At about this point, a middle-aged detective who reminded her of a rural Al Hawkin stopped the series of questions he was asking and looked at her closely.
"Are you all right, Inspector?"
Kate took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of her nose. "No, I'm not all right," she said aggressively. "These goddamn headaches leave me feeling like a zombie."
"Migraines?"
"Not exactly, but close enough. They're the tail end of an injury."
"Car accident?"
"What the hell does it matter?" she snapped, and then immediately said, "Sorry. No, I got hit in the head with a piece of galvanized pipe. Stupid. I was going in after a perp I'd wounded and one of his friends was waiting for me. I forgot to duck. My own damn fault."
As soon as she looked back at him, she knew that she had inadvertently said the right thing. The half-suspicious expression that had dogged his features miraculously cleared, and she could almost see the man recognize her, not as the butch-looking San Francisco cop, one of those affirmative-action females who would fret over a broken fingernail and be unreliable in a tight place, but, rather, as "one of us." A real cop. Oh well, she thought. Anything that helps.
"When did you eat last?" he said abruptly.
"I don't know. I'm not hungry."
He got up and went to the door of her motel room, which had been left open a crack despite the cold.
"Hank, go grab us some sandwiches. You want a beer, glass of wine, something?" he asked Kate, who became dimly aware that it must be closer to noon than morning.
"Alcohol's not a good idea just now. A Coke is fine, or coffee."
The food, she had to admit, had been a good idea. Reality approached a few steps when the sandwiches had hit her system, and her mind started to work again.
"I'm sorry, what did you say your name was?"
"Hank Randel."
"Hank. What have we got so far?"
A deep, melodious, and sardonic voice cut across any answer Hank Randel might have made. "Sergeant, I'm sure you weren't going to answer that, so I'll save you the embarrassment of having to refuse."
Kate had been a police officer long enough to know the voice of authority when she heard it. She stifled an impulse to stand to attention and instead turned to look at the figure that now filled the doorway.
"Inspector Martinelli," said the man, coming into the room. "Lt. Florey D'Amico." He was a huge man with a quiet voice, and his hand as it shook hers was cautious with its strength. He was a foot taller than Kate and weighed two of her. She felt like a child, or a doll, in front of him as he took off his hat, shook the rain from it, and examined her thoughtfully. "I'm sorry this has happened, Inspector Martinelli. The child, she isn't yours I was told."
"No, she's… a sort of goddaughter. A friend. She's my partner's stepdaughter."
"I see. Well, what say we leave these gentlemen to get on with their work and you come back with me to the office."
Kate dug in her heels. She had no standing here to speak of, but she could be an obnoxiously well-informed private citizen, with rights.
"I want to know what you are doing about locating Jules."
He inclined his head to the door in invitation. She thought he was merely ignoring her demand, and she considered fighting him, then decided that she probably could do it better in front of witnesses. She picked up her coat and went to the door she had not been out of in nearly two hours, and when she stepped out onto the walkway, she felt her jaw drop. The motel parking lot was a writhing hive of police activity: a dozen marked cars and as many more distinctively dull sedans, uniformed officers and plainclothesmen in all directions, even a mobile command post in the process of being set up. Civilians were lined up outside half a mile of yellow tape, and she knew were she down there, she would hear the sound of news cameras and shouted questions. Voices from the room Jules had occupied drew her, and she looked in, seeing the final stages of the Crime Scene technicians' activities.
Kate was completely bewildered at the intensity of response to a missing girl. Portland was quieter than San Francisco, granted, but this? There were even television news vans, for God's sake. She looked up into D'Amico's face.
"I don't understand," she said.
"Ah. I wondered. Well, Inspector Martinelli, you obviously did not think of it, but your young friend Jules Cameron is young, slim, and has short dark hair, and as such (Oh God, Kate thought) we have to recognize that she fits the profile of victims for (oh God, no) the man the press has taken to calling the (No. Oh, no, no, no) Snoqualmie Strangler."
