Two

Kate satisfied herself with a slow drive-by and a pause in the parking lot, although Jules was anxious to show her around.

“No, I just wanted to see,” she said firmly. “And you used to meet him under that tree? What direction did he usually come from? No, just to get an idea. Now, show me where you live. No, Jules, I’m not just going to drop you off.”

Ignoring the girl’s protests, Kate parked in a visitor’s slot behind the large brick building and walked up the stairs behind her, feeling like a truant officer. The apartment turned out to be larger than the one Kate had seen in San Jose, where Jani and her daughter had lived two floors above a particularly vicious psychopath, but it retained the old one’s personality as the lair of a distracted academic and her serious and equally intellectual daughter. The high ceilings seemed to be held up by bookshelves—no neatly arranged storage spaces, either, but depositories laden with volumes in the disarray of constant use. Some improvements had been made over the last place: the ghastly motel furniture had been left behind, the plastic and chrome dinette set traded for a wooden dining table with six matching wooden chairs, the flowered sofa replaced by a suite of comfortable-looking overstuffed chairs and sofa in corduroy the shade of cappuccino. Even the heaps of books seemed less precarious here; a few surfaces were actually free of them.

Jules picked up two mugs, one with a spoon in it, and carried them into the kitchen. Kate followed her.

“Nice place.”

“I like it better than the other one. Nobody lived in that building but Yuppies, and then after…I kept thinking I saw him in the hallways.” She turned away, furiously embarrassed by this admission, to thrust the mugs and a couple of other things into the dishwasher.

“Spooky,” Kate agreed. “Where does Mrs. Hidalgo live?”

“Oh, she won’t be expecting me for hours yet. I don’t get home ’til two sometimes.” It had been “three or four” earlier; Jules, among her many accomplishments, was not a practiced liar.

“I suppose you could forge a note for school,” Kate said easily, looking out the window at a desk-sized balcony and a postage stamp—sized swimming pool below, “but Mrs. Hidalgo would probably find out, and your mother would blow up. Best defuse the bomb before it starts spluttering.”

Jules was silent; then Kate heard her sigh. “You’re as bad as Al,” she complained. “Okay, just let me just dump these books. You want to see my room?”

“Sure,” said Kate. Jules caught up her backpack and led Kate to the other end of the very ordinary apartment. The room, as Kate had suspected, was not ordinary. It was, in fact, like no other teenage bedroom she’d ever seen, and in the course of her professional life she had seen quite a few.

To begin with, it was tidy. Not compulsively so, but beneath a minor accumulation of papers, books, and Coke cans, things were obviously in their assigned and logical places. The shelves were free of dust, and the bed had even been made.

The room was very Jules. The top end of the bed was buried under an arrangement of stuffed animals; on the foot of the bed were two books, each of them weighing at least five pounds. The one on the top was a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. A high shelf, running around three sides of the room, was solid with more toys, teddy bears in the full gamut of pastels, a grouping of stuffed cows and another of elephants, and so on through the bestiary. The shelves below that held books—paperback novels on the higher shelves, solid books lower down; tomes such as few adults had even held were down at waist level. This was a logical-enough arrangement in earthquake country—some of those books would kill a person if they fell from a height of eight feet—but she was amused to see a collection of old and obviously much loved picture books shoulder-to-shoulder with a collection of glossy coffee table art books. The cross between childhood naïveté and adult sophistication extended to the walls as well: Three framed prints from the pages of Goodnight Moon were arranged on one wall, facing a poster of a Renaissance woman’s face on the other, an ethereal blond portrait with the name of a German museum underneath.

Jules had dropped her backpack on the desk and gone across to open the door of a wire cage. A black-and-white rat came blinking out onto his mistress’s hand, but Kate was distracted by a piece of paper that had been pinned up to the corkboard over the desk, on which was printed the word sesquipedalian.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing.

“That’s my word for the day,” Jules told her matter-of-factly. She had been cuddling the rat to her chin, and she now kissed his pointy nose and allowed him to scramble onto her shoulder. “It means long words. Literally, it refers to something a foot and a half long.” She took a peanut from a jar and held it up to her shoulder. Kate watched the rat manipulate the nut between his delicate paws and nibble it down to nothing, and she wondered briefly how to respond to the word of the day before deciding that she didn’t actually have to.

