With Child

"I usually have one or two names a trip, like if someone has a car for sale, or does some kind of work I might need, or a friend needs. Or" - her voice dropped - "if it's a good-looking guy, you know?"

"And these two?"

"These two… let's see. Beth lives down here and does sewing, these sort of patchwork things. She was wearing this fantastic jacket, said she could make me one. And Henry fixes old cars. I thought he might be able to get a couple of parts my boyfriend needs for his '54 Chevy. Which reminds me, I forgot to tell him," she noted, but Kate did not hear the end of the remark. She had been struck by a vision of a thin young woman with two inches of black roots to her blond hair, furry boots, and a knee-length coat that was a riot of color in the drab parking lot, a garment incorporating a thousand narrow strips of fabric, silks and velvets and brocades, a coat that seemed to cast warmth on everyone in its vicinity. The girl in the coat had been there at the same time as Kate and Jules, one cold day three weeks before. Suddenly, with this tangible link between the driver and herself, the whole thing seemed possible, an actual investigation rather than aimless wandering.

It was a familiar feeling, and a welcome one, this almost physical jolt when an investigation began to come together around an unexpected piece of information, and after the brief distraction of her vision, Kate focused on what else the woman might have to say.

"Do you remember a photographer?" she asked. "A girl with a camera?"

"Everyone on these trips has a camera," Montero said unhelpfully.

However, Kate had thought a great deal about this particular girl and her camera, and she had a description ready. "She was about five two and looked like a sheep - not her face, but she was wearing a sheepskin jacket with the fur on the outside. She was young - maybe eighteen or so. Looked a bit Hispanic, maybe Puerto Rican. She had a truly ugly hat on, an orange knit thing that was all lumpy. Blue leggings, red high-top athletic shoes. The camera was a thirty-five millimeter with a long lens, kind of beat-up-looking, and she was running around telling people where to stand. I don't know what color hair she had, because of that hat, but I'd have thought she'd stand out in a crowd. Bossy in a ditzy kind of way."

After a pause, Montero said in a voice gone oddly flat, "Black."

"Sorry?"

"Her hair was black. Is black. And she's twenty-seven, not eighteen."

"You know her, then?" Kate felt a surge of hope out of all proportion to the actual information.

"My mother made that hat." Her voice had traveled from flat to disapproving.

"Your mother?" Realization began to dawn, along with an awareness that her description had not been as flattering as it might have been.

"What does "ditzy" mean?"

"Um. Well, sort of unstructured," Kate said. "Free-thinking. That was you, with the camera?"

"You really think that hat is ugly?"

"Oh no, not ugly, really. Just… handmade."

There was a snorting noise, and then the woman was laughing. Kate, much relieved, joined in.

"God, it is ugly, isn't it?" Montero admitted. "She's doing me a sweater to match, and I swear the arms are six feet long. You don't know any cold gorillas, do you?"

"I'll let you know if I meet one."

"Anyway, was it me you were looking for?"

"It sounds like it. What I'm after is a record of the people and cars in that rest stop when you were there. Did you have that film developed?"

"Sure."

"Do you have it there? Can you look for me and see what you caught?" Kate's voice was normal, conversational, but only years of experience kept it that way. Jules was almost certainly dead, murdered by Lavalle, but Kate could not suppress the crazy feeling that the child's life rode on this woman's answer.

"Sure. Do you want me to call you back, or do you want to hang on?"

"I'll hang on," Kate said firmly.

"It'll be a few minutes," Montero warned, then put the phone back onto the table.

It was more than a few minutes. Kate entertained herself by chewing a thumbnail, clicking her pen in and out, and listening to the conversation in the house in Anaheim. Montero and her boyfriend were arguing about dinner. Their voices faded and returned, drawers opened and closed, and finally Kate heard Montero shout that she was tired, too; she didn't feel like cooking; why didn't he go down and get some hamburgers; by the time he got back, she'd be finished on the phone.

The receiver was picked up just as a door slammed, and Montero was back on the line. "Found them. Now, let's see. I took seven or eight shots there, but they're mostly of people on the bus. What are you looking for? Is this some kind of insurance thing?"

"That sort of thing. What kind of background images did you get? Cars, people?"

"Okay. First picture: In the background, there're some people going into the toilets, a couple of cars sticking out behind the bus."

"License plates?"

"No, they're from the side."

"Go on."

"Um. Nothing on this one. Here's one of an old guy standing in the river fishing. Not a bad shot, either. Very evocative. Next is a picture of Beth whatsis in her coat - oh, there're some people and a car in this one. Mother and daughter, I guess, getting into a white convertible. Something foreign, I think."

"A Saab?"

"Hey, you're right. It is a Saab. How'd you know?" It was an odd sensation, knowing that a stranger a thousand miles to the south was gazing at a picture of her and Jules.

"That's me," she said.

"I can't see you very well, but your daughter's gorgeous."

"She's not my daughter," Kate said before she could stop herself. Something in her voice gave her away.

"Who is - What are you after? Is this - Oh shit. Oh Jesus. Is this about that last girl who was killed by the Strangler? The policeman's daughter?"

"It is."

"And is this her, in the picture? That means…" The voice trailed off.

"That's her, yes. And she disappeared a few hours after you took that picture."

"And you think he was there? Stalking her? You want my pictures as evidence."

This was much the same thing as Peter Franklin had thought, and Kate again rejected the complicated truth in favor of keeping things simple. "That's what we're hoping. Are there any cars or people in the other pictures?"

A pause while Montero looked at the remaining pictures. "Well, yes, there's a bunch. Maybe a dozen cars and RVs, six or eight people walking around - people who weren't from my bus, that is. And a few more people inside cars, though of course you can't see them very well. What does Lavalle look like?"

Kate made her decision. "I'd like to ask you for the pictures and the negatives," she said.

"You can have them," Montero said emphatically and with revulsion. "Do you want me to mail them to you?"

"Would it be possible," Kate said slowly, "for you to meet me at the airport?"

TWENTY-TWO

On the ground, in the hotel room that had come to vibrate with frustration during the four days that Kate had occupied it, the decision to fetch B.J. Montero's photographic efforts herself had seemed logical enough. A combination of desperation and a vague sense of preserving some semblance of an evidence chain had made the trip seem almost necessary.

Inside the plane, however, with the credit card receipts for hotel, car, and airplane ticket weighing heavily in her pocket, it was a different matter. She nearly got off before the attendants shut the door; probably the only thing that kept her in her seat was the knowledge of how difficult and unlikely a refund would be.

How much had she spent on this fruitless quest? With something approaching horror, she counted up the charges put on her credit card in the last two months, beginning with the waterproof shoes she had bought Jules in Berkeley the day they headed out. Where were those shoes now? she wondered. God, the card must be nearly at the max now. How would she ever pay for it? And what good had it done anyone? In the end, Jules would still be gone, and she would be working to pay off an expensive wild goose.

The plane lumbered and rose, and three hours later dropped into Los Angeles. A remembered figure, wearing a much prettier hat, stood at the gate, manila envelope in her right hand and a large boyfriend at her left. She held out the envelope tentatively.

"Kate Martinelli?"

Kate took the envelope and held out her right hand, first to the woman, then to the man. "BJ. Montero? Good to meet you. I'm Kate Martinelli," she said to the boyfriend.

"This is Johnny," Montero said by way of introduction. He grunted and crushed Kate's hand a bit, in warning perhaps, or revenge for all the disturbance she had caused, or maybe just because he was a poor judge of his own strength.

"Good to meet you, Johnny." Kate extracted her hand. "Want to go for some coffee? I have half an hour before my return flight." The last flight to San Francisco, she thought, wondering why no one had written a song with that title. She then wondered if she wasn't getting a little light-headed. "A drink, maybe?"

"Sure," B.J. said, without so much as a glance at her companion. The top of her head was in line with the center of his biceps, but she handled him with all the ease of a mother.

Kate paid for two coffees and a beer for Johnny ("I'm driving," said B.J.) and, once at the table, opened the envelope. There were nine photographs, not eight. Middle-class gypsies in Afghan hats were caught in motion; the elderly fisherman stood in the frigid water, looking like a frost-rimed sculpture; Kate and Jules stood on opposite sides of the car, taking a last glance at the scene. Kate's door was open, as was the girl's mouth. Jules had been saying something about Montero's sheepskin coat, Kate thought, and remembered the blast of cold air against her nearly shaven scalp when she took off her hat before getting into the car, a jolt that seemed to have set off the headache.

The five remaining pictures were snapshots, hastily composed, though well focused. The focal points, however, were on the young people close to the lens, not on the cars parked in the slots or on the ordinary people walking to and from them. Kate glanced through them, not knowing what she thought she might see, but they were only pictures, memories of someone else's good times.

"You see anything?" B.J. asked. Kate tore her gaze from the picture and reached for her coffee. She shook her head.

"I didn't really expect to."

"You mean the man isn't there? Lavalle?" B.J. sounded both disappointed and relieved.

"I don't know what he looks like."

"You don't?"

Kate, seeing her astonishment, pulled herself together and gave a laugh. "I haven't been in on the interviews yet, and I wasn't there when he was arrested. A case like this, there're hundreds of people working on it. I'm only one." She glanced at her watch. "I better get moving. Let me give you a receipt, and if you'd just sign the backs of those photographs, so we know whose they are." A chain of evidence, as if anyone would ever look at them in a court of law. Would ever look at them, period.

Kate could feel herself beginning to run down. The brief push of zeal that had been set off by Peter Franklin at the bus company and the photographs taken by his driver was fading. If she hadn't already made an arrangement with the police photographic lab technician, she would have gone straight home from the airport, but instead, carried along by routine, she dutifully went to the lab, marked the photos for cropping and enlargement, and pointed out the faces and license plates she wanted brought out.

Then she went home.

It was nearly ten o'clock when she woke up the next morning, and the house was filled with the rich aroma of bread baking. She felt rested, but the sensation of being a piece of run-down machinery persisted. The last few days seemed unreal, like some stupid and pointless dream that had seemed profound at the time. Lee was home and Jon was baking. It was a sunny Thursday morning as she lay in bed while the rest of the world was hard at work. A bird was singing in the tree outside the window, and a dog barked somewhere.