When he saw her reaction, D'Amico grabbed her arm and all but lifted her back inside the room, allowing her to drop onto the bed and shoving her head down onto her knees. She had not fainted, did not even cry out, but she sat with her head down and bit the side of her hand so hard, there was blood in her mouth.
It seemed a very long time, but in fact it was less than five minutes before Kate sat upright on the bed. This time she had no questions, merely followed the lieutenant meekly out the door and to his car.
D'Amico's office was warm, light, and surprisingly tidy. The telephones and voices were muted by a glass-topped door. He pointed Kate to a chair, went on down the hallway for a minute, and when he came back, he closed the door and went around the desk to his own chair.
"Tea?"
"I'd rather have coffee."
He scooped up the telephone receiver in one paw and spoke into it. "Two coffees, one cream and sugar."
When it came, Kate drank the sweet mixture obediently.
"Tell me what happened," he said.
She rubbed one hand tiredly across her ridiculously short hair, vaguely aware that she had forgotten to pull on the knit cap before leaving her room. Her head was throbbing again, though so far her stomach had not joined in the revolt. "I don't know what happened. Jules and I checked in to the motel yesterday at about four-thirty, and this morning when I woke up, she wasn't in her room. That's all I know."
"When did you leave San Francisco?"
"We left… What's today? Wednesday? We left Monday morning. Stayed Monday night near Sacramento. Jules wanted… Jules wanted to… Oh God."
"Inspector Martinelli," he said, and his voice, quiet as ever, nonetheless brought her spine straight. "I require your assistance. You will give me a report of your movements since you left San Francisco on Monday morning."
"Sir. Jules's mother and my partner were married on Sunday afternoon. We had made an arrangement that Jules would spend two weeks with me while they were on their honeymoon, and after the wedding she went back with me to my house in San Francisco. We left the house at nine o'clock Monday morning. We stopped in Berkeley to do some shopping, and then about noon we drove north and then east onto highway Eighty. We detoured to Sacramento because Miss… because Jules needed to see the capitol building for a school project. We stayed the night at a motel just north of town, got back the next morning onto the I-Five, and continued north. We'd planned on staying the night in Portland, but we didn't quite get that far." She described the trip, the stops, and the meals. About ten minutes after she began, another man came in, a young man in a dark suit with FBI written all over him. She broke off, but he just nodded at D'Amico, pulled up a chair, and waited for her to resume. She made it to the end of the report, and Jules was still missing from her room. Then the questions began.
"Inspector, why did the two of you come here?"
"I wanted… My lover is visiting her aunt, in the San Juan Islands." Neither of them reacted to the word her. "I haven't seen her since August, and I thought - I'm on sick leave - I'd come up for Christmas."
"And Jules Cameron? Why was she with you?" asked the FBI man.
"Her mother and my partner just got married, on Sunday," Kate repeated patiently. "They're in Mexico on their honeymoon, but Jules didn't want to go with them; she asked to come stay with me instead. I was happy to have the company. She's a good kid. No, she's better than that. She's a lovely human being, v
ery smart, frighteningly smart, and mixed up, and she wanted… she likes me." Suddenly the tears came, unexpected and unwelcome in front of these men, but unstoppable. D'Amico put a box of tissues on the desk in front of her, and they waited until she gained control.
"God," she said hoarsely. "How am I going to tell Al?"
"Al is her stepfather? Your partner."
"Al Hawkin.",
D'Amico's head came up. "I know Al Hawkin. I thought he was with L.A."
"He was. He transferred to us a couple of years ago."
The FBI man spoke up. "The Eva Vaughn case."
"I remember," D'Amico said. "Were you involved with that one?" He was asking her, and she nodded. "And the Raven Morningstar case, during the summer following?" he added slowly, as recognition and memory came. She nodded again, blew her nose a last time, and sat up to look straight at him, bracing herself. However, he did not comment about her notoriety or the mess that had been made of that latter case, but went back to her partner. "I heard Al Hawkin speak at a conference a few years ago. He's an impressive man. His subject… the subject was child abduction," he said in a voice gone suddenly flat.
