The marked unit arrived within three minutes, drifting to a stop with its headlights out. The dome light did not go on when the two men opened their doors with gentle clicks, and neither of them slammed his door. Kate was relieved; they knew their business. She cleared her throat quietly and walked over to them.
"Kate Maninelli, Homicide," she identified herself. "What do you know about that three-story building just this side of the garage?"
"It's been a squat for a couple of months now. No problems," said the older one. "We reported it, but the attitude this time of year is, if it stays quiet, let it go. There aren't enough beds for them, in the shelters, anyway," he added defensively.
"I know. But it's been quiet? No sign of Johns, not a crack house, shooting gallery, anything like that?"
"No customers of any kind. Why?"
"I don't have a warrant. I'm just looking for a boy, was told he was in there sick. I went in, but I… I don't like the way it feels inside. Wanted some backup." The younger man looked at her sideways, but the older one just nodded.
"I know what you mean. I'll go in with you," he offered. His voice sounded familiar. Kate looked more closely.
"Tom Rawlins, isn't it? Rawlings?" He seemed pleased to be recognized. "Thanks, but I think I'd better go in alone, I don't want to scare them off. Just watch my back? And maybe your partner here —"
"Ash Jordan," he said, introducing himself.
"Maybe Ash can watch around in back? There's a fire escape."
"Fine."
"What's he done?"
"As far as I know, he's only a status offender - assuming that I have his age right. I'm trying to track him down as a favor to a friend."
The men both accepted this, understanding the language of favors and friends and the problems of runaways.
"He calls himself Dio, light-skinned Hispanic, five seven, skinny, looks about fourteen."
"If he comes out, we'll just sit on him for a while," Rawlings assured her.
"That's great, thanks. This shouldn't take more than a few minutes."
She went back through the hole behind the metal sheet with the reassuring feeling of a brother cop at her back, and it made all the difference. She made her way cautiously, although not afraid, and found herself in a warren of what had once been offices and a showroom, empty now of stock but in an appalling state of dilapidation, Sheetrock drooping off the walls, ceiling joists exposed, filthy beyond belief. If there was a group of boys in the building, she decided after a quick search, they did not live down here.
Her flashlight found the stairs, stripped of the rotted carpeting, which had been left in a heap in one of the offices. They were firm, although they squeaked here and there as she started upward. She held the gun in one hand, the light in the other, and though her flesh still crawled, there was no turning back now.
At the top of the stairs, she stood just outside the door and stuck the flashlight and one eye around the corner, and here she found the boys' living quarters. It was a big room, one single space with a heavy freight elevator on one end, frozen with its floor two feet beneath the ceiling. Ropes of dust-clogged cobwebs dangled from the steel beams fifteen feet overhead, but on closer observation, she noticed there had been some effort to clean the floor, which lacked the jumble of bottles, needles, glue tubes, paint cans, used condoms, and general squalor that these places usually held. In the middle were a rough circle of chairs and milk crates on top of a frayed circular rug, pillows on some of the crates, one of them upended with a camping lantern set on top. Around the edges, against two of the walls, there seemed actually to have been an attempt at marking out eight or ten separate quarters with a hodgepodge of crates, cardboard boxes, and bits of wood draped with pieces of incongruous fabric, from flowered bedspreads to ancient paint-splattered tarps. Keeping well out in the center of the room, her ears straining for the least sound, Kate began to circle the floor. She probed each of the quarters with the beam of her flashlight, finding the same semblance of order that the circle of chairs showed. Some of the mattresses even had their rough covers pulled neatly up, though others…
She paused, went back to one Spartan and tidy cell, and ran the flashlight beam over the heap of - well, for lack of a better word, bedding. Yes, that was indeed a foot that she had seen protruding from the pile, enclosed in at least two layers of frayed sock. And now that she was closer, she could hear the sound of labored breathing above the slap of heavy raindrops against the black plastic someone had nailed up against the broken windows. She slid her gun back under her arm, transferred the light to her right hand, squatted down, and reached out gingerly for the covering layers at the opposite end of the mattress from the exposed sock. Black hair, long and greasy and soaked with sweat, straggled across a flushed face that had the high, broad cheekbones of a Mayan statue. His breathing sounded like a pair of wet sponges struggling to absorb a bit of air - it hurt Kate's chest just to listen to it. The boy's forehead was burning, and she pulled the covers back up around his neck. Somehow she was not surprised to see a neat stack of shoe boxes, two wide and three high, next to his mattress. On top of them lay a small, grubby notebook: There was a rainbow on its cover.