And Jules was dead.

That brilliant, sweet, troubled, funny girl was gone, victim of the most revolting kind of killer. Kate had loved her, had been loved by her, and now she was gone.

She lay among the rumpled sheets, thinking bleak thoughts on a beautiful morning, and when the doorbell rang down below, she was caught up in a memory of another morning, in late August, when Jules had arrived on her doorstep and rung the bell, backpack over her shoulder, bandage on her knee, her hair still worn in long, childish braids, to ask Kate's help in looking for a friend. Kate had found him, and lost her, and suddenly, hit by an overwhelming upsurge of the grief that she had so long pushed away, she turned her face into the pillow and allowed the tears to come.

She didn't hear the sound of the bedroom door opening and then closing, but a minute later the mattress sank as Lee sat down on it, and she felt Lee's hand stroking her hair. Neither of them said anything for a long time, until Kate finally lifted her head, found a Kleenex, and turned onto her back.

The manila envelope Lee held was much thicker than it had been the night before. Kate took it from her without comment and slid the pictures out onto the bedcovers.

"A courier brought it from the lab," Lee said. "I thought it might be urgent."

Kate picked up one enlargement that she hadn't asked for but that had been done anyway: she and Jules on either side of the Saab, two heads of cropped hair, one on an ill-looking cop, the other on a girl with her life ahead of her. Except it wasn't life that awaited her a short distance up the road.

Urgent? These? No. The whole thing was pointless, a delaying tactic to avoid facing the truth, and she had finally admitted it.

Lee's fingers appeared at the top edge of the picture and tugged gently. Kate let it go and closed her eyes. Even with her arm across her face, she could feel. Lee studying the two images, and she knew just when Lee began to cry. Kate held out her arms, and Lee curled up against her, and while the sun shone and the bread cooled and the dog was finally let inside, the two women mourned the brief life of Jules Cameron.

And yet…

"You're like this terrier my parents used to have," Lee said. "He would not let go of a thing once he got his teeth into it." She was trying to be humorous, but her concern showed, and a bit of irritation, as well.

Kate licked the last of the sticky rolls from her fingers and turned her face to the sun. She had carried a table and chairs down to this, the newly rescued patch of garden, the only place in the winter that caught any sun. Jon had gone out, and the house felt silent and nearly content, as in the aftermath of a storm.

"I feel more like one of those high school biology experiments," she said ruefully. "You know, where you have some dead creature that you prod at and it jumps."

"Do you really have to do this?"

"It's a loose end, and it'll keep twitching until I tidy it up. After all, I did get all those people on the alert on Friday, then just took off."

"Rosa Hidalgo and some computer nut hardly count as 'all those people.' "

"It seemed like a lot more at the time. Anyway, it'll only be for the afternoon, and then tomorrow or the day after I was thinking about taking off for a couple of days."

"I think that would be a good idea," Lee said carefully.

"With you? Please? If you can get free," she added.

The joy dawning on Lee's face rivaled the morning sun, but all she said was, "Where?"

"Somewhere on the coast. Just drive?"

"South to Carmel or Big Sur?" Lee suggested.

"Fine."

"I'll need to buy a bathing suit. My only one has holes in unfortunate places."

"What fun."

"If you can guarantee me a private swimming hole, yes."

"Jon would love to take you shopping for a suit," Kate said firmly.

Kate stared at the telephone for twenty minutes before she could work up her nerve to call Rosa Hidalgo. The question of legality - no, it was not even a question - the fact that what she planned was both illegal and unethical was actually of little concern when compared to the thought of Jani's anger if she heard that the woman she blamed for her daughter's disappearance had then been inside her apartment. Scenarios of shame and a permanent state of discomfort around Al almost drove her off - almost.

Very fortunately, Rosa was not home, and would not be home until late. Furthermore, her daughter, Angelica, had no hesitation about letting Kate into the apartment.

Albert Onestone, king of the Internet - Richard Schwartz to the rest of the world - took her a while longer, but she eventually got through to him, his real rather than virtual self on the telephone. Had she been conversing through the keyboard, she was certain he would have wriggled out of her grasp, but confronted by a live voice in his ear, he was out of his element and agreed to go with her to tease the secrets from Jules's computer.

Richard lived in a converted garage not far from the university, and when he came to the door, she almost laughed, so like the caricature of the computer nerd was he. Stooped, pale, bespectacled, and blinking at the sunlight, he was far from the overbearing persona that came across on the screen. She introduced herself, shook his damp hand, invited him to get in the car, waited while he logged off and shut down some machines, assured him that the jacket he had on would be heavy enough, helped him find a pen, and made sure he locked the door behind him.

"Richard," she said when they were in the parking area next to Jules's apartment, "for your own protection, I'm trying to keep anyone from knowing that you were here."

"Protection?" he said nervously. "I don't think —"

"Not that kind of protection - there's nothing dangerous here. It's just to keep you from getting involved. If anyone finds I've been here and broken into the computer, it's my responsibility. I don't want to bring you into it."

"Would you know how to get through the security blocks by yourself?" he asked dubiously.

"Probably not, but nobody could prove I hadn't stumbled through on my own. Don't worry, I'm great at bluffing. Now, you wait here. I'm going to go up and get the door open, then come back for you. I'll be five or ten minutes."

"Really?" He sat up, looking interested. "Do you use picks? I'd like to watch."

"Nothing so clever, just the key. Wait here."

Angelica was home, and she came to the door with a phone tucked under her chin.

"Hi!" she said; then she muttered into the phone, "Hold on just a sec." Turning back to Kate, she said, "I've got the key. Do you want me to come up with you?"

"Oh, no, that's okay," Kate assured her. "Al told me where he kept his sweaters; it'll only take me a minute."

"Funny, Mom just sent them a bunch of things."

"Well, you know how men are," Kate said vaguely. Angelica laughed and went back to her phone conversation, leaving the door open. Kate trotted up the stairs and let herself in.

It did indeed take her only a minute to locate Al's unpacked boxes, piled to await his return from the aborted Mexican honeymoon. One in the bedroom held warm sweatshirts, so Kate pulled out three or four and some socks, bundled them under her arm, and went back downstairs with the key, carefully leaving the apartment door unlocked.

Angelica was still on the phone. She was sitting on the sofa with her feet on the coffee table, painting her toenails with bright red stars against a white background. Kate held up the key between two fingers. "Where does it go?" she asked.

"Oh, stick it on the hook next to the kitchen phone," the girl answered, waving at the door. Kate found the hook and returned the key to what she hoped was the same place that Angelica's mother had left it. When she came back through, the girl looked up from her task.

"Just a sec," she said again into the receiver, and to Kate: "Did you find what he wanted?"

"I did, thanks. And look, Angelica, maybe you shouldn't mention this to your mother. Actually, she sent the wrong stuff, not what Al had asked her for. She'd be embarrassed if she knew."

Angelica giggled conspiratorially, and Kate shut the Hidalgo door behind her when she left.

Richard was reading the driver's manual from the glove compartment.

"Come on," Kate said, throwing the clothes across the backseat.

"Wait a minute. I don't know if I - What are those?"

"Old sweatshirts. Let's go."

"Just how illegal is this?"

"Not at all. He's my partner," which had nothing to do with it, but it seemed to reassure him. He allowed her to take the manual from his hand and pull him out of the car.

"I really don't —" he whined.

"Shhh!"

"I really don't understand," he said in a whisper. "You never explained why you need to get into Jules's computer."

"I told you she disappeared. She was kidnapped."

"Yes, I know."

Feeling she had given the feeble explanation so often that it was nearly threadbare, she sighed. "If Jules disappeared voluntarily, she may have left behind an indication of why - a friend's address, for example, or a phone number. She kept a written diary, but she took it with her. She may also have kept a diary in her computer."

"It's an invasion of privacy," he said desperately. "There are laws against it. I'm sure there are."

They were on the stairs now, the back ones, which did not run right past the Hidalgo door. "I thought hackers believed in freedom of information," she commented.

"Corporate or governmental information, sure, but not private stuff."

"Never mind, Richard, I won't make you read it. Just unlock the door and I'll rob the palace."

They got into the apartment without being seen. Richard booted up, then tapped and scowled at the keyboard for a while before giving a brief grunt of satisfaction as Jules's files fell open before them.

"Before I open these," he said to her, "I need to know if you want to hide your tracks."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, as it is, when I go into one of these, the computer will record that it was opened on this date and time. If you don't want that to happen, I have to change the date on the computer so it thinks it's last month, or last year. It's not perfect, and someone looking for it would probably see it, but it's a way of escaping a quick glance. I can be more elaborate if you like, and nobody would ever know, but that takes more time."

"No, we don't need to be paranoid about this. Go ahead and do the simpler cover."

The files Richard opened were as tidy as Kate would have expected, clearly delineated between work and private material. She had him open each one to be sure, but many of them were simply for school - science and English assignments, book reports and homework of various kinds.

There were three oddball files, and Kate, knowing that Jules used a compatible, if more advanced, version of the word processing program that Lee had on their computer, had him copy them onto a disc. He then closed down the files, restored the proper date to the computer's brain, and shut it down.

"Should we wipe off our prints?" he suggested eagerly.

"No," she said, to his disappointment. When they left, it was quite dark, and again nobody noticed their presence.

TWENTY-THREE

There was a lot of material on the disc, and Lee's archaic printer was smelling overheated before Kate finished. But that was nothing compared to what the stuff did to her brain as she read far into the night, lying on the couch in the guest room.

She fell asleep at some time before dawn, waking three hours later with a drift of papers covering her and the floor around the sofa, like a caricature of a park-bench sleeper with a blanket of newspapers. She groaned, eased her rigid neck, and cobbled the papers together in rough order before walking stiffly down the stairs to the coffeepot.

"Sleeping beauty," commented Jon. He was constructing a shopping list, which always seemed to involve turning out the entire contents of every cupboard. Fortunately, there was a bit of cold coffee in the pot. Kate splashed it into a mug and put it in the microwave to heat.

