Fourteen hours later, the telephone woke Kate. Lee already had it and was speaking into the receiver in a low voice.
“She’s still asleep. Do you think I—”
“I’ll take it,” Kate said. She put out a hand and said into the phone, “Martinelli here.”
“Kate, Al.” She sat up sharply on the bed.
“Is there—”
“No news,” he was already saying. “Not about Jules. I need to talk to you. I’m coming over.”
“What is it? Something’s wrong.”
“Not on the phone. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
When she had hung up, Kate realized that she was wearing little but her knit cap and her corduroy shirt, which looked clean but stank of old sweat. She wondered how on earth Lee had managed to maneuver her wet jeans and socks off without waking her.
“You were out cold,” Lee said, having read her face, or her mind. “The phone rang an hour ago, and you never twitched. Feel better?”
“I feel filthy. Al’s coming over. I’d better have a shower first.”
“Your clothes are unwearable. Better take something of mine. And don’t tell me they won’t fit, because they will. Just roll up the cuffs.” Kate had her doubts, but it was true, laundry had been fairly low on her priorities the last few days, and her own clothes were so stale as to be offensive. And to her surprise, when she pulled on the jeans after her long and blessed shower, she found that they did indeed fit. The mirror told her the half of it, and a survey of Lee the remainder.
“You’ve put on weight,” she said, sitting on the bed and pulling on a pair of Lee’s socks. “It looks good.”
“And you’ve lost some. Rosalyn told me you had a new image, sort of punk, she said. Actually, I think it’s more a tough-guy look than punk, with that hat.”
“Marlon Brando. Wait’ll you see me in my tight T-shirt with the pack of cigarettes tucked in the sleeve. When did you talk to Rosalyn?”
“She wrote me a while back.”
“I see. Did she tell you anything else about me?”
“Such as what?”
“Anything. Recently.”
“Not recently. And really, it was only a passing mention, a month or so ago. I think she said you’d been there for Thanksgiving dinner.”
“I was, yes. We had a good time.”
“Did Maj cook?”
“Of course.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t…Kate, it’s…I’m so…Oh shit,” said this woman who rarely swore. “Would you come over here? Please.”
Except for the palm of her hand, and a couple of cheek-pecking hugs, Kate’s body had not been in voluntary physical contact with another person for four months. It was awkward at first, no denying that. Too much had happened, and too many questions lay unanswered for it to be easy. However, there was no denying that touch, even with a woman Kate had cursed and resented and wanted to do violence to more than once over the past months, was a good and glorious thing. The familiarity of Lee’s body slid past her defenses, and she was beginning to relax into the curves and angles when footsteps sounded in the hall outside, followed by a sharp rap at the door.
Flustered, she pulled back, then shot out an arm when Lee swayed insecurely. She steadied her, picked the arm braces off the floor and gave them to Lee, then went to let her partner in.
He came in, his eyes sliding past her to Lee. His tired face lit up.
“Lee! Woman, it’s great to see you.” He took three steps and enveloped her in a hug of his own, so that when Kate turned back from closing the door, all she could see of Lee was a pair of hands emerging from behind a plaid wool coat. She picked the braces up from the floor again, then waited until Al stepped back, his hand firmly on Lee’s elbow until she had her arms in the beaded cuffs.
“You’re looking great, Lee. The woods agree with you.”
She acknowledged his remark with a nod, but her thoughts were all on him. She put her hand out and touched his arm. “Al, I was devastated when I heard. Is there anything I can do? Can I help Jani?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Can I let you know?”
“Of course. Kate said—”
Lee was interrupted by another knock at the door. Kate answered it and found a young woman in the uniform of the café next to the hotel. She was carrying two large brown bags.
“You ordered breakfast?”
“Did we order breakfast, Lee?”
“Yes.”
“Come on in,” she said. “I didn’t know you delivered.”
