With Child (19 page)

The lights of Seattle did not rise up to greet the plane until nearly two o'clock the following morning. Waiting for the bag holding every warm garment Jon had been able to dig up took forty endless minutes, and renting a car nearly as long. She drove south on the empty freeways, through Tacoma and Olympia, and listened to the radio. Every news report trumpeted the arrest of Anton Lavalle, the homegrown American boy of French-Canadian stock, for the murders of at least three of the Strangler victims.

When she stopped at an all-night cafe to pour some coffee into her numb body, the name Lavalle was on the tongues of the waitress and the cook, the truckers and the highway patrolman, and when she spread out her map to consider the best route, the waitress was unsurprised at her destination.

"You want this turnoff right here, honey," she told Kate, tapping the map with an authoritative red fingernail. "Twenty miles up and then watch for the crowds." Kate laughed politely. "Want some more cream with that?"

"Yes, please, and could I have some toast or a muffin or something?" She was dimly aware that a hamburger with Dio was the last meal she'd eaten.

"Got a nice bran muffin, fresh yesterday. Give you twenty-five cents off."

"That'll do fine. Thanks."

An hour later, Kate realized that the waitress had not been joking about the crowds: A line of parked cars and vans suddenly materialized at one side of the narrow two-lane road, with two figures carrying equipment trotting away from her headlights. She pulled over uncertainly, unwilling simply to park and walk into the night, but while she was trying to make up her mind, a car pulled up behind her. Its driver and a passenger got out with bulky bags slung over their shoulders and set off briskly down the road, which, she saw, was beginning to be visible in the first stages of dawn.

"Must be the place," she said aloud. She took her parka out of the bag and put on the boots she'd last worn to search the hills for Jules (both items cleaned and mended by Jon), then locked the bag in the trunk. In that time, two more cars had joined the line, three more intent men trotting down the road, their breath streaming out in the dim morning light. Kate tied her shoelaces and followed them.

There was chaos at the gate, where a dirt road branched off from the paved one. Kate held up her badge, put down her head, and shoved her way to the front. Even then, it took a long time to convince the short-tempered guards to let her through, a very long time after a local television man had recognized her and began to plague her with questions she could not possibly answer. The nearest guard let her in the gate, and when a convoy of emergency vehicles appeared, trying to push their way through the throng, he waved her on in disgust, then left to go and tear a few verbal chunks out of the nosy civilians.

"Hey, you!" he bellowed. "Yeah you, good-looking. You don't move your ass, I'm going to chain it to a tree." Kate slipped past him and set off up the hill.

The dirt road was nearly a mile long, climbing the side of a gentle hill. Once when Kate hit a patch of silence, free from the crackle of radios and amplified voices below and the growl of a generator from above, for a moment she found herself strolling along a country lane in the dappled sun of a crisp morning that seemed more spring than winter, complete with birdsong: nothing to say that she was nearing a pit of horror. Nothing at all, except for the faces on the men in the car she met around the corner.

She had known it was going to be bad, this lair of a killer, and the closer she drew, the greater the dread grew, until she felt the breakfast muffin like a fist beneath her heart.

Crime scenes invariably gave birth to the black humor of professional cleaner-uppers, and the worse the scene - a weeks-old body, a shotgun wound, an evisceration - the more mordant the jokes. Not many cops smile at the scene of unpleasant death, though they will occasionally bare their teeth, and often they laugh. But the grin is that of a death's-head, and the humor is blue, or, more often, black.

At a certain point, however, even the armor of humor fails, and the hard pleasure of triumph at the arrest of a stone killer has no chance against the reality of the man's acts. This was like approaching the epicenter of some horrendous natural disaster. The airy winter-bare woods and rutted dirt road were soon filled with grim-faced men and women who did not meet one another's eyes and whose shoulders were stiff with an aimless rage and despair. The short tempers that she had seen down at the main road were intensified up here into a barely controlled fury, and she let her face go blank and picked up her pace so as not to draw attention. It was going to be very bad.