"Do you think we could bear to have lentils again?" he asked her. He was tapping his teeth with the eraser end of the pencil, a gesture Kate suddenly recognized as pure Lee, adopted by her caretaker.

"I like lentils," she said finally.

"Maybe I should substitute flageolet. Such a saucy name, don't you think?"

"They sound delicious," she said absently, turning to remove the still-cold coffee from the whirring machine. Dio - she'd meant to call Dio before he went to school.

She took the cup into the living room, making a face when she sipped it, and paused to get her notebook from her briefcase. She flipped through it to find the phone number she wanted, sat down, dialed, sipped, and grimaced again, then sat forward when the phone was answered.

"Wanda Steiner? This is Kate Martinelli."

"Hello, my dear. How is your poor head?"

"Much better, thanks. How is Dio doing?"

"He's coming along nicely. I do like him. He's one of the nicest boys we've had in a long time. Not a mean bone in his body, despite everything he's been through."

"Has he given you any other ideas about his past? Where he came from, what his name is?"

"As you know, Inspector" - Kate grinned to herself: When being official, both Steiners invariably called her Inspector Martinelli; otherwise, to the wife, she was Kate, dear - "I try to give my boys as much privacy as I can, and they know I won't violate their confidence. However, having said that, there's really nothing to tell. I think he may have come from a medium-sized city in some western state, and I believe his mother died within the past five years."

"That's more than he told us."

"Oh, he hasn't said anything directly. I judged it by his habits, and the fact that he has very pretty manners when he chooses. He spent a childhood around a woman who loved him and taught him well, but he's had a fair amount of rough treatment since then. There are scars on his back, you know."

"Are there," Kate said grimly.

"From a belt or a switch, I'd say, which drew blood, and more than once." The words were cool and factual - she had, after all, seen worse beneath her roof - but the voice was not.

"And he hasn't let a name slip?"

"Never. In fact, he's taken the birth name of his friend, your partner's daughter."

"Jules?"

"When he first came to us out of the hospital, we told him he needed two names for the records, at school and so forth, so he asked her permission to borrow it temporarily."

"Good… heavens."

"I thought it was rather sweet."

"I wonder what her mother thinks."

"I doubt that she knows," Wanda said complacently. "So, were you just asking after the boy, or was there something in particular I could help you with?"

"There is, yes. I'd like to talk to him again after school, if you don't mind. I'll drive him home afterward."

"He was a little upset last time, dear," she said in oblique accusation.

"I know; I'm sorry. And I can't promise he won't be upset this time, as well."

"Tell me about it."

"Dio knows something about Jules that may have some bearing on her disappearance."

There was a long silence while Wanda Steiner thought it over. "You're not going to arrest him?"

"Absolutely not."

"Or threaten him with arrest."

"I won't threaten him with anything. I like the kid, too."

"That doesn't mean you won't do your job, Inspector Martinelli. Very well, you may talk with him after school, under two conditions. One, that you tell him clearly, at the beginning, he does not have to talk with you, and two, that you keep firmly in mind, Inspector, that if you cause him to run away from here or lose the progress he has made in the last month, I will be very upset."

It was funny, Kate thought, how this gray-haired lady with the grandmotherly act could produce a threat of sharpened steel with her voice.

"Yes, ma'am," she said meekly.

However, when she called Dio's school to leave a message, she was disconcerted to find they had no student by the name of Dio Cameron.

"I was just told he was with you. In fact, his guardian gave me your number."

"Just a moment, please. I'll let you talk to one of the vice-principals about it."

Before Kate could stop her, the call clicked and hummed, and a woman answered.

"Cathryn Pierce."

"My name is Kate Martinelli. I'm trying to leave a message for one of your students, and I was just told that he isn't registered there."

"But you think he should be?"

"I was told so - by his current guardian, Wanda Steiner."

"This is one of Wanda's boys?"

"He's using the name Dio Cameron, although —"

"Dio Kimbal."

"Kimbal?"

"That's how he registered, although I was told that wasn't his actual name. Why, is there something wrong?"

"No, no. Sorry, I must've misunderstood Wanda. But there couldn't be two kids named Dio who live with the Steiners."

"Not likely," the vice-principal agreed.

"Anyway, I'd appreciate it if you'd get a message to him, to say that Kate Martinelli would like to speak with him after school. Tell him he doesn't have to but that she'd appreciate it."

There was a pause while Pierce wrote the message down; then she said, "Okay, I'll have it delivered."

"Thank you very much. How's he doing, by the way?"

"Surprisingly well. Are you a friend?"

"I found him, when he was sick."

"You're the police officer who saved his life and was nearly killed?"

"Both exaggerations. But I'm glad he's doing okay."

"He seems to have a lot of catching up to do, but by his tests, I'd say he's a bright boy. Not that being bright is everything."

"It probably helped him survive."

"There is that, yes. Well, thank you, Ms Martinelli. Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with."

Kate thanked her in return, and cut the connection with her finger. Kimbal? After a moment she allowed the button to come up, and dialed the Steiner number again.

"Wanda? Kate here. Tell me, why is Dio using the name Kimbal?"

"I'm sorry, I assumed you knew. Kimbal is apparently the girl's birth name. I ought to have made it clear, but I thought you knew her so well."

"Who told you her last name was Kimbal?"

"I suppose Dio must have. That is to say, I know her name is Cameron now, but I assumed her mother changed it after the divorce. Is this not the case?" she asked, sounding more resigned than concerned. "Has Dio been lying to me?"

"No. I mean, you seem to know more about Jules than I do."

"I never met her, or her mother, but it sounds like she was a lovely girl."

Kate felt her throat constrict at the flavor of eulogy in Wanda Steiner's words, but she forced herself to say, "Yes, she was. Thanks, Wanda. I won't bother you any more."

"It's not a bother, dear. Tell me, do you want me to say anything to Dio about the name? I will if it's important, but at this stage with my boys I generally find it best to keep the number of confrontations to a minimum."

Kate agreed that it was a question that could be put off for an easier time, thanked her again, and hung up.

After a minute of staring unseeing at the carpet, she blinked and then went in search of Lee, whom she found in the consulting rooms, where she saw her clients. There was no client this morning, just Lee, tidying the crowded shelves of figurines used in the therapeutic process.

"Can I consult?" Kate asked.

"The couch is free."

"Not for me, Frau Doktor. A consultation about a mutual friend." Lee put down her cleaning cloth and lowered herself into a chair. Kate sat in the chair across from her, picking up a glass unicorn to fiddle with. "As you know, I'm trying to reconstruct why and how Jules disappeared."

"There's been nothing to connect her with the Strangler, then?"

"Al would've called. No, I think something else happened to her."

"But I thought - Are you saying you think she's alive?"

"No." Kate took a breath, then forced herself to say it. "I think Jules is dead. But I'm not convinced the Strangler did it. There are too many oddities: Jules was getting weird phone calls from a man; on the drive north, she seemed at times preoccupied, touchy; and unless she was snatched from the parking lot at the motel, which is unlikely, she opened her door to her abductor. Voluntarily. No, I'm uncomfortable with a number of things, and I think there's a chance that someone either watched her or communicated with her over the Internet, or both, then either followed us on the freeway - which wouldn't have been difficult to do, and I certainly wasn't watching over my shoulder - or else arranged to meet her along the way, as soon as she was away from the fairly tight watch Jani kept over her." She rubbed her forehead with her free hand. "I don't know, Lee. I'm just trying to find an explanation that makes sense."

"What did you want to consult about?"

"I broke into Jules's computer."

"How on earth did you do that?"

"I had some help. A lot of what I found was what you'd expect, school assignments and such, but there were three files that bother me. One of them seems to be a kind of novel she's writing, all about a little girl - her words - named Julie. I should mention that according to Dio, one of the things her strange phone caller said was, "You're mine, Julie." The story is an endless round of these idyllic episodes, picnics and horseback rides and travel and camping and cooking dinner at home, with her in the middle of a family: Mommy, Daddy, and Julie. Pages and pages of detail, actually very monotonous. If it hadn't been in her personal files and had her kind of vocabulary, I wouldn't have thought she could write such drivel.

"The second file was a lot more like Jules. It was notes and references and statistics, all about relationships."

"Relationships?"

"Marriage, mostly. Pieces of articles about marriage and divorce, statistics about the effects of divorce on children, things that sounded like advice-to-the-lovelorn columns -how to keep your man, things like that - next to a part of some university study with a hundred footnotes, all of them copied. Oh, and personal research she'd done, as well. I recognized several conversations I'd had with her over the last few months, transcribed. She had an amazing memory."

"And the third file?"

"That was the strangest of all. She named the file "J.K.," just the initials. Now, I just got off the phone to the vice-principal of Dio's high school, and she told me that Dio is using the last name Kimbal. Wanda Steiner, who's fostering Dio, thought that was Jules's original last name."

"J.K."

"Yes."

"What's in the file?"

"A name. That's the whole file, just a name: Marsh Kimbal."

Lee thought for a moment, looking progressively more unhappy. "You've got to talk to Al, ask if he knows who Marsh Kimbal is."

"And how do I explain how I got the name? Broke into his apartment, violated Jani's privacy?"

"You did get the name from Dio's school."

"The last name, yes, but the name Marsh would take some explaining. I know I'll have to tell him eventually. But first I need to talk to Dio: There are things he's not telling me. And I'll run a search on the name Marsh Kimbal, see if anything turns up, though it's probably a pseudonym."

"You still haven't asked me a question," Lee said mildly.

"I have several. First, would you say those first two files indicate a normal reaction on the part of a single-parent child?"

"A highly intelligent thirteen-year-old who doesn't have a family aside from her mother; who, as you told me the other day, just learned her father was a violent criminal; who, furthermore, is going through a rough time with her mother and is facing the upheaval of having a new father wished on her, even a father she's fond of - all this considered, I'd say yes, it's an unusual interest in family dynamics, but an understandable one."

"Okay. Now, you know Jules; you know how smart she is. Could someone who found out about this fixation —"

"Not a fixation, I'd say that was too strong a word."

"Okay, this strong interest - could he sucker her into running away by playing on a sense of family?"