"Hello, Dio," she said quietly. She stood up, took the radio from the pocket of her leather jacket, spoke into it, and had gotten as far as "We've got a sick boy here at —" when all hell broke loose.
With a distant thunk, the overhead lights went on, and Kate's body was already automatically moving down and back when the gun started roaring at her from the freight elevator. She dove into the base of the makeshift walls, sending boxes and wood scraps flying and keeping just ahead of the terrifying slaps at her heels, until finally she had her own beautiful piece of metal in her hand. From the spurious protection of a packing crate, she aimed her gun at the source of the murderous fire. Her fifth bullet hit something.
A noise came, half yelp, half cough, followed immediately by a sharp clatter of metal dropping into metal.
"Police!" bellowed Kate at the top of her adrenaline-charged lungs. "Anyone reaching for that gun, I'll shoot!"
She heard voices, then panicking shouts, and a number of feet on the floor overhead broke into a run, heading for the back of the warehouse. At the same time, one pair of feet came pounding up the stairs toward her, stopping just outside the door.
"Police!" he shouted, then said, "Inspector Martinelli you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. There was a single gun from the freight elevator; doesn't seem to be another. I hit him and he dropped it. See it? Hanging just under that strut?" She narrowed the beam on her flashlight to illuminate the spot.
"No, I - yes, got it."
"Keep an eye on it; I'm going up."
"Wait —"
"No. Is your partner around back?"
"Yes."
"Hope he stayed there - I don't want these kids to get away. I'll clear the elevator and then call you up. Oh, and the one I was looking for is down at the other end. I was just in the middle of calling for an ambulance - it sounds like pneumonia."
Kate had lost her radio in her rapid trip through the walls but had miraculously retained her flashlight, which even more miraculously still functioned. As Rawlings spoke into his own radio, giving rapid requests for backup and ambulance, she took off across the dusty wooden floor at a fast, low crouch, hit the now-well-lit stairs at a run, and, at the top landing, seeing no switch, put her leather-clad arm up across her face and then reached up in passing to swipe at the hanging bulb with the butt end of the heavy flashlight. Safe now in the concealing darkness, she pushed the flashlight into her pocket, took up a position to one side of the door to the third floor, turned the handle, and pushed it open. Nothing. Silence came through the doorway at her, but for the wind and the raindrops, and the only light was the dim illumination creeping in through the windows and up the elevator shaft. Gun at the ready, she slipped inside; there were raised voices outside and three floors down - Rawlings's partner, Jordan, had indeed stayed in his pla
ce. And then the most beautiful sound in the world: sirens, from several directions at once, getting louder every second. Beneath them, half-heard, came a low groaning sound from the direction of the freight elevator. Out came the flashlight again, and, holding it well to the side of her body, she flicked it on. The room was open and empty of anything large enough to hide a person. Just a matter of making sure the shooter couldn't retrieve his gun. Kate took two steps away from the wall, and no more.
There was no pain, no burst of light, no time for fear, much less anger, just the beginning awareness of movement above and behind her, a faint swishing noise registering in her ears, and then Kate was gone.
SEVEN
Somewhere, deep down, she was aware. Some part of her concussed and swelling brain smelled the dust on the floor beneath her, heard the boots running toward her and the sirens cutting off, one by one, somewhere below, felt the hands and cushions and neck brace, dimly knew that she was being lifted and carried, that there was rain in her face and blue strobing lights and then the harsh flat surfaces of the hospital. A buzzing as her hair was shaved, a cold wash against the scalp, and eventually a mask on her face.
