anything about you, you look off into space and mutter. I don't care if your father's a garbageman or something, or if you don't have one. I don't have a father, but that doesn't mean I won't go to a friend's house for dinner. I thought we were friends, anyway. Aren't we?'
Well, um, er, yes, but.
'You don't have to invite me to your house if it's dirty or something. Mom's making hamburgers, is all, and she said I could invite you.'
'You told your mother about me? What did you tell her? What'd she say?'
'I told her there was a new kid I'd met in the park who liked to read, and she said, 'That's nice, honey,' and went back to work. She's writing a book.' That distracted him.
'What kind of book?'
'Like I told you, her field is medieval German literature. This one is on marriage as a symbolic something or other. Pretty boring, really. I looked at a few pages, and even I couldn't make any sense of them. So, will you come to dinner?'
'Your mother will ask questions, and her cop boyfriend' - 'Sorry, Kate, that's what he said,' Jules explained - 'will come looking for me.'
'Why, are you some kind of criminal?'
'No! I mean, in a way. He might think I was. Thing is, Jules, I live here, in the park.'
There followed a lengthy discussion with an incredulous Jules slowly being convinced that yes, a person could actually sleep here, could live in the gaps of her own staid community. Actually, Kate had to admit, the boy sounded smart, and he had found an ideal place for a residence - for the summer, at any rate. He bathed in the backyard swimming pools of dark houses; he ate from the garbage cans of the rich and the fruit trees and tomato vines of the weekend gardeners. He even earned a bit of money, posing as a neighborhood kid willing to mow lawns and do chores (of whom Kate could imagine there were few enough in that particular town). He probably did his share of trying for unlocked back doors and helping himself to small items from cars, but without a criminal brotherhood to back him up, he would have found it a problem to fence goods or sell drugs on any scale. No, he sounded like a springtime runaway who had discovered a superior resting place, an urban Huck Finn's island, until the winter drove him in, into the arms of the city's predators. Kate wished him luck, but she had seen too many of them to hold out much hope, or to feel a great urgency to action.
Jules, however, was worried. Not just because he was without a home - she, too, had read enough Mark Twain to take the edge off the reality the newspapers told her about - and not for fear of what the harder life of October would push him toward. She was worried because he had disappeared.
Kate let her talk on, half-hearing the anxious recital of her visit to the police and sheriff's office, the patrolman who had laughed at her, the park maintenance man who had told her to go home, the downstairs neighbor, Senora Hidalgo, who had thrown a fit when she heard Jules admit to speaking to a stranger and then had listened no more. Kate had known what was coming from the moment Jules had mentioned a boy in the park with an unlikely name. The only surprises were the resourcefulness of the runaway and the persistence of the girl who had befriended him. Kate also noticed, when she more or less automatically got a physical description of the boy from Jules, the complete lack of romance in the girl's words. Dio was clearly a friend, not an adolescent fantasy.
'I know that Al would help,' Jules was saying, 'but he and Mom won't be back until the day after tomorrow, and I would have called him and asked him to make the police listen to me, but then I remembered you, and I thought you might help me look for Dio, at least until Al gets back.'
Kate felt her professional cynicism gently nudged by this declaration of faith - until she called forcefully to mind just whom she was dealing with here, stared hard into the large, innocent, barely-out-of-childhood hazel eyes before her, and saw reflected in them the dim, cool glow of a computer display. Kate, Kate, she chided herself, lack of sleep is no excuse for being taken in by the patter of a twelve-year-old con woman. The kid knew damn well that Kate would jump through flaming hoops for her. Al Hawkin was Kate's partner, but he was also her superior; Al was fighting hard to make points with Jani Cameron; the way to Jani Cameron was through her daughter; therefore, performing this small service would ultimately boost her, Kate's, position. Kate might even work harder to find Dio than Al would - but that was getting too cold-blooded, and surely the timing of Al's absence was coincidental.
'Right,' she said dryly, letting Jules know that she hadn't fallen for it. Nonetheless, she would look. Sure, the boy was likely to be in Los Angeles, or working the streets closer to home, but she was not about to tell that to Jules. Not her job, thank God, to educate a privileged and protected girl about the monsters lurking in the shadows, about the parents with the moral awareness of three-year-olds who, when faced with the problems of a child, be it a crying infant or a prickly teenager, took the simple response of hitting it or getting rid of it. Disposable children, Dio and thousands like him, thrown away by his family, picked up by a pimp for a few years, and thrown away again to die of drugs and disease and the depredations of life in the streets. He had started by bathing in the swimming pools of affluent families, but that wasn't what he was doing now.
None of this to Miss Jules Cameron, however. Something prettier.
'Jules, the policeman you talked to was probably right. I know street people, and the chances are very good he just left - for a few days or weeks, or permanently. Yes, I know he wouldn't have left without telling you, but what if he had to? What if, say, his parents showed up and he didn't want to go home? Wouldn't he then just take off without a word until the coast was clear?' Kate hurried over the thin patches in this argument. 'Does he know how to get in touch with you?'
'Yes. I gave him a notebook for a present, a little one, to fit in his pocket. It had a rainbow on the front. He told me he didn't know when his birthday was, which is ridiculous, of course. I still can't think why he wouldn't tell me that - you can't trace someone by his date of birth, can you? Anyway, I gave him an unbirthday party, made him some microwave brownies with candles and some ice cream, though by the time we ate it, the ice cream was melted and we had to use it like a sauce, and for his present I bought him the notebook. I wrote his name on the front page, just Dio, but in Gothic script, using a calligraphy pen, and on the second page I put my name and address and phone number. You think he's in trouble, don't you?' she said abruptly. 'Kidnapped by a serial killer and tortured to death, like that one up in Seattle, or the man you and Al caught, Andrew Lewis. You just don't want to tell me.'
So much for pretty deceptions. Kate ran her fingers through her still-damp hair, thinking idly that she would really have to get it cut. 'That was a completely different thing, Jules, you know that.'
'But there is someone killing people up in Seattle. He just goes on and on. What if he moved down here?'
'Jules,' Kate said firmly, 'stop trying to frighten yourself. He's killing young women, not homeless boys.' Five of them so far, and granted, all were young and small and most of them had cropped hair, but still.
'You're right,' Jules said, and let out a long sigh. 'I always let my imagination run away with me. In fact, sometimes I —' She stopped, and looked away.
'Sometimes you what?'
'Oh, nothing. It's stupid. It's just that when I was little, I used to believe that if I could imagine something bad, it wouldn't happen to me. Childish, huh?'
'Oh, I don't know,' Kate said slowly. 'It's always the unexpected things that knock you for a loop.'
Jules glanced at her quickly, then away again. 'Yeah, well. It was probably some psychological interpretation of a statistical probability, like saying lightning won't strike the same place twice. I used to lie in bed at night trying to think of all the terrible things that might happen, and it was always a relief to come up with something really awful, because if I could imagine it clearly enough, it was as if it had actually happened, and then I would know that at least I was safe from
The adult vocabulary combined with the earnestness of youth made it difficult to get a grip on Jules Cameron, but for the moment Kate put aside the question of what Jules was telling her and went for the most immediate consideration.
'Jules, I truly do not think you need to worry about serial killers and torture murders. The newspapers make you think that kind of thing happens all the time, and sure, there are a lot of things someone like Dio can get into, things that are not very nice. The world isn't a good place for a kid on his own. But I think it's much more likely that, for reasons known only to himself, Dio decided suddenly to move on. And I do honestly think he may just show up again. Without more information, I can't do much for you, and of course you realize that I personally have very little authority outside of San Francisco. However, I will go and ask a few questions, see what I can find out about him,