“What’s his name?” she asked instead.

“Ratty.”

“I loved The Wind in the Willows when I was a kid,” Kate agreed.

“Actually, his full name is Ratiocinate,” said Jules, putting him back in the cage with another nut. “But I call him Ratty.”

Kate laughed aloud and followed Jules back to the kitchen. The girl looked into the refrigerator. “Would you like a Coke?” she offered. “Or I could make you some coffee. Mrs. Hidalgo never has anything but juices to drink; she believes in healthy living.” It sounded like a quote, as did many of Jules’s remarks. Kate was not actually thirsty, and she didn’t much like Coke either, but without knowing why, she found herself accepting the offer. She and Jules stood in the kitchen for a while, talking about the apartment and drinking from the cans, until eventually Kate suggested they should be going downstairs.

Then, on their way out of the apartment, an odd thing happened, one that would have made little impression on Kate had it not been for Jules’s reaction. The telephone rang as they walked toward it, and without hesitating, almost without breaking stride, Jules simply picked up the receiver and let it drop immediately back onto the base. No, not drop: Jules slammed it down in a small burst of fury and continued on out of the apartment. Kate followed, waited while Jules dug the key from her shorts pocket and locked the door, and then spoke to the back that she was following down the hallway.

“Get a lot of wrong numbers, do you?” She was totally unprepared for the girl’s reaction: Jules whipped around, long braids flying and her face frozen, as if daring Kate to push an inquiry, and then she started down the stairs at a pace so fast, it was almost running. Kate caught up with her at the downstairs neighbor’s door, putting out a hand to touch the girl’s arm.

“Jules, are you getting a lot of crank phone calls?”

The girl stared at the doorbell, and then the rigidity in her shoulders gave way and she exhaled.

“No, not a lot. I just had one a while back that was really weird, and I guess I’m still jumpy when the phone rings if I’m alone. Stupid to just hang up like that, isn’t it? I mean, what if it was Mom?”

“Or Dio?”

She turned to stare at Kate. “God, I didn’t think about that. He’s never phoned me,” she said doubtfully. “But he could.”

“If you’re having a problem, Jules, you can always have your phone number changed. Or you can arrange with the phone company—”

“No!” she said fiercely. “I don’t want to change the number, and I don’t want to bring the phone company into it.”

“Use the answering machine, then, to screen your calls.”

“I do, sometimes.”

“Have you told your mom, or Al?”

“It only happened once!” Jules nearly shouted. “It’s not a problem.”

“It sounds to me like it is.”

“Really, Kate, it’s not. It’s just all the stuff about Dio—it’s getting to me. But if whoever it is starts up again, I promise I’ll ask Mom to change the number.” Jules reached for the doorbell again, and this time Kate let her ring it.

The matriarch of the Hidalgo clan did not quite match the short, squat, big-busomed surrogate-grandmother-to-the-neighborhood image Kate had formed. True, her skin was the color of an old penny, and true, the smell of something magnificent on the stove filled the stairwell; there was even the clear indication that half the children on the block had moved in. However, the good señora had a waist slimmer than Kate’s, and the jeans and scoop-necked pink T-shirt she wore covered a body taut with aerobic muscles. She also wore a small microphone clipped to the front of her shirt, like a newscaster’s mike, only pointing down. She looked at her two visitors with concern.

“Julia, you are home early. Was there a problem at the school?” She gave the name a Spanish pronunciation, but her accent was mild.

“Buenos dias, Señora,” said Jules carefully. “No hay problema. Este es mi amiga Kate Martinelli. Yo tengo…tiene…yo tenía una problema, y ella va a ayudarme con, er…”

“That was very good, Julia; you’re coming along rapidly. I’m pleased to meet you, Ms. Martinelli. Rosa Hidalgo.” She put out her hand, which was as firm as the rest of her. “Come in. I was just finishing here. Fieldwork for my thesis in child psychology,” she added, looking over her shoulder.

The room was awash with children, along with a number of maternal types planted around the edges like boulders. Rosa Hidalgo moved surely through the small multicolored heads, avoiding the clutter of blocks and toys that covered the floor like debris from a shrapnel bomb.

