With Child km-3

by Laurie R. King

  "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, "w
hat 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.