and names of the remaining eight. Hawkin shouted at him.
'What the hell have you been doing down there? You should have had all eleven before noon, even if you had to walk up the road to get them! You've got what? Oh, Christ, yes I did hear about it, but I didn't know they'd called you in on it. All right, sorry for shouting. Yes, give them to me now, the rough outlines anyway.' For ten minutes Hawkin grunted and scribbled notes; he finally dropped the phone and sat back.
'Half of Trujillo's men are down in San Benito county with that gunman who wants his kids.' An irate father with a rifle was holed up in an office building demanding that his ex-wife give him their two sons—the kind of situation that eats up a lot of hours and manpower. 'Well, at least it's put off that damn meeting with the FBI and half the cops in northern California. Throw these names into the machine and go home.' Hawkin picked up a stack of papers and settled down at his desk with his nineteenth cup of coffee that day. 'Go home, Martinelli. We'll go down ourselves tomorrow.'
Thursday morning the telephone allowed her to sleep until after six before jerking her from a luxurious dream in which she was sitting on the deck of a cruise ship eating spaghetti and watching a child play with a windmill. The child began suddenly to wail, and it took a long moment for Kate to realize that the wail was the telephone.
'Yes!'
'Martinelli, I need you down here. Ten minutes ago.'
'Piss off,' she snarled, but he had already hung up.
'I knew we should have gone to bed rather than watching the late show.' The muffled voice was not even accompanied by an eye this morning; it was simply an untidy lump in the blankets.
'See you on TV,' Kate replied.
'You did look cute.'
'Scared stiff.'
'So adorable, showing off that baby's picture.'
'Shut up.'
'What is it, Al? What happened?' she asked as she walked into his office.
'Nothing happened. I'm going home for two hours, and I need you to sit on the phone in case something comes up. If Trujillo calls, we'll be there by noon.' He stood up and reached for his jacket.
For that you woke me up and made me run down here? she wanted to say. Why couldn't you sleep ordinary hours? Haven't you heard that telephone calls can be forwarded, for God's sake? But she bit it back, and asked simply, 'Don't you ever go home?'
'When I don't have this kind of case, yes.'
Kate squashed her own guilt feelings at having gotten six whole hours of sleep and turned resentfully to the console. She worked away for slightly over an hour and a quarter before a series of words came onto the screen that made her back go straight and her heart thump. She looked at the telephone and couldn't help the malicious grin that spread onto her face.
At the fifth ring the telephone was taken off the hook. Long seconds passed before the sound of heavy breath told of the passage up to his ear. His voice was coarse with sleep, but Kate pushed away another twinge of guilt.
'Hawkin here.'
'Al? This is Casey. Something's come up I think you should see. Right away.' She hung up gently. Revenge was sweet.
She was on the phone when he came in. He had stopped to shave, she noted. She handed him the thick sheaf of computer printout. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him pour a cup of coffee and settle to the continuous pages, eyes moving swiftly. She hung up and turned in her chair.
'Sorry to wake you.'
'S'okay. Bunch of misfits, aren't they? Marijuana, LSD, peyote possession, arrest at Diablo Canyon, defacing a public building, army desertion and dishonorable discharge, mental hospital. What a place.'
'Very few violent crimes, though. Number fourteen, there, six months as a juvenile for assulting a teacher, and number twenty-seven, who shot up a billboard while under the influence. But it's number fifty-four I called you about; it just came in.'
He flipped over the pages until he reached the name of Siobhan Adams, unmarried Caucasian female; he skimmed the first few lines, and then his eyes slowed abruptly. Kate watched his lips move slightly as he read the words. He closed his eyes.
'God in heaven, why didn't we have this twenty-four hours ago?'
'It was one of the names Trujillo gave us last night. There was some confusion over it, and I got the correct name from Tyler's lawyer only an hour ago. Everyone knows her as Vaun, but I drew a blank on that.'
'Vaun. Vaun Adams. Detweiler mentioned her. An artist, he said. Maidens in castles and metaphysical trees, no doubt. How do you get Vaun from Siobhan?' He gave it three syllables.
'It's pronounced Zhi-von, an old Irish name. I told Trujillo to have his people stop her if she tries to leave, but not to approach her otherwise. Was that okay?'
'On the nose. Let's get out of here.'
He threw the printout onto his desk, and Kate snatched up her gun and her jacket and hurried down the hall after him. The paper lay face up, the lines of impersonal dot-matrix print telling of one Siobhan Adams, age thirty- six, unmarried Caucasian female, arrested at the age of eighteen and charged with the murder by strangulation of six-year-old Jemima Brand. She was convicted, served nine and a half years, and had been paroled seven years before. Her house was less than two miles from where Samantha Donaldson had been found.
7
Contents - Prev/Next
Vaun Adams lived in one of the few houses on the Road that looked like a place to live in rather than an experiment or a fantasy, despite the gleam of photovoltaic panels on the roof and its almost unreal air of perfect simplicity. It lay on top of a hill half a mile up from the Road. A footpath wound through redwoods and opened up on a broad acre or two of vegetable beds and fruit trees, surrounded by a high wire fence. Some of the beds had a few straggly lettuce heads, beets, and broccoli growing in them, and one tree showed a handful of premature white dots on its branches, but the rest was neatly mulched over for the winter.
The house looked more at home on the site than the garden did, as if it had grown from the ground under the supervision of the wise trees. Simple, long, wood and glass, its back set actually down into the earth so that its two stories appeared low, it was a structure both distinctive and totally unobtrusive. Kate wondered where Adams had found an architect who did not insist on a splashy signature and wondered, too, if in houses as in clothing the simple and well-made were the most expensive.
There was a face looking down at them from the stretch of upstairs window.
'She's seen us,' Hawkin noted.
'She could hardly miss the sound of that truck.'
'Looks almost Japanese, doesn't it?'
'The house? It does, now that you mention it. I was thinking it looked deceptively simple.'
Hawkin nodded. 'Solid. It sure wasn't built by the guy who did the leaky dome or that place with the turrets and gargoyles.'
The entrance was tucked under an upstairs deck. A small, mesh-covered pond with a few bright koi swimming in it lay next to the front door. Hawkin reached for the bell rope, but the door opened first.
Christ, she's gorgeous, was Kate's first thought, followed immediately by, She looks like one of those living dead looking blankly into the camera outside Dachau or Buchenwald. Her glossy black curls were slightly too long and tumbled onto her shoulders and around a pair of startling, icy blue eyes that revealed nothing whatsoever of the thoughts behind them. Her cheekbones were high and thin, her skin pale, her mouth a fraction too wide for the rest of the face. A heavy, loose, brown sweater with flecks of color spun into it and a smear of blue paint on one sleeve emphasized the slimness of the body it covered and revealed long hands with short, square nails. She had soft, dark brown corduroy trousers on her long legs, cloth shoes on her feet, and a deep, even voice as she stood back from the door.
'I wondered when you would come for me.'
'Miss Adams?' Hawkin, too, seemed taken aback by her appearance and words.
