He sat down in a handy chair. Could it be she had never left the city at all? He bit his lip. Never left the city. Why had they not thought of that?
Perhaps Serruto had and simply neglected to mention it to Garreth; after all, Garreth had not been deeply involved in the investigation since his injury. He found it easy to imagine how they missed finding her. After ridding herself of the car or hiding it, she probably checked into a hotel in some kind of disguise. With her height, she could even pass as a man.
She had stayed, and watched, and when it was safe, had picked up her belongings. This was one very cool lady. What was it her agent had said about her? All ice and steel inside. Really!
A shiver moved down his spine. The maiden is powerful. Beware of such a maiden. Made of ice and steel and with over forty years head start on him in vampirism and living experience, did he really stand a chance of finding her? What might she do if she suspected he was after her?
Then he shook his head. Personal danger should be the least of his worries. His life was already gone. All she could take away from him now was existence. On the other hand, she had the capacity to harm a great many more people if allowed to continue unchecked.
Very well, then . . . he must keep going. He needed a direction, though. Any help he might have gained from her belongings had disappeared. He had to proceed on what he already knew.
What did he know?
The writing paper still remained in the desk. He took out a sheet and itemized his knowledge. She came, probably, from a Germanic background. She sometimes used Germanic names. She spoke German and Russian.
He made a note to find out through one of the local universities the location of German and Russian groups near each other in the United States around World War I when she was born.
Could any of her belongings regionalize her? Too bad he did not know rocks well enough to describe those in the type tray to a geologist. If all of them were childhood "treasures" as other objects in the tray seemed to suggest, and if two or more came from a single geographic area, it might have been a lead. All he remembered, though, was the black shark tooth. Was that something he could use?
The apartment had given him as much as it was ever going to. He left, checking out the window beside the door to make sure the street was clear before passing through to the porch, and drove down to Fisherman's Wharf.
A few of the shops in the area remained open, catching late tourist trade. He wandered into one. "Do you have shark's teeth?" he asked the girl behind the counter.
She took him to a section where the wall displayed small circles of jawbone lined with rows of wicked teeth. He studied the teeth. They looked to be the same shape as the teeth he had seen, but were all white, not black.
"Do you have any black shark's teeth?"
She blinked. "Black? I've never seen black ones before."
He tried a similar shop farther down the street with the same results. The two clerks and a customer there had never seen or heard of black shark's teeth, either.
The time had come, he decided, to seek expert advice. In the morning he would call one of the universities and ask them where black shark's teeth came from.
Morning. He chafed at that. Why did it always have to be during the day when he could accomplish anything? He crossed Jefferson and began wandering through the arcades of the Cannery, peering into its shop windows fuming in impatience. Nothing was open when he felt most like working. Lane had taken convenience from him, too.
Then, in the window of a jewelry shop, he saw them . . . earrings, hooped for pierced ears, with small black teeth dangling from them! The shop had closed, of course, but a light still burned and he could see someone moving around inside. Garreth rapped on the window.
A man came out of a back room. He shook his head, pointing at the sign in the window stating business hours.
"I just want to ask a question," Garreth called.
I'm closed, the man's mouth said.
"I just want to know where those earrings come from!"
Come back tomorrow.
Garreth groped in his jacket pocket, then swore when he remembered there was no longer a badge to pull out and dangle before the window.
"Sir," he called, "this is very important. I must-"
But the man shook his head a final time and walked out of the room, leaving Garreth swearing in frustration. The question would have taken only a minute to ask and answer. The shopkeeper would have opened up fast enough for a badge. So why did he refuse Garreth that minute?
Because I don't have a badge; I'm only a civilian now.
And as the implications of that beyond the present inconvenience sank in, Garreth saw how truly alone he stood against his quarry, and he shivered in the cold wind blowing down his unprotected back.
9
The TV morning news warned citizens to drive cautiously. Fog had rolled in overnight and blanketed the entire city so heavily that it lay in a dim, shadowless twilight. Foghorns sounded from Mile Rocks east to Fleming Point and from Point San Pablo south to Hunters Point. Traffic accident investigation units ran fifteen calls behind. Garreth, though, welcomed the fog. He still felt the sun above it, weighting and weakening him, but for once he could enjoy opening the shades and letting such daylight as there was fill the apartment. He could sit by the window wearing his trooper glasses, feet upon the sill, phone in hand, and look out at the billowing grayness while he dialed the number of the biology department at the University of San Francisco.
"My name is Garreth Mikaelian. I need to talk to someone who can tell me where certain kinds of shark's teeth are found."
He would have thought that was a simple request, but the phone went on hold for what seemed to be an eternity before a reedy male voice said, "This is Dr. Edmund Faith. You're the gentleman who needs to know where to find certain breeds of sharks?"
"I need to know where their teeth are found. Let me explain."
"By all means, Mr.-"
"Mikaelian. I found a shark's tooth in a shop on Fisherman's Wharf the other day. It's unusual because it's black. I'd like to find another and have a pair of earrings made for my wife. However, the girl in the shop had no idea where the tooth came from and neither did anyone else I asked."
