Kate whipped around to find Jules, but the girl had already cleared the corner. When she looked back at the man, the elevator door was closing, but she heard the other man saying, "Jesus, Mark, put your foot in it, why don't you? That was the daughter of Al Hawkin's —' The door closed on the rest of it.
It had probably not been meant cruelly, or even crudely; the man Mark was simply one of those who thought that the way to demonstrate tolerance for gay women was to treat them as one of the boys. Still, when Kate caught up with Jules, she looked closely for red ears or other signs of discomfort, and was relieved when she found it obvious that the girl had not heard him. Kate got her out of there as soon as she could, infinitely grateful that the bad taste was only in her own mouth.
And still, all that fall, she looked for Dio. Once a week, she made the rounds of the homeless, asking about him. Always she asked among her network of informants, the dealers and hookers and petty thieves, whenever she saw one of them, and invariably received a shake of the head. Twice she heard rumors of him, once at a house for runaway teenagers, where one of the current residents had a friend who had met a boy of his description, over on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, or it might have been College Avenue, though it might have been Dion instead of Dio; and a second time, when one of her informants told her there was a boy-toy of that name in a house used by pederasts over near the marina. She phoned a couple of old friends in the Berkeley and Oakland departments to ask them to keep an ear out, and she arranged to be in on the raid of the marina house, but neither came up with anything more substantial than the ghost she already had. She doubted he was in the Bay Area, and told Jules that, but she also kept looking.
That autumn, in one of those flukes that even the statistician will admit happens occasionally, it seemed for a while that every case the Homicide Department handled involved kids, either as victim or perpetrator, or both. A two-year-old with old scars on his back and broken bones in various states of mending died in an emergency room from having been shaken violently by his eighteen-year-old mother. Three boys aged sixteen to twenty died from gunshot wounds in less than a month. Four bright seventeen-year-old students in a private school did a research project on explosives, using the public library, and sent a very effective pipe bomb to a hated teacher. It failed, but only because the man was as paranoid as he was infuriating, and had called the police before he touched the parcel; the four were charged with conspiracy and attempted murder, and might well be tried as adults. A seven-year-old in a pirate costume was separated from his friends on Halloween; he was found the next morning, raped and bludgeoned to death; the investigation was pointing toward a trio of boys only four years older. Kate saw two of her colleagues in tears within ten days, one of them a tough, experienced beat cop who had seen everything but still couldn't bring himself to look again at the baby in the cot. The detectives on the fourth floor of the Department of Justice made morbid jokes about it being the Year of the Child, and they either answered the phone gingerly or with a snarl, according to their personalities.
NOVEMBER,
DECEMBER
SIX
The end of November drew near.
Christmas lights went up in celebration of the feast of Thanksgiving, and the following morning, still bloated from her dinner at the house of Rosalyn and Maj, Kate rode around Union Square on her way to the Hall of Justice, just to look at the windows of the big stores, filled with lace and gilt, velvet and silks, sprinkled with white flakes to evoke the wintery stuff seen in San Francisco perhaps twice in a century, set up to attract throngs of shoppers anxious to recapture the fantasies of a Victorian childhood, no matter the cost. The pickpockets and car thieves had a merry season, a coke dealer in the Tenderloin took to wrapping his packets in shiny red and green foil, Al and Jani set their date for the eighteenth of December, and people went on killing one another.
It was wet and miserable outside three days later, on the last Monday of November - a fact Kate could well attest to, as she'd been out in it a fair part of the day, following up witnesses to a domestic shooting in Chinatown. She had used departmental vehicles for the trips out, but she was now faced with either climbing into her damp moon-walk outfit, which would keep her mostly dry on the motorcycle, or getting a ride up the hill and having to cope with public transport in the morning.
The phone on her desk rang. She eyed it sourly, making no move to answer it. At the fourth ring, the man at the next desk looked up.
"Hey, Martinelli," he called. "That thing's called a tel-uh-phone. You pick it up and talk into one end, voices come from the other. Really fun, you should try it."
