grown-up, not some adolescent girl who'd broken up with the class cool guy and couldn't bear to face him in homeroom.
“Where are we going?” Angie asked, dialing the radio to an alternative rock station. Alanis Morissette whining at an ex-boyfriend with bongos in the background.
“Uptown. What do you want to eat? You look like you could use some fat and cholesterol. Ribs? Pizza? Burgers? Pasta?”
The girl made the snotty shrug that had driven parents of teenagers from the time of Adam to consider the pros and cons of killing their young. “Whatever. Just as long as there's a bar. I need a drink.”
“Don't push it, kid.”
“What? I have a valid driver's license.” She flopped back against the seat and put her feet up against the dash. “Can I bum a smoke?”
“I don't have any. I quit.”
“Since when?”
“Since 1981. I fall off the wagon every once in a while. Get your feet off my dashboard.”
The big sigh as she rearranged herself sideways in the bucket seat. “Why are you taking me to dinner? You don't like me. Wouldn't you rather go home to your husband?”
“I'm divorced.”
“From the guy on the answering machine? Quinn?”
“No. Not that it's any of your business.”
“Got kids?”
A beat of silence before answering. Kate wondered if she would ever get over that hesitation or the guilt that inspired it. “I have a cat.”
“So do you live in Uptown?”
Kate cut her a sideways look, taking her eyes briefly off the heavy rush hour traffic. “Let's talk about you. Who's Rick?”
“Who?”
“Rick—the name on your jacket.”
“It came that way.”
Translation: name of the guy she stole it from.
“How long have you been in Minneapolis?”
“A while.”
“How old were you when your folks died?”
“Thirteen.”
“So you've been on your own how long?”
The girl glared at her for a beat. “Eight years. That was lame.”
Kate shrugged. “Worth a shot. So what happened to them? Accident?”
“Yeah,” Angie said softly, staring straight ahead. “An accident.”
There was a story in there somewhere, Kate thought as she negotiated the twisted transition from 94 to get to Hennepin Avenue. She could probably guess at some of the key plot ingredients—alcohol, abuse, a cycle of unhappy circumstances, and dysfunction. Virtually every kid on the street had lived a variation of that story. So had every man in prison. Family was a fertile breeding ground for the kind of psychological bacteria that warped minds and devoured hope. Conversely, she knew plenty of people in law enforcement and social work who came from that same set of circumstances, people who had come to that same fork in the road and turned one way instead of the other.
She thought again of Quinn, even though she didn't want to.
The rain had thickened to a misty, miserable fog. The sidewalks were deserted. Uptown, contrary to its name, was some distance south of downtown Minneapolis. A gentrified area of shops, restaurants, coffee bars, art house movie theaters, it centered on the intersection of Lake Street and Hennepin. Just a stone's throw—and a world—west of the tough Whittier neighborhood, which in recent years had become the territory of black gangs, driveby shootings, and drug raids.
Uptown was edged to the west by Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles, and was currently inhabited by yuppies and the terribly hip. The house Kate had grown up in and now owned was just two blocks off Lake Calhoun, her parents having purchased the solid prairie-style home decades before the area became trendy.
Kate chose La Loon as their destination, a pub away from the lively Calhoun Square area, parking in the nearly empty side lot. She wasn't in the mood for noise or a crowd, and knew both could be used as a shield by her dinner companion. Just being a teenager was enough of a barrier to overcome.
Inside, La Loon was dark and warm, all wood and brass with a long, old-fashioned bar and few patrons. Kate shunned a booth in favor of a corner table, where she took the corner chair, which gave her a view of the entire dining room. The paranoid seat. A habit Angie DiMarco had already picked up for herself. She didn't sit across from Kate with her back to the room; she took a side seat with her back to a wall so she could see anyone approaching the table.
The waitress brought menus and took drink orders. Kate longed for a stout glass of gin, but settled for chardonnay. Angie ordered rum and Coke.
The waitress looked at Kate, who shrugged. “She's got ID.”
A look of sly triumph stole across Angie's face as the waitress walked away. “I thought you didn't want me to drink.”
“Oh, what the hell,” Kate said, digging a bottle of Tylenol out of her purse. “It's not like it's going to corrupt you.”
The girl had clearly expected a confrontation. She sat back, a little bemused, slightly disappointed. “You're not like any social worker I ever knew.”
“How many have you known?”
“A few. They were either bitches or so goody-goody, I wanted to puke.”
“Yeah, well, plenty of people will tell you I qualify on one count.”
“But you're different. I don't know,” she said, struggling for the definition she wanted. “It's like you've been around or something.”
“Let's just say I didn't come into this job via the usual route.”
“What's that mean?”
“It means I don't sweat the small stuff and I don't take any shit.”
“If you don't take any shit, then who beat you up?”
“Above and beyond the call of duty.” Kate tossed the Tylenol back and washed it down with water. “You should see the other guy. So, any familiar faces in those mug books today?”
Angie's mood shifted with the subject, her pouty mouth turning down at the corners, her gaze dropping to the tabletop. “No. I would have said.”
“Would you?” Kate muttered, earning a sullen glance. “They'll want you to work with the sketch artist in the morning. How do you think that'll go? Did you see him well enough to describe him?”
“I saw him in the fire,” Angie murmured.
“How far away were you?”
Angie traced a gouge mark in the tabletop with one bitten fingernail. “I don't know. Not far. I was cutting through the park and I had to pee, so I ducked behind some bushes. And then he came down the hill . . . and he was carrying that—”
Her face tightened and she bit her lip, hanging her head lower, obviously in the hope that her hair would hide the emotion that had rushed to the surface. Kate waited patiently, keenly aware of the girl's rising tension. Even to a streetwise kid like Angie, seeing what she had seen had to be an unimaginable shock. The stress of that and the stress of what she had been through at the police station, compounded by exhaustion, would all have to eventually take a toll.
