Seventeen

“You’re not to know,” Al said quickly. “Don’t react to what I say. If the FBI or D’Amico find out I’ve been talking to you, they’ll shut me out completely.”

“I’m…glad you’ve had good weather.” She smiled stiffly at Tom Boyle, standing next to her desk, and willed him to move away.

“There’s someone near you. Okay, just listen. We had a letter, just a brief one, claiming to be from the Strangler. He said Jules wasn’t one of his.” Something of Kate’s psychic message must have gotten through to Boyle, because he moved away.

“Surely you must be getting a hundred letters a day, saying all kinds of things,” she protested in a low voice.

“He gave some details it would be difficult to know, unless he’s got access to FBI records.”

“My God,” Kate whispered, trying with difficulty to keep her face straight. “Have you seen it? The letter?”

“A copy of it.”

“And?”

“It’s an identical typewriter to the original burial letter. And it has the right flavor. Indignant that he would be credited—his word—with a kill he didn’t do. Plus that, it was mailed in the same way he sends the funeral money, to an apparently random name with the address of the police station, so it doesn’t catch the attention of the post office until it reaches the local branch.”

“Did it say anything else?”

“It said, I quote, ‘I don’t know why you’re trying to credit me with the missing California girl. Asian girls don’t have any curl in their hair.’ The Strangler always takes a snip of hair from the back of the head, and there’s never been a breath in any of the reports about it. So watch yourself with that knowledge, too.”

“What’s the reaction up there?”

“It’s got everyone standing on their head. D’Amico thinks the Strangler’s cracking, that this is the first step to turning himself in. There’re three psychiatrists shouting at one another down the hall right now.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What I’ve done all along: keep an open mind, and look at everything. All I can do.”

“Any way I can help?”

“I can’t think of a damn thing.”

Neither could Kate. She asked after Jani, Al asked after Lee, neither listened to the other’s reply, and both hung up feeling, if anything, more depressed than ever.

At one o’clock that afternoon, Kate thought of something she could do. She hunted down the file of the case that had begun, for her, with a search for a lost boy and ended with a piece of galvanized pipe, and after a bit of wading about, she found what she was looking for: the phone number of the foster home that had taken in Dio.

He was in school, of course, but she asked for, and eventually received, permission to meet the boy and have a conversation—alone.

She had to park illegally, but she was at the school when it let out. She almost missed him, he had changed so much in the last month, but his round-shouldered stance gave him away, that and the distance between him and the other students.

“Hello, Dio,” she said, falling in at his side.

He stopped dead and looked at her warily. “Inspector Martinelli?”

“Call me Kate. What’s the matter, didn’t you recognize me on my feet and without a bandage on my head?”

“I guess not. You look…better.”

“You look a little different, too.”

She’d been referring to his obvious good health and the five pounds he’d put on, but he ran a hand through his neat haircut and said, with an attempt at humor that held a trace of bitterness, “My disguise. I’m passing for normal.”

“Let me know if you manage. I never did. I’d like to talk with you for a little while. Wanda said it was okay.”

“They like me home right after school,” he said uncertainly.

“I told her I’d take you home later. Only, I’m parked in a red zone, so the first thing we have to do is move my car. Want to go get a hamburger?”

“Sure. Is this your car? Cool.”

“Jules—” Kate stopped, occupying herself with the door locks for a moment. “Jules told me that cool was back in use.”

They got into the car.

“Have you heard anything about her?” Dio asked, looking straight ahead.

“Nothing.”

“Do you think that Strangler got her, like the papers say?”

“I don’t know, Dio. I honestly don’t know.”

“She’s the greatest person in the world,” he said simply, then shut his mouth hard against further revelations.

Kate turned the key and put the car in gear without answering. Neither of them spoke to the other until they were seated, with their hamburgers on the table between them.

“How do you like Wanda and Reg?” she asked. Kate privately thought of the Steiners, whom she had met in any number of cases involving damaged children, as saints of God.

“They’re okay. Kind of like boot camp or something, but she’s a great cook. We eat at the same time every day,” he said, as if describing the odd habits of exotic natives. “I even have a room to myself.” Regular meals, privacy, and having a person to notice whether or not you were home from school was clearly foreign ground to Dio. Foreign, but, by the sound of it, not entirely unpleasant.

“Sounds like you come from a big, confused family,” Kate commented. According to his file, he had consistently refused to speak about his past, where he came from, to give his full name, or even tell them if Dio was his real given name. It was no different now: He closed his mouth and his face, and Kate immediately backed away.

“Hey, man, I’m not trying to pump you. Dio, look at me.” She waited until his sullen eyes came up. “I don’t care where you come from, so long as you’re better off now than you were before. I just want to know what you and Jules talked about.”

He blinked. “I thought…”

“You thought what?”

“That you’d want to talk about Weldon.”

