A Grave Talent

been found abruptly let go and dumped several hundred thousand tons of mud and rock onto the upper end of Tyler's Road. At four-thirty the storm suddenly gave up and moved on to see what it could do with real mountains. By five o'clock silence descended, broken only by the pervasive sound of running water.

Light seemed to come earlier than usual that morning, as if the sun were anxious to see what its clever child had accomplished during the night. All over Northern California life slowly dug itself out and ventured into the changed world. For hundreds of miles the ground was carpeted with branches and trees, broken glass, tangled wires, drowned birds, billboards, mudslides, roof shingles. Anything and everything that could be lifted and moved by wind or water had been. The world took a shaky breath, grateful birds began to sing, and the sun rose in clear blue skies to give its blessing to this humbling of creation.

At six-thirty Kate jerked awake and wondered why the telephone had not yet rung. Then she came fully awake and laughed to realize that she had come to assume, after only three days, that the day began with a call from Hawkin. She stretched hard like a cat and turned over to kiss the sleep-soft mouth next to her. The phone rang.

'Martinelli,' she answered through clenched jaws.

'Look, Trujillo just called to say the Road's out, and it'll be some time before anyone can even walk up it, so I thought we'd spend the morning here, trying to put a few things together.'

'Good morning, Inspector Hawkin.'

'What? Oh, good morning. Is this too early to call?'

'What time do you get up, anyway?'

'I don't. Get here when you can.'

'Seven-thirty.' She dropped the receiver down hard onto the base and hoped it hurt his ear.

At seven-fifteen she found him in his office, and at first glance she thought the wind had gotten in during the night. She pushed aside the drift of scraps, set a white paper bag on the corner of the desk, and drew out a whole-wheat croissant. Hawkin looked up from the pages he was pinning on the wall.

'What's that?'

'Breakfast. There's one for you, if you want it.'

'Did you bring me a coffee?' He eyed the foamy top of her double cappuccino.

'You have a machine.'

'I'm out.'

She sighed, and poured some off for him into a chipped white mug with a thick brown glaze in the bottom.

'Al, I should tell you that these are the days when even the lowly secretary takes her boss to court when he expects her to make him coffee.'

'Aren't you glad you're not a secretary? No sugar?'

'Aren't you glad it's not goat's milk? No sugar.'

She took her roll over to the wall and studied his handiwork. Her original map had been replaced by a contiguous series of large-scale topographical maps, taped together and tacked to the wall. Houses and buildings were drawn in with small blue squares (even the octagonal, circular, and rhom-boidal ones), some of which had red check marks in them. Scraps of paper, mostly pieces of computer printout, but also handwritten notes, a few Xeroxed newspaper clippings, and several photographs, were taped and pinned in clusters, with a line leading from each collection to a blue square. On a number of the papers Kate saw green frames around words or paragraphs.

'Why?'

'Why what?' Hawkin grunted, trimming a length of paper and pinning it up to the wall.

'Why all this fuss? I've got all of it in the computer, if you want to retrieve it.'

'I hate computers,' he said absently. 'Glorified filing cabinets that are always locking themselves up just when you need them. Computers don't think, they just suck up information and tyrannize the people using them into thinking the way they do: yes, no; A, B. It's limiting, and it's no way to catch a murderer.'

'Is that—' Kate bit her tongue.

'Speak, Martinelli.'

'Well, you have to admit it's unusual for someone to make lieutenant and then willingly take another job that means a reduction in rank. I was just wondering if being allergic to computers had something to do with it.'

'It had nothing to do with it, Martinelli, and don't be so damned superior. My mistrust of computers isn't a phobia, it's common sense. I am in the vanguard of a new age, the post-computer age, when our race turns from the worship of silicon idols and recognizes anew the superiority of the human brain. As for the other,' he said, stabbing up a note in green ink, 'I dumped the job because I was too damned good at it. There was no challenge. Now, if you're not going to help me with this you can go buy some coffee.'

'What are the red check marks?' she asked, peering at his wall collage.

'When I'm satisfied that we have relatively complete information on each person in the house, no large gaps, I put a check.'

'And the green looks like it marks evidence.' She was looking here at the first name attached to the farthest-left blue square, which was Tyler's. His pieces of paper included a note of two years' residence in the same town as Amanda Bloom's mother and the fact that Anna grew up less than ten miles from Samantha Donaldson's neighborhood. Both of those facts were marked in green ink, along with the word keys, circled in green, and the note Jag—hairs, similarly colored.

As the morning wore on, the leaves of paper on the wall multiplied and fluttered like aspen leaves whenever the door opened. The red checks gradually progressed in from both ends, a few green marks were added, and Kate's back began to ache. The telephone rang steadily throughout the morning with names to add, alibis checked, information received. Shortly after noon Kate picked it up to hear Trujillo's indistinct voice.

'That you, Casey? Sorry this line is so bad. It's actually down across the road, but it still works, if I can keep the press from driving over it too much. I wanted to tell you that I've been up the Road to the washout, and we probably won't be able to bridge it until tomorrow at the earliest. They're working on it from both sides, but the water in the creek is still pretty hairy. What's that? I couldn't hear you.'

'I said,' she shouted, 'what about from the upper side, through the reserve?'

'Even worse, apparently. There's a lot of big trees gone down, and a major slide across the Road. Sounds like an ungodly mess. Look, this line is getting pretty bad. If you want to reach me you'll need to use the radio. I'll call you in a couple of hours. Ciao.'

Ciao? she thought, looking at the phone. The man's up to his nicely tailored behind in mud and reporters, and he still manages to be trendy?

'That Trujillo?' Hawkin had been running his hands through his hair while he stood staring at his map, and he looked very rumpled.

'None other. The Road's out until at least tomorrow.'

'Thought it would be. Christ, what a mess. At least there aren't any brown-haired six-year-old girls living on the Road, or I'd have to have somebody go in and haul her out.' By the way he said her, Kate knew he meant Vaun Adams. 'Let's take a break, I'm seeing contour lines in front of my eyes. Time for lunch.'

Lunch was two beers and a hamburger for Hawkin, one beer and a chicken salad for Kate. After that it was back to the computer screen and the wall, and standing and thinking and half waiting for the telephone call, which finally came at two-forty. Kate took it, listened for a minute, and then interrupted.

'Hang on just a sec. Al? I think you should hear this.' She waited until he picked up the other extension. 'Go ahead, start again.'

The words tumbled out over the telephone in a rush, as if the speaker did not want to stop and consider too closely what he was saying.

'Jim Marsh. Trujillo sent me to try and track down the owner of that ring we found in the Jaguar yesterday, and I think I've got it. I'm sorry it took me so long, but the roads are pretty bad all over. I started with the Donaldsons, but nobody there or at her school recognized it, and the same story with the Blooms. I went to the Merrill house, then to the child's school, and her teacher, who was just leaving, said she thought it might belong to