"This is not official business," she told him.
"That's cool," he said.
"I just need to find her."
"Like I said, why?"
"Frankly, I don't have the authority to go into that. I can only say that she may have seen something with a direct bearing on an ongoing investigation."
Without answering her, he picked up his coat, hat, gloves, and scarf and took them through a doorway. She heard a mild clatter of clothes hangers, and he came back, running both hands through his hair.
"You want some tea? Or there's instant coffee," he offered.
"Um, sure, thanks. Instant's fine."
He went back through the door. This time, she heard water running into a pot and the click of a switch turning on, and then he was back again.
"You know," he said, "if you're going to ask deceitful questions, you really ought to wear glasses or a fake mustache or something. Your face has been on the news."
"As I said, this is not an official inquiry."
"I'm a law student, and I can guess how close to illegality you're walking."
Kate stepped back and looked at him, and rapidly shoveled her original impressions of him out into the melting snow. She smiled wryly and held out her hand.
"Kate Martinelli."
"Peter Franklin," he said, and shook her hand. "What is it you're after?"
"A girl on your bus. She was taking pictures of the other passengers; there's a tiny chance she may have caught someone in the background."
"The Strangler himself? Lavalle?"
"He's denying any connection with Jules Cameron's disappearance," Kate said, which was the truth, although not in the way Franklin would hear it. "I want to pick up evidence while it's still fresh. If you're a law student, you're probably aware of how fast memories fade, how easy it is for evidence to become compromised."
The mild flattery got through. He nodded, started to speak, and was cut off by the whistle of the kettle in the next room, building to a shriek.
He chipped some coffee out of an encrusted jar, dropped a piece into a mug, and poured on the hot water. Milk was added to hers, honey to his straw-colored herbal tea, and Kate resumed.
"I could get a warrant if you think it's necessary," she said, feigning assurance.
"I don't know if it would help," Franklin said, blowing across the top of his steaming cup. "We don't really keep passenger lists."
"Oh Christ." Kate set the cup down so hard, the foul ersatz coffee slopped onto the counter. "Why didn't you just tell me that to begin with?"
"Whoa, lady. Would you rather I just said, Sorry I can't help you. Piss off?"
"Isn't that what you're saying?"
"No."
"Do you have a passenger list?"
"Not a passenger list. We keep records of the reservations made, but those are all along the line of "Pick up Joe and Suzanne at the truck stop.""
"No names or phone numbers?"
"It's not an airline."
"This doesn't sound very hopeful," she said aloud.
"Look, do you want to find your girl with the camera or not?"
"That's why I came here, but you just said —"
"Christ on a cross," he said to himself, turning away to a filing cabinet. "No wonder crimes never get solved."
Kate became belatedly aware that this was probably the most incompetent interview she had ever conducted. Franklin pulled a file from the drawer, pulled up the one in front to mark its place, and came over to her, laying it on the counter and opening it.
"Now, what was the date?"
"The twentieth. What is that?"
"The list of drivers."
"You think the driver might remember one girl?" Kate said dubiously.
"Our trips aren't like Greyhound. We have two drivers on all the time, and even on the straight-through trips there's a lot of interaction. We arrange a picnic, stop at a hot springs, that kind of thing - it can be more a brief impromptu tour than just a form of transportation, and the driver is a part of it. Portland, you say. Going which way?"
"Northbound."
He reached under the counter and came out with a piece of scratch paper, a recycled flyer of some sort torn neatly in quarters. He wrote a name and a seven-digit phone number on it, turned a few pages in the file, and wrote another name and number, this one with a 312 area code.
"That close to Christmas, we run four buses instead of two up and down, but there's only one that might've been there on the twentieth. That was Sally's bus. These are the drivers' numbers - No, wait a minute. Was that when B.J. had the brake problem?" He read on, then nodded. "Right, we had a delay and therefore a bit of an overlap. I'll give you their numbers, too." He wrote down a pair of names and numbers, one local and the other in the 714 area. Then he closed the file and went over to put it back in its drawer.
"One of these numbers is in L.A.," Kate noted. "Where is this other one?"