Lee saw immediately where she was heading. "There've been a number of cases like that lately, haven't there? Kids making friends through the Internet and running away to join them."

"Exactly."

"And you're asking me if Jules might have done that?"

"I can't believe it. I'd have thought she was way too bright to fall for a con."

"A con she wants to believe in? A fantasy to fit her own, a way out of the problems she's had building up in school and at home, a way to follow the romanticized notions of homelessness she may have built up around Dio? Kate, you know as well as I do that a teenager always believes he or she is both isolated and invulnerable - "You don't understand" and "It can't happen to me" form the bedrock of her age group."

"So you'd say she could have done it?"

"Gone with someone who presented himself as a father figure? Sure. Were there any Internet conversations in storage?"

"None. Richard - the computer kid - said there were signs she'd dumped files. But she'd done it so cleanly, he couldn't retrieve them."

"So what do you do next?"

Kate put the delicate horned figure back on its shelf. "What I've been doing all along. What I always do. Ask ten thousand pointless questions and follow any answer that doesn't feel right."

"But we're still planning on going out of town?"

"Tonight. After I've seen Dio."

"Wanda told me not to harass you," she told the boy over their hamburgers. He looked startled, then smiled uncertainly.

"Did she think you were going to?"

"She knows I'm going to." Calmly, she ate a bite of her food and took a pull at the straw in her milk shake. "But she wanted you to know that you don't have to talk to me if you don't want to."

"And do I? Have to talk to you?" He was thrown off balance by her odd attitude.

"No."

"So, why should I stay here?"

She shrugged. "Be a shame to waste your burger." She took another bite, and after a minute, he followed her example.

"So," he asked after a while, "when does the harassment begin?"

"It's been going on since I left the message for you at school. I plan to make you so sick of little notes and big hamburgers that you tell me what I want to know."

His jaws stopped, then started moving again, more slowly.

"What do you want to know?"

"The same thing I wanted to know last time. Whatever you're not telling me about Jules."

"What am I not telling you?"

"If I knew that, I wouldn't have to harass you."

"What makes you think there's something I'm not telling you?"

"I don't think; I know."

"How do you know?"

"You tell me every time you open your mouth."

"Maybe I'll just keep my mouth shut, then."

"See? You just did it again."

Resentment and outrage mingled in Dio's face as he searched for the proper reaction.

"Dio, you're going to tell me sooner or later, because you want to. You can tell me now, or you can tell me after I've beaten you into submission with hamburgers and milk shakes. Oh, and ice cream. You like ice cream?"

"Yeah." He was beginning to look alarmed.

"There's a killer ice cream parlor in the other direction from the school. I can bring in the big guns; they have a brownie sundae that makes you think you've died and gone to heaven. That ought to bring you to your knees. And if it doesn't, I'll have to torture you with the occasional ball game."

Suddenly, it dawned on him: This adult, this policewoman, was making a joke. She could see him rejecting the idea, trying it on again, and slowly working around to considering the possibility. Eyeing her curiously, he ventured a response: "If you really wanted to hurt me, there's a movie I was thinking of seeing."

She threw the remnant of her hamburger onto the paper-lined basket; he jumped; she reached for the napkins and began to wipe her hands in disgust. "Wouldn't you know," she said bitterly. "Here I try to threaten someone, it turns out he's a goddamn masochist."

His mouth went into an O, and then he saw the skin around her eyes crinkle slightly, and he suddenly began to laugh.

Kate was inordinately proud of that laugh, but she gave no indication. Instead, she finished dramatically wiping her hands and fought hard to keep a look of disgust pasted on while the boy dissolved in snorts and choking laughter. She doubted he'd laughed like that in a hell of a long time.

It wiped away his fear of her. However, when the brief episode was over, he became suddenly shy, and she decided that Wanda Steiner was right: It was best to take things in stages - too soon to ask about the name Kimbal. She led him off to the car and drove him home, chatting about nothing.

But when they were in front of the Steiner home, she caught him before he could open the door.

"Jules was my friend, Dio," she said quietly. "I intend to find out what happened to her, and I can't afford to ignore what you know. Think about it."

He walked away, subdued. She drove away, buoyant with the knowledge of a step taken, and with the thought of some days alone with Lee.

"Has Jon been home since this morning?"

"Just to drop off the swimsuit he bought me. You like it?"

Kate turned from her examination of the closet to look at the piece of nylon Lee was holding up.

"Good heavens, it looks like you could actually swim in the thing. I'd have expected something that looked like spiderwebs, or with plastic fruit hanging off it, or made out of snakeskin. How on earth did you get him to buy just an ordinary suit?"

"I told him I'd make him go back until he got me one that I would wear, that I'd pay for only one suit, and that if he succeeded, he could have three days off."

"Clever you. Does it fit?"

"More or less."

"Will wonders never cease? But anyway, he does know we're going away?"

"I told him I doubted we'd leave before tomorrow morning - I didn't think you'd actually get away, to tell you the truth."

"Ye of little faith. Do you want the sweatshirt or the sweater?"

"Both. I did tell him we'd leave a note if a miracle happened and we actually got away before he gets back. Which reminds me, did you make any arrangements with work, or are you just calling it medical leave?"

"I called in two days of vacation. Have you seen those rubber sandals I bought last year?"

"Jon put them in the box on the left. Sweetheart," said Lee in a different voice, "what do you want to do with these?"

Kate turned from the closet and saw Lee holding the envelope and loose pictures.

"Ah, hell," she said. "I don't know. Send them to Al, I guess. No, not the one of Jules. And leave the negatives out, as well; he won't need those. Just stick them in the drawer, and here, give me the envelope." She sealed the flap and, downstairs, paused in the act of carrying out the suitcases to address the envelope to Al in care of D'Amico's department. She then added a P.S. to Lee's note, asking Jon to mail it, and then she carried the suitcases out to the car.

She left her gun in its drawer and the cellular phone on its charger. After much agonizing and changing her mind three times, she left her pager too, on the table next to the phone. Like it or not, this would be a holiday. She felt that she owed Lee the symbolic commitment of leaving the beeper behind.

Three hours later, Jon came in, his arms filled with grocery bags. The puzzled look on his face cleared when he found the note propped against the saltcellar, and he looked pleased, then mildly irritated as he glanced at the food he had just bought, and then he began to look even happier as he realized he did not, after all, have to cook it. A phone call and a quick distribution of groceries into the refrigerator and freezer, followed by a trip downstairs for a change of clothes and a small overnight bag, and he was also out the door. However, a minute later his key sounded in the lock. He went back to the kitchen, picked up the manila envelope, and went out again.

At the shipping place, Jon hesitated briefly over the methods of delivery before deciding that the other jobs he'd done for Kate lately had been matters of life and - no, maybe that wasn't the best phrase - had been urgent as hell, so he might as well treat this the same way. If Kate was too busy to mail it herself and couldn't be bothered to give instructions, well, she'd just have to pay for it. Besides, the expense made him feel he'd had revenge for having had to put that lovely fresh bit of salmon into the freezer instead of directly onto the grill.

He sent the envelope the fastest way they offered, and the most expensive. He then climbed back into his car and headed across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin and the mountaintop house of friends.

In the other direction, near Monterey, Kate and Lee found a hotel with a room on the ground level and a glimpse of the ocean. One of the first things Kate did was to leave a message for Jon on the machine to tell him where they were: the freedom from responsibility represented by leaving her beeper and gun behind extended only so far. That done, however, she forced herself to relax. During the night the rhythm of the waves pervaded their bodies, and during the day they walked and did tourist things at the aquarium, and they talked.

For the first time since August, they began tentatively to explore this new stage in their relationship, with both of them now convinced that Lee was, literally, back on her feet and able to shoulder a real part of the burden. Cautious of hurting each other, careful not to wield grievances, trying hard for a clean beginning, they talked.

One of the things they talked about was a topic that had lain between them for five months, ever since the argument about Aunt Agatha's letter. Yes, Lee still wanted a child. No, she hadn't forgotten it; she hadn't said it in a fit of madness; it had not been a passing fantasy. She also was not about to go ahead with it unless Kate agreed. If she had a child, that child would have two parents, not a mom and an 'other.'

She had, she told Kate, gone so far as to research the problems. On the medical side, there were actually a few doctors out there who regarded pregnancy in a woman who had poor use of her legs as something other than a prescription for an abortion. On the legal side, she felt she could now present a case, if called for, that she was competent to perform the tasks of motherhood. She might not be able to run after a two-year-old, but she could hobble fast. The dual legal threat concerning the status of the child of a lesbian and a handicapped woman would remain, but she was as prepared as she could be.

Kate did not agree with any of this. She did, however, listen.

All the members of that family - householder, partner, servant, and the ghost of an as-yet-unformed child - spent a quiet two days in their various places of rest, blissfully unaware of the storm that was moving in on two fronts.

At 1:15 on Sunday afternoon, the telephone in the empty house on Russian Hill began to ring.

By the time Jon Samson arrived home later that afternoon, relaxed and slightly rosy from the wintery sun beating down on his friends' sheltered swimming pool, the tape on the answering machine was filled, almost entirely with the same message, delivered in Al Hawkin's increasingly frantic voice. When Jon got out of his car, he was pounced upon by a burly but not unattractive uniformed police officer who had been doing drive-bys all afternoon, waiting for a sign of life at the house.

While Jon was rescuing the salmon from the freezer and preparing to grill it with some tiny red-skinned potatoes for his new friend, Kate and Lee, also sunburned and satisfactorily tired, were approaching the city.

"Do you want to go somewhere for dinner, or just pick something up?" Lee asked. "If we just go home, Jon will feel obliged to cook."

(Jon, meanwhile, was trying hard to cook, although the telephone calls were becoming very frustrating, not only because he hadn't the faintest idea where the pictures in the envelope he'd sent had come from but also because they kept interrupting his attempts at conversation with the burly cop. The beeper's intermittent noise also drove him bats, because it was locked into the small table with Kate's gun. He finally had the uniformed officer carry the table into Lee's consulting rooms and shut the door on it, and went back to his charcoal.)

"I don't feel like a restaurant," Kate said. "Shall we just stop for a burger? In fact - would you like to meet Dio?"

