it, but your young friend Jules Cameron is young, slim, and has short dark hair, and as such (Oh God, Kate thought) we have to recognize that she fits the profile of victims for (oh God, no) the man the press has taken to calling the (No. Oh, no, no, no) Snoqualmie Strangler."

When he saw her reaction, D'Amico grabbed her arm and all but lifted her back inside the room, allowing her to drop onto the bed and shoving her head down onto her knees. She had not fainted, did not even cry out, but she sat with her head down and bit the side of her hand so hard, there was blood in her mouth.

It seemed a very long time, but in fact it was less than five minutes before Kate sat upright on the bed. This time she had no questions, merely followed the lieutenant meekly out the door and to his car.

D'Amico's office was warm, light, and surprisingly tidy. The telephones and voices were muted by a glass-topped door. He pointed Kate to a chair, went on down the hallway for a minute, and when he came back, he closed the door and went around the desk to his own chair.

"Tea?"

"I'd rather have coffee."

He scooped up the telephone receiver in one paw and spoke into it. "Two coffees, one cream and sugar."

When it came, Kate drank the sweet mixture obediently.

"Tell me what happened," he said.

She rubbed one hand tiredly across her ridiculously short hair, vaguely aware that she had forgotten to pull on the knit cap before leaving her room. Her head was throbbing again, though so far her stomach had not joined in the revolt. "I don't know what happened. Jules and I checked in to the motel yesterday at about four-thirty, and this morning when I woke up, she wasn't in her room. That's all I know."

"When did you leave San Francisco?"

"We left… What's today? Wednesday? We left Monday morning. Stayed Monday night near Sacramento. Jules wanted… Jules wanted to… Oh God."

"Inspector Martinelli," he said, and his voice, quiet as ever, nonetheless brought her spine straight. "I require your assistance. You will give me a report of your movements since you left San Francisco on Monday morning."

"Sir. Jules's mother and my partner were married on Sunday afternoon. We had made an arrangement that Jules would spend two weeks with me while they were on their honeymoon, and after the wedding she went back with me to my house in San Francisco. We left the house at nine o'clock Monday morning. We stopped in Berkeley to do some shopping, and then about noon we drove north and then east onto highway Eighty. We detoured to Sacramento because Miss… because Jules needed to see the capitol building for a school project. We stayed the night at a motel just north of town, got back the next morning onto the I-Five, and continued north. We'd planned on staying the night in Portland, but we didn't quite get that far." She described the trip, the stops, and the meals. About ten minutes after she began, another man came in, a young man in a dark suit with FBI written all over him. She broke off, but he just nodded at D'Amico, pulled up a chair, and waited for her to resume. She made it to the end of the report, and Jules was still missing from her room. Then the questions began.

"Inspector, why did the two of you come here?"

"I wanted… My lover is visiting her aunt, in the San Juan Islands." Neither of them reacted to the word her. "I haven't seen her since August, and I thought - I'm on sick leave - I'd come up for Christmas."

"And Jules Cameron? Why was she with you?" asked the FBI man.

"Her mother and my partner just got married, on Sunday," Kate repeated patiently. "They're in Mexico on their honeymoon, but Jules didn't want to go with them; she asked to come stay with me instead. I was happy to have the company. She's a good kid. No, she's better than that. She's a lovely human being, very smart, frighteningly smart, and mixed up, and she wanted… she likes me." Suddenly the tears came, unexpected and unwelcome in front of these men, but unstoppable. D'Amico put a box of tissues on the desk in front of her, and they waited until she gained control.

"God," she said hoarsely. "How am I going to tell Al?"

"Al is her stepfather? Your partner."

"Al Hawkin.",

D'Amico's head came up. "I know Al Hawkin. I thought he was with L.A."

"He was. He transferred to us a couple of years ago."

The FBI man spoke up. "The Eva Vaughn case."

"I remember," D'Amico said. "Were you involved with that one?" He was asking her, and she nodded. "And the Raven Morningstar case, during the summer following?" he added slowly, as recognition and memory came. She nodded again, blew her nose a last time, and sat up to look straight at him, bracing herself. However, he did not comment about her notoriety or the mess that had been made of that latter case, but went back to her partner. "I heard Al Hawkin speak at a conference a few years ago. He's an impressive man. His subject… the subject was child abduction," he said in a voice gone suddenly flat.

Kate's mouth twisted into a bitter laugh. "It was his specialty," she said. "Oh God."

FOURTEEN

Kate met the newlyweds at the airport early the following morning. Beneath their incongruous fresh sunburns and bright holiday clothes, they both looked deathly ill, flabby with exhaustion and grinding terror. Jani seemed unaware of her new husband's arm across her shoulders, unconscious of the coffee stains down the front of her lightweight yellow linen jacket. Her eyes flicked across Kate to fix on the large man at Kate's side. Hawkin spared Kate a longer glance, taking in his partner's equally derelict state in the moments it took to walk from the gate to where she and Lieutenant D'Amico stood waiting. Kate said nothing. Before Al Hawkin could speak, Jani walked straight over to the tall man in authority and looked up into his face.

"Is there any news about my daughter?"

"Nothing yet, ma'am. The search team is assembling now; they'll set out with the dogs again as soon as it gets light. Let's take you to a hotel, get you something to eat, and we can talk. Do you have any luggage?"

"It'll catch up with us later," Hawkin said absently. "They held the plane for us in L.A.; the bags got left behind." Kate could see that he badly wanted to seize D'Amico and demand every detail and was keeping himself in only because he knew that loss of control would mean loss of time.

"I'm Florey D'Amico," the lieutenant said belatedly, sticking out his hand.

Kate trailed behind the three of them through the quiet airport and to D'Amico's unmarked car outside the baggage-claim area. After a brief hesitation, he put Jani in the front seat, but Al was leaning over the seat, waiting for him as soon as he got behind the wheel.

"What have you got so far?" he asked.

"Your little girl disappeared from her motel room south of here sometime after nine o'clock Tuesday night. We have yet to find anyone who saw anything, though of course we're still tracing half a dozen hotel guests who left before we were called. I should make it clear," he added, peering at Jani to see if she was listening to him, "that we have no evidence of foul play. Nothing to indicate that she did not walk away from her hotel room all by herself."

Jani was looking at him, but she might as well not have heard, for all the impact his words had on her expression. Al Hawkin brushed away the reassurances, if that is what they were meant to be.

"You must have more than that," he said impatiently.

D'Amico looked again at Jani, then turned to look at the traffic behind him before pulling out into the roadway. When the terminal was behind him, he said to Hawkin, his voice heavy with warning, "I think we ought to get you settled first, before we go into the details."

"Jani should hear it, too."

The heavy shoulders in front of Kate shrugged. "If you say so. Okay. As I said, there's nothing real yet aside from the fact that she wasn't in her room when Inspector Martinelli here woke up. She hadn't seen her since they checked in at four-thirty, although the waitress in the coffee shop says that Jules had a hamburger at about six and charged it to the room. The register tag is timed at six-forty-eight, and the waitress says the girl was reading, by herself, and took a long time to eat.

"So far, two people remember seeing her walking back toward her room a little after quarter to seven. She had the book in her hand. One of them commented that she looked cold and was hurrying, because a wind had come up and it was starting to sprinkle. She wasn't wearing a coat.

"We don't have anyone yet who saw her enter her room, but the house log shows she began watching a pay-per-view movie at eight-thirty-five. The family that stayed in the room next to hers isn't sure about anything. They knew the room was occupied because they heard movement and television noises from time to time, but they have two kids, and it wasn't until they got the kids settled at nine that their own room went quiet. They then heard nothing but the TV from Jules's room until they turned off the lights and went to sleep at about ten-thirty. The wife did hear voices sometime later. She thought before midnight, but she didn't look at the clock, and she couldn't tell where they were coming from. Could have been the parking lot or the hallway or the room on the other side.

"You have anything to add yet, Kate?"

"Just that I was sleeping so soundly that I probably wouldn't have heard voices unless they were pretty loud. I had taken a pain pill," she added. Jani said nothing, but Al looked at her. "My head was bothering me," she said. "That's why we stopped so early in the first place. I didn't think it was safe to drive."

"So you abandoned her instead," Jani said from the front seat, her voice thick with loathing and her jaw clenched.

"I —" Kate started, but Al reached forward with his right hand and placed it on his wife's shoulder.

"Jani, no," he said. After a minute, he looked at Kate, and she resumed.

"I didn't hear anything from Jules's room. In the morning when I tried to wake her up, at about eight-thirty, I couldn't get an answer, so I got the key from the desk and we opened her door. She'd been there, had a glass of water, sat on the bed for a while watching the TV. Her room key was there, along with the keys I'd given her to the car and to my room, but some of her stuff was gone: her jacket, the book she was reading, her diary, her pen, and some of her bathroom things. Her toothbrush and hairbrush were missing from the zip bag. Her makeup was still there."

"Jules doesn't wear makeup," Jani interrupted, her voice dripping scorn. "She borrowed some of mine for the wedding."

Kate looked at Hawkin. "Er, she doesn't exactly wear it, no. But she does experiment with it sometimes," she told the mother in the front seat.

"She didn't before she got to know you." Kate looked helplessly at her partner, who offered her an infinitesimal shrug.

"That's all. Except for the boots. Her new boots were missing."

"She doesn't own any boots, and certainly not new ones." Jani again. "Al, this is ridiculous." She spoke over her shoulder, still looking only at the windshield. She can't bear to look at me, thought Kate, who became aware of a tiny spark of wholly inappropriate and utterly inexpressible anger.

"She does own a pair of boots," Kate said quietly. "A pair of waterproof Timber land hiking boots she said she's been wanting for a long time."

"Jules wouldn't want a pair of boots."

"I was with her. We bought them on Monday, in Berkeley. In fact, I put them on my credit card," Kate said baldly. Silence fell in the car, and Kate knew that it was all Jani could do not to insist that Kate be put out of the car, right there on the freeway.

"Was she wearing them during the day?" D'Amico asked unexpectedly.

"Yes."

"Well, she took them off at eight-thirty."

His three passengers gaped at him, astonished at this obscure bit of knowledge.

"We're not sure about it, of course, but it looks as if she was lying on the bed, watching her movie, and she must have kicked them off, one after the other, over the side of the bed. We found some chunks of dried mud in the carpeting from a sole with a deep tread," he explained. "And the guy downstairs was turning on his television when he heard two thuds from overhead, about thirty seconds apart. He said they sounded like shoes dropping." He shot Hawkin a glance over his shoulder. "You can see that we were interested in the mud and in the noises, but I'd say it's pretty certain they're connected. Besides, he heard her moving around a while later. Unfortunately, he went to sleep early."

"So that's it?" Hawkin asked him. "That's all you have?"

"So far. They're still running prints, and as I said, the search parties will be out again in a little while."

"They found nothing yesterday?"

"Not a thing. But the dogs didn't get here until the afternoon, so they had only a couple of hours."

"You haven't received a note?"

The brief hesitation before D'Amico answered said a great deal about the chances that she was being held for ransom. "No." That Al had even asked, his expression said, was a surprise; but then the Al who had asked was not the investigator; it was the father.

What followed in the ensuing days seemed to Kate like a cross between being inside a tumble dryer and being shot from a cannon. Because she had no standing here in Oregon, she could take on none of the usual roles of questioning or directing or even acting as liaison with the unofficial volunteers. Still less could she talk with the press, which had seized on her familiar name with the glee of a pack of hounds and came howling to life whenever her face crossed their cameras.

She ended up collating, filing, and answering the telephone, performing her tasks with a grim ferocity, aching to do more and constantly aware of things going on just outside her sight and hearing. She saw Al a few times, Jani twice, looking so pale that her brown skin seemed as translucent as a lamp shade.

On Friday night, Kate caught at D'Amico's arm as he went past her. He looked at her as if he had never seen her before.

"You've got to give me something to do," she said, in what she had intended to be a demand but that came out a plea. "I'm going crazy here."