Kate's mouth twisted into a bitter laugh. "It was his specialty," she said. "Oh God."
FOURTEEN
Kate met the newlyweds at the airport early the following morning. Beneath their incongruous fresh sunburns and bright holiday clothes, they both looked deathly ill, flabby with exhaustion and grinding terror. Jani seemed unaware of her new husband's arm across her shoulders, unconscious of the coffee stains down the front of her lightweight yellow linen jacket. Her eyes flicked across Kate to fix on the large man at Kate's side. Hawkin spared Kate a longer glance, taking in his partner's equally derelict state in the moments it took to walk from the gate to where she and Lieutenant D'Amico stood waiting. Kate said nothing. Before Al Hawkin could speak, Jani walked straight over to the tall man in authority and looked up into his face.
"Is there any news about my daughter?"
"Nothing yet, ma'am. The search team is assembling now; they'll set out with the dogs again as soon as it gets light. Let's take you to a hotel, get you something to eat, and we can talk. Do you have any luggage?"
"It'll catch up with us later," Hawkin said absently. "They held the plane for us in L.A.; the bags got left behind." Kate could see that he badly wanted to seize D'Amico and demand every detail and was keeping himself in only because he knew that loss of control would mean loss of time.
"I'm Florey D'Amico," the lieutenant said belatedly, sticking out his hand.
Kate trailed behind the three of them through the quiet airport and to D'Amico's unmarked car outside the baggage-claim area. After a brief hesitation, he put Jani in the front seat, but Al was leaning over the seat, waiting for him as soon as he got behind the wheel.
"What have you got so far?" he asked.
"Your little girl disappeared from her motel room south of here sometime after nine o'clock Tuesday night. We have yet to find anyone who saw anything, though of course we're still tracing half a dozen hotel guests who left before we were called. I should make it clear," he added, peering at Jani to see if she was listening to him, "that we have no evidence of foul play. Nothing to indicate that she did not walk away from her hotel room all by herself."
Jani was looking at him, but she might as well not have heard, for all the impact his words had on her expression. Al Hawkin brushed away the reassurances, if that is what they were meant to be.
"You must have more than that," he said impatiently.
D'Amico looked again at Jani, then turned to look at the traffic behind him before pulling out into the roadway. When the terminal was behind him, he said to Hawkin, his voice heavy with warning, "I think we ought to get you settled first, before we go into the details."
"Jani should hear it, too."
The heavy shoulders in front of Kate shrugged. "If you say so. Okay. As I said, there's nothing real yet aside from the fact that she wasn't in her room when Inspector Martinelli here woke up. She hadn't seen her since they checked in at four-thirty, although the waitress in the coffee shop says that Jules had a hamburger at about six and charged it to the room. The register tag is timed at six-forty-eight, and the waitress says the girl was reading, by herself, and took a long time to eat.
"So far, two people remember seeing her walking back toward her room a little after quarter to seven. She had the book in her hand. One of them commented that she looked cold and was hurrying, because a wind had come up and it was starting to sprinkle. She wasn't wearing a coat.
"We don't have anyone yet who saw her enter her room, but the house log shows she began watching a pay-per-view movie at eight-thirty-five. The family that stayed in the room next to hers isn't sure about anything. They knew the room was occupied because they heard movement and television noises from time to time, but they have two kids, and it wasn't until they got the kids settled at nine that their own room went quiet. They then heard nothing but the TV from Jules's room until they turned off the lights and went to sleep at about ten-thirty. The wife did hear voices sometime later. She thought before midnight, but she didn't look at the clock, and she couldn't tell where they were coming from. Could have been the parking lot or the hallway or the room on the other side.
"You have anything to add yet, Kate?"