"I'd love to, but you can't just drop in on him on a Sunday night."

"Oh yes I can," she said, a shade grimly.

Wanda Steiner opened the door. "Kate! Hello, dear. Do come in."

"Hello, Wanda. Sorry to drop in on you like this. I was wondering if Dio was in. I don't know if you've had dinner, but I thought he might like to come out and have a hamburger with us."

"I'm sure he'd love to - you know how boys his age can eat, and he did seem to enjoy your last meeting - but he's still out at the park with Reg, kicking around a soccer ball." .

"Oh well, that's okay. Another time."

"No, dear, why don't you just pop down and see if they aren't nearly finished? Reg won't admit when he's had enough, but he did pull a shoulder muscle the other day playing basketball. That's why they're playing soccer, to give his arm a rest. No, I'm sure he'd be happy for an excuse to quit, and I think Dio wanted to talk with you, anyway."

"Did he?" Kate said, feeling her pulse quicken.

"I think so. Anyway, you go see. It's only at the park -that's two blocks up the way you were going and one over to the right. Just have him back by nine. School tomorrow, you know."

TWENTY-FOUR

At the park, a graying man with the stocky build of a lifelong athlete was running up and down the otherwise-deserted playing field with three boys. What they held over him by young muscle, numbers, and speed was countered by experience and wile, although to Kate's eye, he appeared to be flagging a bit. She got out of the car and walked slowly toward them across the soggy winter grass, enjoying the thud and scuffle and snatches of breathless exclamations across the cold dusk air.

"Watch out, Jay."

"He's got —"

"No you don't!" shouted the older voice, a laugh lodged in the back of it.

"It's mine!"

"Pass it, Dio. Pass it!"

"I - oh shit!" came Dio's voice as he caught his foot on a stray toe and went sprawling.

"Language," chided Reg's voice.

"I meant shoot," Dio called, but the action was moving rapidly away from him as Reg ran with the ball in a zigzag pattern down the field, deflecting the teenagers with his broad shoulders, stopping abruptly twice to change direction and run around them, and finally booting the black-and-white ball ahead of him through some invisible goal. He threw up both hands in triumph, but as the boys stood around him protesting his sly maneuvers, he bent over and stood with his hands on his knees, sides heaving.

Dio looked up at Kate's approach.

"Did you see that?" he demanded. "He fouled me. It was deliberate."

"I wouldn't put it past him," she agreed amiably. "Hi, Reg. Still sitting out an easy retirement, I see."

"That's me." He gasped, and stuck out a hand filthy with sweat, mud, grass, and God knew what else. She shook it.

"See, she agreed! That was a foul."

"So maybe next time you won't insist on three against one," Reg said.

"Cheating old man," Dio protested, without sounding actually angry.

Reg Steiner ignored him. "What can I do for you, Ms Martinelli?"

"Wanda told me I could steal Dio for a little. If he wants to join us for dinner," she added, making it a question.

"Sure," Dio said. "Is that okay, Reg?"

"Fine. I'll drop Jason and Paulo home. Better get your sweats from the car."

Sweatpants on and sweatshirt in hand, Dio climbed into the back of the Saab, filling it instantly with the vigorous smell of fresh air, crushed grass, and male sweat.

"Dio, this is my friend Lee Cooper. Lee, this is Dio, known as Dio Kimbal, for reasons known only to himself."

Dio absently wiped his right hand on the leg of his sweatpants before putting it over the seat for Lee to shake, but he was looking only at Kate.

"More third degree, eh?" he asked.

"I have my truncheon ready."

"Where are we going?"

"Someplace quiet, where your screams won't be heard."

They ended up at a place where indeed screams would barely be heard, but not because of the quiet. There could be little attempt at interrogation over the blare of the jukebox, or even conversation, although Lee's mouth moved a great deal as the music played up and down through the songs of her own adolescence. They had burgers and shakes and apple pie, and it was half past seven when they went back out onto the street, all three of them beaming and replete.

In the car, Kate paused with her hand on the key. "Wanda said you wanted to talk to me."

"Maybe you'd like to drop me somewhere first," Lee immediately offered.

"No, that's okay," Dio said. "I didn't really want to talk."

Kate wondered if she'd imagined the very slight stress on the final word. "What did you have in mind?"

"I thought…" He took a deep breath. "I thought I'd show you something."

"Good," Kate said approvingly. "Showing me things is good. While you're thinking, though, you might also think about where the name Kimbal came from."

"It's Jules's name."

"Her name is Cameron," Kate pointed out.

"Her real father's name was Kimbal."

Kate whirled around so fast, she nearly strangled herself on the seat belt. "She told you that?"

"Yeah."

"Marsh Kimbal?"

"I don't know. She never told me his first name."

"What is Cameron, then?"

"I don't know that, either, but it's not his name. It isn't her mother's name, either. At least that's what Jules said."

"How did she find this out? Did she come across her birth certificate?"

"It isn't on her birth certificate, not the one her mother has. There isn't a father listed on that one. Jules hunted it down in the records of some hospital somewhere, over the computer."

"How long have you known this?"

He wouldn't meet her eyes. "Since last summer," he said in a small voice.

"Shit, Dio." She turned and smacked her hand hard against the steering wheel. "How could you keep this kind of information to yourself? I've been trying —"

"Kate," Lee said quietly. "He's given it to you now. Work with it."

Kate grasped the wheel firmly with both hands and took several slow breaths. "Okay. I'm sorry, Dio. Thank you for telling me. I'm glad the hamburger torture worked. Now I'm going to have to find a phone." She pulled the keys out of the ignition and began to peer at the surrounding buildings, but she was interrupted by Dio's hand tentatively touching her shoulder.

"Could the phone wait?" he asked. "I promised Reg I'd be back by nine, and I'd really like to give you the other thing tonight."

"What is it?"

"An envelope Jules gave me last month, with something lumpy in it. I didn't open it."

"Where is it?"

"At the squat. It was the only place I could think of to hide something."

She looked at the clock. To the squat and back across town would indeed leave little time for hunting down first a telephone and then Al Hawkin.

"Why didn't you ever have a car phone put in?" she complained to Lee, starting the engine and pulling out with a squeal onto Van Ness Avenue.

The three of them sat in the silent car and looked at the dark, dreary bulk of the warehouse.

"We don't haye a key for the padlock," Kate said, "and they've nailed the metal sheet down."

"I got in another way last month," Dio told her. "It'll only take me a minute."

"I'll go with you."

"You don't have to."

"Yes, I do." She left the keys in the ignition and turned to Lee. "If anyone comes, anyone at all, lean on the horn. I'll be here in twenty seconds."

"Be careful," was all Lee said.

"I wonder if my tetanus shots are up-to-date," Kate muttered, reaching under the seat for the flashlight.

The boy's alternate entrance was around the back of the building. He dragged a crate from its resting place against the wall to a position under the metal fire escape and boosted himself up onto it. To Kate's relief the box proved itself sturdier than it looked by not collapsing as Dio jumped up to catch the lowest rung. He pulled himself up, Kate following with a good deal more effort. Halfway up the stairway, he swung his leg over the handrail and onto a narrow decorative ledge on the building. Kate kept the light shining on his feet as he picked his way along to a small window half a dozen feet away, which easily pushed open. He turned and grinned at Kate, his teeth gleaming in the indirect glow of the flashlight.

"I was afraid they'd fastened it shut." He placed both hands on the sill and pulled himself up and over. After a muffled thump, he reappeared and stretched his hand out for the light, then guided Kate's steps until she, too, had dropped into the strategically placed mattress. She coughed violently at the dust raised, and moved away.

"Let's hurry this up. I'd rather not have to explain what we're doing to the local patrol."

They went down the hall, passing the room where Kate's head had been bashed in, and down the stairs past the communal living quarters to the ground floor. It was still filthy, and there were still heaps of decaying carpet filling one of the rooms and sagging Sheetrock on the walls.

"Can I borrow the light?" Dio asked. Kate handed it to him, watching as he picked his way across the floor to one bit of ruined wall, where he shone the light up into the dust-colored studs and then worked his hand up into the recesses. When he drew out the envelope, Kate released a breath she had not known she was holding: She did not like spiders.

He came back and handed her the dirty white envelope. She took it by one corner and looked at it curiously. The back had been opened and then taped shut. "It was like that when Jules gave it to me," he said. "Look at how it's addressed."

She turned it over. On the front was typed:

JULIE KIMBAL

(JULES CAMERON)

"Can we open it?" he asked eagerly.

In answer, she patted her clothing, found a lack of anything that would do as an evidence bag, and shook her head. "Not yet. Jesus, I hope this case never comes to trial; the defense will have a field day. No, Dio, we can't look at it yet. Give me the light."

Still holding the lumpy envelope by the same corner, she retraced her steps upstairs to the small window and peered down in dismay. One-handed and backward, it was an ugly proposal.

"Isn't there another way out?" she asked.

"The top of the fire escape is at the roof, but there's a padlock on the door. This window's so small, nobody bothered."

"The hell with it. Let's see if we can break the padlock."

It was a small lock and a thin chain, held on by a couple of feeble staples. Kate raised a leg and kicked it, and the whole thing went flying out onto the roof. She had Dio prop the door shut against the wind when they left:

"Why didn't you guys ever take that off?"

"Weldon said it wasn't right to break things in the squat." Kate turned to stare at him, but he was serious. She followed him, shaking her head at the logic of a man who would shoot a cop but not break a lock.

At the car, he asked again, "Are we going to open it?"

"I'm going to take you home."

"Please. I really want to see what's in it."

Oh hell, Kate thought, he deserves it. And I'm not about to take it into the lab without opening it, anyway.

She cut the envelope open on Wanda Steiner's kitchen table. Wanda had placed a paper towel down to protect the scrubbed wood from the dirty paper, and she'd given Kate a lethally sharp kitchen knife with a long, narrow blade. Kate slit the paper, leaving the tape intact, lifted the slit open with the tip of the knife, and slid out the thing inside.

