With Child

of the cafe next to the hotel. She was carrying two large brown bags.

'You ordered breakfast?'

'Did we order breakfast, Lee?'

'Yes.'

'Come on in,' she said. 'I didn't know you delivered.'

'We don't,' said the young woman laconically, dropping the bags on the small table and pocketing the money Lee held out. An expensive breakfast, thought Kate, closing the door.

Lee had ordered for Al as well, eggs and bacon and toast, only slightly leathery from the delay. Al took off his heavy coat and sat on the bed, Lee and Kate took the chairs, and they were silent until the food was nearly gone. Lee looked up first from her Styrofoam plate.

'I assume that if there had been any change, you'd have said something.'

'No change. No sign whatsoever.'

'There was a rumor yesterday at the search site,' Kate said. 'Someone may have seen a car?'

'D'Amico thought he'd found someone who saw a pickup with two people in it enter the freeway from the motel ramp just after midnight, the passenger small like Jules, but it's so vague as to be useless. Light-colored, full-sized pickup, it could have been from anywhere other than the motel. By the time the FBI finished questioning him, he wasn't even sure it was this exit.'

'She vanished into thin air,' Lee said quietly.

'Not under her own power she didn't.'

'You're certain of that?'

'The dogs traced her to the back of the motel, period. She got into a car and was driven off.'

'Got, or was put. Would the dogs have been able to track her if she'd been carried around the motel rather than walked there?'

'The handlers said yes, but that the animals wouldn't have seemed as confident as they did, if she'd been carried.'

'And this killer, the Strangler. Could it be - I'm sorry, Al. You don't want to go over it all again.'

Actually, Kate thought, he had seemed more comfortable now than when he had first appeared at the door.

'Lee, you couldn't possibly make it worse than it already is. Yes, it could be the serial killer who's working up here. Jules fits the physical description of his victims. He always takes them from near freeways, and there's no doubt he's moved south from where he first began.'

'But?'

'The 'buts' are very thin. This guy normally kills immediately, takes his girls away, and lays them out ritually in a place they're sure to be found within a few days. Always within a twenty-mile radius of where they disappeared. And then a few days later, some police station in the area will receive an envelope with five twenty- dollar bills in it. The first one, two years ago, had a typed note saying it was for burial expenses, but since then it's just been the money. And that, by the way, is a tight secret. You're not to speak of any of this to anyone. You, too, Kate. The FBI would string me up if they knew I'd told you two.'

'Of course.'

'Anyway, no note, no money, they haven't found her —' His forced attitude of detached professionalism slipped, and he choked on the word body. He cleared his throat and started again. 'There are also indications that she left the motel, if not deliberately, then at least under her own power. Mostly the things that are missing - her shoes and coat she'd have taken even for a short trip out of doors, but probably not her hairbrush, and certainly not her toothbrush and her diary.'

What is your word for the day, Jules? Kate wondered, and was hit by a wave of the grief and guilt that had dogged her every moment of the last ten days. To push it away, she shifted in her chair and asked, 'You don't think she went off on her own, though?'

'No. She'd have left a note. I think someone took her, and I think he had a weapon, because there was no sign of a struggle and I know Jules would've raised bloody hell unless she had a damned good reason not to.'

'How did he get inside her room, or get her to come out?' Lee wondered.

'I don't know.'

'What is it, Al?' Kate asked. 'You had a reason for coming over here.

His right hand went spontaneously to the pocket in his shirt, and Kate did not need the look of embarrassment on his face to know that it was time to brace herself. Hawkin had been a smoker when she first met him, and she had quickly come to be wary of what that gesture meant.

His hand fell away before reaching the empty pocket, and he raised his face and looked straight at her for the first time.

'I want you to go back to San Francisco.'

Until that moment, Kate had managed to forget the question that had been asked at the door of her mud- spattered car the evening before. It had not been difficult to push it away, given the burden of extreme exhaustion, followed by the shock of Lee's appearance and then the heaviest sleep she'd had in weeks, but suddenly all she could see was the knowing look of accusation in the broadcaster's face and the shape of his leather glove spread out against the handle of the car. She waited, and although it was Lee who asked him why, he answered as if Kate had spoken.

'A whole lot of reasons. You need to see your doctor. There're at least three cases pending that one of us needs to work on. And —'

'Pardon me,' Lee said. 'Doctor? Kate? Have I missed something here?'

'She hasn't told you why she's not at work?' Al asked.

'No,' she said slowly. 'Somehow it hasn't come up yet.'

'It's nothing, Lee,' Kate said. 'I got hit on the head, and until the headache goes away, I'm on medical leave.'

Al Hawkin kept his mouth firmly shut at this vast understatement. Lee looked at him, but he gave nothing away. Finally, she struggled to her feet, picked her way over to where Kate sat, and reached out to pull off Kate's hat. Four weeks of hair did little to cover the scar, and she grunted in pain at the sight.

Kate picked the cap out of Lee's hand and pulled it back over her scalp, ignoring her. 'Don't lie to me, Al. What is it?'

'I don't know how to say this.'

'Jani wants me gone.'

'That's part of it.'

'And there's talk.'

Hawkin exhaled. 'Shit. You heard.'

'I haven't heard anything, except one of the most offensive questions I've ever been asked by a newsman.'

'Yes, that would be where it'd surface. That's undoubtedly where it started.'

Lee said in a plaintive voice, 'I'm really sorry, but I'm not following any of this conversation.'

'Sweetheart, you'd have been better off staying put with your aunt Agatha. Maybe I should go and stay with your aunt Agatha. I was asked yesterday if I knew where Jules was.'

'Why would you - Oh. Oh God, Kate, he couldn't have meant… Al?'

He stood up and went over to the window, his hand patting the front of his shirt again before he remembered and thrust both hands into his pants pockets instead. His voice was harsh, painfully so, when he began to push the words out. 'I should have known it was coming. I should've gotten you out of here earlier. I mean, of course you're going to be a target. Even before, you would've been, but now, when half of San Francisco knows about the leathers and the bike, you're meat to their gravy. And Jules taking after you, that haircut she got, and the two of you riding around town on the motorcycle.'

Lee positively radiated bewilderment, but neither Kate nor Al could spare her a thought. 'Al, does Jani think —'

'Jani's not thinking at the moment, but no, not really.'

Which meant that she did indeed think something like that, or at least have her doubts.