After a minute, he asked, "You have waterproof clothes?"

"I can get some."

He took a pen from his pocket and leaned over the desk, wrote a few words, and handed her the paper.

"Tomorrow morning, they start at first light. Go past the motel about half a mile. Give that to the man in charge. And get a jacket with a hood. They might not spot you quite so quickly." He walked away before she could thank him. Kate abandoned her filing and went to buy herself clothes to scramble over hills in. She did not think for a moment that they would find Jules anywhere near the motel, but it was better than sitting inside under the headache-inducing fluorescent lights.

Kate had already been forced to rent an anonymous small car when word got out among the press that she was driving a Saab convertible - a car that stood out in rainy Portland. She had gritted her teeth over the cost, and she winced when she saw the price tag on the jacket, a parka combining the most modern materials with traditional goose down, but the monetary penance seemed appropriate, and at least she would not collapse because of the cold and wet.

And cold and wet it was, beating the bush, working on an ever-widening circle out from the motel, covering her assigned segment before staggering back to swallow hot drink and food, not even able to indulge in the luxury of camaraderie with the other exhausted searchers lest she be recognized, then zipping her coat again and going back out into the miserable afternoon. The rain turned into a dispirited sleet before dark. One of the search dogs slid into a frigid stream and was taken away for a rest. A volunteer cracked his head open against a branch; another took his place. Half-frozen mud glued itself to the outside of Kate's new boots; inside, blisters formed on her feet despite doubled socks. Her knees ached, her hands were raw, one cheekbone was black and blue from an incautiously released branch, and the left sleeve of her expensive parka bore an already-fraying patch of duct tape to keep the feathers from drifting out of the rip it had suffered at some point.

The next day was Christmas. During their breaks, the searchers ate turkey and pie until they could burst, but they found no sign of Jules.

On Kate's third day, the search parties split in two and shifted their centers of operations east and west of either side of the freeway. Kate went with the easterly party, farther up into the foothills. They found articles of clothing by the bushel, skeletons of various animals, and a few fresh animal corpses. One of those last caused a great convulsion of fear and excitement among the searchers, until it was determined to be the flayed remains of a deer, stretched out by scavengers among the dead leaves. The search went on.

Dogs and helicopters and human eyes traversed the hills in the filthy weather. Searchers faltered and dropped out, some of their places going unfilled now, six days after Jules had disappeared. Gray hopelessness was in all their minds. Everyone knew they were not going to find her, and the knowledge made the physical strain nearly unbearable, until only the habit of determination kept them at it, step by step, one tree, one boulder, one stream at a time.

After nine days, beneath a low sky dribbling wet snow, the search was called off. Had it been likely that Jules had simply wandered away, the search would have continued, but the chances of this were minuscule. Someone had taken her, and despite the total lack of evidence, people from one side of the country to the other knew who that someone was, if not his actual identity.

There were news cameras at the center of operations to record the closing down of the hunt, and Kate in her exhaustion failed to dodge them. One minute she was trudging through the mire of the field turned parking lot, exchanging a few cliched but deeply felt phrases with two fellow searchers, a young brother and sister who had driven three hundred miles from eastern Washington to join the hunt. The next minute, a shout went up, and before she could make her escape, she had the pack on her heels, with shouts of "Inspector Martinelli!" and "How do you feel about the search being called off, Kate?" and "What will you do now?" being hurled at her from these strangers. She pulled her hood back up over her face, put her head down, and pushed her way through the microphones and pocket tape recorders to her ordinary-looking rental car. She had unlocked the door when a gloved hand came into her line of vision, covering the handle.

"Get your hand off this car," she said in a low voice, not looking up. The hand drew back quickly, and she had begun to pull the door open against the weight of the people standing against it before her mind registered the question that she had been asked. She looked up into his expensive newscaster's face, and despite his superior height and her complete dishevelment, what he saw in her eyes made him step back onto his cameraman's toes. "What was that?" she asked him.

"I said, Do you know where Jules Cameron is?"

Two years before, in another lifetime, Kate might have responded, might have given way to incredulity and fury, might even have attacked him. She had been through the wars since then, though, and by now not responding to the media was as automatic as breathing. She tore her gaze from his, shoved the filthy door back against their immaculate coats, and fell into the car. They continued to shout questions at her as she started the engine and put the car into gear; then they fell silent, looks of eager astonishment on their faces when she braked suddenly and rolled down the window. They surged forward, and she waited until they were beside her before she spoke.

Then clearly, for the benefit of their recording devices, she said, "For the record, no, I do not know where Jules Cameron is." She hesitated for an instant before adding, "I wish to God I did."

Rolling up the window, she drove off, reflecting that at least "Inspector Martinelli said she did not know where the girl is" sounded slightly better than "Inspector Martinelli refused to comment." Some of them might even relent and include her final phrase. Beyond that thought, her mind refused to look.

It was difficult driving while wearing slippery oversized boots and bulky ski mittens, so before she reached the freeway, she pulled over to strip off various garments and lace on her lighter shoes. Had she not stopped, she would probably not have noticed the olive green car until it pulled up beside her in front of her motel, but in the mirror she saw it brake for an instant before accelerating past her, and when she saw the driver hide his face by lifting an arm as he went by, she knew that some enterprising reporter had decided to tail her. Too bad I didn't think of it earlier, she reflected grimly as she pulled off the gloves and bent down to the soggy laces. I could have led them off like the Pied Piper and given the other searchers a chance to get away. As it is, the search teams are in for a round of Kate Martinelli questions. Casting a mental apology over her shoulder, she struggled out of her boots and drove off in her stocking feet, too tired to bother with other shoes.

With a depressing sense of inevitability, she saw the green car in her mirror, pulling out of a dirt road behind her, keeping well back. It took her half an hour and several illegalities before the reporter's nerve broke and she lost him, but the effort cost her the last shreds of her energy. When she pulled up in front of the hotel, she was trembling with fatigue and her head was throbbing along the line where the pipe had hit her skull. She retrieved her shoes, abandoning the wet boots and gloves, and dropped the car keys twice - once when she pulled them from the car-door lock, then again when she was digging in her jeans pocket for the key to her room - before she made it to the safety of her room. She let her shoes fall to the floor, fumbled with the bolt and the chain until they were fastened, and walked blindly across the sterile room to the bathroom. She went inside, then came back out to look across the room with dull incredulity at the still figure standing near the window. "Lee?"

FIFTEEN

"Hello, Kate," Lee said in a small voice. "You look… Oh God, Kate. You didn't find her?"

Kate didn't bother to answer, just stood, trying to absorb the sight of the woman standing beside the chipped veneer table, dressed in a flannel shirt, a puffy down vest, khaki trousers, and hiking boots. Her hair was down to her shoulders now, longer than it had been even in university days, and the arm cuffs of her aluminum arm braces had been covered with a solid band of Indian beadwork, a bright, complex pattern that drew Kate's eyes; they were easier to look at than Lee's face. Lee said something. Kate blinked, shrugged off her heavy parka, and tossed it in the direction of the bed, where it fell slowly to the floor.

"Sorry, I have to…" She knew she sounded idiotic, but she could not help it, and so she turned and went back into the bathroom. The toilet flushed, and when she came out again, Lee had not moved.

"I'm sorry," Kate repeated. "I don't seem to be working at top speed. What did you say?"

"Nothing that can't keep. You should have a hot bath and something to eat."

Kate made an effort to rouse herself.

"Sounds heavenly."

"I'll start the bath running." Lee moved then, using the arm braces to steady herself rather than throwing her entire weight on them. Lee was walking, actually walking, not hobbling anymore, moving easily around the end of the bed and past Kate, an arm's reach from her, then going into the bathroom. Kate heard the water start and sat down on the overly soft mattress. She thought about reaching for the phone and checking in with D'Amico, thought about lifting her foot up and peeling off the sodden, filthy socks, thought about Lee actually walking, and then she turned and lay down on the nylon bedspread. Kate was asleep before Lee came out of the bathroom to ask her about room service.

Fourteen hours later, the telephone woke Kate. Lee already had it and was speaking into the receiver in a low voice.

"She's still asleep. Do you think I —"

"I'll take it," Kate said. She put out a hand and said into the phone, "Martinelli here."

"Kate, Al." She sat up sharply on the bed.

"Is there —"

"No news," he was already saying. "Not about Jules. I need to talk to you. I'm coming over."

"What is it? Something's wrong."

"Not on the phone. I'll be there in twenty minutes."

When she had hung up, Kate realized that she was wearing little but her knit cap and her corduroy shirt, which looked clean but stank of old sweat. She wondered how on earth Lee had managed to maneuver her wet jeans and socks off without waking her.

"You were out cold," Lee said, having read her face, or her mind. "The phone rang an hour ago, and you never twitched. Feel better?"

"I feel filthy. Al's coming over. I'd better have a shower first."

"Your clothes are unwearable. Better take something of mine. And don't tell me they won't fit, because they will. Just roll up the cuffs." Kate had her doubts, but it was true, laundry had been fairly low on her priorities the last few days, and her own clothes were so stale as to be offensive. And to her surprise, when she pulled on the jeans after her long and blessed shower, she found that they did indeed fit. The mirror told her the half of it, and a survey of Lee the remainder.

"You've put on weight," she said, sitting on the bed and pulling on a pair of Lee's socks. "It looks good."

"And you've lost some. Rosalyn told me you had a new image, sort of punk, she said. Actually, I think it's more a tough-guy look than punk, with that hat."

"Marlon Brando. Wait'll you see me in my tight T-shirt with the pack of cigarettes tucked in the sleeve. When did you talk to Rosalyn?"

"She wrote me a while back."

"I see. Did she tell you anything else about me?"

"Such as what?"

"Anything. Recently."

"Not recently. And really, it was only a passing mention, a month or so ago. I think she said you'd been there for Thanksgiving dinner."

"I was, yes. We had a good time."

"Did Maj cook?"

"Of course."

"I'm sorry I wasn't… Kate, it's… I'm so… Oh shit," said this woman who rarely swore. "Would you come over here? Please."

Except for the palm of her hand, and a couple of cheek-pecking hugs, Kate's body had not been in voluntary physical contact with another person for four months. It was awkward at first, no denying that. Too much had happened, and too many questions lay unanswered for it to be easy. However, there was no denying that touch, even with a woman Kate had cursed and resented and wanted to do violence to more than once over the past months, was a good and glorious thing. The familiarity of Lee's body slid past her defenses, and she was beginning to relax into the curves and angles when footsteps sounded in the hall outside, followed by a sharp rap at the door.

Flustered, she pulled back, then shot out an arm when Lee swayed insecurely. She steadied her, picked the arm braces off the floor and gave them to Lee, then went to let her partner in.

He came in, his eyes sliding past her to Lee. His tired face lit up.

"Lee! Woman, it's great to see you." He took three steps and enveloped her in a hug of his own, so that when Kate turned back from closing the door, all she could see of Lee was a pair of hands emerging from behind a plaid wool coat. She picked the braces up from the floor again, then waited until Al stepped back, his hand firmly on Lee's elbow until she had her arms in the beaded cuffs.

"You're looking great, Lee. The woods agree with you."

She acknowledged his remark with a nod, but her thoughts were all on him. She put her hand out and touched his arm. "Al, I was devastated when I heard. Is there anything I can do? Can I help Jani?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Can I let you know?"

"Of course. Kate said —"

Lee was interrupted by another knock at the door. Kate answered it and found a young woman in the uniform of the cafe next to the hotel. She was carrying two large brown bags.

"You ordered breakfast?"

"Did we order breakfast, Lee?"

"Yes."

"Come on in," she said. "I didn't know you delivered."

"We don't," said the young woman laconically, dropping the bags on the small table and pocketing the money Lee held out. An expensive breakfast, thought Kate, closing the door.