“We don’t,” said the young woman laconically, dropping the bags on the small table and pocketing the money Lee held out. An expensive breakfast, thought Kate, closing the door.
Lee had ordered for Al as well, eggs and bacon and toast, only slightly leathery from the delay. Al took off his heavy coat and sat on the bed, Lee and Kate took the chairs, and they were silent until the food was nearly gone. Lee looked up first from her Styrofoam plate.
“I assume that if there had been any change, you’d have said something.”
“No change. No sign whatsoever.”
“There was a rumor yesterday at the search site,” Kate said. “Someone may have seen a car?”
“D’Amico thought he’d found someone who saw a pickup with two people in it enter the freeway from the motel ramp just after midnight, the passenger small like Jules, but it’s so vague as to be useless. Light-colored, full-sized pickup, it could have been from anywhere other than the motel. By the time the FBI finished questioning him, he wasn’t even sure it was this exit.”
“She vanished into thin air,” Lee said quietly.
“Not under her own power she didn’t.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“The dogs traced her to the back of the motel, period. She got into a car and was driven off.”
“Got, or was put. Would the dogs have been able to track her if she’d been carried around the motel rather than walked there?”
“The handlers said yes, but that the animals wouldn’t have seemed as confident as they did, if she’d been carried.”
“And this killer, the Strangler. Could it be—I’m sorry, Al. You don’t want to go over it all again.”
Actually, Kate thought, he had seemed more comfortable now than when he had first appeared at the door.
“Lee, you couldn’t possibly make it worse than it already is. Yes, it could be the serial killer who’s working up here. Jules fits the physical description of his victims. He always takes them from near freeways, and there’s no doubt he’s moved south from where he first began.”
“But?”
“The ‘buts’ are very thin. This guy normally kills immediately, takes his girls away, and lays them out ritually in a place they’re sure to be found within a few days. Always within a twenty-mile radius of where they disappeared. And then a few days later, some police station in the area will receive an envelope with five twenty-dollar bills in it. The first one, two years ago, had a typed note saying it was for burial expenses, but since then it’s just been the money. And that, by the way, is a tight secret. You’re not to speak of any of this to anyone. You, too, Kate. The FBI would string me up if they knew I’d told you two.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, no note, no money, they haven’t found her—” His forced attitude of detached professionalism slipped, and he choked on the word body. He cleared his throat and started again. “There are also indications that she left the motel, if not deliberately, then at least under her own power. Mostly the things that are missing—her shoes and coat she’d have taken even for a short trip out of doors, but probably not her hairbrush, and certainly not her toothbrush and her diary.”
What is your word for the day, Jules? Kate wondered, and was hit by a wave of the grief and guilt that had dogged her every moment of the last ten days. To push it away, she shifted in her chair and asked, “You don’t think she went off on her own, though?”
“No. She’d have l
eft a note. I think someone took her, and I think he had a weapon, because there was no sign of a struggle and I know Jules would’ve raised bloody hell unless she had a damned good reason not to.”
“How did he get inside her room, or get her to come out?” Lee wondered.
“I don’t know.”
“What is it, Al?” Kate asked. “You had a reason for coming over here.
His right hand went spontaneously to the pocket in his shirt, and Kate did not need the look of embarrassment on his face to know that it was time to brace herself. Hawkin had been a smoker when she first met him, and she had quickly come to be wary of what that gesture meant.
His hand fell away before reaching the empty pocket, and he raised his face and looked straight at her for the first time.
“I want you to go back to San Francisco.”
Until that moment, Kate had managed to forget the question that had been asked at the door of her mud-spattered car the evening before. It had not been difficult to push it away, given the burden of extreme exhaustion, followed by the shock of Lee’s appearance and then the heaviest sleep she’d had in weeks, but suddenly all she could see was the knowing look of accusation in the broadcaster’s face and the shape of his leather glove spread out against the handle of the car. She waited, and although it was Lee who asked him why, he answered as if Kate had spoken.