"A black shark's tooth?"
"Yes. Do you know where in the world they come from?"
"Mr. Mikaelian, if you're interested in black shark's teeth, you don't want me; you want a paleontologist. I'm not sure of all the areas they're found, but I do know that the black ones are fossils."
"Fossils?" Garreth sat upright.
"Maybe I can give you a name," Dr. Faith went on. "Let's see." Over the line came the rustle of paper. "Yes. Try Dr. Henry Ilfrod in the geology department." He gave Garreth a phone number.
Garreth jotted the number down, then jiggled the phone button and dialed the new number.
Dr. Ilfrod, a secretary informed Garreth, was in class. Garreth remembered from his college days how difficult it could be to find a particular professor when one needed him, and with a sigh, said, "I need information on locating fossil shark's teeth. I'll talk to anyone who can help me."
"I'll see if the graduate students are in their office," the secretary said.
The phone went on hold again. Garreth drummed his fingers. As much as he preferred phoning to running around in daylight, perhaps he should have driven to the campus. Listening to a phone in limbo, he found it too easy to imagine the secretary finishing a letter then going on coffee break, forgetting about him.
Before long, though, another voice came on the line, pleasantly female, inquiring if she could be of help. Garreth patiently repeated his question. "Can you tell me the areas where black shark's teeth are found?"
"Well." She drew out the word. "Fossil shark's teeth can be found in about seventy-five percent of the country. It's almost all been under water at one time or another."
Garreth sighed. Seventy-five percent? So much for the tooth as a lead to Lane's background.
"But," the
young woman went on, "most of the teeth are white. The only places I know to find the black ones are on the eastern seaboard and in western Kansas."
Garreth scribbled in his notebook. "Just those two places? How easy are the teeth to find there?"
"I think you have to dig back east, but they're on the surface and accessible in Kansas."
Accessible. "Could a kid find one without much trouble?"
"I'm sure he could. I've been told it's possible to pick them up just walking across a plowed field or in the cuts along roads and streams."
Which should be how she acquired it, if the tooth in the type tray were a "treasure." He recalled the other fossils in the type tray. "Are there many kinds of fossils available in the Kansas area, say in limestone?"
"It's wonderful fossil country."
He thanked her and hung up, then sat staring at his scribbled notes. Kansas. The postmark the lab brought up on the burned envelope had a 6 and 7 in it. Harry had said that the Kansas ZIPs used those numbers. He ticked his tongue against his teeth. Did the trail smell warmer?
He went through the phone book again, this time for the number of the sociology department. "I need to talk to someone who can tell me where immigrant German and Russian groups settled in this country."
That brought him more interminable time on hold while the secretary hunted for a likely prospect. She came back suggesting he call in two hours, when a Dr. Iseko would be in his office.
Hanging up, Garreth sat looking out the window. A partial Zip code and-when he reached this Dr. Iseko-areas of German and Russian settlements would still not pinpoint Lane's home exactly. He needed a town. Three partial letters had also been visible on that postmark. What were they? An O or U preceded by A, K, R, or X and followed by any letter beginning with a vertical stroke. He hunted through the bookcase, but had nothing like an atlas, nothing with a detailed map of Kansas in it. It appeared he would have to go out, after all.
He drove down to what had become his best source of information lately, the public library. There he spent an hour, with the zip directory, fording towns with 67 as the first or second two numbers and whose name contained letters in the right combination to match the postmark. Halfway through the list of towns, a name leaped out of the book at him: Pfeifer. Pfeifer! Eagerly, he raced through the rest of the names. Ten fit. He looked up their locations in an atlas. Of the ten, two possibles lay in the immediate vicinity of Pfeifer, Dixon to the southwest and Baumen to the northeast.
Then he went looking for a telephone to call the university back. This time he found Dr. Iseko in his office.
"I'm a writer doing research for a book," Garreth told him. "I need to know if Kansas has communities of German immigrants living in close proximity to Russian immigrants, and if so, where."
"I'm afraid there are none quite like that in Kansas," the anthropologist replied.
Garreth's stomach dropped. He swore silently in disappointment. "But what about towns like Pfeifer?"
"That's the Ellis County area? Pfeifer and the communities around it like Schoenchen and Munjor don't have German and Russian immigrants; they were settled by the so-called Volga Germans, Germans who immigrated to Russia and lived along the Volga before immigrating to this country in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century."
Something electric sizzled through Garreth. He felt all his hair stand on end. "They're a kind of mixed German and Russian, then? Does their language have both German and Russian in it?"
"It most certainly does. It's a very unique language. An acquaintance of mine wrote his dissertation on it."
Claudia etc. had said: It was nothing but a hodgepodge of German and Russian.
"How large an area did these Volga Germans settle?"
"The Catholic group is mainly around Ellis County. However, there was a Protestant German-Russian group who settled in Bellamy and Barton counties, and some of them extend into Rush and Ness."
Garreth wrote it all down. After thanking the doctor and hanging up, he went back to the library and the atlas. Dixon lay in Rush County; Baumen, in Bellamy County.
