"What was all that?" Kate asked politely. "It didn't look like English."
"It wasn't. Bloke in Moscow," said the woman, her voice thickly Australian. "He can only talk when his partner goes on a break."
"Full of interesting stuff," commented the oldest man, who might have been thirty. "However, his English isn't up to it. Hence Sheila here," he said, nodding at the woman.
"Kate Martinelli," Kate offered, taking the name as an opportunity for introductions, although the woman's name was Maggie, not Sheila. The others were Rob, the young redhead; Simon, the older man; and a young Chinese man with the unlikely name of Josiah. "My adoptive parents were missionaries," he said, offering a well-worn explanation in a voice with no accent.
"Do any of you know Jules Cameron?" Kate asked as soon as introductions had subsided. Four sets of eyes looked at her blankly. "She's a junior high school student who was in a class that was taught here last summer, something about programming. There was a boy in the class, her partner in some project. He sold a game to Atari when he was ten years -"
"Richard!" three voices chorused.
"We all know Richard," Maggie said. "We've all heard the story about Atari a thousand times."
"I haven't," said Josiah.
"You've only been here a week."
"I bet you know him anyway," said Simon. "He uses Albert Onestone as his nom de clavier."
"Oh, Albert. Sure, I know Albert. Is he as bigmouthed in life as he is on the net?"
"Worse."
"God."
"Do you know where I can find him?" Kate asked.
"He's always on the Internet. I don't think he sleeps. Or do you mean actually him, as in his body?" Maggie asked.
"His actual physical person, yes."
"I'm not sure where he lives."
"Could you ask him?" Kate asked.
"You mean when I see him?"
"If he's always on-line, what about now?"
Richard, the computer genius whose pomposity had come across clearly even in choppy Internetspeak, had nonetheless agreed to meet Kate in the flesh. First, though, she needed to reach Rosa Hidalgo, to gain access to the Cameron (now Cameron-Hawkin) apartment. Richard, she trusted, would be able to open the computer inside the apartment, on the slim chance that Jules had left something - diary, letters, mutterings to herself - in its electronic recesses. It was this thin thread that she had followed down here, and she could only hope it led her a bit further before it snapped, or unraveled. She'd been an investigator long enough to be resigned to any number of fruitless days, but that did not mean she relished them.
Rosa was home. Her voice sounded strained, and she obviously held the memory of December's conversation with Kate in the front of her mind. Kate sat at the telephone in the corner of the computer lab and gradually wore Rosa down, grinding away with a steady application of Jules's name and an attitude of profound apology. She hung up feeling more than a bit nauseated, but with the permission at hand. Now all she needed to do was drag Richard away from his keyboard.
She was interrupted in her dialing of his number by the beeper somewhere on her person. She hung up, dug the tiny machine out of her pocket, and held it up. It displayed her own home number, with no message.
Old familiar panic feelings flooded over her as she punched the numbers, and when Lee herself answered, Kate went querulous with relief.
"What do you want, Lee?"
"Where are you? We expected you hours ago."
"Is that why you beeped me, because I missed dinner? I'm working." Damn it, Kate groused to herself. She can take off for months, yet I can't have a couple of hours without checking in. Well, she corrected herself after a glance at her watch, six hours. "Sorry, I guess it is late. I should've called. I've gotten out of the habit of having someone at home."
"It doesn't matter. Oh, look Kate, I'm sorry - I'm not thinking straight. I just got off the phone with Al Hawkin."
Kate held her breath.
"They've arrested the Strangler," Lee's voice in the receiver said.
"What?" The four people at the computer turned to look at her, but she did not see them.
"Just a little while ago. He wanted you to know before you heard it on the news."
"How good a make is it?"
"Sorry?"
"How sure are they that they've got the right man?"
"Al said it looks positive. He said to tell you a witness came forward who saw the letter being mailed. I assume that makes sense to you?"
"It does, yes. Where is he? Al, I mean."
