'He said he was with D'Amico at the man's house, south of Tacoma, helping with the search, but that he'd call you tomorrow.'
The help that Al would be giving, Kate knew, was to stand by and look at things taken out of the Strangler's house, to see if one of the trophies he had collected belonged to Jules. She shuddered and grasped the telephone as if it were a lifeline. Think, woman, she ordered. Don't go all soft now. She looked at her watch: just after eight o'clock. Lee was talking again, but Kate broke in, unheeding.
'Lee, I need you to make some phone calls. Do you have a pencil? Okay. Rosa Hidalgo: Tell her I won't be coming by tonight, but for God's sake, don't tell her why. Next, a kid named Richard.' She gave Lee the number. 'Same message as for Rosa; I'll call him in a few days. Next, call the dispatcher. Have her contact Kitagawa and tell him I'm going back on medical leave, that my head's killing me… No, of course not; it's fine. And then the airport. Find me a flight; I'll be able to make it by ten o'clock. Wait a minute - did Al say more precisely where it was?'
'Just that it was south of Tacoma.'
'Nothing about which airport?'
There was a silence on the line, then Lee said, 'He did say something about it being too damn far from Portland, that he wished he'd flown into Seattle.'
That answered the bigger question: Yes, Al knew that his partner would come.
'Right. Book me a flight into Sea Tac, have a taxi at the house in, oh, an hour. That'll give me five minutes to pack. See you shortly.'
'Drive carefully,' Lee urged, but the phone was dead before she had finished.
When Kate reached Russian Hill, she found her bag already packed and Jon bent over the duct-taped tear on her down parka with a needle and thread.
'Bless you, Jon,' she said, and trotted upstairs.
'Do you want a sandwich, or coffee?' he called after her.
'No, I ate,' she shouted back, ducking into the study to hunt down maps of Washington. As she pawed through the map drawer, she was dimly aware of the sounds of Lee making her laborious way up the stairs. When the click of her braces paused at the study door, Kate spoke over her shoulder.
'Have you seen those large-scale maps I brought back with me?'
'They're on the shelf.'
Kate looked up and saw the bulging manila envelope. She kicked the drawer shut and stretched up for the packet, then shook it out on the desk and began sorting through it for the maps she might need.
'I'll call you tomorrow,' she said. 'Let you know where I'm staying. The car keys are on the table downstairs.' She chose half a dozen sheets and put them back into the envelope, bent down the little metal wings to seal the flap, and turned to go.
'Kate, just hold on a minute.'
'I can't, sweetheart. I'll miss the plane.'
'Why do you have to go? Can't it wait until tomorrow?'
'It can't wait,' Kate said gently. 'I have to go.'
'But why? They don't want you up there.'
Kate winced, then said simply, 'Al needs me.'
I need you, Lee wanted to say, knowing that if she did, Kate would stay, and that Kate would resent it. And she couldn't help but be aware that she had relinquished the right to say that, after these last months, no matter how true it was. She forced herself to draw back.
'All right, love. Come back soon.'
Kate stepped briskly into the hallway, then stepped back in. She kissed Lee, slowly.
'Good-bye, love,' Kate said. 'I'll call you.'
Then she flew down the stairs to the waiting taxi.
NINETEEN
The lights of Seattle did not rise up to greet the plane until nearly two o'clock the following morning. Waiting for the bag holding every warm garment Jon had been able to dig up took forty endless minutes, and renting a car nearly as long. She drove south on the empty freeways, through Tacoma and Olympia, and listened to the radio. Every news report trumpeted the arrest of Anton Lavalle, the homegrown American boy of French-Canadian stock, for the murders of at least three of the Strangler victims.
When she stopped at an all-night cafe to pour some coffee into her numb body, the name Lavalle was on the tongues of the waitress and the cook, the truckers and the highway patrolman, and when she spread out her map to consider the best route, the waitress was unsurprised at her destination.
'You want this turnoff right here, honey,' she told Kate, tapping the map with an authoritative red fingernail. 'Twenty miles up and then watch for the crowds.' Kate laughed politely. 'Want some more cream with that?'
'Yes, please, and could I have some toast or a muffin or something?' She was dimly aware that a hamburger with Dio was the last meal she'd eaten.
'Got a nice bran muffin, fresh yesterday. Give you twenty-five cents off.'
'That'll do fine. Thanks.'
An hour later, Kate realized that the waitress had not been joking about the crowds: A line of parked cars and vans suddenly materialized at one side of the narrow two-lane road, with two figures carrying equipment trotting away from her headlights. She pulled over uncertainly, unwilling simply to park and walk into the night, but while she was trying to make up her mind, a car pulled up behind her. Its driver and a passenger got out with bulky bags slung over their shoulders and set off briskly down the road, which, she saw, was beginning to be visible in the first stages of dawn.
'Must be the place,' she said aloud. She took her parka out of the bag and put on the boots she'd last worn to search the hills for Jules (both items cleaned and mended by Jon), then locked the bag in the trunk. In that time, two more cars had joined the line, three more intent men trotting down the road, their breath streaming out in the dim morning light. Kate tied her shoelaces and followed them.
There was chaos at the gate, where a dirt road branched off from the paved one. Kate held up her badge, put down her head, and shoved her way to the front. Even then, it took a long time to convince the short-tempered guards to let her through, a very long time after a local television man had recognized her and began to plague her with questions she could not possibly answer. The nearest guard let her in the gate, and when a convoy of emergency vehicles appeared, trying to push their way through the throng, he waved her on in disgust, then left to go and tear a few verbal chunks out of the nosy civilians.
'Hey, you!' he bellowed. 'Yeah you, good-looking. You don't move your ass, I'm going to chain it to a tree.' Kate slipped past him and set off up the hill.
The dirt road was nearly a mile long, climbing the side of a gentle hill. Once when Kate hit a patch of silence, free from the crackle of radios and amplified voices below and the growl of a generator from above, for a moment she found herself strolling along a country lane in the dappled sun of a crisp morning that seemed more spring than winter, complete with birdsong: nothing to say that she was nearing a pit of horror. Nothing at all, except for the faces on the men in the car she met around the corner.
She had known it was going to be bad, this lair of a killer, and the closer she drew, the greater the dread grew, until she felt the breakfast muffin like a fist beneath her heart.
Crime scenes invariably gave birth to the black humor of professional cleaner-uppers, and the worse the scene - a weeks-old body, a shotgun wound, an evisceration - the more mordant the jokes. Not many cops smile at the scene of unpleasant death, though they will occasionally bare their teeth, and often they laugh. But the grin is that of a death's-head, and the humor is blue, or, more often, black.
At a certain point, however, even the armor of humor fails, and the hard pleasure of triumph at the arrest of a stone killer has no chance against the reality of the man's acts. This was like approaching the epicenter of some horrendous natural disaster. The airy winter-bare woods and rutted dirt road were soon filled with grim-faced men and women who did not meet one another's eyes and whose shoulders were stiff with an aimless rage and despair. The short tempers that she had seen down at the main road were intensified up here into a barely controlled fury, and she let her face go blank and picked up her pace so as not to draw attention. It was going to be very bad.
But when she got there, she found no corpses being exhumed, no smell of death on the clean air. People were standing around or going about their jobs, but always, she soon saw, their glances returned to the ordinary