But when she got there, she found no corpses being exhumed, no smell of death on the clean air. People were standing around or going about their jobs, but always, she soon saw, their glances returned to the ordinary run-down white trailer at the far end of the road - an old white box, its metal sides begrimed with mildew and rust, its roof hidden beneath lichen and leaves and layers of black plastic sheeting, ordinary except for the amount of attention being given it. The horror here was not in human remains; the horror reflected in the faces came from the knowledge of what sort of creature had inhabited the trailer.

The command post trailer was already in place, bristling with antennae and vibrating with foot traffic and the power generator, overwhelming its sick and decrepit white cousin. Two of the dozen or more vehicles packed into the clearing had their emergency lights on, pulsing the trees in syncopated bursts of color.

There was no sun here yet, if indeed there ever was on this side of the hill. It looked dank and the air smelled musty beneath the fumes of gas and diesel motors. Kate zipped her jacket to her chin, made sure her ID was clipped to the pocket, and approached the command post.

"Al Hawkin?" she asked a man in the uniform of the local sheriff's department. He shrugged and walked past her. "Al Hawkin?" she asked a plainclothesman. He tipped his head toward the trailer. "Al Hawkin?" she asked a woman who looked like a doctor, just inside the door.

"He's back there, with D'Amico. Can I help you with something?"

"I'm his partner. I need to talk with him."

"His partner? But I --" The woman stopped, studied Kate for a moment with a bit too much interest, blushed lightly when she realized what she was doing, and took a step back. "I'll just let him know..." She turned and walked away into the noisy trailer, leaving Kate to reflect on the price of fame. Or was the word
infamy
?

Al appeared immediately on the woman's heels. He had his head down and kept it down, not greeting Kate, but merely gathered her up and propelled her down the steps ahead of him. He paused behind her, and she heard him say, "Harris, get someone to turn off those flashers, would you? It makes the place look like a goddamn movie set." Then he was beside her. "C'mon," he said, and set off through the trees. She had to trot to keep up with him, down a well-worn path between some shrubs.

The path ended at a sheer drop of about fifteen feet, which, judging by the cans and containers littering the ground between the bottom of the cliff and a busy creek some six or eight feet farther down, had served as the trailer's garbage dump. A bulky uniform was standing guard at the site. He looked up at their approach, flipped a gloved hand at Hawkin, and turned his back again.

Al moved to a fallen tree a few feet back from the cliff face. Kate went to sit beside him. It was quiet here, and all she could see was woods. No garbage, no cop, no serial killer's trailer, just growing things. Al took a nearly flat package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and lit it. She did not comment.

"How's Jani?" she said instead.

"She's in the hospital."

"Al! What happened?"

"Couple days ago, before this latest. She's all right, just collapsed. They've got her on tranks and vitamins. She hasn't been eating, and I didn't notice it." Kate opened her mouth to protest at the tired self-loathing in his voice, then closed it again.

"Al," she started to say, but he spoke at the same instant.

"Videotapes," he said. The word burst out under pressure, from jaws that were held so tightly clenched, they must have ached. "Seven videotapes. One for each girl, more or less. A couple of them are mixed together."

"Oh shit, Al. Was there one --"

"No. No sign of Jules. None at all."

Kate could think of nothing to say.

"They're not finished yet, of course. But there're no traces so far, none of her clothes, no tape. And he's still saying he didn't do her."

She waited.

"However, there're two girls we know were his, and they didn't have any videos, either. One of those he says he didn't do, but we know he did. There's even a necklace of hers here; he's just forgotten. Probably because he didn't have a tape for her, he forgot about her. D'Amico thinks... D'Amico thinks that he forgot the camera, or the battery was... the battery... Oh shit."

Al Hawkin threw his cigarette to the forest floor and slowly doubled over, as if he'd been hit in the stomach. He turned away from her, placed both of his fists hard against his forehead, and curled up fetally, his back to her. Kate was torn between the need to offer physical comfort and the man's intense need for privacy, and she held her hands out to his shoulders, hovering over his jacket for a long time, before she lowered them gently to touch him.

