With Child (4 page)

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 Dios
," 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 bolstering 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.