She knew all these things as textures and tastes: velvet soft black night studded by hard, sharp blue beads; the hospital as slick and cold as tile but overlaid with the warm, soft touch of a nurse whose words wrapped around her, incomprehensible but as comforting as a fur blanket. Cops like pillars, doctors like whips, these sensations washed over her while she lay stunned and unmoving, imprinting their textures on her battered brain, to appear in later life - never while she was conscious, but as dream images: fellow cops who smelled of dust, a nurse covered with luscious warm fur, words that tasted like broken glass.
And there were memories, drifting in and out as she lay in her hospital bed in the intensive care unit: moments of fear, times of great pleasure. Memories of Lee. Mostly, during the following days, she was back in August.
A letter.
It had begun with a letter, and now Kate lay in her hospital bed and remembered—
—a day in early August. San Francisco had sweltered for ten days, longer, everyone complained, the weatherman explained, with his highs and lows - until finally that afternoon at three o'clock the people on the sidewalks at Fishermen's Wharf had felt the first damp fingers of fog on their sunburned faces, and by five o'clock the city was cool and cocooned.
The house on Russian Hill retained the day's heat, but the food on the stove smelled good, appetizing after a week of cold salads and refrigerated soups. "That smells great, Jon," she said, greeting him from the hallway. She poked her head into the kitchen. "Hi."
"Hello, Kate, isn't it lovely to be cool again? I've been waiting for weeks to try this Ethiopian meat thing."
"Smells incredible." She turned to the closet and peeled off her windbreaker and shoulder holster, kicked off her shoes, stowed her briefcase on the floor, then put her head around the door to the living room, saw it was empty, and went back to the kitchen. "I know what you mean. I haven't felt like eating in days."
He looked up from the cutting board, his thinning hair in damp disarray. "Then the mice are getting pretty pushy, taking plates of food from the fridge."
"Squeak," she admitted. "Want a glass?" At his nod, she poured him some, and then filled a third glass. Pushing one toward him and picking up the other two, she asked, "Is Lee upstairs?"
"She is. The new physiotherapist was by this morning, seemed impressed," he reported. "And she had a couple of letters. One of them seemed to upset her."
"Upset her? How?"
"Maybe upset isn't the right word." He paused, one hand on his hip, the other flung back with a sauce-coated spoon in it. He'd dropped most of his limp-wrist caricatures in the last year, thank God, but tended to strike poses when distracted and mince his words when uncomfortable. "Excited, maybe? Like a child with a secret, or a present. She said it was from her aunt." He shrugged and went back to his fragrant alchemy. Kate did not tell him that, as far as she knew, Lee had only one aunt, and she had died years ago.
"Everything else okay?"
"Fine. Dinner in twenty minutes," he said, dismissing her. She paused in the hallway to leaf through the mail on the table, seeing only bills and circulars, then carried the wine upstairs, where she found Lee in her study, reading something at the desk.
"Howdy, stranger," Kate said. Lee started violently, dropping the letter, and swung her chair around sharply. "Sorry, hon," Kate apologized, "I thought you heard me coming." She placed a glass on Lee's desk, kissed her, and dropped into the armchair with her own glass.
Lee looked flushed, but not with exertion, and it was cool up here. Excitement? Embarrassment? Kate's eyes flicked to the letter and away. She would not ask - Lee had little enough privacy, though Kate tried hard to give her as much as she could.
"Glad you could stop by," Lee said, regaining her calm. "Are you here or just passing through?"
"Here. And tomorrow off."
"You caught your baddie?"
"We did that, and a right little shit he is, too." Most murderers were someone close to the victim, family or friend, who lost control for a brief, fatal minute - not villainous, not particularly bright, and soon apprehended. Bread and butter for a homicide detective, but there was no denying the hard satisfaction of putting cuffs on someone to whom murder was more than an accident of chance.