Lee had ordered for Al as well, eggs and bacon and toast, only slightly leathery from the delay. Al took off his heavy coat and sat on the bed, Lee and Kate took the chairs, and they were silent until the food was nearly gone. Lee looked up first from her Styrofoam plate.

"I assume that if there had been any change, you'd have said something."

"No change. No sign whatsoever."

"There was a rumor yesterday at the search site," Kate said. "Someone may have seen a car?"

"D'Amico thought he'd found someone who saw a pickup with two people in it enter the freeway from the motel ramp just after midnight, the passenger small like Jules, but it's so vague as to be useless. Light-colored, full-sized pickup, it could have been from anywhere other than the motel. By the time the FBI finished questioning him, he wasn't even sure it was this exit."

"She vanished into thin air," Lee said quietly.

"Not under her own power she didn't."

"You're certain of that?"

"The dogs traced her to the back of the motel, period. She got into a car and was driven off."

"Got, or was put. Would the dogs have been able to track her if she'd been carried around the motel rather than walked there?"

"The handlers said yes, but that the animals wouldn't have seemed as confident as they did, if she'd been carried."

"And this killer, the Strangler. Could it be - I'm sorry, Al. You don't want to go over it all again."

Actually, Kate thought, he had seemed more comfortable now than when he had first appeared at the door.

"Lee, you couldn't possibly make it worse than it already is. Yes, it could be the serial killer who's working up here. Jules fits the physical description of his victims. He always takes them from near freeways, and there's no doubt he's moved south from where he first began."

"But?"

"The 'buts' are very thin. This guy normally kills immediately, takes his girls away, and lays them out ritually in a place they're sure to be found within a few days. Always within a twenty-mile radius of where they disappeared. And then a few days later, some police station in the area will receive an envelope with five twenty-dollar bills in it. The first one, two years ago, had a typed note saying it was for burial expenses, but since then it's just been the money. And that, by the way, is a tight secret. You're not to speak of any of this to anyone. You, too, Kate. The FBI would string me up if they knew I'd told you two."

"Of course."

"Anyway, no note, no money, they haven't found her —" His forced attitude of detached professionalism slipped, and he choked on the word body. He cleared his throat and started again. "There are also indications that she left the motel, if not deliberately, then at least under her own power. Mostly the things that are missing - her shoes and coat she'd have taken even for a short trip out of doors, but probably not her hairbrush, and certainly not her toothbrush and her diary."

What is your word for the day, Jules? Kate wondered, and was hit by a wave of the grief and guilt that had dogged her every moment of the last ten days. To push it away, she shifted in her chair and asked, "You don't think she went off on her own, though?"

"No. She'd have left a note. I think someone took her, and I think he had a weapon, because there was no sign of a struggle and I know Jules would've raised bloody hell unless she had a damned good reason not to."

"How did he get inside her room, or get her to come out?" Lee wondered.

"I don't know."

"What is it, Al?" Kate asked. "You had a reason for coming over here.

His right hand went spontaneously to the pocket in his shirt, and Kate did not need the look of embarrassment on his face to know that it was time to brace herself. Hawkin had been a smoker when she first met him, and she had quickly come to be wary of what that gesture meant.

His hand fell away before reaching the empty pocket, and he raised his face and looked straight at her for the first time.

"I want you to go back to San Francisco."

Until that moment, Kate had managed to forget the question that had been asked at the door of her mud-spattered car the evening before. It had not been difficult to push it away, given the burden of extreme exhaustion, followed by the shock of Lee's appearance and then the heaviest sleep she'd had in weeks, but suddenly all she could see was the knowing look of accusation in the broadcaster's face and the shape of his leather glove spread out against the handle of the car. She waited, and although it was Lee who asked him why, he answered as if Kate had spoken.

"A whole lot of reasons. You need to see your doctor. There're at least three cases pending that one of us needs to work on. And —"

"Pardon me," Lee said. "Doctor? Kate? Have I missed something here?"

"She hasn't told you why she's not at work?" Al asked.

"No," she said slowly. "Somehow it hasn't come up yet."

"It's nothing, Lee," Kate said. "I got hit on the head, and until the headache goes away, I'm on medical leave."

Al Hawkin kept his mouth firmly shut at this vast understatement. Lee looked at him, but he gave nothing away. Finally, she struggled to her feet, picked her way over to where Kate sat, and reached out to pull off Kate's hat. Four weeks of hair did little to cover the scar, and she grunted in pain at the sight.

Kate picked the cap out of Lee's hand and pulled it back over her scalp, ignoring her. "Don't lie to me, Al. What is it?"

"I don't know how to say this."

"Jani wants me gone."

"That's part of it."

"And there's talk."

Hawkin exhaled. "Shit. You heard."

"I haven't heard anything, except one of the most offensive questions I've ever been asked by a newsman."

"Yes, that would be where it'd surface. That's undoubtedly where it started."

Lee said in a plaintive voice, "I'm really sorry, but I'm not following any of this conversation."

"Sweetheart, you'd have been better off staying put with your aunt Agatha. Maybe I should go and stay with your aunt Agatha. I was asked yesterday if I knew where Jules was."

"Why would you - Oh. Oh God, Kate, he couldn't have meant… Al?"

He stood up and went over to the window, his hand patting the front of his shirt again before he remembered and thrust both hands into his pants pockets instead. His voice was harsh, painfully so, when he began to push the words out. "I should have known it was coming. I should've gotten you out of here earlier. I mean, of course you're going to be a target. Even before, you would've been, but now, when half of San Francisco knows about the leathers and the bike, you're meat to their gravy. And Jules taking after you, that haircut she got, and the two of you riding around town on the motorcycle."

Lee positively radiated bewilderment, but neither Kate nor Al could spare her a thought. "Al, does Jani think —"

"Jani's not thinking at the moment, but no, not really."

Which meant that she did indeed think something like that, or at least have her doubts.

"And D'Amico?"

"Florey doesn't listen to gossip. Besides, if he thought there was the least chance, he'd've had you down answering questions."

"And what —"

He whirled around, looking very large and extremely angry. "Martinelli, if you ask me whether I believe those filthy rumors, I swear I'll throw something at you."

Kate took what seemed like the first breath in minutes and felt her eyes tingle with relief.

"Thank you, Al."

"But when you get home, I'd leave that leather outfit in the closet for a while, and drive something with four wheels."

"Okay."

"You'll go?" He could not hide his astonishment.

"I don't have any choice. I'm not doing any good here, and if I stay, it'll only make things worse for everyone. It's already enough of a circus." Maybe I can do my Pied Piper act now, she thought bitterly, drag all the reporters back to San Francisco.

"I don't like it," he said unexpectedly.

"Al, she's your wife. And Jules… Jules is your daughter. But you've got to promise me, if there's anything I can do, you'll call."

"I'll call anyway. Look, I've got to go. I'm late for a meeting with the FBI; they've got a profile to go over."

"Another one?"

"Yeah. As if it does us one bit of good to know that there's a seventy percent chance he wet his bed as a kid and an eighty percent chance his parents were divorced."

"I'm glad they're keeping you in on it, Al."

"I had to call in a lot of favors," he admitted, and it dawned on Kate that one of the conditions they had made was her departure from the scene.

"Take care of yourself. And Jani," she said.

"You'll drive back?"

"I'll leave tonight."

"Watch the snow on the passes." He walked over to kiss Lee on the cheek, nodded to his partner, and went out. The door clicked; his steps faded.

"That was generous of you, Kate," Lee said.

Kate was on her feet. "Shut up!" she screamed. "For Christ's sake, just shut up!" She caught up a glass from the table, turned, and threw it with all her strength across the room, straight at the mirror above the cheap chest of drawers, then flung herself out the door.

Downstairs, panting, she told the startled desk clerk, I'm leaving. Get my bill together. And you'll have to add something for a broken mirror."

JANUARY

SIXTEEN

It was a long and mostly silent drive to San Francisco. They stayed the night in Ashland, waiting for the snowplows to clear the road ahead of them, and it was an equally long and silent night. Kate seemed uninterested in how Lee had come to appear out of nowhere, seemed only half aware of her explanation of seeing a week-old newspaper on a trip into town for supplies. She could not rouse herself to give Lee anything but the most perfunctory account of her injury and the shooting of Weldon Reynolds, which simply seemed too far away to be of concern to anyone.

Eventually, Lee recognized the symptoms, and she forced herself to draw back. Kate was not still angry; she wasn't even sulking. She was merely hungover from the excesses of emotion, burnt-out and drained in every way, and fortunately Lee had the sense, and the experience, to see that Kate merely needed solitude, or as close to it as she would get with a passenger in the car. Lee wrapped herself in patience, biding her time, and allowed the miles to pass while she waited, with growing apprehension, for Kate to make the first overture.

The closer they drew to the city, the worse the traffic grew, until halfway across the eastern segment of the Bay Bridge they came to a halt. Kate stirred, looked in the rearview mirror, and spoke for the first time in two hours. "What the hell is going on? Traffic should be dying down, not getting worse. What day is this, anyway?"

"I think it's Saturday."

Kate grumbled and threw occasional complaints at the grateful and relieved therapist at her side, who worked hard to preserve a detached air and paid no attention to the roadways outside until, once they were back on the ground and nearing the city center, a rapid movement came spilling in front of them. Kate slammed on the brakes, cursed, and laid on the horn simultaneously; at the same moment Lee began to laugh.

"What?" Kate demanded. "The whole goddamn city's gone nuts, and you're laughing?"

"Sweetheart, we're the ones who are nuts. Look at what they're wearing. This is New Year's Eve."

Kate leaned forward to examine the costumes, an equal number of men in diapers and in bedsheets, all of them carrying various noisemakers.

"Thank God," she said. "I thought the place had gone off the deep end for sure."

On Russian Hill, every house was lit up, including their own, which would have surprised Kate except that she had spotted Jon's car down the hill. She eased the Saab in between a convertible Mercedes and a Citroën DCV, coasted into the garage, and hit the button to shut the door behind them. Jon was already on the stairs. His skin looked brown even under the fluorescent lights of the garage, and he was wearing an apron and carrying a wooden spoon in one hand and a pot holder in the other.

He was at the passenger door before Kate had the key out of the ignition. "Lee! Oh my God, girl, look at you. You look like a woodsman; all you need is your ax. Where's your - Will you look at those. Have you taken up beadwork in your old age, my dear? Oh yes, give us a hug." Kate smiled at the sight of her two housemates pounding each other's backs (Jon holding the beaded arm braces now as well as the cooking utensils) before she went around to open the trunk and begin the process of unloading. When her head emerged, Jon was holding Lee at arm's length, still exclaiming. "I love the macha look; it reminds me of the seventies. Do you need a hand here? My God, she's walking. Look at her, Kate; it's a miracle of the blessed Jesus. We'll go dancing next week - can I have a date, dear? How superbly retro, dancing with a woman. God, you look great. You're glowing. Isn't she positively glowing, Kate? Hello, Kate, darlin', you look tired." Kate could see him hesitate, consider words of sympathy and expressions of horror, and then decide that this was not the time - for which she was grateful.

"Hello, Jon," she said, sidling past them with her arms full of bags and packs. "It's good to see you."

The next day was Sunday, but Kate managed to track down the surgeon who had pieced her head together. He was at the hospital checking up on a trio of drunk-driving injuries from the evening before and agreed to see her.

When she saw him, their conversation consisted of "Does that hurt?" (No.) "What about that?" (Yes.) and "Any fevers or headaches?" (No, and Not for ten days.) With a warning to avoid hard things with her skull for a while, he scrawled a note allowing her back on limited duty. She took it, and broke out in a cold sweat.

She walked back to the car, unaware that she was getting rained on, and drove out of the parking garage, fully intending to go home. Somehow or other, she didn't get there. Instead, she drove out to the coast highway and parked, watching the waves pound furiously at the shore. The car shook with the gusts of wind, and the windshield became opaque with spray. After a while, she got out and walked into the maelstrom.