“That’s great for today. Thank you all. How about lunch now? Eh, amigos,” she said in higher tones, “you hungry? Burritos, peanut butter, tuna fish, and tell Angélica what you want to drink.” She began folding away tape recorder and mike while various boulders moved forward to scoop the abandoned toys into containers and the children, all of them small, marginally verbal, but astonishingly noisy, washed off to the next room, where her daughter, a tall girl of perhaps seventeen, presided with an immense dignity over sandwiches and pitchers of drink.

“Have you eaten, Kate? Jules? There’re vegetarian burritos; I hope that is all right. I use adzuki beans. Jennifer, this is Kate. Show her where things are, would you? Tami, I know you need to leave, but I must clarify something. When Tom junior was talking about the dog, was he saying—”

Although Kate was no more hungry than she had been thirsty when offered the Coke upstairs, she ate two of the superb fat burritos, which were everything their fragrance had advertised, and refused a third only at the thought of the already-straining waistband of her trousers.

“Do you have a child here, Kate?” asked the woman whom Rosa had addressed as Jennifer.

“Sorry? Oh, no. No, I don’t have any children. I’m a friend of Jules, the girl over there. She lives upstairs. Do you know how much longer—”

She was interrupted by a rapid escalation of shrieks from the next room, at which point Jennifer was suddenly just not there, only her plate teetering on the edge of the sink. Kate rescued it, and was relieved when she saw that the furious quarrel at the children’s table was the signal for a mass departure. Twenty minutes of potty visiting and prying toys from clenched fists later, Kate was finally alone with Rosa Hidalgo.

“Whew! Madre, I need a cup of coffee. How about you?”

Kate thought a slug of bourbon more like it, but she accepted the lesser drug with thanks. It was real coffee, from a press-filter machine, thick and gritty and exactly right.

“I thought at first you were running a nursery in here.”

“Twenty three-and-a-half-year-olds, it sounds more like the monkey house in the zoo. Every six months, they come here in the mornings for a week.” She paused, reviewing the syntax of the sentence. “Twice a year, I have them here, every morning for a week.”

“Must seem quiet when the week is over,” Kate commented.

“Madre, my ears, they sing. Next February will be the last time. I wonder if I will miss them.”

“You said it was for a thesis?”

“Yes, I am tracing the development of gender characteristics, which boys play with toy cars and which girls prefer dolls, comparing them with the results of a number of other researchers doing similar studies. I have been following this group since they had one year.”

“Since they were one year old, Mama,” corrected her daughter, clearing dishes in the background.

“Since they were one year old. Thank you, Angél. My English suffers after one of these sessions,” she remarked to Kate, her pronunciation more precise than ever. “It is a symptom of stress. Angél, go and get your suit on; we will go for a swim. You, too, Julia. Leave those dishes; we’ll do them later. Now”—she turned to Kate when the door had closed behind the girls—“you will please tell me what problem you are helping Julia with, what is troubling her, and why she did not go to her computer class today.”

“I think you’re aware that Jules made a friend in the park this summer, a homeless boy.” Rosa Hidalgo nodded. “Well, he’s disappeared, and she’s concerned. She came to ask me to look into it. I’m with the police department,” she added. “In San Francisco. I work with her mother’s…boyfriend.”

“Alonzo Hawkin, yes. And you live in San Francisco?” Kate nodded. “I see. And she went during school hours that I might not know.”

“She thought you’d worry.”

“She was correct. Why do the bright ones always do such awesomely stupid things?” The shake of her head was the gesture of an experienced mother rather than that of a trained psychologist. “What will you do, about the boy?”

“There isn’t much I can do, to tell you the truth. Talk to the local sheriff’s department, put his description out over the wire if he doesn’t show up in a few days, see if he’s shown up in L.A. or Tucson.”

“That does not sound very hopeful.”

“Juvenile runaways are nearly impossible to trace. I haven’t said anything to Jules, but I think she is aware of the difficulties. She also seems aware of the dangers, though if anything, I’d say she has an overly dramatic view of the threats to the boy. AIDS and hepatitis are more likely than the murdering maniac she visualizes.”

Rosa Hidalgo’s gaze narrowed to attention at Kate’s last words, and she spoke sharply.

“What precisely did she tell you?”

“I think she was worried about a serial killer torturing him to death. Something like that.”

“Madre de Díos,” she muttered, shaken.