It was a small, lumpy wad of tissue paper wrapped around something. With the tip of the knife and the end of a fingernail she began to undo it. The object whispered slightly inside the paper, the metallic whisper of a chain shifting, and with a shudder of premonition she knew what would be inside the envelope.

She was right: dog tags.

A set of dog tags, scratched and dull from long wear.

The name stamped onto them was KIMBAL, MARSHAL J.

Kate stood up. Her body felt numb with cold, but she was vaguely aware of relief that her brain was still functioning.

"I've got to talk to Al," she said, looking at Lee.

"Do you have his number?"

"It's at home. I left everything at home."

"Jon's probably back, if you don't want to wait."

"He'll find it for me." Kate went to the phone on the kitchen wall, and only when she had begun to punch in her home number did she realize that it was a strange phone, and then she noticed that she had an audience. Awkwardly, she held out the receiver to the Steiners. "Do you mind if I…"

"Of course not."

She turned to complete the dial sequence and remembered something. "None of you touch that paper or the dog tags," she ordered. After a minute, she frowned. "He's got the answering machine on."

"He may be screening calls. Leave a message."

Kate nodded, and when the recorded message had played to the end, she started to say in the stilted tones of someone speaking into a recording device, "Jon, it's Kate here. Lee and I will be home in —"

The others in the room heard the phone give forth a whoop, and then a loud and vastly relieved voice was shouting into Kate's ear.

"Kate, darling! My God, it's been like Grand Central Station around here. Where on earth are you?"

"Why? What's wrong?"

"Something about some pictures you sent to Al Hawkin. You've stirred up a veritable ant's nest there, dear. I thought he —"

"Pictures? What pict - B.J. Montero's photographs. Jon, what about them?" she said urgently.

"I don't know; he wouldn't tell lowly old me. Just said that there's a man in them who shouldn't be, or something."

"Was it Lavalle?"

"Well, you know," said Jon, "I really don't think so. Anyway, you'd better call the poor man before he ruptures a blood vessel or something. He was sounding a wee bit stressed."

Al wasn't the only one, Kate thought. She hadn't heard Jon this arch in months.

"Right. Did he give you a number?"

"Only a few dozen times. Do you have a pen?"

"Just a minute. Lee? Hand me that pencil? Okay," she said to him. He gave her a Portland number. She repeated it, hung up, punched in the lengthy sequence that would bill it to her credit card, and when it rang she asked for Al Hawkin. He was there in a matter of seconds.

"Kate? Thank God. Where the hell did you get those pictures?"

"It's a long story, but they were taken at a rest stop south of Portland where Jules and I went - in the afternoon, a few hours before she disappeared. Some people were there, taking pictures of one another, and I tracked them down. I sent them to you on the off chance Lavalle's car was there."

"Not Lavalle, no. Jesus. When I got them, I didn't know what the hell they were. Nobody else recognized them, so I stuck them in the team room - I'm back in Portland - and Jani saw them when she came to bring me some lunch." Jani's on her feet again, Kate noted in passing. "She just looked through them. In fact, she'd put them down and walked away, when it hit her. I thought she was going to pass out again."

"She saw Marsh Kimbal," Kate said.

But for the background noise, she would have thought he had hung up. Eventually, he spoke, his voice high and breathless.

"How the fuck did you know that?"

"I've been busy, Al. I just found out. He's been sending Jules messages. He sent her a present, too - his old army dog tags. I assume he was in the army?"

"Yes. Jani… Jani told me he was dead. I still don't know if she honestly thought he was, or if she told herself he was so many times that she began to believe it herself, or - Anyway, that doesn't matter. What matters is, if Jules's father snatched her, there's a good chance she's still alive."

"Al, tell me, please tell me there's something visible on his car's license plates," she prayed.

"The car's registered to a Mark Kendall. He lives in the middle of nowhere in southern Oregon, two, three hours from Medford."

"It's him?"

"Sounds like. We've stayed away until we knew what the hell we were dealing with, but the FBI's already set up a team in Lakeview."

"I'll leave tonight, be there before morning. Where should I go?"

"They've taken over a building at - where the hell's that address? Here it is." He read it off to her. "It's a bank that just went bust; the FBI is borrowing it."

"Where will you be?" she asked him.

"I'll be there," he said, and hung up.

She lifted the receiver from her ear and placed it gently on the base that was mounted on the wall, staring at it for a long moment before she turned to the others. Struggling to contain the riot of emotions set off by the rebirth of hope, she looked first at Lee, then at Dio.

"Jules may be alive," she said.

TWENTY-FIVE

"His name is Marshal James Kimbal, known as Marsh," the FBI man had begun, but that had been a long, weary time ago, and Kate now felt as if she'd been sitting for a week in this chair around the long table in the anonymously corporate boardroom in this building in southern Oregon. She'd arrived here at some ungodly hour on Monday morning, having driven through the night, and had sat here, it seemed, ever since. It was now Wednesday, and as far as she could see, they were setting off on a second full day of the same circular discussion that had occupied part of Monday and all day Tuesday.

Even the photograph of Jules that was pinned to the wall, blurry from enlargement and the dust in the air between the girl and the telephoto lens, failed to charm anymore. When she'd first seen it on Monday afternoon, she couldn't take her eyes off it for the sheer joy of seeing evidence of Jules alive. Now her attention, what was left of it, was all for the man who walked in front of Jules, the man with the gun in his hand, the man who had tracked Jani and found Jules and taken her out from under Kate's unconscious nose.

Since those introductory words on Monday afternoon, the compilers of evidence - those not occupied with Anton Lavalle two hundred miles to the north - had been in high gear. Photographs, a couple of nearly inaudible long-range recordings, and a detailed history of an obsessed father had been wheeled in, and analysts and recommendations had begun. And they had continued, until Kate was beginning to regret that the investigation was as high-key as it had turned out. Normally, a father kidnapping a daughter would not merit two FBI agents, a sheriff and his deputy (who knew the land like the backs of their sun-beaten hands), and two highly qualified psychiatrists, experts in the field of kidnapping (one speaking for the mind of the villain, the other, the only woman in the room aside from Kate, sharing her expert opinion on the mental state of the child victim). The experts were there as spillover from the Lavalle case, having been sent down because they were more or less in the neighborhood; the others were there because of Al, and because it had begun as a highly visible case in the media. One of the agents was unhappy about being in the sticks rather than in Portland, and both of the experts were tired and just a bit bored. Al was present because he was, after all, experienced in the field, and Kate had a seat at the table because he wanted her to. Various other people had been in and out of the boardroom during the last two days, from Jani (for an uncomfortable time, causing a collective sigh of relief when she left) to D'Amico (who shuttled back and forth a few times from one end of Oregon to the other before it was decided that he was best used on his home ground in Portland) and a handful of technicians and other law-enforcement personnel, who came and went as they were needed.

Two things had justified the cautious and high-tech approach they were taking: Kimbal had a well-documented tendency toward violence, and the girl's stepfather was a cop. There was no way they could use the standard approach, which would have been to take a couple of sheriff's deputies and bring the girl back. The core eight people had spent the last two days discussing evidence and options, and by now they were thoroughly fed up with one another.

"Look," Al was saying tiredly, "even you guys aren't allowed just to take the guy out without even giving him a warning."

"We're not suggesting that," began the FBI man at the head of the table.

"Sounds to me like you are. You just said you couldn't go in at night because of his dogs and because he and Jules are always in the cabin together, but during the day you can't get in fast enough to separate them without alerting him. Short of cold-blooded murder with a sniper scope, what're you going to do, disguise yourselves as rocks?"

Several angry voices spoke up at once, and Kate half-listened to the argument, her eyes drawn to the enlarged photos of the small cabin where Jules had been taken by her father.

It was literally out in the middle of nowhere, in an expanse of knee-high scrub and rock, five miles from the nearest neighbor. For a paranoid ex-con with survivalist leanings out to save his only daughter from the wicked world, it was perfect: He could see the enemy coming, miles away.

Other photos tacked up on the carpeted walls showed fuzzy images of Marsh Kimbal, lanky and black-haired. In several of them, Jules followed behind, but the pictures, taken over a considerable distance with lenses like telescopes, were too hazy to give a hint of the girl's expression. To Kate, though, the girl's body language told of her confusion and doubt.

The argument was coming around again, and it was time for Kate to say her bit. She stirred, waited for an opening, and spoke up.

"I still think you're wrong. I know kidnap victims always fall in love with their captors, but I don't believe Jules would fall for his crap, not in the long run. I mean, look, the man's a fascist."

"He's a survivalist," corrected the male psychiatrist, and Kate went on hurriedly before he could present a lecture on political niceties.

"Same thing," she said. "He's a sexist and a swine, and Jules would never go for it. You won't have any trouble separating her from him."

"She's only a child," he insisted.

"She's got more brains than any three adults, present company not excluded."

"She may be bright," commented the woman expert, "but that doesn't mean she is not gullible."

"Okay," Kate conceded. "Granted, intelligent people can be really stupid. But not Jules, not in this case. I know that if I go in there all by myself, let her see me, just ease in and out again, she'll read it as a warning, so that when you come in with force, she won't panic. She'll be ready to come to us. On the other hand, if you just descend on her with guns blazing, then she probably would hang on to Kimbal, because she wouldn't know what the hell was going on. An adult wouldn't, either."

At this point in the argument's cycle, the head man normally either redirected the flow or called for a break, but this time, before he could do more than place his hands on the table preparatory to shifting his chair back, the woman expert sat forward and placed her gold pen onto the glossy wood with an authoritative click.

"Inspector Martinelli may be right," she stated. The room went still in surprise. "If she did succeed in going in, making contact with the child, possibly even conveying a message, and coming away, then we would be in much the stronger position: Jules would be forewarned, and we would have had a direct look into Kimbal's defenses. If she failed, one of three things would have happened: She would be driven off, taken hostage herself, or shot outright. In the first case, we would not be much worse off than we are now, nor in the second, which would also give us the thin advantage of having a trained adult present to oppose Kimbal. As to the third possibility, I don't know that there is much to say, other than noting that Inspector Martinelli is clearly aware of the risks involved, has had a good deal of field experience with decoy situations, and does not appear to me suicidal."