An hour later, face scoured raw and her entire body feeling cleansed, she unlocked the door and got back in. As she drove home, she tried not to think about Monday. Monday, when she would go back to work, to find that the storm of publicity and the lightning strikes of filthy rumors had moved south, directly into the Hall of Justice. How many obscene notes would be waiting for her? How many photographs confiscated from the collections of pederasts would find their way into her papers, appear on the walls of the toilet cubicles? How many disgusting objects could her colleagues come up with to torment a lesbian rumored to know more than she was telling about the disappearance of a child?

Kate did not know if she could summon the strength to cope with another campaign of whispers. She actually hoped, prayed, for a relapse, a headache powerful enough to justify her absence. However, Monday dawned with nothing worse inside her skull than the muzziness of a sleepless night. She put on her holster, feeling weary to her bones and cold with dread, and went to work.

Kate's finger hovered over the DOOR CLOSE button on the elevator, but it did not actually make contact, and the door slid open at the fourth floor. She stepped out and walked down the hall to the Homicide Department. Inevitably, the first person she saw was Sammy Calvo, who could be offensive even when he was trying to be friendly. She braced herself, and he looked up from his desk and smiled at her.

"Casey! Hey, great, glad you're back. It's been really dull around here without you."

"Er, thanks. I guess."

The phone in front of him rang, cutting short any further, more devastating phrases. Kitagawa appeared next, his nose in a file until he was almost on top of her.

"Morning, Kate. How's the head?"

"Doing better, thanks."

"You still on leave?"

"I'm on a limited medical for the next three or four weeks."

"Right. When you get a chance, let's go over the cases you were working."

"Sure. I mean, fine." He put his nose back into the file and went out. However, his attitude meant nothing, Kate told herself. Kitagawa would have been polite to Jack the Ripper.

Tom Boyle caught her as she was stowing her gun and her lunch in a desk drawer.

"Hi, Kate, how you feeling?"

"Fine, Tommy boy. How was Christmas?" she ventured.

"Nuts, as usual. My brother-in-law broke his wrist playing kick the can in the street after dinner, and Jenny's grandmother cracked her dentures on a walnut shell in the fruitcake. How was yours?" He seemed to catch himself, and looked uncomfortable. "Oh, right. I don't suppose you had one, really."

"No, I didn't," she agreed.

"I think we'll go away next year, just Jenny and the kids and me. Disneyland or something. How's Al doing?"

"He's hanging in there."

"Yeah. Not much else he can do, is there? Well, I gotta go. See you."

Something was very odd here. Everyone was entirely too friendly. The messages on her desk, when she sorted through them, not only contained nothing filthy, but there were two generic greetings and a casual invitation to lunch from another detective, a woman Kate had worked with on a vice case some months before. Finally, when it began to seem that every person in the building - uniform, plainclothes, and support staff alike - was finding some reason to pass by her desk and say hello, she went to hunt down Kitagawa. She cornered him outside the interrogation rooms, ushered him inside one, and shut the door behind her.

"All right. What's up?"

"Ah, Kate. Is this a good time to —"

"I want to know why everyone is so goddamned cheerful around here. Everyone in the building knows that I'm fine, Lee's fine, Jon is just dandy, and Al's as well as can be expected. Not one person has mentioned that Jules is still missing. Why the hell not?"

"They are probably aware that the subject causes you discomfort."

"Since when do my feelings —" She stopped. "Al. Al had something to do with this."

"He made a couple of phone calls, yes, to let us know that you might be back."

"What else did he tell you?"

Kitagawa squinted down at the form in his hand, although as far as Kate knew, he'd never had anything but perfect sight.

"You know," he said in pedantic tones,"the police, perhaps more so than other people, do not care for outsiders tormenting one of their own. Even when that member has not fit in terribly well before, if another group who is perceived as "the enemy" begins pursuit, we have an extraordinary urge to close ranks around our threatened member."

Kate stared at him, openmouthed.

"An interesting insight into group dynamics, don't you think? Although you, with your background in sociology, would know all about it." He smiled, then reached past her to open the door, leaving her standing there.

When Kate went home that night, she told Lee about the conversation, and about a day surrounded by the gruff support of her colleagues.

"God," said Lee. "I couldn't think what was worrying you. I didn't even think of that. You must feel relieved."

"Relieved? I feel like I'd just heard the sirens start up in response to an "officer down" call."

That night, for the first time since late August, Kate slept in the main bedroom.

For three and a half days after that, Kate succeeded in enduring the unremitting friendliness of the San Francisco Police Department. Then on Friday, in the late morning, there was a telephone call for her.

It was Al. He said, "We've had a letter."

SEVENTEEN

"You're not to know," Al said quickly. "Don't react to what I say. If the FBI or D'Amico find out I've been talking to you, they'll shut me out completely."

"I'm… glad you've had good weather." She smiled stiffly at Tom Boyle, standing next to her desk, and willed him to move away.

"There's someone near you. Okay, just listen. We had a letter, just a brief one, claiming to be from the Strangler. He said Jules wasn't one of his." Something of Kate's psychic message must have gotten through to Boyle, because he moved away.

"Surely you must be getting a hundred letters a day, saying all kinds of things," she protested in a low voice.

"He gave some details it would be difficult to know, unless he's got access to FBI records."

"My God," Kate whispered, trying with difficulty to keep her face straight. "Have you seen it? The letter?"

"A copy of it."

"And?"

"It's an identical typewriter to the original burial letter. And it has the right flavor. Indignant that he would be credited - his word - with a kill he didn't do. Plus that, it was mailed in the same way he sends the funeral money, to an apparently random name with the address of the police station, so it doesn't catch the attention of the post office until it reaches the local branch."

"Did it say anything else?"

"It said, I quote, 'I don't know why you're trying to credit me with the missing California girl. Asian girls don't have any curl in their hair.' The Strangler always takes a snip of hair from the back of the head, and there's never been a breath in any of the reports about it. So watch yourself with that knowledge, too."

"What's the reaction up there?"

"It's got everyone standing on their head. D'Amico thinks the Strangler's cracking, that this is the first step to turning himself in. There're three psychiatrists shouting at one another down the hall right now."

"What are you going to do?"

"What I've done all along: keep an open mind, and look at everything. All I can do."

"Any way I can help?"

"I can't think of a damn thing."

Neither could Kate. She asked after Jani, Al asked after Lee, neither listened to the other's reply, and both hung up feeling, if anything, more depressed than ever.

At one o'clock that afternoon, Kate thought of something she could do. She hunted down the file of the case that had begun, for her, with a search for a lost boy and ended with a piece of galvanized pipe, and after a bit of wading about, she found what she was looking for: the phone number of the foster home that had taken in Dio.

He was in school, of course, but she asked for, and eventually received, permission to meet the boy and have a conversation - alone.

She had to park illegally, but she was at the school when it let out. She almost missed him, he had changed so much in the last month, but his round-shouldered stance gave him away, that and the distance between him and the other students.

"Hello, Dio," she said, falling in at his side.

He stopped dead and looked at her warily. "Inspector Martinelli?"

"Call me Kate. What's the matter, didn't you recognize me on my feet and without a bandage on my head?"

"I guess not. You look… better."

"You look a little different, too."

She'd been referring to his obvious good health and the five pounds he'd put on, but he ran a hand through his neat haircut and said, with an attempt at humor that held a trace of bitterness, "My disguise. I'm passing for normal."

"Let me know if you manage. I never did. I'd like to talk with you for a little while. Wanda said it was okay."

"They like me home right after school," he said uncertainly.

"I told her I'd take you home later. Only, I'm parked in a red zone, so the first thing we have to do is move my car. Want to go get a hamburger?"

"Sure. Is this your car? Cool."

"Jules —" Kate stopped, occupying herself with the door locks for a moment. "Jules told me that cool was back in use."

They got into the car.

"Have you heard anything about her?" Dio asked, looking straight ahead.

"Nothing."

"Do you think that Strangler got her, like the papers say?"

"I don't know, Dio. I honestly don't know."

"She's the greatest person in the world," he said simply, then shut his mouth hard against further revelations.

Kate turned the key and put the car in gear without answering. Neither of them spoke to the other until they were seated, with their hamburgers on the table between them.

"How do you like Wanda and Reg?" she asked. Kate privately thought of the Steiners, whom she had met in any number of cases involving damaged children, as saints of God.

"They're okay. Kind of like boot camp or something, but she's a great cook. We eat at the same time every day," he said, as if describing the odd habits of exotic natives. "I even have a room to myself." Regular meals, privacy, and having a person to notice whether or not you were home from school was clearly foreign ground to Dio. Foreign, but, by the sound of it, not entirely unpleasant.

"Sounds like you come from a big, confused family," Kate commented. According to his file, he had consistently refused to speak about his past, where he came from, to give his full name, or even tell them if Dio was his real given name. It was no different now: He closed his mouth and his face, and Kate immediately backed away.

"Hey, man, I'm not trying to pump you. Dio, look at me." She waited until his sullen eyes came up. "I don't care where you come from, so long as you're better off now than you were before. I just want to know what you and Jules talked about."

He blinked. "I thought…"

"You thought what?"

"That you'd want to talk about Weldon."

"The squat isn't my case anymore, other than having to testify. No, I want to know about Jules. Do you mind telling me about her?"

"Why should I?"

"Dio, she's thirteen years old. She comes from a very sheltered background. She's missing, and I don't know why. It appears that there's a chance - a very, very small chance, but it's there - that the Strangler did not take her. Now, the FBI and everyone else up in Portland are working on the assumption that it was him. I can't do anything about that, but I can follow up on the other possibilities. What if she walked away on her own? Did some other son of a bitch kidnap her, or is she still out there somewhere, alone? You see, Dio, I thought I was getting to know Jules pretty well last fall, and then people started telling me things about her that made me realize there were whole parts of her I had no idea about. I'd like to know what you have to add to it."

"What kind of things?"

"For one, she ran away from another hotel last summer. Did she tell you about that?" She could see from his face that he didn't know what she was talking about. "Last summer when she and her mother were in Germany, they had an argument, and Jules walked out of the hotel. In a foreign country, where she didn't even speak the language. And she never told me about that. After I found out, I never asked her, because I figured that if she wanted to keep it to herself, that was her business. But not now. Now I need to know everything I can about her. Help me, Dio. It might make a difference."

Dio fiddled with the French fries in front of him, then put two in his mouth. Kate took it as a sign of conditional assent.

"First of all, did Jules ever talk to you about the Northwest? She told me one time that she'd lived in Seattle when she was very young. Do you know if she had any friends there?" Inevitably, she was going over well-trodden ground. The investigation, though concentrating on the Strangler, had not dismissed other possibilities quite as cavalierly as Kate had indicated. Nearly everyone who had come into contact with Jules Cameron, from her boy friend Josh to old neighbors and the families of Jani's colleagues at the university in Seattle, had been traced and interviewed. The address book Jules had left behind contained only one entry north of California: a school friend who had moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. She was away for the holiday and had written Jules to tell her that.

Dio thought for a minute, and looking at his face, deep in concentration, Kate realized that this was not a bad-looking young man. In another couple of years, in fact, if he could lose the wary sullenness, he would be handsome.

"I don't remember anything. She did tell me that she'd lived in Seattle, but all she could remember was when it snowed once. I think she moved when she was three or four."

Jules had been just barely three when Jani got a job at UCLA.

"Was she happy, do you think?"

"Jules? Sure. I mean, she didn't seem unhappy. Except -well, I don't know. Sometimes she acted kind of preoccupied. She used to get really pissed at her mom. I don't think her mother ever realized what an amazing person Jules was. Is."

"How did she feel about Al? Do you think she may have resented the marriage somehow?"

"She liked Al a lot. As far as I could tell, she was really looking forward to her mom and him getting married, when I saw her in December. Last summer, she used to talk a lot about families. She'd found out something about her own family, not very long before. She never told me just what it was, but she said it was "ugly." It made her feel ugly. And dirty, she said. Her mother's past made her feel dirty."