"Gee, thanks, Tommy boy. Thing is, my psychic reader told me never to answer any call that comes two minutes before I want to leave - it's sure to be a bad omen."
They both sat and watched it ring.
"Who's on call?" he asked.
"Calvo." There was no need to say more: They both knew he would be late. He was always late.
"Could be the lottery," he suggested.
"I never buy lottery tickets."
It rang on.
"You answer it, Tommy."
"It's my wife's birthday tonight; she'd kill me if I was late."
Ring. Ring.
"If you wait long enough, the shift will be over and you can leave."
Ring.
"Sounds pretty determined," he commented.
Kate stretched out a hand and picked up the instrument. "Inspector Martinelli."
"Kate? I thought I had missed you. This is Grace Kokumah, over at the Haight/Love Shelter. We talked, three, four weeks ago?" Her voice added a slight question mark at the end of the sentence, but Kate knew her instantly: a big, dignified black-black African woman with the flavor of her native Uganda rich in her voice and her hair in a zillion tiny glossy braids that ended in orange beads. Kate had met her three years before, when Lee had worked with her on the case of a fourteen-year-old boy with AIDS.
"Yes, Grace, how are you? Enjoying the rain?" Too many years of drought made rain the central topic of most winter conversations.
"We have many holes in our roof, Kate Martinelli, so I do not enjoy the rain, no. We have run out of buckets. The entire neighborhood has run out of buckets. We are making soup in roasting pans because our pots are busy catching drips. Kate, are you still interested in a boy called Dio?"
Thoughts of time clocks and home vanished.
"Do you have him there?"
"I do not have him, no. But one of my girls, who heard from a friend of a friend… You know?"
"Is she there? Will she talk to me?"
"To the famous Inspector Casey Martinelli? Yes."
Kate made a face at the receiver.
"I think it is better for you to come here," Grace suggested. "Tonight?"
"I can be there in half an hour, less if the traffic's clear."
"We will be very busy for the next hour, Kate. We are just serving dinner. Best you come a little later, when we have finished with the dishes. Then Kitty will be free to talk with you."
"If I come now, can you use a hand, with serving or washing?"
Grace's laugh was rich and deep. "Now I think you know that to be one stupid question, Inspector Martinelli."
"Fine, see you soon." She dropped the phone onto its hook and started to gather up her papers.
"Sounds like a hot date there, Martinelli."
"Sure you don't want to bring your wife? Dinner at the soup kitchen, give her a slice of life for her birthday present?"
"It's not my wife's birthday. What gave you that crazy idea?"
"I can't think. G'night, Tommy."
"Stay dry. So much for your psychic reader."
Kate's steps faltered briefly as his words triggered a vivid memory: Jules, speaking with such seriousness about her long-past childhood, when she lay in bed inventing horrors as a talisman to keep the real ones at bay. Anything that can be imagined won't happen.
Now why should I think of that? Kate asked hers
elf as she waited for the elevator. Dio, I guess, and Jules, and meeting Dio at last and what I will see in his eyes and his nose and his skin, how far gone he'll be.
The serving was over and the nonresident recipients were reluctantly scattering for their beds in doorways and Dumpsters and the bushes of Golden Gate Park when Kate blew into the Haight/Love Shelter. Grace Kokumah stood with her hands in the pockets of her sagging purple cardigan and watched without expression as Kate came to a halt next to the thin and already-yellowing Christmas tree and dropped her burden with a clatter before beginning to strip off the astronaut helmet, the dripping and voluminous orange neck-to-ankle waterproof jumpsuit, and the padded gloves. When Kate had popped open the snaps on her leather jacket and run a hand through her brief hair, the woman shook her beads.
"The city's finest, a vision to behold."
"Do you want the buckets or don't you?" Kate growled.
"Where did you find them?" She studied the waist-high stack, no doubt wondering instead how Kate had managed to transport them without being lifted up, cycle and all, by their wind resistance and dropped into the San Francisco Bay.