"He said he was with D'Amico at the man's house, south of Tacoma, helping with the search, but that he'd call you tomorrow."
The help that Al would be giving, Kate knew, was to stand by and look at things taken out of the Strangler's house, to see if one of the trophies he had collected belonged to Jules. She shuddered and grasped the telephone as if it were a lifeline. Think, woman, she ordered. Don't go all soft now. She looked at her watch: just after eight o'clock. Lee was talking again, but Kate broke in, unheeding.
"Lee, I need you to make some phone calls. Do you have a pencil? Okay. Rosa Hidalgo: Tell her I won't be coming by tonight, but for God's sake, don't tell her why. Next, a kid named Richard." She gave Lee the number. "Same message as for Rosa; I'll call him in a few days. Next, call the dispatcher. Have her contact Kitagawa and tell him I'm going back on medical leave, that my head's killing me… No, of course not; it's fine. And then the airport. Find me a flight; I'll be able to make it by ten o'clock. Wait a minute - did Al say more precisely where it was?"
"Just that it was south of Tacoma."
"Nothing about which airport?"
There was a silence on the line, then Lee said, "He did say something about it being too damn far from Portland, that he wished he'd flown into Seattle."
That answered the bigger question: Yes, Al knew that his partner would come.
"Right. Book me a flight into Sea Tac, have a taxi at the house in, oh, an hour. That'll give me five minutes to pack. See you shortly."
"Drive carefully," Lee urged, but the phone was dead before she had finished.
When Kate reached Russian Hill, she found her bag already packed and Jon bent over the duct-taped tear on her down parka with a needle and thread.
"Bless you, Jon," she said, and trotted upstairs.
"Do you want a sandwich, or coffee?" he called after her.
"No, I ate," she shouted back, ducking into the study to hunt down maps of Washington. As she pawed through the map drawer, she was dimly aware of the sounds of Lee making her laborious way up the stairs. When the click of her braces paused at the study door, Kate spoke over her shoulder.
"Have you seen those large-scale maps I brought back with me?"
"They're on the shelf."
Kate looked up and saw the bulging manila envelope. She kicked the drawer shut and stretched up for the packet, then shook it out on the desk and began sorting through it for the maps she might need.
"I'll call you tomorrow," she said. "Let you know where I'm staying. The car keys are on the table downstairs." She chose half a dozen sheets and put them back into the envelope, bent down the little metal wings to seal the flap, and turned to go.
"Kate, just hold on a minute."
"I can't, sweetheart. I'll miss the plane."
"Why do you have to go? Can't it wait until tomorrow?"
"It can't wait," Kate said gently. "I have to go."
"But why? They don't want you up there."
Kate winced, then said simply, "Al needs me."
I need you, Lee wanted to say, knowing that if she did, Kate would stay, and that Kate would resent it. And she couldn't help but be aware that she had relinquished the right to say that, after these last months, no matter how true it was. She forced herself to draw back.
"All right, love. Come back soon."
Kate stepped briskly into the hallway, then stepped back in. She kissed Lee, slowly.
"Good-bye, love," Kate s
aid. "I'll call you."
Then she flew down the stairs to the waiting taxi.
NINETEEN
The lights of Seattle did not rise up to greet the plane until nearly two o'clock the following morning. Waiting for the bag holding every warm garment Jon had been able to dig up took forty endless minutes, and renting a car nearly as long. She drove south on the empty freeways, through Tacoma and Olympia, and listened to the radio. Every news report trumpeted the arrest of Anton Lavalle, the homegrown American boy of French-Canadian stock, for the murders of at least three of the Strangler victims.
When she stopped at an all-night cafe to pour some coffee into her numb body, the name Lavalle was on the tongues of the waitress and the cook, the truckers and the highway patrolman, and when she spread out her map to consider the best route, the waitress was unsurprised at her destination.
"You want this turnoff right here, honey," she told Kate, tapping the map with an authoritative red fingernail. "Twenty miles up and then watch for the crowds." Kate laughed politely. "Want some more cream with that?"