Kate could feel him opening out, but she was careful not to react. "Tell me what you know about her family."

He shrugged, but he wouldn't look at Kate, and she watched the muscle of his jaw jump.

"She must have said something to you… about her past."

He sat back and stretched his neck, as if easing his shoulders, and resumed play with the three limp fries in front of him. "Just that her mom divorced her dad. She didn't remember him - Jules, I mean. Just that he was somehow scary. He probably used to beat her mom."

The matter-of-factness of his last throwaway observation would have told Kate a great deal about his own family life, had she needed the confirmation.

"Did Jules tell you that?"

"No, it just sounded… you know, like something that would happen." He concentrated on slurping the last of his chocolate shake.

"You're probably right," she began to say, and was startled when the boy across from her slapped the cup down and began to give out a stream of words.

"She really wanted a family, to be part of a real family, with a mother and a father and a dog. And a baby brother." His face screwed up in a wry humor that was painfully close to tears. "She wanted a baby brother to take care of. I told her she was stupid, that babies cried all the time and trapped you, but it was all just a fantasy, you know? She just used to talk about it, about making a family. She'd go on and on until I'd want to shout at her."

"She didn't want her own baby, though?" Kate asked cautiously.

"Ah shit, man," he burst out. "She was only twelve!"

"Have you never known a twelve-year-old with a baby?"

"Well, yeah. But that's different."

"Is it?"

"Of course. That kind of girl is - well, they're not really girls. Jules was different. She really was young. She was just a kid. Is… just a kid," he corrected himself. To Kate's amusement, the street-wise boy across the table from her began to blush. "She never knew anything about sex, not when I knew her last summer, anyway. I mean, she'd talk sometimes, you know, but it was just an idea to her, not a real thing. I'm sure she didn't know. And I never…"

"Did anything to disturb her innocence," Kate finished for him.

"No."

The brief flicker of amusement died under the bleak awareness that if Jules was by some miracle still alive, her innocence almost certainly was not. Kate refused to think about it, and she moved on to safer topics.

"When I was at her apartment once, just after you'd disappeared, the phone rang. She took it off and immediately hung up, without even answering, and she said something about strange telephone calls. Do you know anything about them?"

He squirmed in his seat, and all her instincts awoke. She'd hit something here; she could smell it radiating off him. He did not answer, just sat hunkered down, his blush gone, leaving him pale and very determined.

"Dio, she's missing," she said, nearly pleading. "I don't think she went under her own power, or if she did, she didn't mean to be away this long. She wouldn't have left us all hanging like this, Dio. Not Jules. She would have called, written, something."

"She… was getting… weird phone calls," he said jerkily. "A couple of times, maybe. It was a man."

"Were they obscene? Did she tell you what he said?"

"They weren't, no. That was the problem - if they'd just been some guy getting off on dirty talk, she'd have known how to deal with it, but this was just bizarre. He'd say things like, 'You're mine, Jules,' and then - no, wait, he called her Julie. 'You're mine, Julie' and 'I love you, Julie, I'll take care of you.' "

Kate felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle and rise. That kind of call was indeed seriously creepy. "Why didn't she tell anyone about the calls? Other than you?"

"I told her she ought to. They freaked her out, they really did, but she'd only had two or three, and he didn't actually threaten her or anything."

"God, she could be stupid," Kate began, but Dio, his brow furrowed in thought, was not finished.

"And I think there was something else."

She waited, and then coaxed, "What was that?"

"She seemed… this funny attitude… I don't know how to describe it." He was searching for words, though, so Kate waited, and after a minute his face cleared. He looked up at her eagerly, looking amazingly young and almost beautiful until he remembered who she was. He hesitated but then went on, although cautiously.

"I knew someone once - a friend's sister. His older sister, a year and a half older. They had a lot of problems in their family, but the two of them were really close. Then, when she was about fourteen, she started seeing this older guy. I mean a lot older, maybe thirty. He had a big car and he used to take her out, buy her clothes, and she began to get all secretive. She acted proud and excited and a little bit scared, like she had a big prize she was keeping to herself."

"What happened to her?"

"Dad - her dad found out and threw her out of the house. I don't know what happened next, because I left a few weeks later."

"And Jules reminded you of your… friend's sister?" Kate asked, drawing him gently back to the point he had been making.

"A little."

"You think she had a boyfriend, then?"

"Not a boyfriend. Like I said, she's just a kid. Not in her brain, but in a lot of other ways."

"But it was somebody she'd met?"

He began to look uncomfortable again, and suddenly Kate was certain that he knew more than he was telling.

"I don't think she ever met him, no."

"There's something else, isn't there, Dio?" She leaned forward, suppressing the urge to shake him. "Please, Dio. It could be what I need to find her."

"What if she doesn't want to be found?" he, burst out angrily. "She's surrounded by goddamn college professors and cops. Who could blame her?"

"Did she tell you that, when you saw her in December?" Kate demanded, but it was too much for him. He stood up and threw his tall cup toward the garbage can, ignoring it when it missed. Kate scooped up the other wrappings, threw them and the cup in the bin, and hurried out the door after him. She caught him halfway down the block.

"Dio, you have to let me take you home."

"I don't have a home," he raged, throwing her hand off his shoulder, "and I don't have to let you take me anywhere!"

"I told Wanda I'd drive you back. If you come back on foot, she won't like it."

"Who gives a fuck?"

"She does, Dio. She's a good woman; don't push her around just because you're pissed off at me. It's not worth it."

He saw the sense of this, but no ex-con in cuffs went into a patrol car with less willingness than Dio climbing into the Saab, and he glowered out the side window the whole way back. She pulled up in front of the nondescript suburban house that had served as shelter for an endless trail of disturbed teenagers and turned off the engine.

"You're a good friend to Jules, Dio," she said quietly. His hand froze on the door handle. "I think she would be so happy to see how much you've done to pull your life together. I know it's tough, and if there's anything I can do to help you stick with it, I hope you'll call me. I don't agree with all the decisions you're making here, but I do understand that you only want to help Jules, and that you think this is the best way. I only ask you to think about something.

"Sometimes it's a sign of courage not to snitch on your friends. Other times, it's irresponsibility. Part of growing up is beginning to wonder which it is."

He didn't respond, but he didn't move, either.

"Jules saw the makings of a fine human being in you, Dio. I'm beginning to agree with her." She saw the color begin to creep up the side of his neck. "I gave you my card, didn't I? Phone me if you think of anything else," she said. "Anything at all."

EIGHTEEN

Kate drove the Saab away from Wanda and Reg Steiner's home, but around the corner she pulled over and turned off the ignition. After tapping her fingers on the steering wheel for a while and pursing her lips, she looked at her watch. A lousy time of day to get onto the freeway, but it couldn't be helped.

To her dismay, Rosa Hidalgo's apartment was silent, and there was no answer to the bell or Kate's knock. She walked back to the car, thought for another minute, then retraced her path toward the freeway, stopping at a gas station to buy a map and borrow a phone book.

Jules had said her summer computer class was at the university, which Kate took to mean the university her mother taught at. The departmental listings in the telephone book took up an entire column, but there was no answer, not in the Computer Sciences office, nor in the German department, nor in any of half a dozen others she tried at random. The secretaries had left for the weekend.

However, Kate reflected, the computer maniacs she had known would not be diverted by the hour hand of a clock - or, for that matter, by a ringing telephone. There wasn't much else to do, short of going home, so she bought herself a cup of bad coffee from the gas station cashier and drove to the university.

Darkness had fallen before Kate's flashed badge and firm reiteration of her name and rank got her into the computer labs.

"See?" said the elderly security guard who had been Kate's guide for the final stages of her quest. "Told you they'd be here."

The four people at the computer terminal did not stir until Kate had actually hung her badge down over the front of the monitor, and even then the only response was one of vague irritation. The hand of the man sitting next to the keyboard reached up and brushed her ID away.

"You'll have to wait a minute," he said.

Kate had to admit that she hadn't anything better to do, so she waited a minute, and then five more. After that, she got up and went into the next room, an office filled with copy machines old and new, a long table with a motley group of chairs, and various kitchen machines. She found a can of coffee in the refrigerator and filters in with the reams of Xerox paper. When the coffee was made, she carried the carafe into the lab, along with half a dozen Styrofoam cups, the top one filled with packets of sugar and creamer. The woman and the three men had not changed position, although it was now the woman's hands that flew across the keyboard.

"Coffee?" Kate asked loudly. One of the men, a young boy with red hair and freckles, tore his eyes from the monitor long enough to glance at his watch.

"Two minutes," he murmured, though not necessarily at Kate. She considered interrupting, by pulling out a few plugs perhaps, but decided to give them the two minutes. Actually, she thought as she poured herself a cup and sipped, it was almost refreshing to meet people who were not only unintimidated but also seemingly unaware of her status as an authority figure.

Two minutes and twenty seconds later, some invisible sign on the screen caused the four attendants to slump back in their chairs. The woman gave the keyboard a few perfunctory taps, and across the room a laser printer hummed to attention.

"Coffee?" Kate asked again. This time, the four of them, chatting in incomprehensible shorthand, came over to where she sat at a worktable. She poured and pushed the cup with sugar and creamer toward them. The redheaded boy was the only one to add sugar, stirring it in with a ballpoint pen that he took from his pocket.

"What was all that?" Kate asked politely. "It didn't look like English."

"It wasn't. Bloke in Moscow," said the woman, her voice thickly Australian. "He can only talk when his partner goes on a break."

"Full of interesting stuff," commented the oldest man, who might have been thirty. "However, his English isn't up to it. Hence Sheila here," he said, nodding at the woman.

"Kate Martinelli," Kate offered, taking the name as an opportunity for introductions, although the woman's name was Maggie, not Sheila. The others were Rob, the young redhead; Simon, the older man; and a young Chinese man with the unlikely name of Josiah. "My adoptive parents were missionaries," he said, offering a well-worn explanation in a voice with no accent.

"Do any of you know Jules Cameron?" Kate asked as soon as introductions had subsided. Four sets of eyes looked at her blankly. "She's a junior high school student who was in a class that was taught here last summer, something about programming. There was a boy in the class, her partner in some project. He sold a game to Atari when he was ten years -"

"Richard!" three voices chorused.

"We all know Richard," Maggie said. "We've all heard the story about Atari a thousand times."

"I haven't," said Josiah.

"You've only been here a week."

"I bet you know him anyway," said Simon. "He uses Albert Onestone as his nom de clavier."

"Oh, Albert. Sure, I know Albert. Is he as bigmouthed in life as he is on the net?"

"Worse."

"God."

"Do you know where I can find him?" Kate asked.

"He's always on the Internet. I don't think he sleeps. Or do you mean actually him, as in his body?" Maggie asked.

"His actual physical person, yes."

"I'm not sure where he lives."

"Could you ask him?" Kate asked.

"You mean when I see him?"

"If he's always on-line, what about now?"

Richard, the computer genius whose pomposity had come across clearly even in choppy Internetspeak, had nonetheless agreed to meet Kate in the flesh. First, though, she needed to reach Rosa Hidalgo, to gain access to the Cameron (now Cameron-Hawkin) apartment. Richard, she trusted, would be able to open the computer inside the apartment, on the slim chance that Jules had left something - diary, letters, mutterings to herself - in its electronic recesses. It was this thin thread that she had followed down here, and she could only hope it led her a bit further before it snapped, or unraveled. She'd been an investigator long enough to be resigned to any number of fruitless days, but that did not mean she relished them.

Rosa was home. Her voice sounded strained, and she obviously held the memory of December's conversation with Kate in the front of her mind. Kate sat at the telephone in the corner of the computer lab and gradually wore Rosa down, grinding away with a steady application of Jules's name and an attitude of profound apology. She hung up feeling more than a bit nauseated, but with the permission at hand. Now all she needed to do was drag Richard away from his keyboard.