"Just that I was sleeping so soundly that I probably wouldn't have heard voices unless they were pretty loud. I had taken a pain pill," she added. Jani said nothing, but Al looked at her. "My head was bothering me," she said. "That's why we stopped so early in the first place. I didn't think it was safe to drive."
"So you abandoned her instead," Jani said from the front seat, her voice thick with loathing and her jaw clenched.
"I —" Kate started, but Al reached forward with his right hand and placed it on his wife's shoulder.
"Jani, no," he said. After a minute, he looked at Kate, and she resumed.
"I didn't hear anything from Jules's room. In the morning when I tried to wake her up, at about eight-thirty, I couldn't get an answer, so I got the key from the desk and we opened her door. She'd been there, had a glass of water, sat on the bed for a while watching the TV. Her room key was there, along with the keys I'd given her to the car and to my room, but some of her stuff was gone: her jacket, the book she was reading, her diary, her pen, and some of her bathroom things. Her toothbrush and hairbrush were missing from the zip bag. Her makeup was still there."
"Jules doesn't wear makeup," Jani interrupted, her voice dripping scorn. "She borrowed some of mine for the wedding."
Kate looked at Hawkin. "Er, she doesn't exactly wear it, no. But she does experiment with it sometimes," she told the mother in the front seat.
"She didn't before she got to know you." Kate looked helplessly at her partner, who offered her an infinitesimal shrug.
"That's all. Except for the boots. Her new boots were missing."
"She doesn't own any boots, and certainly not new ones." Jani again. "Al, this is ridiculous." She spoke over her shoulder, still looking only at the windshield. She can't bear to look at me, thought Kate, who became aware of a tiny spark of wholly inappropriate and utterly inexpressible anger.
"She does own a pair of boots," Kate said quietly. "A pair of waterproof Timber land hiking boots she said she's been wanting for a long time."
"Jules wouldn't want a pair of boots."
"I was with her. We bought them on Monday, in Berkeley. In fact, I put them on my credit card," Kate said baldly. Silence fell in the car, and Kate knew that it was all Jani could do not to insist that Kate be put out of the car, right there on the freeway.
"Was she wearing them during the day?" D'Amico asked unexpectedly.
"Yes."
"Well, she took them off at eight-thirty."
His three passengers gaped at him, astonished at this obscure bit of knowledge.
"We're not sure about it, of course, but it looks as if she was lying on the bed, watching her movie
, and she must have kicked them off, one after the other, over the side of the bed. We found some chunks of dried mud in the carpeting from a sole with a deep tread," he explained. "And the guy downstairs was turning on his television when he heard two thuds from overhead, about thirty seconds apart. He said they sounded like shoes dropping." He shot Hawkin a glance over his shoulder. "You can see that we were interested in the mud and in the noises, but I'd say it's pretty certain they're connected. Besides, he heard her moving around a while later. Unfortunately, he went to sleep early."
"So that's it?" Hawkin asked him. "That's all you have?"
"So far. They're still running prints, and as I said, the search parties will be out again in a little while."
"They found nothing yesterday?"
"Not a thing. But the dogs didn't get here until the afternoon, so they had only a couple of hours."
"You haven't received a note?"
The brief hesitation before D'Amico answered said a great deal about the chances that she was being held for ransom. "No." That Al had even asked, his expression said, was a surprise; but then the Al who had asked was not the investigator; it was the father.
What followed in the ensuing days seemed to Kate like a cross between being inside a tumble dryer and being shot from a cannon. Because she had no standing here in Oregon, she could take on none of the usual roles of questioning or directing or even acting as liaison with the unofficial volunteers. Still less could she talk with the press, which had seized on her familiar name with the glee of a pack of hounds and came howling to life whenever her face crossed their cameras.
She ended up collating, filing, and answering the telephone, performing her tasks with a grim ferocity, aching to do more and constantly aware of things going on just outside her sight and hearing. She saw Al a few times, Jani twice, looking so pale that her brown skin seemed as translucent as a lamp shade.
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