With Child (21 page)

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 hanging 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 people 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?"

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.

"This is Johnny," Montero said by way of introduction. He grunted and crushed Kate's hand a bit, in warning perhaps, or revenge for all the disturbance she had caused, or maybe just because he was a poor judge of his own strength.

"Good to meet you, Johnny." Kate extracted her hand. "Want to go for some coffee? I have half an hour before my return flight." The last flight to San Francisco, she thought, wondering why no one had written a song with that title. She then wondered if she wasn't getting a little light-headed. "A drink, maybe?"

"Sure," B.J. said, without so much as a glance at her companion. The top of her head was in line with the center of his biceps, but she handled him with all the ease of a mother.

Kate paid for two coffees and a beer for Johnny ("I'm driving," said B.J.) and, once at the table, opened the envelope. There were nine photographs, not eight. Middle-class gypsies in Afghan hats were caught in motion; the elderly fisherman stood in the frigid water, looking like a frost-rimed sculpture; Kate and Jules stood on opposite sides of the car, taking a last glance at the scene. Kate's door was open, as was the girl's mouth. Jules had been saying something about Montero's sheepskin coat, Kate thought, and remembered the blast of cold air against her nearly shaven scalp when she took off her hat before getting into the car, a jolt that seemed to have set off the headache.

The five remaining pictures were snapshots, hastily composed, though well focused. The focal points, however, were on the young people close to the lens, not on the cars parked in the slots or on the ordinary people walking to and from them. Kate glanced through them, not knowing what she thought she might see, but they were only pictures, memories of someone else's good times.

"You see anything?" B.J. asked. Kate tore her gaze from the picture and reached for her coffee. She shook her head.

"I didn't really expect to."

"You mean the man isn't there? Lavalle?" B.J. sounded both disappointed and relieved.

"I don't know what he looks like."

"You don't?"

Kate, seeing her astonishment, pulled herself together and gave a laugh. "I haven't been in on the interviews yet, and I wasn't there when he was arrested. A case like this, there're hundreds of people working on it. I'm only one." She glanced at her watch. "I better get moving. Let me give you a receipt, and if you'd just sign the backs of those photographs, so we know whose they are." A chain of evidence, as if anyone would ever look at them in a court of law. Would ever look at them, period.

Kate could feel herself beginning to run down. The brief push of zeal that had been set off by Peter Franklin at the bus company and the photographs taken by his driver was fading. If she hadn't already made an arrangement with the police photographic lab technician, she would have gone straight home from the airport, but instead, carried along by routine, she dutifully went to the lab, marked the photos for cropping and enlargement, and pointed out the faces and license plates she wanted brought out.

Then she went home.

It was nearly ten o'clock when she woke up the next morning, and the house was filled with the rich aroma of bread baking. She felt rested, but the sensation of being a piece of run-down machinery persisted. The last few days seemed unreal, like some stupid and pointless dream that had seemed profound at the time. Lee was home and Jon was baking. It was a sunny Thursday morning as she lay in bed while the rest of the world was hard at work. A bird was singing in the tree outside the window, and a dog barked somewhere.

And Jules was dead.

That brilliant, sweet, troubled, funny girl was gone, victim of the most revolting kind of killer. Kate had loved her, had been loved by her, and now she was gone.

She lay among the rumpled sheets, thinking bleak thoughts on a beautiful morning, and when the doorbell rang down below, she was caught up in a memory of another morning, in late August, when Jules had arrived on her doorstep and rung the bell, backpack over her shoulder, bandage on her knee, her hair still worn in long, childish braids, to ask Kate's help in looking for a friend. Kate had found him, and lost her, and suddenly, hit by an overwhelming upsurge of the grief that she had so long pushed away, she turned her face into the pillow and allowed the tears to come.

She didn't hear the sound of the bedroom door opening and then closing, but a minute later the mattress sank as Lee sat down on it, and she felt Lee's hand stroking her hair. Neither of them said anything for a long time, until Kate finally lifted her head, found a Kleenex, and turned onto her back.

The manila envelope Lee held was much thicker than it had been the night before. Kate took it from her without comment and slid the pictures out onto the bedcovers.

"A courier brought it from the lab," Lee said. "I thought it might be urgent."

Kate picked up one enlargement that she hadn't asked for but that had been done anyway: she and Jules on either side of the Saab, two heads of cropped hair, one on an ill-looking cop, the other on a girl with her life ahead of her. Except it wasn't life that awaited her a short distance up the road.

Urgent? These? No. The whole thing was pointless, a delaying tactic to avoid facing the truth, and she had finally admitted it.

Lee's fingers appeared at the top edge of the picture and tugged gently. Kate let it go and closed her eyes. Even with her arm across her face, she could feel. Lee studying the two images, and she knew just when Lee began to cry. Kate held out her arms, and Lee curled up against her, and while the sun shone and the bread cooled and the dog was finally let inside, the two women mourned the brief life of Jules Cameron.

And yet...

"You're like this terrier my parents used to have," Lee said. "He would not let go of a thing once he got his teeth into it." She was trying to be humorous, but her concern showed, and a bit of irritation, as well.

Kate licked the last of the sticky rolls from her fingers and turned her face to the sun. She had carried a table and chairs down to this, the newly rescued patch of garden, the only place in the winter that caught any sun. Jon had gone out, and the house felt silent and nearly content, as in the aftermath of a storm.

"I feel more like one of those high school biology experiments," she said ruefully. "You know, where you have some dead creature that you prod at and it jumps."