"Yes, please, and could I have some toast or a muffin or something?" She was dimly aware that a hamburger with Dio was the last meal she'd eaten.
"Got a nice bran muffin, fresh yesterday. Give you twenty-five cents off."
"That'll do fine. Thanks."
An hour later, Kate realized that the waitress had not been joking about the crowds: A line of parked cars and vans suddenly materialized at one side of the narrow two-lane road, with two figures carrying equipment trotting away from her headlights. She pulled over uncertainly, unwilling simply to park and walk into the night, but while she was trying to make up her mind, a car pulled up behind her. Its driver and a passenger got out with bulky bags slung over their shoulders and set off briskly down the road, which, she saw, was beginning to be visible in the first stages of dawn.
"Must be the place," she said aloud. She took her parka out of the bag and put on the boots she'd last worn to search the hills for Jules (both items cleaned and mended by Jon), then locked the bag in the trunk. In that time, two more cars had joined the line, three more intent men trotting down the road, their breath streaming out in the dim morning light. Kate tied her shoelaces and followed them.
There was chaos at the gate, where a dirt road branched off from the paved one. Kate held up her badge, put down her head, and shoved her way to the front. Even then, it took a long time to convince the short-tempered guards to let her through, a very long time after a local television man had recognized her and began to plague her with questions she could not possibly answer. The nearest guard let her in the gate, and when a convoy of emergency vehicles appeared, trying to push their way through the throng, he waved her on in disgust, then left to go and tear a few verbal chunks out of the nosy civilians.
"Hey, you!" he bellowed. "Yeah you, good-looking. You don't move your ass, I'm going to chain it to a tree." Kate slipped past him and set off up the hill.
The dirt road was nearly a mile long, climbing the side of a gentle hill. Once when Kate hit a patch of silence, free from the crackle of radios and amplified voices below and the growl of a generator from above, for a moment she found herself strolling along a country lane in the dappled sun of a crisp morning that seemed more spring than winter, complete with birdsong: nothing to say that she was nearing a pit of horror. Nothing at all, except for the faces on the men in the car she met around the corner.
She had known it was going to be bad, this lair of a killer, and the closer she drew, the greater the dread grew, until she felt the breakfast muffin like a fist beneath her heart.
Crime scenes invariably gave birth to the black humor of professional cleaner-uppers, and the worse the scene - a weeks-old body, a shotgun wound, an evisceration - the more mordant the jokes. Not many cops smile at the scene of unpleasant death, though they will occasionally bare their teeth, and often they laugh. But the grin is that of a death's-head, and the humor is blue, or, more often, black.
At a certain point, however, even the armor of humor fails, and the hard pleasure of triumph at the arrest of a stone killer has no chance against the reality of the man's acts. This was like approaching the epicenter of some horrendous natural disaster. The airy winter-bare woods and rutted dirt road were soon filled with grim-faced men and women who did not meet one another's eyes and whose shoulders were stiff with an aimless rage and despair. The short tempers that she had seen down at the main road were intensified up here into a barely controlled fury, and she let her face go blank and picked up her pace so as not to draw attention. It was going to be very bad.
But when she got there, she found no corpses being exhumed, no smell of death on the clean air. People were standing around or going about their jobs, but always, she soon saw, their glances returned to the ordinary run-down white trailer at the far end of the road - an old white box, its metal sides begrimed with mildew and rust, its roof hidden beneath lichen and leaves and layers of black plastic sheeting, ordinary except for the amount of attention being given it. The horror here was not in human remains; the horror reflected in the faces came from the knowledge of what sort of creature had inhabited the trailer.
The command post trailer was already in place, bristling with antennae and vibrating with foot traffic and the power generator, overwhelming its sick and decrepit white cousin. Two of the dozen or more vehicles packed into the clearing had their emergency lights on, pulsing the trees in syncopated bursts of color.