“I told her that was completely unlikely,” Kate hastened to say. “And really, it’s a credit to her that she’s concerned about him. It doesn’t even seem to be anything romantic, just that she feels responsible for a friend she’s just realized she badly misunderstood. She’s a good kid. Don’t come down too hard on her for lying to you.”

“If ‘coming down hard’ means expressing anger, then no, I will not. I will, however, strongly urge her mother and Alonzo to educate her as to the dangers the world holds for young girls. Talking to a boy in a well-populated public park is one thing; taking a bus to San Francisco without telling anyone is quite another. Her mother has a strong tendency to be overly protective, and to avoid unpleasant topics with her daughter. She must be shown that it only makes the darkness beneath Julia’s brilliance all the greater. I shall speak to Alonzo about it, I think. It was very perceptive of you to see beneath the armor of Julia’s mind, Ms. Martinelli.”

For a cop, Kate supposed she meant.

“The name is Kate. Here, let me give you my phone number, in case anything else comes up. That’s my number at work, and—do you have a pen? This,” she continued, writing on the back of the card, “is my home number. I have to run, but would you tell Jules I’ll call her tomorrow night? Maybe you’d better give me your number, too,” she said, taking back the pen and writing down the number. As Rosa escorted her to the door the two girls reappeared, clutching scraps of bright nylon and brighter towels. Kate sidled past them into the hallway and, reassuring Jules that she was going to look into Dio’s absence, that she would be in touch, and that she would be discreet, she made her escape.

Kate parked on the far side of the park from the swimming pool, in case Jules ended up there. Kate had no intention of allowing Jules to tag along while she followed her nose to what might turn up as a two-day-old decomposing corpse bent over a spray-paint canister. Jani—and Al—would not thank her for that.

However, a circuit of the park, which took less than half an hour, brought no whiff of the utterly unmistakable, primally unnerving smell of a rotting human being. The park was partly grass and playground, partly scrub woodland around an arroyo—masses of tick bush, madrone, live oak, and great billows of poison oak beginning to take on the spectacular red of its autumnal coloring. She went back to the car and drew out a mechanic’s coverall that she kept there, more as emergency-clothing-cum-rag than because she worked on the car in it. It was made of tightly woven gabardine, and as she zipped it up, she felt as if she had stepped into a sauna. She also put on socks and running shoes and a pair of driving gloves. She thought of tying her hair in a towel, but decided that would be just too awful. She locked the car and walked along the road that wrapped the wilderness portion of the park until she found a vague deer trail, then pushed her way into the stifling, hot, dusty, fragrant brush. When that trail petered out, she reversed her steps and tried another.

Forty minutes later, she found the boy’s lair. He must have been immune to poison oak, because Kate had to swim in the stuff, and twice she had gone past the low entrance before registering that one of the branches seemed even more dead than the others.

There was a tent, brown and dusty and pushed in among the bushes on all sides, carefully zipped up, but with the flaps only casually draped across the door and left down at the windows. She cleared her throat and said the boy’s name loudly, but the only movement was a blue jay over her head. With a beat of apprehension she pulled up the door flap and looked through the screen into the tent, claustrophobic in its branch-crowded windows. There was no body, sprawled and swelling. There was a pair of cloth high-top tennis shoes, mostly holes, in one corner next to a neat pile of folded clothes which, she soon found, consisted of a pair of shorts and one of jeans, a T-shirt, two graying pairs of undershorts, a pair of mismatched, once-white athletic socks, and a sweatshirt. There were also half a dozen two-liter plastic soft-drink bottles filled with water that appeared dirty with the beginnings of algae; a worn beach towel; a sleeping bag with several holes and a broken zipper; and half a dozen shoe boxes in a neat pile. Some of these last were empty, others held a variety of undoubtedly scrounged treasures: two or three half-empty notepads—stained with what, coffee grounds?—three pencils, two pens. Another shoe box held string, twine, elastic bands, broken shoelaces, a snarl of twist ties, and some neatly folded plastic grocery bags. Another—surprise: jewelry. Most of it was of the costume variety, but there was also a man’s gold signet ring with a small diamond, the metal scratched and slightly misshapen as if it had been buried in sand, and three odd earrings for pierced ears, all of which had lost the post’s anchor. One of the earrings had three gold chains, each ending in a small ruby and dangling from a center stud with a larger ruby, to Kate’s eyes genuine and worth a few dollars at a pawnshop or jeweler’s. She closed the shoe boxes and put them back as she had found them, then continued her search. Inside a cracked plastic file box about a foot square and with a rock on top of it, she found Dio’s library, including a hardback science fiction novel from the local public library, due the following week. Checked out to Jules? After an inner battle, she removed it from the others, most of them worn paperback classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, David Copperfield, and Peter Pan. Deliberately collected, she wondered as she thumbed through them, or just what someone in the neighborhood happened to throw out? There was no rainbow notebook, no identifying papers aside from the much handled photograph of a woman with large teeth laughing into the camera on a beach. It was the only thing in the tent that she thought Dio might regret, were it to be damaged by rain, so for safekeeping she stuck it inside the library book and put that to one side.

