With Child

by Laurie R. King

  “Hello, Jon,” she said, sidling past them with her arms full of bags and packs. “It’s good to see you.”

  The next day was Sunday, but Kate managed to track down the surgeon who had pieced her head together. He was at the hospital checking up on a trio of drunk-driving injuries from the evening before and agreed to see her.

  When she saw him, their conversation consisted of “Does that hurt?” (No.) “What about that?” (Yes.) and “Any fevers or headaches?” (No, and Not for ten days.) With a warning to avoid hard things with her skull for a while, he scrawled a note allowing her back on limited duty. She took it, and broke out in a cold sweat.

  She walked back to the car, unaware that she was getting rained on, and drove out of the parking garage, fully intending to go home. Somehow or other, she didn’t get there. Instead, she drove out to the coast highway and parked, watching the waves pound furiously at the shore. The car shook with the gusts of wind, and the windshield became opaque with spray. After a while, she got out and walked into the maelstrom.

  An hour later, face scoured raw and her entire body feeling cleansed, she unlocked the door and got back in. As she drove home, she tried not to think about Monday. Monday, when she would go back to work, to find that the storm of publicity and the lightning strikes of filthy rumors had moved south, directly into the Hall of Justice. How many obscene notes would be waiting for her? How many photographs confiscated from the collections of pederasts would find their way into her papers, appear on the walls of the toilet cubicles? How many disgusting objects could her colleagues come up with to torment a lesbian rumored to know more than she was telling about the disappearance of a child?

  Kate did not know if she could summon the strength to cope with another campaign of whispers. She actually hoped, prayed, for a relapse, a headache powerful enough to justify her absence. However, Monday dawned with nothing worse inside her skull than the muzziness of a sleepless night. She put on her holster, feeling weary to her bones and cold with dread, and went to work.

  Kate’s finger hovered over the DOOR CLOSE button on the elevator, but it did not actually make contact, and the door slid open at the fourth floor. She stepped out and walked down the hall to the Homicide Department. Inevitably, the first person she saw was Sammy Calvo, who could be offensive even when he was trying to be friendly. She braced herself, and he looked up from his desk and smiled at her.

  “Casey! Hey, great, glad you’re back. It’s been really dull around here without you.”

  “Er, thanks. I guess.”

  The phone in front of him rang, cutting short any further, more devastating phrases. Kitagawa appeared next, his nose in a file until he was almost on top of her.

  “Morning, Kate. How’s the head?”

  “Doing better, thanks.”

  “You still on leave?”

  “I’m on a limited medical for the next three or four weeks.”

  “Right. When you get a chance, let’s go over the cases you were working.”

  “Sure. I mean, fine.” He put his nose back into the file and went out. However, his attitude meant nothing, Kate told herself. Kitagawa would have been polite to Jack the Ripper.

  Tom Boyle caught her as she was stowing her gun and her lunch in a desk drawer.

  “Hi, Kate, how you feeling?”

  “Fine, Tommy boy. How was Christmas?” she ventured.

  “Nuts, as usual. My brother-in-law broke his wrist playing kick the can in the street after dinner, and Jenny’s grandmother cracked her dentures on a walnut shell in the fruitcake. How was yours?” He seemed to catch himself, and looked uncomfortable. “Oh, right. I don’t suppose you had one, really.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she agreed.

  “I think we’ll go away next year, just Jenny and the kids and me. Disneyland or something. How’s Al doing?”

  “He’s hanging in there.”

  “Yeah. Not much else he can do, is there? Well, I gotta go. See you.”

  Something was very odd here. Everyone was entirely too friendly. The messages on her desk, when she sorted through them, not only contained nothing filthy, but there were two generic greetings and a casual invitation to lunch from another detective, a woman Kate had worked with on a vice case some months before. Finally, when it began to seem that every person in the building—uniform, plainclothes, and support staff alike—was finding some reason to pass by her desk and say hello, she went to hunt down Kitagawa. She cornered him outside the interrogation rooms, ushered him inside one, and shut the door behind her.

  “All right. What’s up?”

  “Ah, Kate. Is this a good time to—”

  “I want to know why everyone is so goddamned cheerful around here. Everyone in the building knows that I’m fine, Lee’s fine, Jon is just dandy, and Al’s as well as can be expected. Not one person has mentioned that Jules is still missing. Why the hell not?”

  “They are probably aware that the subject causes you discomfort.”

  “Since when do my feelings—” She stopped. “Al. Al had something to do with this.”

  “He made a couple of phone calls, yes, to let us know that you might be back.”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  Kitagawa squinted down at the form in his hand, although as far as Kate knew, he’d never had anything but perfect sight.

  “You know,” he said in pedantic tones, “the police, perhaps more so than other people, do not care for outsiders tormenting one of their own. Even when that member has not fit in terribly well before, if another group who is perceived as ‘the enemy’ begins pursuit, we have an extraordinary urge to close ranks around our threatened member.”