There was no sun here yet, if indeed there ever was on this side of the hill. It looked dank and the air smelled musty beneath the fumes of gas and diesel motors. Kate zipped her jacket to her chin, made sure her ID was clipped to the pocket, and approached the command post.
"Al Hawkin?" she asked a man in the uniform of the local sheriff's department. He shrugged and walked past her. "Al Hawkin?" she asked a plainclothesman. He tipped his head toward the trailer. "Al Hawkin?" she asked a woman who looked like a doctor, just inside the door.
"He's back there, with D'Amico. Can I help you with something?"
"I'm his partner. I need to talk with him."
"His partner? But I —" The woman stopped, studied Kate for a moment with a bit too much interest, blushed lightly when she realized what she was doing, and took a step back. "I'll just let him know…" She turned and walked away into the noisy trailer, leaving Kate to reflect on the price of fame. Or was the word infamy?
Al appeared immediately on the woman's heels. He had his head down and kept it down, not greeting Kate, but merely gathered her up and propelled her down the steps ahead of him. He paused behind her, and she heard him say, "Harris, get someone to turn off those flashers, would you? It makes the place look like a goddamn movie set." Then he was beside her. "C'mon," he said, and set off through the trees. She had to trot to keep up with him, down a well-worn path between some shrubs.
The path ended at a sheer drop of about fifteen feet, which, judging by the cans and containers littering the ground between the bottom of the cliff and a busy creek some six or eight feet farther down, had served as the trailer's garbage dump. A bulky uniform was standing guard at the site. He looked up at their approach, flipped a gloved hand at Hawkin, and turned his back again.
Al moved to a fallen tree a few feet back from the cliff face. Kate went to sit beside him. It was quiet here, and all she could see was woods. No garbage, no cop, no serial killer's trailer, just growing things. Al took a nearly flat package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and lit it. She did not comment.
"How's Jani?" she said instead.
"She's in the hospital."
"Al! What happened?"
"Couple days ago, before this latest. She's all right, just collapsed. They've got her on tranks and vitamins. She hasn't been eating, and I didn't notice it." Kate opened her mouth to protest at the tired self-loathing in his voice, then closed it again.
"Al," she started to say, but he spoke at the same instant.
&
nbsp; "Videotapes," he said. The word burst out under pressure, from jaws that were held so tightly clenched, they must have ached. "Seven videotapes. One for each girl, more or less. A couple of them are mixed together."
"Oh shit, Al. Was there one —"
"No. No sign of Jules. None at all."
Kate could think of nothing to say.
"They're not finished yet, of course. But there're no traces so far, none of her clothes, no tape. And he's still saying he didn't do her."
She waited.
"However, there're two girls we know were his, and they didn't have any videos, either. One of those he says he didn't do, but we know he did. There's even a necklace of hers here; he's just forgotten. Probably because he didn't have a tape for her, he forgot about her. D'Amico thinks… D'Amico thinks that he forgot the camera, or the battery was… the battery… Oh shit."
Al Hawkin threw his cigarette to the forest floor and slowly doubled over, as if he'd been hit in the stomach. He turned away from her, placed both of his fists hard against his forehead, and curled up fetally, his back to her. Kate was torn between the need to offer physical comfort and the man's intense need for privacy, and she held her hands out to his shoulders, hovering over his jacket for a long time, before she lowered them gently to touch him.
The tears he cried were few and small and bitter, and in barely a minute, he drew in a long breath and sat up straight. He threw his head back, blinking wide-eyed at the treetops and taking sharp breaths through his open mouth before he remembered his handkerchief and used it.
"I've got to get back," he said eventually, not looking at her.
She laid a hand on his arm. "Al, let me help. I'll finish looking at the tapes for you. I'd recognize her as well as you would."
"No," he said quickly.
"Al, I —"
"No! Martinelli, I sent you back to San Francisco. What the hell are you doing here, anyway?"
"I thought —" She caught herself, and instead of saying, I thought you wanted me to come, she said, "I thought I might be of some use."
"There's nothing for you to do here."
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