She was interrupted in her dialing of his number by the beeper somewhere on her person. She hung up, dug the tiny machine out of her pocket, and held it up. It displayed her own home number, with no message.

Old familiar panic feelings flooded over her as she punched the numbers, and when Lee herself answered, Kate went querulous with relief.

"What do you want, Lee?"

"Where are you? We expected you hours ago."

"Is that why you beeped me, because I missed dinner? I'm working." Damn it, Kate groused to herself. She can take off for months, yet I can't have a couple of hours without checking in. Well, she corrected herself after a glance at her watch, six hours. "Sorry, I guess it is late. I should've called. I've gotten out of the habit of having someone at home."

"It doesn't matter. Oh, look Kate, I'm sorry - I'm not thinking straight. I just got off the phone with Al Hawkin."

Kate held her breath.

"They've arrested the Strangler," Lee's voice in the receiver said.

"What?" The four people at the computer turned to look at her, but she did not see them.

"Just a little while ago. He wanted you to know before you heard it on the news."

"How good a make is it?"

"Sorry?"

"How sure are they that they've got the right man?"

"Al said it looks positive. He said to tell you a witness came forward who saw the letter being mailed. I assume that makes sense to you?"

"It does, yes. Where is he? Al, I mean."

"He said he was with D'Amico at the man's house, south of Tacoma, helping with the search, but that he'd call you tomorrow."

The help that Al would be giving, Kate knew, was to stand by and look at things taken out of the Strangler's house, to see if one of the trophies he had collected belonged to Jules. She shuddered and grasped the telephone as if it were a lifeline. Think, woman, she ordered. Don't go all soft now. She looked at her watch: just after eight o'clock. Lee was talking again, but Kate broke in, unheeding.

"Lee, I need you to make some phone calls. Do you have a pencil? Okay. Rosa Hidalgo: Tell her I won't be coming by tonight, but for God's sake, don't tell her why. Next, a kid named Richard." She gave Lee the number. "Same message as for Rosa; I'll call him in a few days. Next, call the dispatcher. Have her contact Kitagawa and tell him I'm going back on medical leave, that my head's killing me… No, of course not; it's fine. And then the airport. Find me a flight; I'll be able to make it by ten o'clock. Wait a minute - did Al say more precisely where it was?"

"Just that it was south of Tacoma."

"Nothing about which airport?"

There was a silence on the line, then Lee said, "He did say something about it being too damn far from Portland, that he wished he'd flown into Seattle."

That answered the bigger question: Yes, Al knew that his partner would come.

"Right. Book me a flight into Sea Tac, have a taxi at the house in, oh, an hour. That'll give me five minutes to pack. See you shortly."

"Drive carefully," Lee urged, but the phone was dead before she had finished.

When Kate reached Russian Hill, she found her bag already packed and Jon bent over the duct-taped tear on her down parka with a needle and thread.

"Bless you, Jon," she said, and trotted upstairs.

"Do you want a sandwich, or coffee?" he called after her.

"No, I ate," she shouted back, ducking into the study to hunt down maps of Washington. As she pawed through the map drawer, she was dimly aware of the sounds of Lee making her laborious way up the stairs. When the click of her braces paused at the study door, Kate spoke over her shoulder.

"Have you seen those large-scale maps I brought back with me?"

"They're on the shelf."

Kate looked up and saw the bulging manila envelope. She kicked the drawer shut and stretched up for the packet, then shook it out on the desk and began sorting through it for the maps she might need.

"I'll call you tomorrow," she said. "Let you know where I'm staying. The car keys are on the table downstairs." She chose half a dozen sheets and put them back into the envelope, bent down the little metal wings to seal the flap, and turned to go.

"Kate, just hold on a minute."

"I can't, sweetheart. I'll miss the plane."

"Why do you have to go? Can't it wait until tomorrow?"

"It can't wait," Kate said gently. "I have to go."

"But why? They don't want you up there."

Kate winced, then said simply, "Al needs me."

I need you, Lee wanted to say, knowing that if she did, Kate would stay, and that Kate would resent it. And she couldn't help but be aware that she had relinquished the right to say that, after these last months, no matter how true it was. She forced herself to draw back.

"All right, love. Come back soon."

Kate stepped briskly into the hallway, then stepped back in. She kissed Lee, slowly.

"Good-bye, love," Kate said. "I'll call you."

Then she flew down the stairs to the waiting taxi.

NINETEEN

The lights of Seattle did not rise up to greet the plane until nearly two o'clock the following morning. Waiting for the bag holding every warm garment Jon had been able to dig up took forty endless minutes, and renting a car nearly as long. She drove south on the empty freeways, through Tacoma and Olympia, and listened to the radio. Every news report trumpeted the arrest of Anton Lavalle, the homegrown American boy of French-Canadian stock, for the murders of at least three of the Strangler victims.

When she stopped at an all-night cafe to pour some coffee into her numb body, the name Lavalle was on the tongues of the waitress and the cook, the truckers and the highway patrolman, and when she spread out her map to consider the best route, the waitress was unsurprised at her destination.

"You want this turnoff right here, honey," she told Kate, tapping the map with an authoritative red fingernail. "Twenty miles up and then watch for the crowds." Kate laughed politely. "Want some more cream with that?"

"Yes, please, and could I have some toast or a muffin or something?" She was dimly aware that a hamburger with Dio was the last meal she'd eaten.

"Got a nice bran muffin, fresh yesterday. Give you twenty-five cents off."

"That'll do fine. Thanks."

An hour later, Kate realized that the waitress had not been joking about the crowds: A line of parked cars and vans suddenly materialized at one side of the narrow two-lane road, with two figures carrying equipment trotting away from her headlights. She pulled over uncertainly, unwilling simply to park and walk into the night, but while she was trying to make up her mind, a car pulled up behind her. Its driver and a passenger got out with bulky bags slung over their shoulders and set off briskly down the road, which, she saw, was beginning to be visible in the first stages of dawn.

"Must be the place," she said aloud. She took her parka out of the bag and put on the boots she'd last worn to search the hills for Jules (both items cleaned and mended by Jon), then locked the bag in the trunk. In that time, two more cars had joined the line, three more intent men trotting down the road, their breath streaming out in the dim morning light. Kate tied her shoelaces and followed them.

There was chaos at the gate, where a dirt road branched off from the paved one. Kate held up her badge, put down her head, and shoved her way to the front. Even then, it took a long time to convince the short-tempered guards to let her through, a very long time after a local television man had recognized her and began to plague her with questions she could not possibly answer. The nearest guard let her in the gate, and when a convoy of emergency vehicles appeared, trying to push their way through the throng, he waved her on in disgust, then left to go and tear a few verbal chunks out of the nosy civilians.

"Hey, you!" he bellowed. "Yeah you, good-looking. You don't move your ass, I'm going to chain it to a tree." Kate slipped past him and set off up the hill.

The dirt road was nearly a mile long, climbing the side of a gentle hill. Once when Kate hit a patch of silence, free from the crackle of radios and amplified voices below and the growl of a generator from above, for a moment she found herself strolling along a country lane in the dappled sun of a crisp morning that seemed more spring than winter, complete with birdsong: nothing to say that she was nearing a pit of horror. Nothing at all, except for the faces on the men in the car she met around the corner.

She had known it was going to be bad, this lair of a killer, and the closer she drew, the greater the dread grew, until she felt the breakfast muffin like a fist beneath her heart.

Crime scenes invariably gave birth to the black humor of professional cleaner-uppers, and the worse the scene - a weeks-old body, a shotgun wound, an evisceration - the more mordant the jokes. Not many cops smile at the scene of unpleasant death, though they will occasionally bare their teeth, and often they laugh. But the grin is that of a death's-head, and the humor is blue, or, more often, black.

At a certain point, however, even the armor of humor fails, and the hard pleasure of triumph at the arrest of a stone killer has no chance against the reality of the man's acts. This was like approaching the epicenter of some horrendous natural disaster. The airy winter-bare woods and rutted dirt road were soon filled with grim-faced men and women who did not meet one another's eyes and whose shoulders were stiff with an aimless rage and despair. The short tempers that she had seen down at the main road were intensified up here into a barely controlled fury, and she let her face go blank and picked up her pace so as not to draw attention. It was going to be very bad.

But when she got there, she found no corpses being exhumed, no smell of death on the clean air. People were standing around or going about their jobs, but always, she soon saw, their glances returned to the ordinary run-down white trailer at the far end of the road - an old white box, its metal sides begrimed with mildew and rust, its roof hidden beneath lichen and leaves and layers of black plastic sheeting, ordinary except for the amount of attention being given it. The horror here was not in human remains; the horror reflected in the faces came from the knowledge of what sort of creature had inhabited the trailer.

The command post trailer was already in place, bristling with antennae and vibrating with foot traffic and the power generator, overwhelming its sick and decrepit white cousin. Two of the dozen or more vehicles packed into the clearing had their emergency lights on, pulsing the trees in syncopated bursts of color.

There was no sun here yet, if indeed there ever was on this side of the hill. It looked dank and the air smelled musty beneath the fumes of gas and diesel motors. Kate zipped her jacket to her chin, made sure her ID was clipped to the pocket, and approached the command post.

"Al Hawkin?" she asked a man in the uniform of the local sheriff's department. He shrugged and walked past her. "Al Hawkin?" she asked a plainclothesman. He tipped his head toward the trailer. "Al Hawkin?" she asked a woman who looked like a doctor, just inside the door.

"He's back there, with D'Amico. Can I help you with something?"

"I'm his partner. I need to talk with him."

"His partner? But I —" The woman stopped, studied Kate for a moment with a bit too much interest, blushed lightly when she realized what she was doing, and took a step back. "I'll just let him know…" She turned and walked away into the noisy trailer, leaving Kate to reflect on the price of fame. Or was the word infamy?

Al appeared immediately on the woman's heels. He had his head down and kept it down, not greeting Kate, but merely gathered her up and propelled her down the steps ahead of him. He paused behind her, and she heard him say, "Harris, get someone to turn off those flashers, would you? It makes the place look like a goddamn movie set." Then he was beside her. "C'mon," he said, and set off through the trees. She had to trot to keep up with him, down a well-worn path between some shrubs.

The path ended at a sheer drop of about fifteen feet, which, judging by the cans and containers littering the ground between the bottom of the cliff and a busy creek some six or eight feet farther down, had served as the trailer's garbage dump. A bulky uniform was standing guard at the site. He looked up at their approach, flipped a gloved hand at Hawkin, and turned his back again.

Al moved to a fallen tree a few feet back from the cliff face. Kate went to sit beside him. It was quiet here, and all she could see was woods. No garbage, no cop, no serial killer's trailer, just growing things. Al took a nearly flat package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and lit it. She did not comment.

"How's Jani?" she said instead.

"She's in the hospital."

"Al! What happened?"

"Couple days ago, before this latest. She's all right, just collapsed. They've got her on tranks and vitamins. She hasn't been eating, and I didn't notice it." Kate opened her mouth to protest at the tired self-loathing in his voice, then closed it again.

"Al," she started to say, but he spoke at the same instant.

"Videotapes," he said. The word burst out under pressure, from jaws that were held so tightly clenched, they must have ached. "Seven videotapes. One for each girl, more or less. A couple of them are mixed together."

"Oh shit, Al. Was there one —"

"No. No sign of Jules. None at all."

Kate could think of nothing to say.

"They're not finished yet, of course. But there're no traces so far, none of her clothes, no tape. And he's still saying he didn't do her."

She waited.

"However, there're two girls we know were his, and they didn't have any videos, either. One of those he says he didn't do, but we know he did. There's even a necklace of hers here; he's just forgotten. Probably because he didn't have a tape for her, he forgot about her. D'Amico thinks… D'Amico thinks that he forgot the camera, or the battery was… the battery… Oh shit."

Al Hawkin threw his cigarette to the forest floor and slowly doubled over, as if he'd been hit in the stomach. He turned away from her, placed both of his fists hard against his forehead, and curled up fetally, his back to her. Kate was torn between the need to offer physical comfort and the man's intense need for privacy, and she held her hands out to his shoulders, hovering over his jacket for a long time, before she lowered them gently to touch him.