"Stole them from the morgue; they use them for the scraps. Joke! That was a joke!" she said to the horrified young people at Grace's back. "Macabre cop humor, you've heard of that. The cleaners buy soap in them, nothing worse than that. Do you have anything to eat? I'm starving."
"This is a soup kitchen, despite the temporary absence of stockpots. We have bean soup tonight, which has had a dry ham bone waved through it, we have white bread with margarine, and we have weak orange drink."
"The season of plenty, I see. Do I have to wash dishes first?"
"A person who brings us eight five-gallon buckets is permitted to eat before she labors. Kitty, would you please show Kate where to wash her hands, and then give her a bowl of soup?"
Once in the cramped corridor that wrapped around the kitchen, Kate touched the girl's arm.
"Grace tells me you might help me find a boy named Dio."
The girl cringed and fluttered her hands to shush Kate. "Not here. Later. I'll come to Grace's room." She scurried off.
So, Kate thought, I wash dishes after all.
After bean soup, and after a largely symbolic contribution to the piles of dirty dishes, Grace rescued her and sent her off to the room she used as counseling center, doctor's examining room, office, and, occasionally, extra bedroom. Within five minutes Kitty skulked in, shutting the door noiselessly behind her. She wasted no time with small talk.
"You're lookin' for a guy named Dio?"
"That's what he called himself last summer, yes."
"What do you want him for?"
"I don't, particularly. Why don't you sit down, Kitty?"
"God, I don't know if I should do this. I mean, I don't know you."
Kate reached into the pocket she'd taken to using instead of the awkward handbag and held out her identification folder between two fingers, mostly as a means of keeping the girl from bolting. Kitty took it, looked at it curiously, handed it back. She sat down and studied Kate's tired face, recently cropped hair, and biker's leathers.
"You look different."
Kate snapped shut the picture of the good Italian girl with the soft hair and the wary smile without glancing at it.
"Don't we all."
"You are that dyke cop whose girlfriend got shot?" she asked uncertainly. Kate did not wince, did not even pause in the motion of putting the ID back into her pocket.
"Yep. Now, tell me, how did you hear I was looking for Dio?"
"Grace put it on the notice board. Course, I don't know if it's the same guy, but it's not like a common name, is it?"
"She posted a notice that I was looking for Dio?"
"Not you. Just that there's word for him. You haven't seen the board? It's in the dining hall, just a bunch of those really ugly black cork squares Grace glued up and sticks notices on, like if someone calls her from Arkansas or something saying, "Have you seen my little girl? Tell her to call Mummy." There's just his name and a note to see Grace. Lots of them have that. She talks to kids and tries to convince them to call home, once they know someone's interested." From the way she spoke, nobody at home had expressed any interest in Kitty for some time.
"So you met Dio."
"Not me. A friend. No, really," she said, seeing Kate's skeptical look. "This guy I met walking down the Panhandle, you know? He gave me a cigarette - and honest, it was just a cigarette. Grace throws you out if she smells weed on you. Anyway, we got to talking about, well, things, you know? And he came back here for dinner and to look at the board and see if maybe… Well, there wasn't nothing for him on it, but then he sees the name Dio and acts kind of surprised, and he goes, "I thought Dio was an orphan," and I go, "You should tell Dio his name is up" - I mean, not like anyone wants to go home, you know, but still, it doesn't hurt to make a-phone call, does it, and they might send some money or something. Well, anyway, he said he'd tell Dio if he saw him."
"When was this?"
"Last week. Friday maybe. Thursday? No, I remember, it was Friday because we had a tuna casserole and we talked about Catholics and that fish thing they used to have."
"Have you seen him since then?"
"Well, yeah, I mean, that's why I talked to Grace, isn't it, "cause Bo - because my friend asked me to. He came here this afternoon. Well, really this morning, but I wasn't here, so he came back. He said he found Dio, and he's really sick - Dio is, I mean - and a couple of Dio's friends are really worried about him."
"Sick how? OD?" If so, he'd be long dead.
"I don't think so. Bo - my friend said he was coughing real bad, for the last week or so."
