a tiny spark of wholly inappropriate and utterly inexpressible anger.
'She does own a pair of boots,' Kate said quietly. 'A pair of waterproof Timber land hiking boots she said she's been wanting for a long time.'
'Jules wouldn't want a pair of boots.'
'I was with her. We bought them on Monday, in Berkeley. In fact, I put them on my credit card,' Kate said baldly. Silence fell in the car, and Kate knew that it was all Jani could do not to insist that Kate be put out of the car, right there on the freeway.
'Was she wearing them during the day?' D'Amico asked unexpectedly.
'Yes.'
'Well, she took them off at eight-thirty.'
His three passengers gaped at him, astonished at this obscure bit of knowledge.
'We're not sure about it, of course, but it looks as if she was lying on the bed, watching her movie, and she must have kicked them off, one after the other, over the side of the bed. We found some chunks of dried mud in the carpeting from a sole with a deep tread,' he explained. 'And the guy downstairs was turning on his television when he heard two thuds from overhead, about thirty seconds apart. He said they sounded like shoes dropping.' He shot Hawkin a glance over his shoulder. 'You can see that we were interested in the mud and in the noises, but I'd say it's pretty certain they're connected. Besides, he heard her moving around a while later. Unfortunately, he went to sleep early.'
'So that's it?' Hawkin asked him. 'That's all you have?'
'So far. They're still running prints, and as I said, the search parties will be out again in a little while.'
'They found nothing yesterday?'
'Not a thing. But the dogs didn't get here until the afternoon, so they had only a couple of hours.'
'You haven't received a note?'
The brief hesitation before D'Amico answered said a great deal about the chances that she was being held for ransom. 'No.' That Al had even asked, his expression said, was a surprise; but then the Al who had asked was not the investigator; it was the father.
What followed in the ensuing days seemed to Kate like a cross between being inside a tumble dryer and being shot from a cannon. Because she had no standing here in Oregon, she could take on none of the usual roles of questioning or directing or even acting as liaison with the unofficial volunteers. Still less could she talk with the press, which had seized on her familiar name with the glee of a pack of hounds and came howling to life whenever her face crossed their cameras.
She ended up collating, filing, and answering the telephone, performing her tasks with a grim ferocity, aching to do more and constantly aware of things going on just outside her sight and hearing. She saw Al a few times, Jani twice, looking so pale that her brown skin seemed as translucent as a lamp shade.
On Friday night, Kate caught at D'Amico's arm as he went past her. He looked at her as if he had never seen her before.
'You've got to give me something to do,' she said, in what she had intended to be a demand but that came out a plea. 'I'm going crazy here.'
After a minute, he asked, 'You have waterproof clothes?'
'I can get some.'
He took a pen from his pocket and leaned over the desk, wrote a few words, and handed her the paper.
'Tomorrow morning, they start at first light. Go past the motel about half a mile. Give that to the man in charge. And get a jacket with a hood. They might not spot you quite so quickly.' He walked away before she could thank him. Kate abandoned her filing and went to buy herself clothes to scramble over hills in. She did not think for a moment that they would find Jules anywhere near the motel, but it was better than sitting inside under the headache-inducing fluorescent lights.
Kate had already been forced to rent an anonymous small car when word got out among the press that she was driving a Saab convertible - a car that stood out in rainy Portland. She had gritted her teeth over the cost, and she winced when she saw the price tag on the jacket, a parka combining the most modern materials with traditional goose down, but the monetary penance seemed appropriate, and at least she would not collapse because of the cold and wet.
And cold and wet it was, beating the bush, working on an ever-widening circle out from the motel, covering her assigned segment before staggering back to swallow hot drink and food, not even able to indulge in the luxury of camaraderie with the other exhausted searchers lest she be recognized, then zipping her coat again and going back out into the miserable afternoon. The rain turned into a dispirited sleet before dark. One of the search dogs slid into a frigid stream and was taken away for a rest. A volunteer cracked his head open against a branch; another took his place. Half-frozen mud glued itself to the outside of Kate's new boots; inside, blisters formed on her feet despite doubled socks. Her knees ached, her hands were raw, one cheekbone was black and blue from an incautiously released branch, and the left sleeve of her expensive parka bore an already-fraying patch of duct tape to keep the feathers from drifting out of the rip it had suffered at some point.
The next day was Christmas. During their breaks, the searchers ate turkey and pie until they could burst, but they found no sign of Jules.
On Kate's third day, the search parties split in two and shifted their centers of operations east and west of either side of the freeway. Kate went with the easterly party, farther up into the foothills. They found articles of clothing by the bushel, skeletons of various animals, and a few fresh animal corpses. One of those last caused a great convulsion of fear and excitement among the searchers, until it was determined to be the flayed remains of a deer, stretched out by scavengers among the dead leaves. The search went on.
Dogs and helicopters and human eyes traversed the hills in the filthy weather. Searchers faltered and dropped out, some of their places going unfilled now, six days after Jules had disappeared. Gray hopelessness was in all their minds. Everyone knew they were not going to find her, and the knowledge made the physical strain nearly unbearable, until only the habit of determination kept them at it, step by step, one tree, one boulder, one stream at a time.
After nine days, beneath a low sky dribbling wet snow, the search was called off. Had it been likely that Jules had simply wandered away, the search would have continued, but the chances of this were minuscule. Someone had taken her, and despite the total lack of evidence, people from one side of the country to the other knew who that someone was, if not his actual identity.
There were news cameras at the center of operations to record the closing down of the hunt, and Kate in her exhaustion failed to dodge them. One minute she was trudging through the mire of the field turned parking lot, exchanging a few cliched but deeply felt phrases with two fellow searchers, a young brother and sister who had driven three hundred miles from eastern Washington to join the hunt. The next minute, a shout went up, and before she could make her escape, she had the pack on her heels, with shouts of 'Inspector Martinelli!' and 'How do you feel about the search being called off, Kate?' and 'What will you do now?' being hurled at her from these strangers. She pulled her hood back up over her face, put her head down, and pushed her way through the microphones and pocket tape recorders to her ordinary-looking rental car. She had unlocked the door when a gloved hand came into her line of vision, covering the handle.
'Get your hand off this car,' she said in a low voice, not looking up. The hand drew back quickly, and she had begun to pull the door open against the weight of the people standing against it before her mind registered the question that she had been asked. She looked up into his expensive newscaster's face, and despite his superior height and her complete dishevelment, what he saw in her eyes made him step back onto his cameraman's toes. 'What was that?' she asked him.
'I said, Do you know where Jules Cameron is?'
Two years before, in another lifetime, Kate might have responded, might have given way to incredulity and fury, might even have attacked him. She had been through the wars since then, though, and by now not responding to the media was as automatic as breathing. She tore her gaze from his, shoved the filthy door back against their immaculate coats, and fell into the car. They continued to shout questions at her as she started the engine and put the car into gear; then they fell silent, looks of eager astonishment on their faces when she braked suddenly and rolled down the window. They surged forward, and she waited until they were beside her before she spoke.
Then clearly, for the benefit of their recording devices, she said, 'For the record, no, I do not know where Jules Cameron is.' She hesitated for an instant before adding, 'I wish to God I did.'