  Kate stared at him, openmouthed.

  “An interesting insight into group dynamics, don’t you think? Although you, with your background in sociology, would know all about it.” He smiled, then reached past her to open the door, leaving her standing there.

  When Kate went home that night, she told Lee about the conversation, and about a day surrounded by the gruff support of her colleagues.

  “God,” said Lee. “I couldn’t think what was worrying you. I didn’t even think of that. You must feel relieved.”

  “Relieved? I feel like I’d just heard the sirens start up in response to an ‘officer down’ call.”

  That night, for the first time since late August, Kate slept in the main bedroom.

  For three and a half days after that, Kate succeeded in enduring the unremitting friendliness of the San Francisco Police Department. Then on Friday, in the late morning, there was a telephone call for her.

  It was Al. He said, “We’ve had a letter.”

  Seventeen

  “You’re not to know,” Al said quickly. “Don’t react to what I say. If the FBI or D’Amico find out I’ve been talking to you, they’ll shut me out completely.”

  “I’m…glad you’ve had good weather.” She smiled stiffly at Tom Boyle, standing next to her desk, and willed him to move away.

  “There’s someone near you. Okay, just listen. We had a letter, just a brief one, claiming to be from the Strangler. He said Jules wasn’t one of his.” Something of Kate’s psychic message must have gotten through to Boyle, because he moved away.

  “Surely you must be getting a hundred letters a day, saying all kinds of things,” she protested in a low voice.

  “He gave some details it would be difficult to know, unless he’s got access to FBI records.”

  “My God,” Kate whispered, trying with difficulty to keep her face straight. “Have you seen it? The letter?”

  “A copy of it.”

  “And?”

  “It’s an identical typewriter to the original burial letter. And it has the right flavor. Indignant that he would be credited—his word—with a kill he didn’t do. Plus that, it was mailed in the same way he sends the funeral money, to an apparently random name with the address of the police station, so it doesn’t catch the attention of the post office until it reaches the
local branch.”

  “Did it say anything else?”

  “It said, I quote, ‘I don’t know why you’re trying to credit me with the missing California girl. Asian girls don’t have any curl in their hair.’ The Strangler always takes a snip of hair from the back of the head, and there’s never been a breath in any of the reports about it. So watch yourself with that knowledge, too.”

  “What’s the reaction up there?”

  “It’s got everyone standing on their head. D’Amico thinks the Strangler’s cracking, that this is the first step to turning himself in. There’re three psychiatrists shouting at one another down the hall right now.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What I’ve done all along: keep an open mind, and look at everything. All I can do.”

  “Any way I can help?”

  “I can’t think of a damn thing.”

  Neither could Kate. She asked after Jani, Al asked after Lee, neither listened to the other’s reply, and both hung up feeling, if anything, more depressed than ever.

  At one o’clock that afternoon, Kate thought of something she could do. She hunted down the file of the case that had begun, for her, with a search for a lost boy and ended with a piece of galvanized pipe, and after a bit of wading about, she found what she was looking for: the phone number of the foster home that had taken in Dio.

  He was in school, of course, but she asked for, and eventually received, permission to meet the boy and have a conversation—alone.

  She had to park illegally, but she was at the school when it let out. She almost missed him, he had changed so much in the last month, but his round-shouldered stance gave him away, that and the distance between him and the other students.

  “Hello, Dio,” she said, falling in at his side.

  He stopped dead and looked at her warily. “Inspector Martinelli?”

  “Call me Kate. What’s the matter, didn’t you recognize me on my feet and without a bandage on my head?”

  “I guess not. You look…better.”

  “You look a little different, too.”

  She’d been referring to his obvious good health and the five pounds he’d put on, but he ran a hand through his neat haircut and said, with an attempt at humor that held a trace of bitterness, “My disguise. I’m passing for normal.”

  “Let me know if you manage. I never did. I’d like to talk with you for a little while. Wanda said it was okay.”

  “They like me home right after school,” he said uncertainly.

  “I told her I’d take you home later. Only, I’m parked in a red zone, so the first thing we have to do is move my car. Want to go get a hamburger?”

  “Sure. Is this your car? Cool.”

  “Jules—” Kate stopped, occupying herself with the door locks for a moment. “Jules told me that cool was back in use.”

  They got into the car.

  “Have you heard anything about her?” Dio asked, looking straight ahead.

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you think that Strangler got her, like the papers say?”

  “I don’t know, Dio. I honestly don’t know.”

  “She’s the greatest person in the world,” he said simply, then shut his mouth hard against further revelations.

  Kate turned the key and put the car in gear without answering. Neither of them spoke to the other until they were seated, with their hamburgers on the table between them.

  “How do you like Wanda and Reg?” she asked. Kate privately thought of the Steiners, whom she had met in any number of cases involving damaged children, as saints of God.