The tears he cried were few and small and bitter, and in barely a minute, he drew in a long breath and sat up straight. He threw his head back, blinking wide-eyed at the treetops and taking sharp breaths through his open mouth before he remembered his handkerchief and used it.

"I've got to get back," he said eventually, not looking at her.

She laid a hand on his arm. "Al, let me help. I'll finish looking at the tapes for you. I'd recognize her as well as you would."

"No," he said quickly.

"Al, I --"

"No! Martinelli, I sent you back to San Francisco. What the hell are you doing here, anyway?"

"I thought --" She caught herself, and instead of saying, I thought you wanted me to come, she said, "I thought I might be of some use."

"There's nothing for you to do here."

It was probably true; the place was swarming with cops already.

"I'll talk to D'Amico."

"I wouldn't," he warned. "He'll take your head off."

Kate sat on the fallen tree and watched her partner pick his way along the pathway, and she continued to sit, with the smell of the killer's garbage mixing with the clean smell of woods and the diesel whiff from the growling generator, and she thought.

No, she would not again beg D'Amico for a meaningless task. However, she could not bear to go back to San Francisco, not yet. She had not even had time to think about the questions raised by the previous evening's interviews, and unfortunately Hawkin was in no condition to talk them over. All he could do was keep his shoulder on the load he had taken to himself. She had to admit that, other than stand by his side, there was nothing for her to do here, but she refused to go home and meekly return to work; she would at least carry through on the line of investigation she had started the day before, pointless though it undoubtedly was.

Assume, for the moment, that Jules was not lifted from the motel parking lot as a random girl by a recreational murderer. This left, as Kate saw it, three options. One, that Jules had chosen to leave, on her own and without so much as a note, for reasons unknown. Two, that there was a second killer, or a copycat, in the Pacific Northwest. Or three, that someone had been after Jules Cameron specifically.

The first one her mind recognized as a real possibility, despite her gut feeling that Jules would have left a note, however misleading its contents. The second, too, was possible, if statistically unlikely. But the third...

If someone had wanted Jules particularly, what would this mean? Why near Portland? And could it have had any connection with those strange telephone calls Jules had been receiving? "You're mine, Julie," the man had said. Was she now his? And why? Were there links to Dio? Or to Al? Or even to the Russian-speaking computer conversation, for God's sake?

Kate sat on her log a long time before she became aware of the cold and her stiffness. She pulled herself off the tree and went back to the command post, which seemed quieter now that the strobes of the car flashers were off. She found Al outside with a cigarette, not so much smoking it as allowing it to burn itself down while he leaned against a car and stared off into the distance. The words rose up in her throat: Al, would Jules have the skills to survive on the streets? Al, how unbalanced is she? What didn't I see? She wanted badly to ask him, to take advantage of his experience and his ability to see things she often missed. She even tried to tell herself that offering him another option would be a kindness, but when she saw him, she knew that she could not. The familiar rituals of investigation, torturous as they were, were the only thing holding him together now. Remove those props and this man could break.

"I'm going now, Al," was all she said. "I have my pager; it seems to work up here. Do you know where you'll be tonight?"

"Here, maybe, or the hospital."

"Al, you're going to end up in the hospital yourself if you don't take care."

He looked at her blankly, noticed the long-ashed cigarette in his hand, and dropped it, grinding it under his heel.

"I'll call you later, okay?" she asked.

"Fine."

She grasped his arm and squeezed hard, then left him.

She was fortunate going downhill, catching a ride with a sheriff's deputy who took her smoothly through the gate and dropped her at her rental car, unrecognized by the press. She had the car turned and away in thirty seconds, feeling the immense relief of an escape from the gates of hell. For once, she did not mean the media circus, but the site behind them.

Long before she reached the freeway, she had decided that what she needed was a meal and a quiet hotel room. She'd been up in the hills for five hours, but it felt like days since her plane had landed at Sea Tac. Her eyes were gritty, she craved a shower and badly needed a toilet, and her skin was twitchy with a combination of anxiety and adrenaline and simple lack of sleep.