“A whole lot of reasons. You need to see your doctor. There’re at least three cases pending that one of us needs to work on. And—”
“Pardon me,” Lee said. “Doctor? Kate? Have I missed something here?”
“She hasn’t told you why she’s not at work?” Al asked.
“No,” she said slowly. “Somehow it hasn’t come up yet.”
“It’s nothing, Lee,” Kate said. “I got hit on the head, and until the headache goes away, I’m on medical leave.”
Al Hawkin kept his mouth firmly shut at this vast understatement. Lee looked at him, but he gave nothing away. Finally, she struggled to her feet, picked her way over to where Kate sat, and reached out to pull off Kate’s hat. Four weeks of hair did little to cover the scar, and she grunted in pain at the sight.
Kate picked the cap out of Lee’s hand and pulled it back over her scalp, ignoring her. “Don’t lie to me, Al. What is it?”
“I don’t know how to say this.”
“Jani wants me gone.”
“That’s part of it.”
“And there’s talk.”
Hawkin exhaled. “Shit. You heard.”
“I haven’t heard anything, except one of the most offensive questions I’ve ever been asked by a newsman.”
“Yes, that would be where it’d surface. That’s undoubtedly where it started.”
Lee said in a plaintive voice, “I’m really sorry, but I’m not following any of this conversation.”
“Sweetheart, you’d have been better off staying put with your aunt Agatha. Maybe I should go and stay with your aunt Agatha. I was asked yesterday if I knew where Jules was.”
“Why would you—Oh. Oh God, Kate, he couldn’t have meant…Al?”
He stood up and went over to the window, his hand patting the front of his shirt again before he remembered and thrust both hands into his pants pockets instead. His voice was harsh, painfully so, when he began to push the words out. “I should have known it was coming. I should’ve gotten you out of here earlier. I mean, of course you’re going to be a target. Even before, you would’ve been, but now, when half of San Francisco knows about the leathers and the bike, you’re meat to their gravy. And Jules taking after you, that haircut she got, and the two of you riding around town on the motorcycle.”
Lee positively radiated bewilderment, but neither Kate nor Al could spare her a thought.
“Al, does Jani think—”
“Jani’s not thinking at the moment, but no, not really.”
Which meant that she did indeed think something like that, or at least have her doubts.
“And D’Amico?”
“Florey doesn’t listen to gossip. Besides, if he thought there was the least chance, he’d’ve had you down answering questions.”
“And what—”
He whirled around, looking very large and extremely angry. “Martinelli, if you ask me whether I believe those filthy rumors, I swear I’ll throw something at you.”
Kate took what seemed like the first breath in minutes and felt her eyes tingle with relief.
“Thank you, Al.”
“But when you get home, I’d leave that leather outfit in the closet for a while, and drive something with four wheels.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll go?” He could not hide his astonishment.
“I don’t have any choice. I’m not doing any good here, and if I stay, it’ll only make things worse for everyone. It’s already enough of a circus.” Maybe I can do my Pied Piper act now, she thought bitterly, drag all the reporters back to San Francisco.
“I don’t like it,” he said unexpectedly.
“Al, she’s your wife. And Jules…Jules is your daughter. But you’ve got to promise me, if there’s anything I can do, you’ll call.”
“I’ll call anyway. Look, I’ve got to go. I’m late for a meeting with the FBI; they’ve got a profile to go over.”
“Another one?”
“Yeah. As if it does us one bit of good to know that there’s a seventy percent chance he wet his bed as a kid and an eighty percent chance his parents were divorced.”
“I’m glad they’re keeping you in on it, Al.”
“I had to call in a lot of favors,” he admitted, and it dawned on Kate that one of the conditions they had made was her departure from the scene.
“Take care of yourself. And Jani,” she said.
“You’ll drive back?”
“I’ll leave tonight.”
“Watch the snow on the passes.” He walked over to kiss Lee on the cheek, nodded to his partner, and went out. The door clicked; his steps faded.
