hoped, prayed, for a relapse, a headache powerful enough to justify her absence. However, Monday dawned with nothing worse inside her skull than the muzziness of a sleepless night. She put on her holster, feeling weary to her bones and cold with dread, and went to work.
Kate's finger hovered over the DOOR CLOSE button on the elevator, but it did not actually make contact, and the door slid open at the fourth floor. She stepped out and walked down the hall to the Homicide Department. Inevitably, the first person she saw was Sammy Calvo, who could be offensive even when he was trying to be friendly. She braced herself, and he looked up from his desk and smiled at her.
'Casey! Hey, great, glad you're back. It's been really dull around here without you.'
'Er, thanks. I guess.'
The phone in front of him rang, cutting short any further, more devastating phrases. Kitagawa appeared next, his nose in a file until he was almost on top of her.
'Morning, Kate. How's the head?'
'Doing better, thanks.'
'You still on leave?'
'I'm on a limited medical for the next three or four weeks.'
'Right. When you get a chance, let's go over the cases you were working.'
'Sure. I mean, fine.' He put his nose back into the file and went out. However, his attitude meant nothing, Kate told herself. Kitagawa would have been polite to Jack the Ripper.
Tom Boyle caught her as she was stowing her gun and her lunch in a desk drawer.
'Hi, Kate, how you feeling?'
'Fine, Tommy boy. How was Christmas?' she ventured.
'Nuts, as usual. My brother-in-law broke his wrist playing kick the can in the street after dinner, and Jenny's grandmother cracked her dentures on a walnut shell in the fruitcake. How was yours?' He seemed to catch himself, and looked uncomfortable. 'Oh, right. I don't suppose you had one, really.'
'No, I didn't,' she agreed.
'I think we'll go away next year, just Jenny and the kids and me. Disneyland or something. How's Al doing?'
'He's hanging in there.'
'Yeah. Not much else he can do, is there? Well, I gotta go. See you.'
Something was very odd here. Everyone was entirely too friendly. The messages on her desk, when she sorted through them, not only contained nothing filthy, but there were two generic greetings and a casual invitation to lunch from another detective, a woman Kate had worked with on a vice case some months before. Finally, when it began to seem that every person in the building - uniform, plainclothes, and support staff alike - was finding some reason to pass by her desk and say hello, she went to hunt down Kitagawa. She cornered him outside the interrogation rooms, ushered him inside one, and shut the door behind her.
'All right. What's up?'
'Ah, Kate. Is this a good time to —'
'I want to know why everyone is so goddamned cheerful around here. Everyone in the building knows that I'm fine, Lee's fine, Jon is just dandy, and Al's as well as can be expected. Not one person has mentioned that Jules is still missing. Why the hell not?'
'They are probably aware that the subject causes you discomfort.'
'Since when do my feelings —' She stopped. 'Al. Al had something to do with this.'
'He made a couple of phone calls, yes, to let us know that you might be back.'
'What else did he tell you?'
Kitagawa squinted down at the form in his hand, although as far as Kate knew, he'd never had anything but perfect sight.
'You know,' he said in pedantic tones,'the police, perhaps more so than other people, do not care for outsiders tormenting one of their own. Even when that member has not fit in terribly well before, if another group who is perceived as 'the enemy' begins pursuit, we have an extraordinary urge to close ranks around our threatened member.'
Kate stared at him, openmouthed.
'An interesting insight into group dynamics, don't you think? Although you, with your background in sociology, would know all about it.' He smiled, then reached past her to open the door, leaving her standing there.
When Kate went home that night, she told Lee about the conversation, and about a day surrounded by the gruff support of her colleagues.
'God,' said Lee. 'I couldn't think what was worrying you. I didn't even think of that. You must feel relieved.'
'Relieved? I feel like I'd just heard the sirens start up in response to an 'officer down' call.'
That night, for the first time since late August, Kate slept in the main bedroom.
For three and a half days after that, Kate succeeded in enduring the unremitting friendliness of the San Francisco Police Department. Then on Friday, in the late morning, there was a telephone call for her.
It was Al. He said, 'We've had a letter.'
SEVENTEEN
'You're not to know,' Al said quickly. 'Don't react to what I say. If the FBI or D'Amico find out I've been talking to you, they'll shut me out completely.'
'I'm… glad you've had good weather.' She smiled stiffly at Tom Boyle, standing next to her desk, and willed him to move away.
'There's someone near you. Okay, just listen. We had a letter, just a brief one, claiming to be from the Strangler. He said Jules wasn't one of his.' Something of Kate's psychic message must have gotten through to Boyle, because he moved away.
'Surely you must be getting a hundred letters a day, saying all kinds of things,' she protested in a low voice.
'He gave some details it would be difficult to know, unless he's got access to FBI records.'
'My God,' Kate whispered, trying with difficulty to keep her face straight. 'Have you seen it? The letter?'
'A copy of it.'
'And?'
'It's an identical typewriter to the original burial letter. And it has the right flavor. Indignant that he would be credited - his word - with a kill he didn't do. Plus that, it was mailed in the same way he sends the funeral money, to an apparently random name with the address of the police station, so it doesn't catch the attention of the post office until it reaches the local branch.'
'Did it say anything else?'
'It said, I quote, 'I don't know why you're trying to credit me with the missing California girl. Asian girls don't have any curl in their hair.' The Strangler always takes a snip of hair from the back of the head, and there's never been a breath in any of the reports about it. So watch yourself with that knowledge, too.'
'What's the reaction up there?'
'It's got everyone standing on their head. D'Amico thinks the Strangler's cracking, that this is the first step to turning himself in. There're three psychiatrists shouting at one another down the hall right now.'
'What are you going to do?'
'What I've done all along: keep an open mind, and look at everything. All I can do.'
'Any way I can help?'
'I can't think of a damn thing.'
Neither could Kate. She asked after Jani, Al asked after Lee, neither listened to the other's reply, and both hung up feeling, if anything, more depressed than ever.
At one o'clock that afternoon, Kate thought of something she could do. She hunted down the file of the case that had begun, for her, with a search for a lost boy and ended with a piece of galvanized pipe, and after a bit of wading about, she found what she was looking for: the phone number of the foster home that had taken in Dio.