No sign of a struggle; on the other hand, it was doubtful that he’d pack up and leave without the bits of jewelry that could buy a hungry boy several meals. But there was nothing more she could do here, except…She took one of the pads and a pencil stub out of the appropriate box and wrote her home phone number on it. Below it, she added: I’m a friend of Jules. Please call collect.

She left the pad on the sleeping bag, picked up Jules’s book, and let herself out of the tent, where the close day seemed cool compared with the stifling tent. She fastened the zip and pulled the door flap across the tent, then pushed her way back out of the brush.

By the time she had gained the road, she could barely keep from ripping off the drenched and sticking coverall. She did unzip it completely, stuffing the gloves into a pocket. Oh God, she thought, I’m itching already, and scratched her head.

She had company. A sheriff’s car had pulled authoritatively, if ineffectually, across the front of her car, and the two deputies were standing side by side, watching her puff up the road.

Kate knew immediately that these two would drawl, though they had probably been born in California, that they’d make some remark about her clothes, and that they would attempt to bracket her at close quarters to strut their power. Well, they’d just chosen the wrong woman on the wrong day for that little game. She walked past them without a glance, went to the trunk of her car, unlocked it, tossed in the library book, and took out two bottles of mineral water. One she drank, letting it spill down her throat. She bent over and let the other one glug across her face and into her hair. Still ignoring the two deputies, who were now standing on either side of her, she capped the bottles, tossed them into the trunk, ran her fingers through her shaggy hair to comb it roughly into place, and brought her right foot up to the bumper to untie her shoe. Only now did one of the young men speak, the one on her left.

“Afternoon there, Miss.”

“Martinelli. And it’s Ms.”

“Why, we got us a card-carrying feminist, Randy,” said the second.

“Randy,” she snorted, kicking her shoe into the trunk and bending to untie the other one. “And I suppose your partner’s name is Dick.” Before he could figure it out, she distracted him by shrugging out of the coverall and tossing the filthy garment in after the shoes and socks, then reaching in for a pair of rubber thongs, dropping them to the ground, and slipping her feet into them. “You drive that car?” she asked.

Totally disconcerted, he actually answered.

“Yeah, I drive it.”

“Well, don’t worry, parking gets easier as you gain experience. Now if you’ll pardon me, boys, I’ve got things to do.” She thrust a hand into the pocket of her running shorts and when she looked up, she found herself staring into the ends of a matched pair of 9-mm automatics.

Afterward, she thought it amazing that she hadn’t been frozen with terror, in the sights of two small cannons manned by lunatics, but at the time all she felt was incredulity. She slowly stretched out her arm and let the key chain dangle from her fingers, and the two sheriff’s deputies straightened up, beginning to look sickly.

“You stupid shits,” she said conversationally. “How long have you two bozos been out of the Academy? A week? You don’t go waving your gun around unless you’re prepared to use it, and you don’t use it unless you’re prepared to spend six months filling out the goddamn forms. For Christ’s sake, can you possibly think that a person dressed like this could conceal anything bigger than a Swiss army knife?”

She gestured at herself, and the two louts looked again at the nylon running shorts and the damp and clinging tank top, then finished holstering their guns.

“We had a report, ma’am…” began the shorter one, the driver, with no trace now of a drawl.

“Some old lady in one of those houses over there no doubt, who saw me poking around and took me for a mad bomber. And now she’s watching you making asses of yourselves.”

“Yes, ma’am. But do you mind telling us what you were doing?”

“This is a public park.”