The tears he cried were few and small and bitter, and in barely a minute, he drew in a long breath and sat up straight. He threw his head back, blinking wide-eyed at the treetops and taking sharp breaths through his open mouth before he remembered his handkerchief and used it.

"I've got to get back," he said eventually, not looking at her.

She laid a hand on his arm. "Al, let me help. I'll finish looking at the tapes for you. I'd recognize her as well as you would."

"No," he said quickly.

"Al, I —"

"No! Martinelli, I sent you back to San Francisco. What the hell are you doing here, anyway?"

"I thought —" She caught herself, and instead of saying, I thought you wanted me to come, she said, "I thought I might be of some use."

"There's nothing for you to do here."

It was probably true; the place was swarming with cops already.

"I'll talk to D'Amico."

"I wouldn't," he warned. "He'll take your head off."

Kate sat on the fallen tree and watched her partner pick his way along the pathway, and she continued to sit, with the smell of the killer's garbage mixing with the clean smell of woods and the diesel whiff from the growling generator, and she thought.

No, she would not again beg D'Amico for a meaningless task. However, she could not bear to go back to San Francisco, not yet. She had not even had time to think about the questions raised by the previous evening's interviews, and unfortunately Hawkin was in no condition to talk them over. All he could do was keep his shoulder on the load he had taken to himself. She had to admit that, other than stand by his side, there was nothing for her to do here, but she refused to go home and meekly return to work; she would at least carry through on the line of investigation she had started the day before, pointless though it undoubtedly was.

Assume, for the moment, that Jules was not lifted from the motel parking lot as a random girl by a recreational murderer. This left, as Kate saw it, three options. One, that Jules had chosen to leave, on her own and without so much as a note, for reasons unknown. Two, that there was a second killer, or a copycat, in the Pacific Northwest. Or three, that someone had been after Jules Cameron specifically.

The first one her mind recognized as a real possibility, despite her gut feeling that Jules would have left a note, however misleading its contents. The second, too, was possible, if statistically unlikely. But the third…

If someone had wanted Jules particularly, what would this mean? Why near Portland? And could it have had any connection with those strange telephone calls Jules had been receiving? "You're mine, Julie," the man had said. Was she now his? And why? Were there links to Dio? Or to Al? Or even to the Russian-speaking computer conversation, for God's sake?

Kate sat on her log a long time before she became aware of the cold and her stiffness. She pulled herself off the tree and went back to the command post, which seemed quieter now that the strobes of the car flashers were off. She found Al outside with a cigarette, not so much smoking it as allowing it to burn itself down while he leaned against a car and stared off into the distance. The words rose up in her throat: Al, would Jules have the skills to survive on the streets? Al, how unbalanced is she? What didn't I see? She wanted badly to ask him, to take advantage of his experience and his ability to see things she often missed. She even tried to tell herself that offering him another option would be a kindness, but when she saw him, she knew that she could not. The familiar rituals of investigation, torturous as they were, were the only thing holding him together now. Remove those props and this man could break.

"I'm going now, Al," was all she said. "I have my pager; it seems to work up here. Do you know where you'll be tonight?"

"Here, maybe, or the hospital."

"Al, you're going to end up in the hospital yourself if you don't take care."

He looked at her blankly, noticed the long-ashed cigarette in his hand, and dropped it, grinding it under his heel.

"I'll call you later, okay?" she asked.

"Fine."

She grasped his arm and squeezed hard, then left him.

She was fortunate going downhill, catching a ride with a sheriff's deputy who took her smoothly through the gate and dropped her at her rental car, unrecognized by the press. She had the car turned and away in thirty seconds, feeling the immense relief of an escape from the gates of hell. For once, she did not mean the media circus, but the site behind them.

Long before she reached the freeway, she had decided that what she needed was a meal and a quiet hotel room. She'd been up in the hills for five hours, but it felt like days since her plane had landed at Sea Tac. Her eyes were gritty, she craved a shower and badly needed a toilet, and her skin was twitchy with a combination of anxiety and adrenaline and simple lack of sleep.

Unfortunately, scores of law-enforcement personnel and media types had been there first, and the closest vacancy sign she came to was halfway to Olympia. She waited impatiently for the desk clerk to record her credit card number, then trotted across to her room. Half an hour later, bladder empty and hair still damp from the shower, she crossed over again and ordered from the 'all day breakfast' page of the menu: eggs and bacon, a short stack of blueberry pancakes and hash browns, orange juice and coffee. The newspapers, waitresses, and other customers were all full of the arrest.

Back in her room, she eyed the telephone, decided she needed to sleep, and lay down with her shoes on, pulling the nylon bedspread over her, prepared to give herself over to the exhaustion loosed by the food.

Twenty minutes later, wide awake and tense as a drawn bowstring, she finally gave up, flung back the bedspread, and picked up the phone.

Lee answered.

"Hello, sweetheart," Kate said. "I thought I'd check in."

"Where are you?"

Kate told her, and gave her the motel's phone number.

"Have you seen Al?"

"Yeah."

"Is he holding up?"

"Barely. Jani's in the hospital." Her narrative punctuated by noises of distress from Lee, Kate told her what she had heard from Al. When she finished, she waited for Lee to speak. Eventually, Lee did.

"And?"

"What do you mean?"

"And so, if Al doesn't want you and D'Amico won't have you, why are you calling me from a hotel in Olympia instead of from the airport, telling me when your flight gets in?"

"I'll go nuts if I come home."

"Tell me more," Lee prompted. Kate had a vivid image of her settling back attentively into the therapist's listening position.

"I'm sure they're right - D'Amico and the FBI. This man Lavalle picked up Jules, and he killed her."

"But you're not sure, completely sure."

"No, I am, really. They're very good, Lee. They don't make stupid mistakes; they don't overlook things."

"Then what is the problem?"

"I don't know. I just know I can't stand the thought of walking away from it."

"Walking away from Jules," Lee said quietly.

"You could say that. Not without clear evidence of what happened to her. If she was on those tapes, or if they found her diary, her fingerprints, anything, I'd feel… well, not better about it, but resigned, I guess."

"The word you want is closure," said the therapist.

"That's right."

"You can't grieve until you know."

Kate did not answer.

"You may never have it. You know that, Kate."

As often as the idea had skirted the edges of Kate's mind, Lee's saying it hit her like a physical blow.

"I know. I do know."

"You'll have to face it sooner or later, Kate. Here or in Olympia. There may be no closure to this; you may need to make your own." Kate was silent. "Are you crying, my love?"

"I wish I could."

"I think you should come back home, Kate."

"I will, in a few days. I just need to satisfy myself that she didn't go to Seattle."

"Why would she have gone to Seattle?"

"She talked about it once. She and Jani lived there when Jules was very small. There's a chance she got it into her head to go back to her past, by herself." It sounded even thinner aloud than it had in thinking about it. Kate tried to elaborate. "You see, one of the things that's come out in all the conversations I've had about Jules is that she had a growing need for her own past. She found out this last summer that her father was like something out of a bad novel, violent and possessive. Jani left him when Jules was small, and he was killed in prison a while later. So she has a thing about her past, a need to find her roots. She talked about family a lot in the days before she disappeared."

"And you think she walked away from you to make her way - what, two hundred miles? - to a city you were going to anyway?"

"She had some money. And if she was going to Seattle, she wouldn't have waited to jump ship there, because it would have become the first place I'd have looked for her. Jules is a clever girl." Kate heard her own use of the present tense, and she felt obscurely cheered, as at an omen.

"How would you find her?"

"Shelters, halfway houses, squats. Bridges."

"It's a big place."

"And she's a distinctive girl. Oh, that reminds me: There're some pictures of her in the camera that I didn't get around to developing. Could you have Jon take the film into that one-hour place, and then choose one or two and have twenty copies of each made? Tell them they have to make a rush job of it. I'll give you a place to overnight them to when I get up there."

"Aren't there posters of her all over? I understood that's one thing they were doing."

"Sure, but I want a color photograph of her with short hair."

"All right." Lee's voice, patient and reserved, caught Kate up short.

"I have to do this, Lee. You do understand?"

"Not entirely, no."

"Lee —" How to say this? How to tell Lee that Jules had been the only thing to get Kate through this terrible autumn? "Lee, Jules and I became friends while you were away. Good friends. She reminded me of my kid sister Patty. You remember her?"

"I do. She was killed in an automobile accident when you were at Cal."

"I love Jules, Lee. She's family. I can't just walk off and leave it to the big boys."

"Even if there's no point in what you're doing?"

"Even if there's no point in what I'm doing."

Kate heard a sigh coming down the line, but no more objections. "Get those pictures together," she said. "I'll call you from Seattle. Oh, and I meant to tell you, my beeper extends this far up, if you need to reach me."

"Take care, sweetheart."

"You, too."

Now, Kate could sleep.

TWENTY

Kate woke up shortly before eight o'clock that evening, disoriented by waking to darkness, but rested. She wasn't hungry, there was nothing of interest on the television, and there was no reason for her to stay here. She threw her things back into her bag and checked out - to the mild consternation of the young desk clerk - got back on the freeway, and drove north.

At ten o'clock, she was checking into another hotel room, this one in downtown Seattle. She called Lee to give her the address, received Lee's assurance that Jon would drive down and drop the packet of photographs off that very night so she would have them tomorrow, and then pulled on her down parka, hat, gloves, and scarf and went out to prowl the streets.

This late at night, and without even a photograph in her hand, there would not be much point in cruising for the truly homeless, who would be under roofs or underground by now. However, she could get an idea of where young people would congregate and what part of town the squats were in, and return the next day armed with photograph and daylight.

She began with Pioneer Square and worked her way up past the Pike Place Market and down along the waterfront. She went into every coffeehouse and cafe, not bothering with the bars or the restaurants with linen on their tables. Jules might have an adult-sized brain, but she had neither the face nor the money for adult entertainment. If she was here, she would be with young people.

So Kate explored, entering a coffeehouse with a roaring espresso machine and a clientele that made her feel middle-aged, ordering a cup of decaf and nursing it, her eyes unfocused and her ears alert to conversation. Then, leaving the coffee half-drunk, she wandered along a few doors down to a vegetarian restaurant, where she ate some tasteless but undoubtedly nutritious soup and listened to a long and technical discussion about the growing of marijuana beneath artificial lights. She didn't finish the soup either, just left her money on the grimy plywood table and went on down the street to a bookstore that had a coffeehouse tacked on the side.

In and out, uphill and down. Eventually, the doors began to close, the people moving on to nightlife in more private venues. Kate walked under the raised freeway, saluted the lights of the city's space needle, and went back to her room, where she half-watched a violent movie on the television and tried not to think about the generous supply of alcohol in the minibar.

On Sunday morning, Kate was out early. In her pocket was a paper with several addresses, copied from the telephone book's listing under "Housing and Emergency Services," and a map from the front desk with those addresses x-ed in. A call to the city's shelter hot line had given her the places most likely to be chosen by a teenager; those places were circled, and Kate went to them first.

It was a long, cold, and dreary morning among the outcasts, and when a listless snow began to fall a little before noon, Kate gave up and took a taxi back to her hotel. A hot, plentiful lunch helped thaw her out, and when the packet of photographs arrived at one o'clock, she decided that it was feeble of her to be chased home by some snow, which had more or less stopped anyway, and besides, she'd feel a real idiot when Jon asked her if his efforts to get her forty pictures of Jules Cameron had done any good. With a marker, she wrote, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? along the top of each photograph, and along the bottom, CALL COLLECT, with her San Francisco telephone number. She drank the last of her now-cold coffee, slid the envelope into an inner pocket, and took herself back out onto the slick streets.