Back to the telephone, calling Information in Kansas, calling Information in Dixon and Baumen. Did they have listings for Biebers? Yes. Both had Biebers.
Excitement rose in Garreth. He might be completely wrong, Lane might come from the East, but Kansas looked good. Very good. He had a feeling about it. A Grandma Doyle-quality Feeling? Or perhaps blood called to blood. After all, in a sense, he was Lane's son; she had made him.
However strongly he felt the key to her lay in those two small towns, though, he would never know for certain without further investigation. He could not do it by phone, either. If she were in touch with people there, they might warn her that she had been traced. To be effective needed subtlety.
He would have to go there.
10
The country did not have the dinner-plate flatness Garreth expected, but its gold-brown hills, so unlike either the yellow ones of California or those in San Francisco, stepped with streets and houses, rolled to an almost unimaginably distant horizon, only sparsely dotted with trees and human constructs. The sky arched overhead, a cobalt bowl of infinity broken only here and there by wisps of cloud. The sun burned Garreth's eyes even behind his glasses. Driving south toward Dixon out of Hays, he felt overwhelmed, a mote crushed between the immensity of earth and sky. He wondered whether it might have been wiser to drive during the day instead of only at night, sleeping in his little tent at public campsites by day. Then he could have gradually accustomed himself to the broadened horizon instead of being suddenly hit by it on this drive.
To take his mind off his unexpected agoraphobia, Garreth thought ahead to Dixon, rehearsing his cover story. He wanted to hunt his relatives. When his grandmother died last year, she had left a letter revealing that she was not the real mother of Garreth's father. Phillip Mikaelian, the letter said, had really been born to a young girl who roomed with them and became pregnant out of wedlock. After the birth, the girl ran away, abandoning the baby, and rather than send it to an orphanage, Garreth's grandmother had raised the boy as her own. She had no idea where the real mother was, but she had a photograph and remembered that the girl used to write letters to a town in the Ellis County area of Kansas. As he was currently between jobs, he had decided to trace his real grandmother's family. He looked young enough to pass as the grandson of a woman born around 1916.
The photograph he carried was actually of Grandma Doyle, taken in the late twenties when she was seventeen and fresh from Ireland. The hard cardboard square stiffened the inside pocket of his coat. Feeling it, Garreth remembered two weekends ago, when he asked for it.
Handing it to him, his grandmother had said, "May it bring you she who killed you, and then a peaceful sleep."
She had known what he was from the moment he walked in the house. She said nothing, but beyond his parents, he saw her reach for the silver Maltese cross she always wore around her neck.
"Garreth," his mother had exclaimed in horror, "you're becoming skin and bones!"
His father said, "What the hell is this I read in the paper about your partner being shot and you quitting the department?"
But his eyes and attention were on Grandma Doyle. "Grandma?" He reached out to hug her but she hurriedly backed away and left the room. Garreth stared stricken after her. "Grandma!"
His mother touched him on the arm. "Please forgive her. I think she's getting old. Ever since you were attacked, she's insisted you're dead. I think she just needs time to accept that, for once, her Feeling was wrong."
Garreth had given silent thanks that his mother misinterpreted the reason for his distress. "I understand." Which did nothing, however, to lessen the pain of having someone in his family fear him.
"What's been going on out there with you?" his father asked.
Garreth's jaw tightened in resentment. Could they have at least a little of: How are you, son? and: It's good to see you home in one piece, rather than immediately mo
ving into: Up against the wall. Spread those feet. You don't have the right to remain silent, and anything you say or don't say will be used against you.
Explaining was not only going to be difficult; it would be impossible. Nevertheless, Garreth tried.
His mother went white, listening. "Will you go back to college now?"
He heard the relief in her voice. Of course she was glad to have him out; now she did not have to fear phone calls about him.
But his father said, "Shane never gives up. They've operated on that knee four times and sometimes he has to play filled with painkillers, but he always plays. He never quits because he's been hurt a little. He's never walked out of a game because he was going to be penalized, either."
That stung. Garreth protested, "I didn't resign because of what the shooting board might say or do!"
"Are you going to see a psychiatrist like they suggested?" his mother asked.
His father snorted. "He doesn't need a shrink; he just needs to quit feeling sorry for himself." He leveled a hard stare at Garreth. "You ought to ask for reinstatement, take your lumps from the shooting board like a man, and get back to work."
Garreth had not argued. "Yes, sir," he said, and escaped from the house into the backyard. Even sunlight was preferable to further conversation with his father.
Why did this have to happen? He loved his father dearly. If only the man could ask a question without making it sound like interrogation and offer an opinion that did not seem to be an order. The worst part was, Garreth could not help wondering if his father was right.
The earth welcomed him as he sat down in the shade of the big cottonwood where he and Shane had built a tree house years ago. The platform still sat in the fork, a little more weathered each year but sound enough yet for Brian and for Shane's kids to play on it when they visited.
Garreth had lain back against the trunk, rubbing his forehead as he thought about Brian. As soon as he visited the boy the question of adoption was bound to come up again. He closed his eyes wearily. What should he do about it this time?
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