Good Morning, Killer

Andrew and I seemed morbid and heavy with our serious questions and oversized adultness in that fluffy room. I wanted to go home and throw on a pair of jeans.

“Why did you say that, Stephanie?”

Stephanie’s creamy complexion turned pink. All at once.

“I don’t know—”

“Don’t trip,” Ethan warned.

I stood up. My back was stiff from wearing heels all day. “I think we’d better get your mom in on this.”

“No. You don’t have to.”

“When are you going to tell us the truth?”

Stephanie said nothing, trembling lips compressed. Her fingers held the denim coverlet, trying not to trip.

“If you’re not telling the truth about a silly car, how can we believe you’re telling the truth about something as important as what was going down with Juliana?”

“Obstruction of justice will look real impressive on your college application,” I suggested.

“That’s bullshit.”

“Bullshit makes the world go round,” Andrew shrugged.

“You can’t do that,” Ethan insisted. “We’re minors.”

“Ask your dad.” Offering my Nextel. “Call him up.”

“You know what, kids?” said Andrew. “This is bush. A girl is missing. You want this on your conscience the rest of your lives? Or does that not mean anything to you? Never mind. You have five seconds.”

He looked at his watch.

“See what I told you?” Ethan said to Stephanie in a high panicked voice. “She did not have a clue.”

“Juliana didn’t have a clue? What did she not have a clue about?” I asked with magnificent restraint.

This is the value of training.

“First of all,” said Stephanie, her clear eyes filling with tears, “it’s not our fault.”

Four

They lied. Of course they lied. They had no intention of meeting Juliana at the bus stop after school. The plan was for Juliana to score some weed and meet them at a diner called Johnny Rockets.

It wasn’t Stephanie or Ethan or Kristin or Brennan or Nahid’s fault that yesterday Juliana went to Crystal Dreams, a New Age store on the Promenade, and never came back. Privately, they thought it was a hoot. Only “some fool” would be so “ghetto” as to go to a public place of business and think they could just walk in and buy drugs. Like what was she going to do, go into the back room where they were smoking crack or whatever, and they’d all be so happy to see little Juliana with her piggybank full of quarters? It was “awesome” to imagine someone so “dumb” not getting ripped off, anyway. Maybe that’s what happened, Stephanie suggested, through beet red sobs: someone got paranoid at Juliana’s “totally tourist” attitude.

No way they asked her to score. They only showed up at Johnny Rockets mainly as a goof, because, as Stephanie and Ethan insisted over and over, they and their friends did not smoke marijuana. In fact they were sure Juliana hadn’t even tried it. That’s what made the whole thing “whack.” Later, we found a stash in Stephanie’s locker at Laurel West Academy.

To me, it was beautiful. But then, I like TV shows about beauty in nature, such as those South American frogs whose dazzling vermilion skin secretes a deadly poison.

We could now establish Juliana’s location yesterday at approximately 3:30 p.m. — and there had been a van, Stephanie and Ethan disclosed when Mrs. Kent had joined us, arms crossed stonily, in her daughter’s Day-Glo hip- hop cradle — a green van parked in a delivery zone at the north end of the Promenade. It pulled away when a Brink’s truck elbowed in. The kids had laughed when it was chased again by UPS. “Dork.” Andrew and I grabbed a noodle bowl and jetted over to the Promenade. The crowds were light for a weekday night because of the rain, which had sucked away the popcorny city stink of pigeons and cheap hamburgers and cigarette smoke, and freed some walking space where there were usually impenetrable ranks of bodies.

The Third Street Promenade was a successful outdoor mall geared to fourteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, anchored by a couple of big bookstores, a deli, some multiplex movie theaters. Clothing chains and street performers and carts selling dance-music CDs had replaced the aging dry goods stores and five-and-dimes from the sixties. Dinosaur fountains and artsy banners were supposed to make you feel safe.

(I had to chuckle when a crime scene instructor, formerly a Chicago homicide detective, who was out here from Quantico to conduct a seminar in which he showed slides of beheaded babies and disemboweled and maggot-encrusted bodies, found our homeless population less than paradise. “A lot of creepy people around here,” he said.) A gate was drawn and Crystal Dreams was dark when we arrived. I’d have an agent over here at first light, but right away we checked exits and entrances, the upper stories — and the parking structure and alleys for a persistent green van.

“It would have been three in the afternoon,” I reminded Andrew.

He nodded, peering up. “Exterior video cameras?”

I scoped the cornice of the brick frontier-style building. “No such luck.”

Peering through the gate I saw polished spheres and tarot cards in the window of Crystal Dreams, along with a cockamamy assortment of straw hats, brand-name backpacks, headphones and handbags, most likely stolen. I took out my pad and sketched the scene, indicating the vitamin store that was adjacent, the greeting card shop on the other side, making note of the position of the fountain and the shuttered carts where a stalker could hide. I sat on a bench and let Juliana’s presence come to me: an unformed girl with an ordinary longhaired look who doesn’t want to feel ordinary.

“Her A-list friends are waiting at Johnny Rockets the next block down. If she has the goods, no problem. If she doesn’t, she’s sitting here, scared out of her mind about how she’s ever going to show her face in school.” “Maybe she doesn’t care,” said Andrew.

I shook my head. “She’s vulnerable. Needy. Her violin fell apart, for God’s sake. She can’t go back to the cool kids with nothing.”

Andrew sat heavily beside me.

“I’m too old for this.”

“Get outta town,” I said of the empty Promenade. “This is the most exciting part.”

“I’m just saying, don’t get carried away.”

“With what?”

“Overidentifying. You don’t know anything about this girl.”

But I felt that I did. I knew something. She was an outsider who wanted to belong.

“What if she gets on a bus?” I riffed. “Winds up on the Strip. Or the Beverly Center, runs out of steam. She’s a good girl, doesn’t do this kind of thing. It’s late, she better call Mom, but she doesn’t. Why?”

Andrew: “Because she’s come into harm’s way.”

We sat in silence. A wind blew up. Strings of white lightbulbs flexed and dipped.

“What do you say, baby? Let’s go home.”

I snuggled against him. “How about Amsterdam?”

He had heard such improbabilities before and indulged me with an arm around the shoulder.

“Although,” I considered, “I’d take the Sandpiper motel.”

“The one up the coast? That was just a shitty little beach joint.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

He was silent, fingering my hair, and we watched the lights, like birds caught in a net, straining to release a flight of radiance from the gloomy trees.

I wish I had asked how he really felt about what happened at the Sandpiper, but I was afraid to push. I