“The squat isn’t my case anymore, other than having to testify. No, I want to know about Jules. Do you mind telling me about her?”

“Why should I?”

“Dio, she’s thirteen years old. She comes from a very sheltered background. She’s missing, and I don’t know why. It appears that there’s a chance—a very, very small chance, but it’s there—that the Strangler did not take her. Now, the FBI and everyone else up in Portland are working on the assumption that it was him. I can’t do anything about that, but I can follow up on the other possibilities. What if she walked away on her own? Did some other son of a bitch kidnap her, or is she still out there somewhere, alone? You see, Dio, I thought I was getting to know Jules pretty well last fall, and then people started telling me things about her that made me realize there were whole parts of her I had no idea about. I’d like to know what you have to add to it.”

“What kind of things?”

“For one, she ran away from another hotel last summer. Did she tell you about that?” She could see from his face that he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Last summer when she and her mother were in Germany, they had an argument, and Jules walked out of the hotel. In a foreign country, where she didn’t even speak the language. And she never told me about that. After I found out, I never asked her, because I figured that if she wanted to keep it to herself, that was her business. But not now. Now I need to know everything I can about her. Help me, Dio. It might make a difference.”

Dio fiddled with the French fries in front of him, then put two in his mouth. Kate took it as a sign of conditional assent.

“First of all, did Jules ever talk to you about the Northwest? She told me one time that she’d lived in Seattle when she was very young. Do you know if she had any friends there?” Inevitably, she was going over well-trodden ground. The investigation, though concentrating on the Strangler, had not dismissed other possibilities quite as cavalierly as Kate had indicated. Nearly everyone who had come into contact with Jules Cameron, from her boy friend Josh to old neighbors and the families of Jani’s colleagues at the university in Seattle, had been traced and interviewed. The address book Jules had left behind contained only one entry north of California: a school friend who had moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. She was away for the holiday and had written Jules to tell her that.

Dio thought for a minute, and looking at his face, deep in concentration, Kate realized that this was not a bad-looking young man. In another couple of years, in fact, if he could lose the wary sullenness, he would be handsome.

“I don’t remember anything. She did tell me that she’d lived in Seattle, but all she could remember was when it snowed once. I think she moved when she was three or four.”

Jules had been just barely three when Jani got a job at UCLA.

“Was she happy, do you think?”

“Jules? Sure. I mean, she didn’t seem unhappy. Except—well, I don’t know. Sometimes she acted kind of preoccupied. She used to get really pissed at her mom. I don’t think her mother ever realized what an amazing person Jules was. Is.”

“How did she feel about Al? Do you think she may have resented the marriage somehow?”

“She liked Al a lot. As far as I could tell, she was really looking forward to her mom and him getting married, when I saw her in December. Last summer, she used to talk a lot about families. She’d found out something about her own family, not very long before. She never told me just what it was, but she said it was ‘ugly.’ It made her feel ugly. And dirty, she said. Her mother’s past made her feel dirty.”

Kate could feel him opening out, but she was careful not to react. “Tell me what you know about her family.”

He shrugged, but he wouldn’t look at Kate, and she watched the muscle of his jaw jump.

“She must have said something to you…about her past.”

He sat back and stretched his neck, as if easing his shoulders, and resumed play with the three limp fries in front of him. “Just that her mom divorced her dad. She didn’t remember him—Jules, I mean. Just that he was somehow scary. He probably used to beat her mom.”

The matter-of-factness of his last throwaway observation would have told Kate a great deal about his own family life, had she needed the confirmation.

“Did Jules tell you that?”

“No, it just sounded…you know, like something that would happen.” He concentrated on slurping the last of his chocolate shake.

“You’re probably right,” she began to say, and was startled when the boy across from her slapped the cup down and began to give out a stream of words.

“She really wanted a family, to be part of a real family, with a mother and a father and a dog. And a baby brother.” His face screwed up in a wry humor that was painfully close to tears. “She wanted a baby brother to take care of. I told her she was stupid, that babies cried all the time and trapped you, but it was all just a fantasy, you know? She just used to talk about it, about making a family. She’d go on and on until I’d want to shout at her.”

“She didn’t want her own baby, though?” Kate asked cautiously.

“Ah shit, man,” he burst out. “She was only twelve!”

“Have you never known a twelve-year-old with a baby?”

“Well, yeah. But that’s different.”

“Is it?”

“Of course. That kind of girl is—well, they’re not really girls. Jules was different. She really was young. She was just a kid. Is…just a kid,” he corrected himself. To Kate’s amusement, the streetwise boy across the table from her began to blush. “She never knew anything about sex, not when I knew her last summer, anyway. I mean, she’d talk sometimes, you know, but it was just an idea to her, not a real thing. I’m sure she didn’t know. And I never…”

“Did anything to disturb her innocence,” Kate finished for him.

“No.”