Well, thought Kate, feeling her mouth go dry, it's always good to have a clear mind to tell us how matters lie. She glanced at Hawkin, but he was not looking at her.

"I still think I should be the one to go," he was saying.

Both psychiatrists began immediately to shake their heads. Even the man agreed that, with this particular hostage taker, any casual intruder would have to appear blatantly harmless. Were they in a city, an aged drunk might do, but not miles from the closest bar. The analysts knew enough about Marsh Kimbal to feel certain that he would take an adult male intruder as a threat. He might believe that a woman was harmless, though, and that she was stupid enough to get lost among the dirt roads of eastern Oregon.

For once, Kate agreed with the experts.

And for once, to everyone's astonishment, the disparate law-enforcement personnel assembled in the room seemed on the verge of agreement, as well. So tired of waiting that they were willing to go along with any proposal actually involving forward motion, they found themselves, with varying degrees of reluctance, agreeing to Kate's proposal.

The rest of the morning was spent laying out plans and fallbacks, and then Kate was excused so that she could put on her fancy-dress costume.

Kate sat, clenching and loosing her hands on the wheel of the little Japanese car, staring through the streaked windshield and over the carefully dirtied hood at the bare road that stretched out into the distance.

Beside her, Al Hawkin rubbed his hand over his mouth, grimacing at the scratchy sound, and broke the silence.

"You don't have to, you know."

"Al, the sooner you get out of the car, the sooner I can get on with this."

"I could go."

"Al," she said warningly.

"All right." He made no move toward the door handle. "Are you scared?"

"Of course I'm scared. I'm always scared when I dress up as a decoy. It's gotten so I start to sweat whenever I pick up a tube of lipstick."

He smiled dutifully at the feeble joke. "Christ, I hate sending you out there without a backup."

"You're not sending me out anywhere," she said, bristling slightly. He turned to look at her for the first time since they'd left town an hour before.

"I wonder if Jules will actually recognize you."

"My new look," she said. "I thought the lace on the collar was a really nice touch." With her tired blond curls, light pink lipstick, trim brown penny loafers, and tan polyester trousers - she'd drawn the line at the flowered skirt that had been offered - she looked like a conservative young woman, the sort who could easily get lost out here in the middle of nowhere.

"In my youth, they used to call that a Peter Pan collar."

"Did they? Funny. Jules told me once she hated Peter Pan - the idea of lost boys made her furious. This was when we were looking for Dio," she explained.

"Yes? Well, I'm sorry Lee can't see you."

"Jon would love it even more. Get out of here, Al. I need to go."

"Watch your, back, Martinelli," he said, and surprised them both by reaching out an arm to embrace her shoulders briefly. In a moment, he was standing on the roadside, watching her drive away, before he turned and got into the back of the governmental car that followed her for a while before turning off to join the rest of the watchers on the low hillock three miles south of the cabin where Jules Cameron was being kept by the man who would be her father.

Kate decided that sweaty hands and heart palpitations were not unsuited to the role she was supposed to be playing, so she might as well not try to hide them. She pulled up in a tentative manner in the dirt space in front of the cabin and sat for a moment, studying the two sleek Doberman pinschers who stood inside their high-wire cage that adjoined the house. They were studying her in turn through the wide spaces of the wire, their heads down, their jaws shut in concentration, their eyes hungry, as she opened her door and cautiously got out of the car. Nothing moved, including the dogs, although she knew that Kimbal and Jules had been inside as recently as when she'd dropped Al, or the FBI men following her would have let her know. Besides, his pickup truck was still there, parked under the bare tree that in the summer would shade a part of the dog run.

She walked around the back of the car, keeping it between her and the dogs, and walked up the two worn wooden steps to knock at the screen door. She stepped back down onto the packed earth, turned her back on the door, and waited.

Tense as she was, she didn't hear the inner door open until the man spoke.

"Yeah?"

Kate spun around, laughing nervously at the shadowy figure behind the screen. His right hand was on the door, his left hand resting on the jamb at shoulder level. She squinted up at him.

"You startled me," she said, with just the slightest drawl in her voice, and tittered again.

"What do you want?" he said.

"Well, I'm lost, I think. At least none of the roads much resemble the directions I was given, and haven't for some time now. I wonder if you might tell me where I am."

She felt his eyes on her, and wondered where Jules was. "Where d'you want to be?" he asked.

"A place called Two-Bar Road? Here, let me get my map. I'll show you." She went to the car, aware of his suspicious gaze burning her, a gaze echoed by the two animals off to her right. She opened the passenger door, took out a crumpled and completely unfolded Oregon road map, and carried it back to the house.

He had not moved. He did not move when she stood on the lower step and fumbled with the awkward sheet, balling it up rather than folding it to the place.

"See, I was here, and - here's the place. It's just a driveway, but they call it Two-Bar Road. It's there where the circle is - see? D'you mind if I open the door so you can see it? That's better. So, can you tell me where I am now?"

No sign of Jules, not even in the slice of tidy room she could see when he allowed the door to open just enough to bring his right shoulder out and point to a place on the map with his index finger while his left hand stayed glued to the inside door jamb - with a gun, she speculated, nestled up against the wood trim and held tightly in place? Kate fancied she could smell gun oil.

"You're right here," he said, his ringer in the blank space forty miles from the imaginary Two-Bar Road.

"Am I really? Oh no. And it'll be dark by the time I get there. How on earth did I get way over here? Oh well. Let me just make sure I have it right. I don't suppose you have a pen? No, don't bother," she drawled, although he had made no move toward stepping inside his house. "I'm sure I have one in the car." She went back to the passenger side of the car, rummaged about in the fake leather handbag, and came back with a cheap ballpoint pen. One of the dogs was smelling the air for her scent, its muzzle protruding from the cage up to its eyebrows. "Those are certainly powerful-looking dogs you've got there," she said to their owner. No response, and Kate was torn between the building fury that nothing whatsoever was happening and the need to maintain her line of helpless chatter.

"Let me just mark this down here. Now where was it?" Where the fuck is Jules, you bastard? she thought. "Okay, I've got it. So I go back to here and then turn left; that should get me there." God, this is her father; she's got his hands, and they have the same eyebrows. "I don't suppose I could use your telephone, just to call and let them know I'm coming?" She knew that he had no telephone, but it was, after all, the sort of thing a lost woman would ask.

"I don't have a phone."

"You don't? Well, I guess it's quite a ways from nowhere. Yours was the first place I saw for miles." Surely she's heard me, Kate thought in desperation. She has to be here, and the cabin is too small for her to be out of earshot. I'm going to have to leave; he's not going to let me in. She wavered, then decided to try just one last nudge. "Just one more thing, then, and I'll let you get on with your evening. I wonder if I could be really intrusive and ask if I could use your bathroom? If I have to go another hour on these roads, I'll just burst." At least I know you have indoor plumbing, you bastard. I don't have to worry about being pointed to an outhouse.

He studied her, looked over her shoulder at the beat-up car, and then took his right hand off the door and stepped to his left. Taking a deep breath, and mightily tempted to elbow him in the gut as she went past, regulations be damned, she went up the two steps and walked past him into the house, into a room with a threadbare braided rug on the worn linoleum floor, mismatched sofa and chairs in front of an oil-drum woodstove, and the arsenal of a survivalist on racks on the walls. She had just time to notice an open book, a spiral notepad, and a pen on the Formica kitchen table when her body froze at the sound of a shotgun shell being jacked into place.

"Turn around," he said. She did so, slowly.

"What are you doing?" she demanded in outrage and fear, neither of which were feigned, not with the barrels of a shotgun two feet from her chest.

"A woman like you would rather pee her pants than come into a lonesome house with a strange man. Who sent you?" Shit, it wasn't just Jani who gave Jules her brains, thought Kate wildly.

"Marsh?" a tentative voice said from behind Kate.

Kate jerked, and then with her hands well out from her sides, she swiveled her head to look at the inner door.

Jules was wearing grubby, overly large jeans and a plaid shirt that had to belong to Kimbal. On her feet were the boots they had bought in Berkeley, one of them with string in place of the original laces. Her haircut had grown out and had a hacked-off appearance. A wide bruise darkened her left cheekbone, and her eyes looked at Kate without recognition.

"Go back to your room, Julie."

"But Marsh, I just wondered —"

"Julie," he said in a voice like a quiet whip crack, "I said go."

The child looked out from under her lank bangs at her father, and at Kate, then stepped back into the room and shut the door quietly. Kate turned her head back to the man with the shotgun.

"Is that what you wanted to see?" he demanded. "That's my daughter. She's mine, and if that bitch of a mother of hers sent you to fetch her back, that's just hard luck for you. Out."

For a moment, Kate felt weak with relief: He was going to let her drive away, thinking her an informal envoy, and no great damage would have been done. However, halfway to the car he said, "Stop right there. Hold out your left hand."

She knew the sound of the rattling metal even before the handcuffs hit her wrist. The sharp jab of the shotgun barrel against her spine kept her from moving, but she broke out in a sweat, oozing fear, and it was all she could do to keep a whimper from finding its way up her throat.

"Other one," he ordered, and when she did not move, he barked, "I'll shoot you down right here if I have to."

He won't, she tried to tell herself. There's no reason for him to do more than drive me off his land in some humiliating manner. Besides, I do have backup; a dozen men are watching through their scopes from that small hill off in the distance. Just keep him calm, and delay. If Jules has the sense to go out the back window, they'll see her and move up quickly. Just take it slowly…

She bent forward so he could have her right hand, and felt the metal cuff slip around it. Kimbal took the gun out of her spine. "I used these on Julie when she tried to run away, back in the beginning. I knew they'd come in handy again."

"What are you going to do with me?"

"Me? I'm not going to do a thing. However, those dogs of mine, they know it's about time they were let out, and they're not going to be too happy about you trespassing."

Kate heard another jingle, and she looked back, to see him thumbing through a key ring. He selected what looked like the key to a padlock and began to move toward the cage and the quivering dogs.

"Marsh," came the voice again.

"Julie, go back in the house," he said without looking up.

"Marsh!"