"Chicago. He just came out to drive the Christmas season. The local ones are between here and Tacoma." These were for Steven Salazar - Sally - and B.J.'s partner.
God, thought Kate in despair, if I can't do this over the phone, the airfares are going to kill me.
She pushed the thought from her mind and gave Franklin a look that was confident and grateful. She held out her hand.
"Thank you."
"I hope it helps," he said, his casual attire clashing strangely with the taut look on his face. "It's cases like these that make me question my opposition to the death penalty."
TWENTY-ONE
Four phone calls, four blanks drawn: All the drivers were out, presumably driving; two of them were expected back either tonight or tomorrow; another tomorrow night; the third, nobody knew where he was, hadn't seen him in a couple of weeks. Out again with the photographs, to soup kitchens and emergency shelters. She avoided the police, which would have involved uncomfortable explanations, telling herself that the police had already conducted their search for Jules Cameron.
Back to the hotel for phone calls to two drivers, one partner, and a lover. One driver had yet to surface and the other would be home at midnight Chicago time, but Kate was told that she'd damn well better not call then, because after a week on the road, the driver would have better things to do than talk on the phone. Al sounded as he had on Saturday, holding on by a mere thread; she told him nothing of what she was doing. Lee was patient and the conversation was short.
Tuesday morning, she caught the Chicago driver at home, but no, he had not pulled into that particular rest stop south of Portland a few days before Christmas.
Tuesday afternoon, three more people told Kate that the girl in her photograph looked familiar, but one was so stoned, Kate didn't think his eyes actually came to a focus, and the other two were helpful and vague and suggestable.
Tuesday evening, she reached the driver Sally. He agreed with his co-driver in Chicago that they had gone through the Portland area at roughly that time, but they had not shepherded their charges to the rest stop near the river.
This left the driver nobody could locate, and B.J. Montero, in the Anaheim area of the Los Angeles sprawl. B.J. was a woman, and her boyfriend worked a graveyard shift and had not been pleased at Kate's initial phone call. He did not seem any more pleased at subsequent calls, either, even though they didn't wake him in the middle of his night. This time when she called, on Tuesday evening, he just snapped into the phone, "She ain't here," and slammed the phone down before she could finish her sentence.
The next morning, timing her call to catch the man before he could drop into bed, she had the same response, only more obscene. Later, she called the Green Tortoise office again, but Peter Franklin could tell her only that B.J. had a couple of days off and had dropped the last of her passengers the day before. Kate supposed she was on her way home, taking her own sweet time - which, she reflected, was understandable if the boyfriend's ill temper was a general state.
Finally, at five o'clock Wednesday evening, the rude boyfriend, instead of hang
ing up, growled a curse and dropped the receiver onto a hard surface. A woman's voice came on the line. Kate introduced herself and explained that she was trying to find a passenger on the trip Montero had driven five days before Christmas, saying that she did understand that passenger lists were not kept, but that the local manager had suggested his drivers might have gotten to know some of their passengers.
"You just want whatever names I have?"
"It's more than I have now."
"Just a minute." The phone crashed back onto the table. Kate heard retreating footsteps, heard the man's voice say, "Wha' the fuck she want?" and, faintly, Montero answering, "Like you said, she's looking for someone who was on one of my trips." Bass grumbling and soprano giggling, punctuated by distant rustles and thumps, made Kate begin to wonder if they had forgotten her in the business of their reunion, but after a while the feet approached the phone again and the woman's voice came on.
"What was the date again?"
"December the twentieth."
"Right." There followed another silence, with faint paper noises. "Oh yeah, that trip. There was a leak in the brake fluid that took me forever to find, and that crew was really into singing. They must've sung "White Christmas" a thousand times. Jesus, I thought I'd go nuts. I've got two names. Got a pencil? They're Beth Perry and… I think this says Henry James - could that be right? Yeah, I think so; I remember some joke about philosophy. You want their phone numbers?" Kate said yes, please, and wrote two strings of numbers down beside each name. "They're both students, so I took their parents' numbers, too. Students move around too much."
"Just out of curiosity, why did you take these names down? If you don't keep track of passengers?"
"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 pe
ople 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.
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