The brief flicker of amusement died under the bleak awareness that if Jules was by some miracle still alive, her innocence almost certainly was not. Kate refused to think about it, and she moved on to safer topics.

“When I was at her apartment once, just after you’d disappeared, the phone rang. She took it off and immediately hung up, without even answering, and she said something about strange telephone calls. Do you know anything about them?”

He squirmed in his seat, and all her instincts awoke. She’d hit something here; she could smell it radiating off him. He did not answer, just sat hunkered down, his blush gone, leaving him pale and very determined.

“Dio, she’s missing,” she said, nearly pleading. “I don’t think she went under her own power, or if she did, she didn’t mean to be away this long. She wouldn’t have left us all hanging like this, Dio. Not Jules. She would have called, written, something.”

“She…was getting…weird phone calls,” he said jerkily. “A couple of times, maybe. It was a man.”

“Were they obscene? Did she tell you what he said?”

“They weren’t, no. That was the problem—if they’d just been some guy getting off on dirty talk, she’d have known how to deal with it, but this was just bizarre. He’d say things like, ‘You’re mine, Jules,’ and then—no, wait, he called her Julie. ‘You’re mine, Julie’ and ‘I love you, Julie; I’ll take care of you.’”

Kate felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle and rise. That kind of call was indeed seriously creepy. “Why didn’t she tell anyone about the calls? Other than you?”

“I told her she ought to. They freaked her out, they really did, but she’d only had two or three, and he didn’t actually threaten her or anything.”

“God, she could be stupid,” Kate began, but Dio, his brow furrowed in thought, was not finished.

“And I think there was something else.”

She waited, and then coaxed, “What was that?”

“She seemed…this funny attitude…I don’t know how to describe it.” He was searching for words, though, so Kate waited, and after a minute his face cleared. He looked up at her eagerly, looking amazingly young and almost beautiful until he remembered who she was. He hesitated but then went on, although cautiously.

“I knew someone once—a friend’s sister. His older sister, a year and a half older. They had a lot of problems in their family, but the two of them were really close. Then, when she was about fourteen, she started seeing this older guy. I mean a lot older, maybe thirty. He had a big car and he used to take her out, buy her clothes, and she began to get all secretive. She acted proud and excited and a little bit scared, like she had a big prize she was keeping to herself.”

“What happened to her?”

“Dad—her dad found out and threw her out of the house. I don’t know what happened next, because I left a few weeks later.”

“And Jules reminded you of your…friend’s sister?” Kate asked, drawing him gently back to the point he had been making.

“A little.”

“You think she had a boyfriend, then?”

“Not a boyfriend. Like I said, she’s just a kid. Not in her brain, but in a lot of other ways.”

“But it was somebody she’d met?”

He began to look uncomfortable again, and suddenly Kate was certain that he knew more than he was telling.

“I don’t think she ever met him, no.”

“There’s something else, isn’t there, Dio?” She leaned forward, suppressing the urge to shake him. “Please, Dio. It could be what I need to find her.”

“What if she doesn’t want to be found?” he burst out angrily. “She’s surrounded by goddamn college professors and cops. Who could blame her?”

“Did she tell you that, when you saw her in December?” Kate demanded, but it was too much for him. He stood up and threw his tall cup toward the garbage can, ignoring it when it missed. Kate scooped up the other wrappings, threw them and the cup in the bin, and hurried out the door after him. She caught him halfway down the block.

“Dio, you have to let me take you home.”

“I don’t have a home,” he raged, throwing her hand off his shoulder, “and I don’t have to let you take me anywhere!”

“I told Wanda I’d drive you back. If you come back on foot, she won’t like it.”

“Who gives a fuck?”

“She does, Dio. She’s a good woman; don’t push her around just because you’re pissed off at me. It’s not worth it.”

He saw the sense of this, but no ex-con in cuffs went into a patrol car with less willingness than Dio climbing into the Saab, and he glowered out the side window the whole way back. She pulled up in front of the nondescript suburban house that had served as shelter for an endless trail of disturbed teenagers and turned off the engine.

“You’re a good friend to Jules, Dio,” she said quietly. His hand froze on the door handle. “I think she would be so happy to see how much you’ve done to pull your life together. I know it’s tough, and if there’s anything I can do to help you stick with it, I hope you’ll call me. I don’t agree with all the decisions you’re making here, but I do understand that you only want to help Jules, and that you think this is the best way. I only ask you to think about something.

“Sometimes it’s a sign of courage not to snitch on your friends. Other times, it’s irresponsibility. Part of growing up is beginning to wonder which it is.”

He didn’t respond, but he didn’t move, either.

“Jules saw the makings of a fine human being in you, Dio. I’m beginning to agree with her.” She saw the color begin to creep up the side of his neck. “I gave you my card, didn’t I? Phone me if you think of anything else,” she said. “Anything at all.”