as the pair approached the steps.
“She hasn't come back,” a detective said.
“Where else is she going to go?” the other detective said. “Any adult she turns to is going to call the authorities.”
“That's what we're going to find out,” the killer said in his familiar Spanish accent. “To discover everything we can about her.”
Faith Ann crept to the back of the house, fighting panic. Her chest was heaving, her stomach lurching. Above her, four sets of shoes battered the hardwood as they too moved toward the rear of the house. When she was near the grids covering the floor furnaces, Faith Ann could make out the voices, but she couldn't hear what they were saying. The killer knew she had his negatives and he was looking for them… and for her. And he was a cop.
She had to get away.
Faith Ann slipped out from under the house. Crouching low, she scooted into the open garage. Her and her mother's bikes were connected to a galvanized eyelet by a plastic-coated steel cable. Her fingers trembled as she turned the four numbered cylinders so the right combination showed. Faith Ann removed the cable and looped it around her bike's crossbar before snapping the lock in the loops to secure it. After putting on her helmet, she closed the kickstand and rolled the ten-speed slowly out through the side door, which opened directly into the backyard next door. She went around that house and, after pausing to tuck her long hair inside the sweatshirt and raising the hood over the helmet, she jumped on board and pumped the pedals furiously.
At the corner of Marengo Street, she turned left toward St. Charles Avenue. The cool wind blew into her face. Her skin stung a little because she'd cried so much. The backpack felt as light as a feather. School would be letting out soon, she decided. The sidewalks, buses, and streetcars would be filled with kids for the cops to check out.
When she passed a patrol car stopped at the intersection with St. Charles, she cut her eyes. The cop inside hardly even glanced at her. She guessed nobody had thought that she might be riding a boy's ten-speed.
13
Marta hadn't chastised Arturo for his mistakes. He hadn't had any reason to imagine that there was a young girl in the lawyer's office, and he wasn't sure the girl had seen him there. It was clear to the police that she had certainly been there after the killings, because there was concrete blood evidence of that.
Mr. Bennett hadn't said anything about there being negatives; just eight photographs, and there was no way to be sure that Amber hadn't hidden them somewhere before she went to the attorney's office. And Bennett told Arturo that according to the cops, there might possibly be a tape recording of the lawyer's conversation with Amber, since there were scores of recorded interviews in the lawyer's desk. The thing that caused Arturo's stomach to hurt was the thought that if the killings were recorded, his voice would be on it, because Amber had spoken his and Mr. Bennett's names. If there was a tape, and it wound up in anyone's hands outside the police department, they were in the worst possible kind of trouble. If that happened, none of Bennett's precious connections would be of any use at all.
The two detectives might have been thoroughly corrupt, but they weren't particularly energetic or enthusiastic. Having no real personal stake in this, they searched rooms lackadaisically. As Arturo was searching for information with an urgency fueled by multilayers of fear, he kept running into their backsides. As far as he was concerned, the two detectives were just unnecessary and potentially dangerous witnesses. While the short one dumped out the dead lawyer's jewelry box, the big one rifled through the refrigerator searching for a snack.
Marta called the detectives to the bathroom to show them that she had found the girl's clothes in the hamper. She pointed out the bloody knees in the jeans, the smears of blood on the discarded shirt.
The short detective took the jeans and found four blast-darkened. 380 shell casings in the pocket. Those would match the handgun that Marta had planted beneath the clothes-the weapon which Arturo had used at the office. After noting that they had found it in the bottom of the hamper, the cops bagged it as evidence. They could collect the child's fingerprints and fix things so that a print would be discovered on the weapon.
Since the clothes were there, they went through the house again, looking for the kid.
Arturo and Marta searched for the negatives and the cassette tape. They found a file box filled with proof sheets and sleeves of negatives, which they took to pore over later. They found a dozen audiocassettes in a drawer. These Arturo put in the shopping bag along with the negatives. The cops collected all of the correspondence they found, including letters and bills, took the laptop computer and a lot of other odds and ends along with the girl's blood-soiled clothing, which they put in a paper evidence bag.
As Marta and Arturo drove away down the street, Marta looked into a cluttered yard and saw a bulldog standing up on its hind legs, its forepaws on its smiling master's stomach. In her mind the dog became a rail-thin, filthy, dark-skinned waif who was kneeling to unzip the trousers of a porcine policeman while a young, hungry boy watched from the window of an abandoned car nearby. She shivered involuntarily.
I had to do what I had to do, to survive.
14
Faith Ann spent three hours at the Audubon Zoo, wandering here and there, visiting her favorite animals, unable to take comfort from the familiarity. Occasionally she almost managed to forget what had happened that morning, but those terrifying memories kept returning, each time accompanied by gut-gripping fear and nausea.
She counted the money she had taken from her mother's safe and discovered that she had a thousand dollars. She bought herself a green cap advertising the zoo, curled up the bill, and kept it tugged down low to her brows. At four-thirty, as the sky turned gray and the wind picked up the scent of moisture, Faith Ann left the zoo. She put on her yellow poncho, covering her backpack. She unlocked her bike, climbed up on it, and started pedaling off just as the first drops of rain fell.
At six o'clock, after buying a Walkman at a Rite Aid, Faith Ann balanced herself on her bicycle at the pay telephone station, the last one of three mounted on the outside wall of the drugstore, and opened the yellow pages. The overhang protected her from the rain. Her heart sank. There were pages and pages of guesthouses. She didn't have any idea which one Uncle Hank and Aunt Millie were staying at, because her mother hadn't mentioned a name to her. How could she find them? A name floated into her mind. Rush Massey. A warmth filled her as she thought about her friend-sighted or not, perhaps the best friend she had. Maybe Rush or his father knew where Hank and Millie were staying. If anybody did, she decided, they would.
Normally she and Rush communicated via computer using instant messenger or sent e-mails. Rush's computer was set up to vocalize his messages so he could respond on the keyboard. Faith Ann had visited with him on the telephone but all she could remember now was that his area code was 704. She took out her mother's cell phone and put her finger over the buttons, trying to recall which buttons she had pressed to get him. 704… 79… 704–795… And then her fingers remembered the entire number and she turned on the unit and pressed them for real. Leaning against the wall beside the pay phone, she listened as the cell phone rang.
“Hello?” the soft voice answered.
“Mrs. Massey, it's Faith Ann Porter. Is Rush there?”
“Well, yes, just a minute, Faith Ann.”
After a few seconds, Rush's voice came on the line. “Hey, Faith Ann!” he said excitedly. “Did Hank tell you I said hey?”
She felt suddenly like she was on the verge of breaking into tears. She fought back the emotion. “No. Rush, I can't go into it right now, but I really need to find Uncle Hank right away. He's here in town, but I don't know where he is staying.”
“He isn't staying at your house?”
“No. And I don't know how to find out where they are. I hoped you might know, because there's about a