“Now, look you—”

“Shut up, Randy,” hissed the driver.

“But Nelson—”

“Nelson?” snorted Kate. No wonder he had a chip on his shoulder. She stood and waited for further grumbles of authority, but there was more apprehension than aggression in their faces.

“No, I’m not going to file a complaint. But you two better think three times before you pull that kind of damn fool stunt again. I don’t expect to have to ID myself every time I go for my keys, and it’s too damn hot to wear a uniform.”

Kate waited an instant before this penny dropped, and she was suddenly aware that she felt better than she had in a long time. Happy, even. She stepped forward and held out her hand to Nelson.

“Inspector Kate Martinelli, SFPD. Homicide.”

She was still feeling marvelously cheerful as she pulled her car in beside Nelson and Randy’s black-and-white in the parking lot of a nearby hamburger joint, and she could feel the bounce in her steps as she accompanied the two looming uniforms inside. She ordered a large iced tea, excused herself to scrub her face and hands in the rest room, and then joined the men at the table, where she flipped her ID onto the table and sat down.

“Okay,” she said without preamble. “What I was doing there in that weird outfit was looking for a boy. Friend of mine met him in the park a few times; he disappeared five days ago. He told her that he lived there, in the park, so I thought I’d have a look. He was telling the truth, but he’s not there now, hasn’t been for a few days, by the look of it, left behind some things of value—a ring, a couple of odd earrings, pair of shoes. He’s a light-skinned Hispanic male, age maybe fourteen or fifteen, five seven, slim, no distinguishing marks except for a chip on the top right incisor, calls himself Dio and his name may be Claudio, hung around the park a lot. Any bells?”

“Sounds like half the kids in the park, come summer,” Nelson said, all business now and damned glad if nobody referred to that little episode earlier.

“This one was a loner, would’ve avoided group activities, didn’t use the pool or take classes, just drifted. Talked to a young girl a lot; she’s twelve, five four, black braids, hazel eyes, slightly Oriental-looking. Pretty, acts older than her age.”

“She sounds familiar. Reads a lot?”

“That’s her.”

“I remember a boy,” said Nelson. “Never talked to him, though.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d keep an eye out for him. He hasn’t done anything, not that I know of, and he sounds the kind of kid who, if he’s been pulled into the game or onto the needle, might cut all ties.”

“Some self-respect, you mean?” asked Nelson. He wasn’t a total loss, then, in the brains department.

“Might be salvaged,” she agreed. “Well, gentlemen, it’s been real. When you find out who made the call about that dangerous madwoman in the bushes, you might ask her if she’s seen our young man. Here’s my card, and my home number.” (Handing out a lot of these lately, she reflected.) “Give me a ring if you get anything. Thanks for the drink.”

Kate drove the thirty miles home without thinking of much of anything, parked on the street in front of the house, and let herself in the front door. When she closed the door behind her, she was hit by the miasma of a house that was not merely empty but abandoned. She stood in the hallway of the house and heard its silence, smelled the staleness beneath the remnants of the breakfast Jules had cooked, and thought how happy she had once been to come home to this place; remembered how she and Lee had loved and labored to free it of its decades of neglect; remembered how she and Lee had loved. It had been their joy and their delight, and now its walls rang with emptiness: no Lee upstairs or in the consulting rooms on Kate’s right, no Jon making magic in the kitchen or down in the basement apartment listening to his peculiar modern music, none of Lee’s clients, none of Jon’s impossible friends, no nothing, just the ache of its emptiness and Kate, standing in the hall.

She poured herself a glass of wine, ignoring the clock, and trudged up the stairs. At the top, not meaning to, she found herself in Lee’s study, standing at Lee’s desk, opening its right-hand drawer, and taking out the letter from Lee’s mad aunt that had begun all this:

My dear niece,

We have only met twice during your life, and as during our brief second meeting you were clad only in a pair of wet diapers, you probably do not remember me. I trust that you are at least aware that your father had a sister. If not, then I imagine this will come as a considerable surprise. Nonetheless, he had, and I am she. Hard to think of my brother—young enough to have been my own baby, come to think of it—as a man of fifty, but as I turn sixty-eight this year, that would have been the case. Except that he died in uniform, you never saw him, and I was kept from you by your mother, because I reminded her of her great loss, or so she said.