They talked for a few minutes of this and that and nothing in particular; then Kate said, "Jon said you had some letters."
Was Lee's evasive glance so obvious, or was the professional habit of interrogation so strong that she read guilt where there was none? 'A postcard from Vaun Adams," Lee said. "From Spain. Where did I put it? Here." A photograph of Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia church, and in Vaun's neat handwriting:
Architecture like this makes a person feel that human beings ought to be a different shape - Ray Bradbury hiring Frank Lloyd Wright to build a house on Mars. Head nearly full, be home soon. Gerry and his wife send greetings.
Love, V.
"The last one was from Kenya, wasn't it?"
"Egypt, and before that, Kenya. She's getting around."
"Nothing else exciting?"
"Couple of things, nothing thrilling."
"Fine," Kate said easily. "Do you feel like going down to dinner, or shall we eat up here? Jon's cooking up a storm."
"I've been smelling it all afternoon, drooling on the rug. I'll go down."
"Need a hand?"
"Carry the wine, please."
Lee rolled her chair over to the stair lift, maneuvered herself from one seat onto the other while Kate stood by making trivial talk and being unobtrusively ready to catch her. At the bottom, she checked that the walker was where Lee could reach it, then walked away, leaving her to it. She washed the grime of the day from her face and hands, then got to the table in time to hold the chair for Lee to lower herself into. Food, talk, paperwork, bed: just a day like any other.
Later that night, cuddling close for the first time since the heat wave had begun, Kate spoke into Lee's ear.
"You don't have to tell me whom you got a letter from."
"Don't I?"
"Of course not. It's your perfect right to have secrets, nasty, horrid secrets, secret lovers probably - I don't mind." Here she began to nibble down the back of Lee's neck while her fingertips sought out the sensitive areas along Lee's ribs. "I'll just tickle you until you tell, but I don't mind if you don't tell me. I can lie here all night tickling you, until you fall out of bed and have to sleep on the floor and —" Lee began to giggle and writhe away from Kate's hands and teeth, and the two of them wrestled until Lee, whose upper-body strength after months in the wheelchair was greater than Kate's, succeeded in pinning down Kate, who was not really trying very hard. Panting, Lee looked down into Kate's dark and astonished eyes.
"You sure you feel like just lying there all night?" she demanded in a husky voice, and put her mouth to Kate's.
It was
the closest they had come to a normal night in a long, long time.
Much later, Kate muttered into Lee's shoulder, "Don't you think that will get you out of telling me about the letter."
"Tomorrow, my sweet Kate. Tomorrow."
"It was from my aunt," Lee said, when tomorrow had come and they were still in bed, drinking coffee.
"But your aunt died." Lee's mother's sister had been a real terror, the sort of ramrod-spined old lady who regarded fitted bedsheets as a sure sign of the country's moral decay, who had left a clause in her will making it quite clear that Lee was to get not one cent to support her abominable lifestyle. "Don't tell me her will included posthumous letters."
"No, this is my father's older sister."
"I didn't know your father had a sister."
"Neither did I. Well, I knew he had one, but she disappeared so long ago, everyone assumed she was dead. You can read the letter if you want to. It's in the top right-hand drawer of my desk."
Kate padded down the hallway and brought it back, three pages of cotton bond covered with strong, thick writing. What would a handwriting analyst make of that hand? she thought idly, and sat down on the edge of the bed to read it.
"My dear niece," it began. By the middle of the second page, Kate's face was crinkled up in amusement, and when she came to the end, she laughed aloud. She took a moment to look back over the peculiar document. "A twenty-four-karat loony, isn't she?" she said with a chuckle. "As if you'd jump at the chance to join an old lady you've never met out in the sticks. You could borrow one of Jon's flannel shirts to chop firewood in. That is a truly great letter - I especially like the idea of hiring a PI to gather information about a niece. The throwaway line about malaria is good, too." She retrieved her cold coffee and took a swallow.
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