With Child km-3

by Laurie R. King

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

  "I'll talk to D'Amico."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Here, maybe, or the hospital."

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

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

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

  "Fine."

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Lee answered.

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

  "Where are you?"

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

  "Have you seen Al?"

  "Yeah."

  "Is he holding up?"

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

  "And?"

  "What do you mean?"

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

  "I'll go nuts if I come home."

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

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

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

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

  "Then what is the problem?"

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

  "Walking away from Jules," Lee said quietly.

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

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

  "That's right."

  "You can't grieve until you know."

  Kate did not answer.

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

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

  "I know. I do know."

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

  "I wish I could."

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

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

  "Why would she have gone to Seattle?"

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

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

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

  "How would you find her?"

  "Shelters, halfway houses, squats. Bridges."

  "It's a big place."

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

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

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

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

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

  "Not entirely, no."

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Take care, sweetheart."

  "You, too."

  Now, Kate could sleep.

  TWENTY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He shrugged. "Probably."

  "How could I find them?"

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

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

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

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

  At half past nine, she spotted a longhaired couple making their slow and affectionate way down the street, and she was not much surprised when they stopped in front of the door. The man extricated an arm and dug into a pocket for a key ring, kissed his companion a long good-bye, and opened the door. Kate followed on his heels.

  It was not much warmer inside than out. The man went around the room switching on lights, heaters, and a computer, and finally he took off his scarf and gloves, indicating that he was open for business.

  "Can I help you?"

  "I hope so. I'm trying to trace one of the passengers on a bus of yours that went through Portland just before Christmas."

  He unbuttoned his coat, revealing a thick green fisherman-knit sweater beneath.

  "Why?"

  Reluctantly, Kate took out her ID and showed it to the man. He looked at it carefully and took off his hat. His hair was not actually long, she noticed; in fact, it was surprisingly neat.