"Do you really have to do this?"

"It's a loose end, and it'll keep twitching until I tidy it up. After all, I did get all those people on the alert on Friday, then just took off."

"Rosa Hidalgo and some computer nut hardly count as 'all those people.' "

"It seemed like a lot more at the time. Anyway, it'll only be for the afternoon, and then tomorrow or the day after I was thinking about taking off for a couple of days."

"I think that would be a good idea," Lee said carefully.

"With you? Please? If you can get free," she added.

The joy dawning on Lee's face rivaled the morning sun, but all she said was, "Where?"

"Somewhere on the coast. Just drive?"

"South to Carmel or Big Sur?" Lee suggested.

"Fine."

"I'll need to buy a bathing suit. My only one has holes in unfortunate places."

"What fun."

"If you can guarantee me a private swimming hole, yes."

"Jon would love to take you shopping for a suit," Kate said firmly.

Kate stared at the telephone for twenty minutes before she could work up her nerve to call Rosa Hidalgo. The question of legality - no, it was not even a question - the fact that what she planned was both illegal and unethical was actually of little concern when compared to the thought of Jani's anger if she heard that the woman she blamed for her daughter's disappearance had then been inside her apartment. Scenarios of shame and a permanent state of discomfort around Al almost drove her off - almost.

Very fortunately, Rosa was not home, and would not be home until late. Furthermore, her daughter, Angelica, had no hesitation about letting Kate into the apartment.

Albert Onestone, king of the Internet - Richard Schwartz to the rest of the world - took her a while longer, but she eventually got through to him, his real rather than virtual self on the telephone. Had she been conversing through the keyboard, she was certain he would have wriggled out of her grasp, but confronted by a live voice in his ear, he was out of his element and agreed to go with her to tease the secrets from Jules's computer.

Richard lived in a converted garage not far from the university, and when he came to the door, she almost laughed, so like the caricature of the computer nerd was he. Stooped, pale, bespectacled, and blinking at the sunlight, he was far from the overbearing persona that came across on the screen. She introduced herself, shook his damp hand, invited him to get in the car, waited while he logged off and shut down some machines, assured him that the jacket he had on would be heavy enough, helped him find a pen, and made sure he locked the door behind him.

"Richard," she said when they were in the parking area next to Jules's apartment, "for your own protection, I'm trying to keep anyone from knowing that you were here."

"Protection?" he said nervously. "I don't think --"

"Not that kind of protection - there's nothing dangerous here. It's just to keep you from getting involved. If anyone finds I've been here and broken into the computer, it's my responsibility. I don't want to bring you into it."

"Would you know how to get through the security blocks by yourself?" he asked dubiously.

"Probably not, but nobody could prove I hadn't stumbled through on my own. Don't worry, I'm great at bluffing. Now, you wait here. I'm going to go up and get the door open, then come back for you. I'll be five or ten minutes."

"Really?" He sat up, looking interested. "Do you use picks? I'd like to watch."

"Nothing so clever, just the key. Wait here."

Angelica was home, and she came to the door with a phone tucked under her chin.

"Hi!" she said; then she muttered into the phone, "Hold on just a sec." Turning back to Kate, she said, "I've got the key. Do you want me to come up with you?"

"Oh, no, that's okay," Kate assured her. "Al told me where he kept his sweaters; it'll only take me a minute."

"Funny, Mom just sent them a bunch of things."

"Well, you know how men are," Kate said vaguely. Angelica laughed and went back to her phone conversation, leaving the door open. Kate trotted up the stairs and let herself in.

It did indeed take her only a minute to locate Al's unpacked boxes, piled to await his return from the aborted Mexican honeymoon. One in the bedroom held warm sweatshirts, so Kate pulled out three or four and some socks, bundled them under her arm, and went back downstairs with the key, carefully leaving the apartment door unlocked.

Angelica was still on the phone. She was sitting on the sofa with her feet on the coffee table, painting her toenails with bright red stars against a white background. Kate held up the key between two fingers. "Where does it go?" she asked.

"Oh, stick it on the hook next to the kitchen phone," the girl answered, waving at the door. Kate found the hook and returned the key to what she hoped was the same place that Angelica's mother had left it. When she came back through, the girl looked up from her task.

"Just a sec," she said again into the receiver, and to Kate: "Did you find what he wanted?"

"I did, thanks. And look, Angelica, maybe you shouldn't mention this to your mother. Actually, she sent the wrong stuff, not what Al had asked her for. She'd be embarrassed if she knew."

Angelica giggled conspiratorially, and Kate shut the Hidalgo door behind her when she left.

Richard was reading the driver's manual from the glove compartment.

"Come on," Kate said, throwing the clothes across the backseat.

"Wait a minute. I don't know if I - What are those?"

"Old sweatshirts. Let's go."

"Just how illegal is this?"

"Not at all. He's my partner," which had nothing to do with it, but it seemed to reassure him. He allowed her to take the manual from his hand and pull him out of the car.

"I really don't --" he whined.

"Shhh!"

"I really don't understand," he said in a whisper. "You never explained why you need to get into Jules's computer."

"I told you she disappeared. She was kidnapped."

"Yes, I know."

Feeling she had given the feeble explanation so often that it was nearly threadbare, she sighed. "If Jules disappeared voluntarily, she may have left behind an indication of why - a friend's address, for example, or a phone number. She kept a written diary, but she took it with her. She may also have kept a diary in her computer."