She posted ten of the one that looked like Jules now, and seven of the long-haired Jules, putting them on bulletin boards in busy coffeehouses and in the shelters. No one told her that they had seen Jules. She took a bus north through the city to the university district and spent a couple of hours there, asking questions, showing the pictures, posting a few. Two or three people thought the girl in the picture looked vaguely familiar, but it never went beyond vague.

The gray sky dimmed into dusk and the snow started up again. Kate took refuge in a restaurant and ordered a bowl of soup, sitting near the window and watching the flakes come hypnotically down, illuminated by the headlights of cars and the pools of light beneath the streetlamps. She was in the heart of the university district, and the people walking past looked like the students of any other university she'd ever seen, only more warmly dressed: backpacks and parkas, boots and woolen caps, an occasional foolhardy soul riding a bicycle and a number of others walking their bikes through the rapidly collecting layer of white on the ground. A young woman walked by with a dog, he trotting with a Frisbee in his mouth, she striding in knee-high boots under several thick skirts and wearing a colorful patchwork jacket and a loose rolled cap from Afghanistan. All she needed to complete the picture was a —

"Oh shit," said Kate aloud, looking at the woman and seeing another. "Oh my God." A camera. All she needed was a camera. There had been a whole busload of Afghan gypsies, one of them with a camera, at the rest stop, with Jules, just as that fateful headache had been coming on. A camera… taking pictures.

Kate stood up violently and went for the door, shrugging her way into her damp parka. She stopped, turned back to drop some money on the table, and headed back toward the door, where she halted a second time, stood with her head down thinking for a moment, and then turned to search for the waitress. The entire restaurant had fallen silent and was watching her, with expressions ranging from amusement to apprehension. The waitress was one of the latter, and Kate's words to her did not soothe her much.

"Do you know the name of that bus company, the one that transports you but stops at places along the way?"

The waitress was looking positively alarmed by the end of the question, and it dawned on Kate that she'd been less than comprehensible.

"Sorry, I'm not making much sense." She tried a smile out on the woman. "There's a sort of hippie bus company, if you want to go to Los Angeles, for example, but they'll stop on the way to visit hot springs or the beach, things like that."

"You want to go to L.A.?" the woman asked hopefully.

A young man with matted blond dreadlocks and the face of a bearded angel cleared his throat. "You mean the Green Tortoise?"

"That's it. Do you know if they have an office around here?"

He shrugged. "Probably."

"How could I find them?"

He glanced sideways at his companion as if suspecting a trick question, then ventured, "The phone book?"

"Ah. Of course, the phone book. Thanks," she said. "And thank you," she added to the waitress, then let herself out into the snow, heading to the phone booth she'd spotted across the street.

It was, of course, Sunday night, and there was no answer at the local number listed for the alternative bus company. Possessed of a raging impatience, Kate slipped and slithered her way around the district, showing off her pictures, to absolutely no avail. Eventually, she went back to the hotel, and a long time later she fell into a few hours of shallow sleep.

The snow had warmed and turned sloppy during the night, sloppy and wet. Kate's shoes, once waterproof, were no longer, and her feet were frozen as she stood on the sidewalk, hugging herself and rubbing her hands, waiting for someone to come and open the Green Tortoise office. She'd been there for half an hour, and the office should have been open twenty minutes ago, at nine.

At half past nine, she spotted a longhaired couple making their slow and affectionate way down the street, and she was not much surprised when they stopped in front of the door. The man extricated an arm and dug into a pocket for a key ring, kissed his companion a long good-bye, and opened the door. Kate followed on his heels.

It was not much warmer inside than out. The man went around the room switching on lights, heaters, and a computer, and finally he took off his scarf and gloves, indicating that he was open for business.

"Can I help you?"

"I hope so. I'm trying to trace one of the passengers on a bus of yours that went through Portland just before Christmas."

He unbuttoned his coat, revealing a thick green fisherman-knit sweater beneath.

"Why?"

Reluctantly, Kate took out her ID and showed it to the man. He looked at it carefully and took off his hat. His hair was not actually long, she noticed; in fact, it was surprisingly neat.

"This is not official business," she told him.

"That's cool," he said.

"I just need to find her."

"Like I said, why?"

"Frankly, I don't have the authority to go into that. I can only say that she may have seen something with a direct bearing on an ongoing investigation."

Without answering her, he picked up his coat, hat, gloves, and scarf and took them through a doorway. She heard a mild clatter of clothes hangers, and he came back, running both hands through his hair.

"You want some tea? Or there's instant coffee," he offered.

"Um, sure, thanks. Instant's fine."

He went back through the door. This time, she heard water running into a pot and the click of a switch turning on, and then he was back again.

"You know," he said, "if you're going to ask deceitful questions, you really ought to wear glasses or a fake mustache or something. Your face has been on the news."

"As I said, this is not an official inquiry."

"I'm a law student, and I can guess how close to illegality you're walking."

Kate stepped back and looked at him, and rapidly shoveled her original impressions of him out into the melting snow. She smiled wryly and held out her hand.

"Kate Martinelli."

"Peter Franklin," he said, and shook her hand. "What is it you're after?"

"A girl on your bus. She was taking pictures of the other passengers; there's a tiny chance she may have caught someone in the background."

"The Strangler himself? Lavalle?"

"He's denying any connection with Jules Cameron's disappearance," Kate said, which was the truth, although not in the way Franklin would hear it. "I want to pick up evidence while it's still fresh. If you're a law student, you're probably aware of how fast memories fade, how easy it is for evidence to become compromised."

The mild flattery got through. He nodded, started to speak, and was cut off by the whistle of the kettle in the next room, building to a shriek.

He chipped some coffee out of an encrusted jar, dropped a piece into a mug, and poured on the hot water. Milk was added to hers, honey to his straw-colored herbal tea, and Kate resumed.

"I could get a warrant if you think it's necessary," she said, feigning assurance.

"I don't know if it would help," Franklin said, blowing across the top of his steaming cup. "We don't really keep passenger lists."

"Oh Christ." Kate set the cup down so hard, the foul ersatz coffee slopped onto the counter. "Why didn't you just tell me that to begin with?"

"Whoa, lady. Would you rather I just said, Sorry I can't help you. Piss off?"

"Isn't that what you're saying?"

"No."

"Do you have a passenger list?"

"Not a passenger list. We keep records of the reservations made, but those are all along the line of "Pick up Joe and Suzanne at the truck stop.""

"No names or phone numbers?"

"It's not an airline."

"This doesn't sound very hopeful," she said aloud.

"Look, do you want to find your girl with the camera or not?"

"That's why I came here, but you just said —"

"Christ on a cross," he said to himself, turning away to a filing cabinet. "No wonder crimes never get solved."

Kate became belatedly aware that this was probably the most incompetent interview she had ever conducted. Franklin pulled a file from the drawer, pulled up the one in front to mark its place, and came over to her, laying it on the counter and opening it.

"Now, what was the date?"

"The twentieth. What is that?"

"The list of drivers."

"You think the driver might remember one girl?" Kate said dubiously.

"Our trips aren't like Greyhound. We have two drivers on all the time, and even on the straight-through trips there's a lot of interaction. We arrange a picnic, stop at a hot springs, that kind of thing - it can be more a brief impromptu tour than just a form of transportation, and the driver is a part of it. Portland, you say. Going which way?"

"Northbound."

He reached under the counter and came out with a piece of scratch paper, a recycled flyer of some sort torn neatly in quarters. He wrote a name and a seven-digit phone number on it, turned a few pages in the file, and wrote another name and number, this one with a 312 area code.

"That close to Christmas, we run four buses instead of two up and down, but there's only one that might've been there on the twentieth. That was Sally's bus. These are the drivers' numbers - No, wait a minute. Was that when B.J. had the brake problem?" He read on, then nodded. "Right, we had a delay and therefore a bit of an overlap. I'll give you their numbers, too." He wrote down a pair of names and numbers, one local and the other in the 714 area. Then he closed the file and went over to put it back in its drawer.

"One of these numbers is in L.A.," Kate noted. "Where is this other one?"

"Chicago. He just came out to drive the Christmas season. The local ones are between here and Tacoma." These were for Steven Salazar - Sally - and B.J.'s partner.

God, thought Kate in despair, if I can't do this over the phone, the airfares are going to kill me.

She pushed the thought from her mind and gave Franklin a look that was confident and grateful. She held out her hand.

"Thank you."

"I hope it helps," he said, his casual attire clashing strangely with the taut look on his face. "It's cases like these that make me question my opposition to the death penalty."

TWENTY-ONE

Four phone calls, four blanks drawn: All the drivers were out, presumably driving; two of them were expected back either tonight or tomorrow; another tomorrow night; the third, nobody knew where he was, hadn't seen him in a couple of weeks. Out again with the photographs, to soup kitchens and emergency shelters. She avoided the police, which would have involved uncomfortable explanations, telling herself that the police had already conducted their search for Jules Cameron.

Back to the hotel for phone calls to two drivers, one partner, and a lover. One driver had yet to surface and the other would be home at midnight Chicago time, but Kate was told that she'd damn well better not call then, because after a week on the road, the driver would have better things to do than talk on the phone. Al sounded as he had on Saturday, holding on by a mere thread; she told him nothing of what she was doing. Lee was patient and the conversation was short.

Tuesday morning, she caught the Chicago driver at home, but no, he had not pulled into that particular rest stop south of Portland a few days before Christmas.

Tuesday afternoon, three more people told Kate that the girl in her photograph looked familiar, but one was so stoned, Kate didn't think his eyes actually came to a focus, and the other two were helpful and vague and suggestable.

Tuesday evening, she reached the driver Sally. He agreed with his co-driver in Chicago that they had gone through the Portland area at roughly that time, but they had not shepherded their charges to the rest stop near the river.

This left the driver nobody could locate, and B.J. Montero, in the Anaheim area of the Los Angeles sprawl. B.J. was a woman, and her boyfriend worked a graveyard shift and had not been pleased at Kate's initial phone call. He did not seem any more pleased at subsequent calls, either, even though they didn't wake him in the middle of his night. This time when she called, on Tuesday evening, he just snapped into the phone, "She ain't here," and slammed the phone down before she could finish her sentence.

The next morning, timing her call to catch the man before he could drop into bed, she had the same response, only more obscene. Later, she called the Green Tortoise office again, but Peter Franklin could tell her only that B.J. had a couple of days off and had dropped the last of her passengers the day before. Kate supposed she was on her way home, taking her own sweet time - which, she reflected, was understandable if the boyfriend's ill temper was a general state.

Finally, at five o'clock Wednesday evening, the rude boyfriend, instead of hanging up, growled a curse and dropped the receiver onto a hard surface. A woman's voice came on the line. Kate introduced herself and explained that she was trying to find a passenger on the trip Montero had driven five days before Christmas, saying that she did understand that passenger lists were not kept, but that the local manager had suggested his drivers might have gotten to know some of their passengers.

"You just want whatever names I have?"

"It's more than I have now."

"Just a minute." The phone crashed back onto the table. Kate heard retreating footsteps, heard the man's voice say, "Wha' the fuck she want?" and, faintly, Montero answering, "Like you said, she's looking for someone who was on one of my trips." Bass grumbling and soprano giggling, punctuated by distant rustles and thumps, made Kate begin to wonder if they had forgotten her in the business of their reunion, but after a while the feet approached the phone again and the woman's voice came on.

"What was the date again?"

"December the twentieth."

"Right." There followed another silence, with faint paper noises. "Oh yeah, that trip. There was a leak in the brake fluid that took me forever to find, and that crew was really into singing. They must've sung "White Christmas" a thousand times. Jesus, I thought I'd go nuts. I've got two names. Got a pencil? They're Beth Perry and… I think this says Henry James - could that be right? Yeah, I think so; I remember some joke about philosophy. You want their phone numbers?" Kate said yes, please, and wrote two strings of numbers down beside each name. "They're both students, so I took their parents' numbers, too. Students move around too much."

"Just out of curiosity, why did you take these names down? If you don't keep track of passengers?"