"Julie," he began in a growl, and then stopped. "Baby, we won't need that. This lady's leaving on her own." Kate turned and saw Jules in the doorway. She had a revolver in her hand that looked as if it belonged in a Western, but it was clean and looked well cared for, as had all the rifles on the wall. She had it in her right hand, pointing at the ground.

"You can't hurt her, Marsh."

"Julie, this is Daddy's business. Take the gun and put it away before you hurt yourself." He sounded as if he were talking to a six-year-old, but then Jules was acting strangely young, as well.

But determined. "Let her go, Marsh. Don't let the dogs out."

Both adults stood still, squinting into the late sun at the thin young girl in ill-fitting clothes, hanging on to a gun that probably weighed more than her arm did. Kate stared not at the gun, but at the tear that was trickling down the young face.

"Julie, you're going to be in big trouble, girl. It'll be the belt for sure if you don't get yourself inside right now." His anger at her disobedience was under thin control.

"Marsh," she said around her tears, "I can't let you hurt her. Let her go. I'll stay here with you. Just let her go. Please!"

That was when Marsh Kimbal made his mistake. Had he simply walked up to Jules to take the gun from her hands, she would certainly have let him, but he lost his temper. He pivoted around with the shotgun coming up, centering it on Kate.

"Daddy!"

It was more a scream for help than a warning, but Marsh Kimbal's entire body jerked in reaction. He whirled, and Kate turned, and they saw Jules standing on the ground now, thirty feet away, the big revolver held in her trembling hands in the position Kate had taught her on the shooting range, pointing straight at her father. Tears welled up and no doubt obscured her vision, but she was biting her lip in concentration, and Kate knew that if Jules fired a shot, there was a good chance that she would hit him. Kimbal knew it, too.

"There's a bullet in the chamber, Daddy. I know how to shoot. Let her leave."

He wavered. If she had been anyone but his daughter, he might have turned the shotgun on her, but this was the daughter he had sought for over ten years, and he could not bring himself to kill her. At the same time, had she been anyone but his daughter, he would have known that if he simply approached her, talking calmly, he could have had the gun for the taking..

But this was his own child defying him, and the step he took toward her was not conciliatory, but furious. She saw it, and she closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.

The shot almost hit him. Had she kept her eyes open, it would have, but it went wide - not by much, but enough. It tore his left shirt sleeve in passing, then went zinging and bouncing against the wire of the dog cage before raising a long plume of dust out into the floor of the scrub desert. One of the dogs went yelping for shelter; the other snarled and leaped at the wire.

But Kate did not see the results of the shot; she only saw that for one brief instant, Kimbal had forgotten her. Hoping fervently that Jules would not continue to pull the trigger in her panic, she threw herself against him.

The shotgun went off, deafening Kate and- taking out half the windows in her rental car but drawing no blood, and Kate continued to shove against him with her head and shoulder, butting him off balance and backward, knowing full well that, cuffed as she was, there was a point at which he would regain control, and then either he would kill her or Jules would shoot him, and Kate didn't know which possibility caused the greater panic. So she shoved hard against his stumbling body until she felt the jar as he fetched up against something solid. She leaned into him hopelessly, knowing it would be over in a matter of seconds, and then, inexplicably, he screamed. Startled, she drew back slightly; he screamed again, and looking up at him, she saw that he had flung out his left arm to catch himself as he hit the wire cage. Half the hand had gone through the wire and the excited dog, growling murderously, had seized it between its teeth.

She moved half a step back, braced herself, and with all her strength swept her left foot against his legs. The momentum unbalanced her and she went down on one knee, but he, too, fell, screaming again as the dog's teeth tore free. While Kate struggled to her feet, he cradled his left wrist in agony, started to rise, and then fell limp and silent as Kate's conservative leather shoe connected with the side of his skull.

Pain shooting up her arms and down the leg she had landed on, bent over double, her arms behind her back, Kate looked around for Jules. She found her standing as before, unhurt, lowering the heavy gun to the ground.

"Hey, J," she panted, and felt a grin begin to grow on her face.

"I knew you'd find me, Kate. I knew it."

TWENTY-SIX

"Jules, sweetheart, where are the keys to these handcuffs?" she demanded.

"I don't know."

Kate racked her brain, trying to visualize the key ring that Kimbal had taken out and probably dropped back into a pocket when he was interrupted by Jules. She couldn't remember seeing a handcuff key, and there had only been half a dozen keys on the thing, but then she'd only seen it for a moment. She looked at the man speculatively.

Jules spoke up. "He doesn't keep them on his key ring. They're somewhere in his room."

No time, then; he was stirring already. The wound in his hand, though dramatically pumping dark red blood all over him, would not be enough to keep him unconscious, and Kate was loath just to keep kicking his head until her backup arrived. She wavered; he stirred again; and she knew that she could not be standing there helpless when he came to. Jules could tie him - but one look at the girl's face and Kate knew she couldn't ask her to go near the injured man. That left two options: awkward flight, with the dogs behind them as soon as Kimbal woke, or Kate's freedom.

"I have to get these cuffs off. You're going to have to shoot them."

Jules tore her eyes from the man who was her father. "There was only one bullet in the gun."

Kate paused for a look of admiration. "God, girl, you sure made it count. Okay, there'll be another shell in the shotgun; that'll have to do." She gently nudged the shotgun across the uneven ground until it lay at Jules's feet. "Now, you haven't shot one of these before, so I'll talk you through it." Words, Kate thought; words would keep Jules moving as nothing else would, her only tool to keep the shock in the girl's face from immobilizing her completely. "Our word for the day is ballistics, okay? First of all, sit down, on the ground with your legs apart. That's right - we don't want you to shoot your nose off here. Now, pick up the shotgun and point it at the sky, kind of jam its butt into the ground to keep it stable, because it has quite a kick. Fine. Now, I'm going to try and get the chain of the handcuffs over the barrel, and you're going to pull the trigger."

Kate bent down close to Jules, facing the opposite direction, trying to look over her shoulder and see her hands, trying at the same time to put as much of herself as possible in front of Jules to protect the girl from stray shot.

"Maybe I should go look for the keys."

"There's no time, Jules. He's waking up."

"I don't think he'll —"

"Jules! We have to do this now or he's going to bleed to death!" Kate didn't think it likely, but she needed Jules to keep going. "Hold the butt steady and ease the trigger back slowly."

"I don't think —" Jules started to say, but over her voice and the noise of the frenzied dogs Kate thought she heard a groan, and cold panic shot through her.

"Jules, pull the trigger!"

Jules pulled, and for the second time, the gun exploded a foot from Kate's head, sending her sprawling on the weedy ground, her shoulders feeling as if they had been ripped from their sockets. She got to her feet and stumbled over to Kimbal, fighting to unbuckle her belt with her sprained and trembling arms. With the remnants of the handcuffs riding her wrists like a pair of punk bracelets, she wrapped the length of fake white patent leather around the man's arm, putting on pressure and watching the pulse of blood slow. She hoped it was because of the tourniquet rather than the approach of death - not that he would be any true loss to the world, but the girl did not deserve to see it.

"Someone's coming," said Jules.

"About time," she muttered. Indeed they were coming, car after governmental car. It had seemed longer, but within four minutes of the shot, the tide of men began to spill out of the cars and wash over them, taking over the care of the wounded man and transforming the remote shack into a bustling center of forensic activity.

Sometime later, after Kimbal had been taken away but before the animal-control officer had arrived with the dog tranquilizers, someone thought to slap some bandages on Kate's scraped knees and the parts of her hands that had been singed by the shotgun blast. She sat on the edge of her car's backseat, brushed clear of glass crumbles, and looked elsewhere while the medic swabbed and taped. He finished, she thanked him, and when she looked up, Jules was in the door of the shack, wrapped in a blanket and cradled in the shelter of Al Hawkin's arm. She was pale with shock and red-eyed, and she looked at Kate with an unreadable expression on her face. Kate got to her feet.

"I'm okay, Jules. Marsh Kimbal's going to be okay. You're safe."

Jules did not answer, but in a minute she turned to Al and allowed him to fold his arms around her. He held her, looking over her head at Kate with a face nearly as devastated with relief as his stepdaughter's.

"Kate, I…" he began, and choked up. She stumped over to where they stood and draped her own arms painfully around the two of them. They stood that way, oblivious of the activity and noises, until the aches in Kate's arms began to turn into shooting pain, and she reluctantly stood back. Al blew his nose, Kate reached into her pocket for a Kleenex and blew her own nose, and finally Jules looked up and said in a small voice, "Can I borrow that?"

Kate began to laugh, and in an instant the three of them were dissolving again, this time in tears of laughter.

"Kate —" he started again, when he could speak, but she interrupted him.

"Take her home, Al. Jani's waiting."

He hesitated, then nodded, and with his arm still around Jules's shoulders, he began to guide her toward the cars. When they had taken a few steps, Jules stopped and eased her head out to look at Kate.

"I knew you'd come," she said. "I knew it."

To Play the Fool

Laurie R. King

Homicide detectives Kate Martinelli and Al Hawkin first appeared in A Grave Talent. Now they are back to investigate the death of a man whose cremated remains are found in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Implicated in the death is Erasmus, a wandering soul and latterday Shakesperean Fool.

Reluctant to take on another high-profile case, Kate is too intrigued to walk away. As she begins to untangle the web of secrecy Erasmus has woven around his former life, she starts to doubt his guilt. But Erasmus will say nothing to point the investigation away from himself, and Kate must not only prove one man's innocence, she must also nail the real killer.

"To Play the Fool is quite wonderful"

ISBN

Boston Globe

A Grave Talent

Laurie R. King

Kate Martinelli, a newly promoted Homicide detective with a secret to conceal, and Alonzo Hawkin, a world-weary cop trying to make a new life in San Francisco, could not be more different, but are thrown together to solve a brutal crime - the murders of three young girls.

As Martinelli and Hawkin get nearer to a solution, they realize the crimes may not be the sexually motivated killings they had seemed, and that there is a coldly calculating and tortuous mind at work which they must outmanoeuvre if they are to prevent both further carnage and the destruction of a shining talent…

"If there is a new P.D. James… I would put my money on Laurie R. King"

Boston Globe