I returned to this country a year ago, taking up residence on an island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca that has no electricity and virtually no neighbors. I find it a delightful contrast to Calcutta, and is not contrast the spice of life? Upon my return, I instructed my lawyer to find what he could about my family members, which may explain why I am writing to you now. He seems to have employed a private investigator—a curious thought—who charged what seemed to me an excessive amount of money for a folder full of newspaper clippings. I apologize for inadvertently trespassing upon your privacy, had I known that I was doing so, I would have instructed the man to desist.

Thus I have learned of your injury, and although I was certainly distressed to hear of it, I understand that you are progressing rapidly, and as, after all, you could hardly stagger about when last I saw you, I suppose one could say that from my viewpoint there has been little change.

Which brings me to my purpose in writing, other than to arrange for an annual exchange of Christmas cards and other nonsense. If you are ever wishing a period in an extremely rustic retreat with an ill-tempered old woman who has no time for sympathy and no craving for service, my island is at your disposal. It is not set up for a disabled person, but then neither is it set up for an sixty-eight-year-old woman with malaria, so we would be evenly matched, and no doubt would cope.

I realize you may be feeling perfectly horrified at the idea, in which case toss these pages into the bin and don’t give me another thought. I write only as a gesture to my brother, of whom I was very fond and whom I still miss daily. If something of him has surfaced in you, and particularly if that element makes the proposal of an island sojourn appealing, please write to tell me when you wish to arrive.

Agatha Cooper

And to think, Kate reflected, that my first reaction was to laugh in delight at its absurdity. The memory made her feel ill, because in reality Lee’s aunt had spoken, and Lee had answered, and now Kate was alone in the big house. She put the letter away and went into the hallway, where she gathered the shed clothes from the night before and took them not into their bedroom, but down to the small guest room at the end of the upstairs hall. She hung the denim jacket in the closet, stripped off her tank top and shorts and threw them along with the other dirty clothes into the guest hamper, and walked nude up the carpeted hall to get her work clothes out of the big bedroom. At the mirrored closet, she paused and eyed her reflection sourly. She wouldn’t be surprised to find two more pounds on the scale: Long drives and comfort eating were killers. She looked pale, restless; her hair was nearly in her eyes. Even her fingernails were dirty and overlong.

“Christ, you’re a mess,” she said to her reflected self, and went to take a long shower with a great deal of soap.

She did not consult the scales; she did cut her fingernails.

Going back downstairs, she checked a second time, but the answering machine was still obstinately free of messages, not a red light to be seen. She even pushed the playback button, rationalizing that the light could be broken, but it merely clunked and beeped at her and was silent. She decided to go in to work after all, although she was only on call.

After the brooding quiet of the house, the gritty chaos of the Department of Justice was almost a balm to Kate’s spirit. She had been away for little more than a week, but it might have been a few minutes. Kitagawa nodded as he passed her, deep in conversation with a man in the garish uniform of a doorman. Tom Boyle raised a finger in greeting but did not take the phone from his ear. She went to her desk, stowed her gun and a thermos of coffee in the bottom drawer, and sat in her chair: home again.

Dellamonica had a new tie. April Robinette had spilled something on her skirt. Gomes came through cursing furiously and carrying a massive electronic typewriter under his arm. There was another new plant on Al Hawkin’s desk, already looking resigned to a lingering death. The top of Kate’s desk was covered with scribbled messages that would take most of the day to decipher and deal with. Among them she found a flyer with the grainy photograph of a young girl with short hair, and she did not need to read the description of the missing girl to know that the police in Washington—no, she corrected herself, this one was from Oregon—were afraid that the so-called Snoqualmie Strangler had claimed a sixth victim. It had been several days since Kate had heard or read any news, but Jules was no doubt more up to date: This was the maniac who worried Jules, although there was no boy among his victims. Kate thought briefly of the girls’ apprehension—no, her fear—that the telephone call had caused, and then her own phone rang.

Despite what she had told Jules, people did die in San Francisco on a Tuesday afternoon. In this case it was a drive-by shooting, in broad daylight, in the Castro district, with three dozen eager and contradictory witnesses to sort out; she would not have much opportunity to doze off over her files that night.

Dropping the flyer into her wastebasket, Kate retrieved her gun and her thermos, and went out to do her job.