  “They’re okay. Kind of like boot camp or something, but she’s a great cook. We eat at the same time every day,” he said, as if describing the odd habits of exotic natives. “I even have a room to myself.” Regular meals, privacy, and having a person to notice whether or not you were home from school was clearly foreign ground to Dio. Foreign, but, by the sound of it, not entirely unpleasant.

  “Sounds like you come from a big, confused family,” Kate commented. According to his file, he had consistently refused to speak about his past, where he came from, to give his full name, or even tell them if Dio was his real given name. It was no different now: He closed his mouth and his face, and Kate immediately backed away.

  “Hey, man, I’m not trying to pump you. Dio, look at me.” She waited until his sullen eyes came up. “I don’t care where you come from, so long as you’re better off now than you were before. I just want to know what you and Jules talked about.”

  He blinked. “I thought…”

  “You thought what?”

  “That you’d want to talk about Weldon.”

  “The squat isn’t my case anymore, other than having to testify. No, I want to know about Jules. Do you mind telling me about her?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Dio, she’s thirteen years old. She comes from a very sheltered background. She’s missing, and I don’t know why. It appears that there’s a chance—a very, very small chance, but it’s there—that the Strangler did not take her. Now, the FBI and everyone else up in Portland are working on the assumption that it was him. I can’t do anything about that, but I can follow up on the other possibilities. What if she walked away on her own? Did some other son of a bitch kidnap her, or is she still out there somewhere, alone? You see, Dio, I thought I was getting to know Jules pretty well last fall, and then people started telling me things about her that made me realize there were whole parts of her I had no idea about. I’d like to know what you have to add to it.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “For one, she ran away from another hotel last summer. Did she tell you about that?” She could see from his face that he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Last summer when she and her mother were in Germany, they had an argument, and Jules walked out of the hotel. In a foreign country, where she didn’t even speak the language. And she never told me about that. After I found out, I never asked her, because I figured that if she wanted to keep it to herself, that was her business. But not now. Now I need to know everything I can about her. Help me, Dio. It might make a difference.”

  Dio fiddled with the French fries in front of him, then put two in his mouth. Kate took it as a sign of conditional assent.

  “First of all, did Jules ever talk to you about the Northwest? She told me one time that she’d lived in Seattle when she was very young. Do you know if she had any friends there?” Inevitably, she was going over well-trodden ground. The investigation, though concentrating on the Strangler, had not dismissed other possibilities quite as cavalierly as Kate had indicated. Nearly everyone who had come into contact with Jules Cameron, from her boy friend Josh to old neighbors and the families of Jani’s colleagues at the university in Seattle, had been traced and interviewed. The address book Jules had left behind contained only one entry north of California: a school friend who had moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. She was away for the holiday and had written Jules to tell her that.

  Dio thought for a minute, and looking at his face, deep in concentration, Kate realized that this was not a bad-looking young man. In another couple of years, in fact, if he could lose the wary sullenness, he would be handsome.

  “I don’t remember anything. She did tell me that she’d lived in Seattle, but all she could remember was when it snowed once. I think she moved when she was three or four.”

  Jules had been just barely three when Jani got a job at UCLA.

  “Was she happy, do you think?”

  “Jules? Sure. I mean, she didn’t seem unhappy. Except—well, I don’t know. Sometimes she acted kind of preoccupied. She used to get really pissed at her mom. I don’t think her mother ever realized what an amazing person Jules was. Is.”

  “How did she feel about Al? Do you think she may have resented the marriage somehow?”

  “She liked Al a lot. As far as I could tell, she was really looking forward to her mom and him getting married, when I saw
her in December. Last summer, she used to talk a lot about families. She’d found out something about her own family, not very long before. She never told me just what it was, but she said it was ‘ugly.’ It made her feel ugly. And dirty, she said. Her mother’s past made her feel dirty.”

  Kate could feel him opening out, but she was careful not to react. “Tell me what you know about her family.”

  He shrugged, but he wouldn’t look at Kate, and she watched the muscle of his jaw jump.

  “She must have said something to you…about her past.”

  He sat back and stretched his neck, as if easing his shoulders, and resumed play with the three limp fries in front of him. “Just that her mom divorced her dad. She didn’t remember him—Jules, I mean. Just that he was somehow scary. He probably used to beat her mom.”

  The matter-of-factness of his last throwaway observation would have told Kate a great deal about his own family life, had she needed the confirmation.

  “Did Jules tell you that?”

  “No, it just sounded…you know, like something that would happen.” He concentrated on slurping the last of his chocolate shake.

  “You’re probably right,” she began to say, and was startled when the boy across from her slapped the cup down and began to give out a stream of words.

  “She really wanted a family, to be part of a real family, with a mother and a father and a dog. And a baby brother.” His face screwed up in a wry humor that was painfully close to tears. “She wanted a baby brother to take care of. I told her she was stupid, that babies cried all the time and trapped you, but it was all just a fantasy, you know? She just used to talk about it, about making a family. She’d go on and on until I’d want to shout at her.”

  “She didn’t want her own baby, though?” Kate asked cautiously.