night at a motel just north of town, got back the next morning onto the I-Five, and continued north. We'd planned on staying the night in Portland, but we didn't quite get that far.' She described the trip, the stops, and the meals. About ten minutes after she began, another man came in, a young man in a dark suit with FBI written all over him. She broke off, but he just nodded at D'Amico, pulled up a chair, and waited for her to resume. She made it to the end of the report, and Jules was still missing from her room. Then the questions began.
'Inspector, why did the two of you come here?'
'I wanted… My lover is visiting her aunt, in the San Juan Islands.' Neither of them reacted to the word
'And Jules Cameron? Why was she with you?' asked the FBI man.
'Her mother and my partner just got married, on Sunday,' Kate repeated patiently. 'They're in Mexico on their honeymoon, but Jules didn't want to go with them; she asked to come stay with me instead. I was happy to have the company. She's a good kid. No, she's better than that. She's a lovely human being, very smart, frighteningly smart, and mixed up, and she wanted… she likes me.' Suddenly the tears came, unexpected and unwelcome in front of these men, but unstoppable. D'Amico put a box of tissues on the desk in front of her, and they waited until she gained control.
'God,' she said hoarsely. 'How am I going to tell Al?'
'Al is her stepfather? Your partner.'
'Al Hawkin.',
D'Amico's head came up. 'I know Al Hawkin. I thought he was with L.A.'
'He was. He transferred to us a couple of years ago.'
The FBI man spoke up. 'The Eva Vaughn case.'
'I remember,' D'Amico said. 'Were you involved with that one?' He was asking her, and she nodded. 'And the Raven Morningstar case, during the summer following?' he added slowly, as recognition and memory came. She nodded again, blew her nose a last time, and sat up to look straight at him, bracing herself. However, he did not comment about her notoriety or the mess that had been made of that latter case, but went back to her partner. 'I heard Al Hawkin speak at a conference a few years ago. He's an impressive man. His subject… the subject was child abduction,' he said in a voice gone suddenly flat.
Kate's mouth twisted into a bitter laugh. 'It was his specialty,' she said. 'Oh God.'
FOURTEEN
Kate met the newlyweds at the airport early the following morning. Beneath their incongruous fresh sunburns and bright holiday clothes, they both looked deathly ill, flabby with exhaustion and grinding terror. Jani seemed unaware of her new husband's arm across her shoulders, unconscious of the coffee stains down the front of her lightweight yellow linen jacket. Her eyes flicked across Kate to fix on the large man at Kate's side. Hawkin spared Kate a longer glance, taking in his partner's equally derelict state in the moments it took to walk from the gate to where she and Lieutenant D'Amico stood waiting. Kate said nothing. Before Al Hawkin could speak, Jani walked straight over to the tall man in authority and looked up into his face.
'Is there any news about my daughter?'
'Nothing yet, ma'am. The search team is assembling now; they'll set out with the dogs again as soon as it gets light. Let's take you to a hotel, get you something to eat, and we can talk. Do you have any luggage?'
'It'll catch up with us later,' Hawkin said absently. 'They held the plane for us in L.A.; the bags got left behind.' Kate could see that he badly wanted to seize D'Amico and demand every detail and was keeping himself in only because he knew that loss of control would mean loss of time.
'I'm Florey D'Amico,' the lieutenant said belatedly, sticking out his hand.
Kate trailed behind the three of them through the quiet airport and to D'Amico's unmarked car outside the baggage-claim area. After a brief hesitation, he put Jani in the front seat, but Al was leaning over the seat, waiting for him as soon as he got behind the wheel.
'What have you got so far?' he asked.
'Your little girl disappeared from her motel room south of here sometime after nine o'clock Tuesday night. We have yet to find anyone who saw anything, though of course we're still tracing half a dozen hotel guests who left before we were called. I should make it clear,' he added, peering at Jani to see if she was listening to him, 'that we have no evidence of foul play. Nothing to indicate that she did not walk away from her hotel room all by herself.'
Jani was looking at him, but she might as well not have heard, for all the impact his words had on her expression. Al Hawkin brushed away the reassurances, if that is what they were meant to be.
'You must have more than that,' he said impatiently.
D'Amico looked again at Jani, then turned to look at the traffic behind him before pulling out into the roadway. When the terminal was behind him, he said to Hawkin, his voice heavy with warning, 'I think we ought to get you settled first, before we go into the details.'
'Jani should hear it, too.'
The heavy shoulders in front of Kate shrugged. 'If you say so. Okay. As I said, there's nothing real yet aside from the fact that she wasn't in her room when Inspector Martinelli here woke up. She hadn't seen her since they checked in at four-thirty, although the waitress in the coffee shop says that Jules had a hamburger at about six and charged it to the room. The register tag is timed at six-forty-eight, and the waitress says the girl was reading, by herself, and took a long time to eat.
'So far, two people remember seeing her walking back toward her room a little after quarter to seven. She had the book in her hand. One of them commented that she looked cold and was hurrying, because a wind had come up and it was starting to sprinkle. She wasn't wearing a coat.
'We don't have anyone yet who saw her enter her room, but the house log shows she began watching a pay-per-view movie at eight-thirty-five. The family that stayed in the room next to hers isn't sure about anything. They knew the room was occupied because they heard movement and television noises from time to time, but they have two kids, and it wasn't until they got the kids settled at nine that their own room went quiet. They then heard nothing but the TV from Jules's room until they turned off the lights and went to sleep at about ten-thirty. The wife did hear voices sometime later. She thought before midnight, but she didn't look at the clock, and she couldn't tell where they were coming from. Could have been the parking lot or the hallway or the room on the other side.
'You have anything to add yet, Kate?'
'Just that I was sleeping so soundly that I probably wouldn't have heard voices unless they were pretty loud. I had taken a pain pill,' she added. Jani said nothing, but Al looked at her. 'My head was bothering me,' she said. 'That's why we stopped so early in the first place. I didn't think it was safe to drive.'
'So you abandoned her instead,' Jani said from the front seat, her voice thick with loathing and her jaw clenched.
'I —' Kate started, but Al reached forward with his right hand and placed it on his wife's shoulder.
'Jani, no,' he said. After a minute, he looked at Kate, and she resumed.
'I didn't hear anything from Jules's room. In the morning when I tried to wake her up, at about eight-thirty, I couldn't get an answer, so I got the key from the desk and we opened her door. She'd been there, had a glass of water, sat on the bed for a while watching the TV. Her room key was there, along with the keys I'd given her to the car and to my room, but some of her stuff was gone: her jacket, the book she was reading, her diary, her pen, and some of her bathroom things. Her toothbrush and hairbrush were missing from the zip bag. Her makeup was still there.'
'Jules doesn't wear makeup,' Jani interrupted, her voice dripping scorn. 'She borrowed some of mine for the wedding.'
Kate looked at Hawkin. 'Er, she doesn't exactly wear it, no. But she does experiment with it sometimes,' she told the mother in the front seat.
'She didn't before she got to know you.' Kate looked helplessly at her partner, who offered her an infinitesimal shrug.
'That's all. Except for the boots. Her new boots were missing.'
'She doesn't own any boots, and certainly not new ones.' Jani again. 'Al, this is ridiculous.' She spoke over her shoulder, still looking only at the windshield. She can't bear to look at me, thought Kate, who became aware of
