He was in school, of course, but she asked for, and eventually received, permission to meet the boy and have a conversation - alone.
She had to park illegally, but she was at the school when it let out. She almost missed him, he had changed so much in the last month, but his round-shouldered stance gave him away, that and the distance between him and the other students.
'Hello, Dio,' she said, falling in at his side.
He stopped dead and looked at her warily. 'Inspector Martinelli?'
'Call me Kate. What's the matter, didn't you recognize me on my feet and without a bandage on my head?'
'I guess not. You look… better.'
'You look a little different, too.'
She'd been referring to his obvious good health and the five pounds he'd put on, but he ran a hand through his neat haircut and said, with an attempt at humor that held a trace of bitterness, 'My disguise. I'm passing for normal.'
'Let me know if you manage. I never did. I'd like to talk with you for a little while. Wanda said it was okay.'
'They like me home right after school,' he said uncertainly.
'I told her I'd take you home later. Only, I'm parked in a red zone, so the first thing we have to do is move my car. Want to go get a hamburger?'
'Sure. Is this your car? Cool.'
'Jules —' Kate stopped, occupying herself with the door locks for a moment. 'Jules told me that
They got into the car.
'Have you heard anything about her?' Dio asked, looking straight ahead.
'Nothing.'
'Do you think that Strangler got her, like the papers say?'
'I don't know, Dio. I honestly don't know.'
'She's the greatest person in the world,' he said simply, then shut his mouth hard against further revelations.
Kate turned the key and put the car in gear without answering. Neither of them spoke to the other until they were seated, with their hamburgers on the table between them.
'How do you like Wanda and Reg?' she asked. Kate privately thought of the Steiners, whom she had met in any number of cases involving damaged children, as saints of God.
'They're okay. Kind of like boot camp or something, but she's a great cook. We eat at the same time every day,' he said, as if describing the odd habits of exotic natives. 'I even have a room to myself.' Regular meals, privacy, and having a person to notice whether or not you were home from school was clearly foreign ground to Dio. Foreign, but, by the sound of it, not entirely unpleasant.
'Sounds like you come from a big, confused family,' Kate commented. According to his file, he had consistently refused to speak about his past, where he came from, to give his full name, or even tell them if Dio was his real given name. It was no different now: He closed his mouth and his face, and Kate immediately backed away.
'Hey, man, I'm not trying to pump you. Dio, look at me.' She waited until his sullen eyes came up. 'I don't care where you come from, so long as you're better off now than you were before. I just want to know what you and Jules talked about.'
He blinked. 'I thought…'
'You thought what?'
'That you'd want to talk about Weldon.'
'The squat isn't my case anymore, other than having to testify. No, I want to know about Jules. Do you mind telling me about her?'
'Why should I?'
'Dio, she's thirteen years old. She comes from a very sheltered background. She's missing, and I don't know why. It appears that there's a chance - a very, very small chance, but it's there - that the Strangler did not take her. Now, the FBI and everyone else up in Portland are working on the assumption that it was him. I can't do anything about that, but I can follow up on the other possibilities. What if she walked away on her own? Did some other son of a bitch kidnap her, or is she still out there somewhere, alone? You see, Dio, I thought I was getting to know Jules pretty well last fall, and then people started telling me things about her that made me realize there were whole parts of her I had no idea about. I'd like to know what you have to add to it.'
'What kind of things?'
'For one, she ran away from another hotel last summer. Did she tell you about that?' She could see from his face that he didn't know what she was talking about. 'Last summer when she and her mother were in Germany, they had an argument, and Jules walked out of the hotel. In a foreign country, where she didn't even speak the language. And she never told me about that. After I found out, I never asked her, because I figured that if she wanted to keep it to herself, that was her business. But not now. Now I need to know everything I can about her. Help me, Dio. It might make a difference.'
Dio fiddled with the French fries in front of him, then put two in his mouth. Kate took it as a sign of conditional assent.
'First of all, did Jules ever talk to you about the Northwest? She told me one time that she'd lived in Seattle when she was very young. Do you know if she had any friends there?' Inevitably, she was going over well-trodden ground. The investigation, though concentrating on the Strangler, had not dismissed other possibilities quite as cavalierly as Kate had indicated. Nearly everyone who had come into contact with Jules Cameron, from her boy friend Josh to old neighbors and the families of Jani's colleagues at the university in Seattle, had been traced and interviewed. The address book Jules had left behind contained only one entry north of California: a school friend who had moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. She was away for the holiday and had written Jules to tell her that.
Dio thought for a minute, and looking at his face, deep in concentration, Kate realized that this was not a bad-looking young man. In another couple of years, in fact, if he could lose the wary sullenness, he would be handsome.
'I don't remember anything. She did tell me that she'd lived in Seattle, but all she could remember was when it snowed once. I think she moved when she was three or four.'
Jules had been just barely three when Jani got a job at UCLA.
'Was she happy, do you think?'
'Jules? Sure. I mean, she didn't seem unhappy. Except -well, I don't know. Sometimes she acted kind of preoccupied. She used to get really pissed at her mom. I don't think her mother ever realized what an amazing person Jules was. Is.'
'How did she feel about Al? Do you think she may have resented the marriage somehow?'
'She liked Al a lot. As far as I could tell, she was really looking forward to her mom and him getting married, when I saw her in December. Last summer, she used to talk a lot about families. She'd found out something about her own family, not very long before. She never told me just what it was, but she said it was 'ugly.' It made her feel ugly. And dirty, she said. Her mother's past made her feel dirty.'
Kate could feel him opening out, but she was careful not to react. 'Tell me what you know about her family.'
He shrugged, but he wouldn't look at Kate, and she watched the muscle of his jaw jump.
'She must have said something to you… about her past.'
He sat back and stretched his neck, as if easing his shoulders, and resumed play with the three limp fries in front of him. 'Just that her mom divorced her dad. She didn't remember him - Jules, I mean. Just that he was somehow scary. He probably used to beat her mom.'
The matter-of-factness of his last throwaway observation would have told Kate a great deal about his own family life, had she needed the confirmation.
'Did Jules tell you that?'