“That was generous of you, Kate,” Lee said.
Kate was on her feet. “Shut up!” she screamed. “For Christ’s sake, just shut up!” She caught up a glass from the table, turned, and threw it with all her strength across the room, straight at the mirror above the cheap chest of drawers, then flung herself out the door.
Downstairs, panting, she told the startled desk clerk, “I’m leaving. Get my bill together. And you’ll have to add something for a broken mirror.”
January
Sixteen
It was a long and mostly silent drive to San Francisco. They stayed the night in Ashland, waiting for the snowplows to clear the road ahead of them, and it was an equally long and silent night. Kate seemed uninterested in how Lee had come to appear out of nowhere, seemed only half aware of her explanation of seeing a week-old newspaper on a trip into town for supplies. She could not rouse herself to give Lee anything but the most perfunctory account of her injury and the shooting of Weldon Reynolds, which simply seemed too far away to be of concern to anyone.
Eventually, Lee recognized the symptoms, and she forced herself to draw back. Kate was not still angry; she wasn’t even sulking. She was merely hungover from the excesses of emotion, burnt-out and drained in every way, and fortunately Lee had the sense, and the experience, to see that Kate merely needed solitude, or as close to it as she would get with a passenger in the car. Lee wrapped herself in patience, biding her time, and allowed the miles to pass while she waited, with growing apprehension, for Kate to make the first overture.
The closer they drew to the city, the worse the traffic grew, until halfway across the eastern segment of the Bay Bridge they came to a halt. Kate stirred, looked in the rearview mirror, and spoke for the first time in two hours. “What the hell is going on? Traffic should be dying down, not getting worse. What day is this, anyway?”
“I think it’s Saturday.”
Kate grumbled and threw occasional complaints at the grateful and relieved therapist at her
side, who worked hard to preserve a detached air and paid no attention to the roadways outside until, once they were back on the ground and nearing the city center, a rapid movement came spilling in front of them. Kate slammed on the brakes, cursed, and laid on the horn simultaneously; at the same moment Lee began to laugh.
“What?” Kate demanded. “The whole goddamn city’s gone nuts, and you’re laughing?”
“Sweetheart, we’re the ones who are nuts. Look at what they’re wearing. This is New Year’s Eve.”
Kate leaned forward to examine the costumes, an equal number of men in diapers and in bedsheets, all of them carrying various noisemakers.
“Thank God,” she said. “I thought the place had gone off the deep end for sure.”
On Russian Hill, every house was lit up, including their own, which would have surprised Kate except that she had spotted Jon’s car down the hill. She eased the Saab in between a convertible Mercedes and a Citroën DCV, coasted into the garage, and hit the button to shut the door behind them. Jon was already on the stairs. His skin looked brown even under the fluorescent lights of the garage, and he was wearing an apron and carrying a wooden spoon in one hand and a pot holder in the other.
He was at the passenger door before Kate had the key out of the ignition. “Lee! Oh my God, girl, look at you. You look like a woodsman; all you need is your ax. Where’s your—Will you look at those. Have you taken up beadwork in your old age, my dear? Oh yes, give us a hug.” Kate smiled at the sight of her two housemates pounding each other’s backs (Jon holding the beaded arm braces now as well as the cooking utensils) before she went around to open the trunk and begin the process of unloading. When her head emerged, Jon was holding Lee at arm’s length, still exclaiming. “I love the macha look; it reminds me of the seventies. Do you need a hand here? My God, she’s walking. Look at her, Kate; it’s a miracle of the blessed Jesus. We’ll go dancing next week—can I have a date, dear? How superbly retro, dancing with a woman. God, you look great. You’re glowing. Isn’t she positively glowing, Kate? Hello, Kate, darlin’, you look tired.” Kate could see him hesitate, consider words of sympathy and expressions of horror, and then decide that this was not the time—for which she was grateful.