"Why didn't his friends take him to the emergency room? Or the free clinic?"
"Well, that part I didn't really understand. There's something about this guy Dio lives with, him and a bunch of other kids, all of them guys, I think. Anyway, there's this old guy who kind of heads up the place they're living in. It's a squat in a warehouse the other side of Market, down where the docks are? Anyway he - the old guy - doesn't like outsiders, like doctors."
I'll bet he doesn't, Kate thought bleakly. "I'd like to talk to your friend about this."
"He said no, he doesn't want nothing to do with it. He's just worried about Dio and thinks somebody should take him out of there before he dies or something. He'd probably freak if he knew I was talking to a cop about it. He said he doesn't want the old guy to know, 'cause he makes my friend nervous. Oh, there's nothing wrong with him. I mean, he takes care of the kids and doesn't feel them up or anything, but he's just… weird. That's what Bo says, anyway. Bo's my friend."
Secondhand and from a limited vocabulary like Kitty's, "weird" could mean anything from a drooling madman to an Oxbridgian with a plummy accent and boutonniere.
"Okay, I'll go see him. And I won't tell how I knew he was there. What's the address?"
Kitty had to stand up to get her hand into the pockets of her skintight jeans. She pulled out a grubby scrap of paper folded multiple times into a wad. Kate unfolded it, saw that the address was clear enough, and put it into her own pocket.
"Thanks, Kitty. I'll do what I can. It was good of you to take the chance, talking to me."
"Yeah, well. If us kids on the street don't look after each other, who will?"
The rain was taking a break when Kate left the center, and the wind had dropped below gale force, so she decided to go by the address on the scrap of paper Kitty had given her. She was almost surprised to find, when she got there, that it actually existed. It proved to be a deserted three-story warehouse with plywood sheets nailed up across all the ground-floor windows, in an area slated for redevelopment. Kate went past it slowly, continued on a couple of blocks, and then doubled back, blessing the Kawasaki's efficient muffler system. Pushing the big machine into a recessed entranceway that stank of urine but was at the moment unoccupied, she climbed out of the bright orange jumpsuit, opened the storage box, took out
a long flashlight and shoved in the wet jumpsuit, closed and locked the top, and clamped her helmet onto the bike with the rigid lock. She thrust the flashlight into the deep front pocket of her leather jacket and cautiously approached the building.
The front was, predictably, padlocked. She found the entrance currently in use down an alleyway on the side of the building, covered by a sheet of corrugated metal that screeched loudly when she pulled it aside. Over the noise of the wind and the occasional heavy drops, she could not tell if there was any movement inside the building. Trying to reassure herself that this really wasn't so stupid, that even though she felt like an empty-headed female on a late-night movie investigating attic noises with a candle in her hand, she actually was an armed cop (admittedly, with no official reason for being here, far less a search warrant), she stepped through the gap.
She had fully intended to make her presence known in a straightforward manner. After all, she hardly looked like a police officer, and she only wanted a chance to talk with the boy Dio. She even had her mouth open to call a placatory greeting when it began, the cold ripple of the skin up along the back of her hand, over her wrists, and up her forearms to her shoulders and the nape of her neck, the creepy-crawlies that told her something really bad was about to go down. She hadn't expected this, had only planned on talking with some unwashed boys in a squat, had arranged no backup, but the moment it started, she didn't stop to think, only reacted.
Gun up in both hands and ready, back against the wall, every hair alert, and… nothing. Nothing.
There were people in the building, though, she would swear to it, could feel them over her head, silently waiting for - what?
She, too, waited in the darkness, long minutes straining to hear, see, anything, tried to make herself open her mouth and call a friendly "Hello, anyone there?" but the ghostly touch along the tops of her arms did not go away. Finally, moving as stealthily as her heavy boots would allow, she sidled back through the gap, trotted down the alley (keeping a wary eye overhead) for a quick glance at the rear of the building, and then made her way back up the alleyway and through the shadows to the cycle, where she unlocked the storage compartment again and took out her mobile radio. She turned the volume right down and spoke in a mutter.
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