run-down white trailer at the far end of the road - an old white box, its metal sides begrimed with mildew and rust, its roof hidden beneath lichen and leaves and layers of black plastic sheeting, ordinary except for the amount of attention being given it. The horror here was not in human remains; the horror reflected in the faces came from the knowledge of what sort of creature had inhabited the trailer.
The command post trailer was already in place, bristling with antennae and vibrating with foot traffic and the power generator, overwhelming its sick and decrepit white cousin. Two of the dozen or more vehicles packed into the clearing had their emergency lights on, pulsing the trees in syncopated bursts of color.
There was no sun here yet, if indeed there ever was on this side of the hill. It looked dank and the air smelled musty beneath the fumes of gas and diesel motors. Kate zipped her jacket to her chin, made sure her ID was clipped to the pocket, and approached the command post.
'Al Hawkin?' she asked a man in the uniform of the local sheriff's department. He shrugged and walked past her. 'Al Hawkin?' she asked a plainclothesman. He tipped his head toward the trailer. 'Al Hawkin?' she asked a woman who looked like a doctor, just inside the door.
'He's back there, with D'Amico. Can I help you with something?'
'I'm his partner. I need to talk with him.'
'His partner? But I —' The woman stopped, studied Kate for a moment with a bit too much interest, blushed lightly when she realized what she was doing, and took a step back. 'I'll just let him know…' She turned and walked away into the noisy trailer, leaving Kate to reflect on the price of fame. Or was the word
Al appeared immediately on the woman's heels. He had his head down and kept it down, not greeting Kate, but merely gathered her up and propelled her down the steps ahead of him. He paused behind her, and she heard him say, 'Harris, get someone to turn off those flashers, would you? It makes the place look like a goddamn movie set.' Then he was beside her. 'C'mon,' he said, and set off through the trees. She had to trot to keep up with him, down a well-worn path between some shrubs.
The path ended at a sheer drop of about fifteen feet, which, judging by the cans and containers littering the ground between the bottom of the cliff and a busy creek some six or eight feet farther down, had served as the trailer's garbage dump. A bulky uniform was standing guard at the site. He looked up at their approach, flipped a gloved hand at Hawkin, and turned his back again.
Al moved to a fallen tree a few feet back from the cliff face. Kate went to sit beside him. It was quiet here, and all she could see was woods. No garbage, no cop, no serial killer's trailer, just growing things. Al took a nearly flat package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and lit it. She did not comment.
'How's Jani?' she said instead.
'She's in the hospital.'
'Al! What happened?'
'Couple days ago, before this latest. She's all right, just collapsed. They've got her on tranks and vitamins. She hasn't been eating, and I didn't notice it.' Kate opened her mouth to protest at the tired self-loathing in his voice, then closed it again.
'Al,' she started to say, but he spoke at the same instant.
'Videotapes,' he said. The word burst out under pressure, from jaws that were held so tightly clenched, they must have ached. 'Seven videotapes. One for each girl, more or less. A couple of them are mixed together.'
'Oh shit, Al. Was there one —'
'No. No sign of Jules. None at all.'
Kate could think of nothing to say.
'They're not finished yet, of course. But there're no traces so far, none of her clothes, no tape. And he's still saying he didn't do her.'
She waited.
'However, there're two girls we know were his, and they didn't have any videos, either. One of those he says he didn't do, but we know he did. There's even a necklace of hers here; he's just forgotten. Probably because he didn't have a tape for her, he forgot about her. D'Amico thinks… D'Amico thinks that he forgot the camera, or the battery was… the battery… Oh shit.'
Al Hawkin threw his cigarette to the forest floor and slowly doubled over, as if he'd been hit in the stomach. He turned away from her, placed both of his fists hard against his forehead, and curled up fetally, his back to her. Kate was torn between the need to offer physical comfort and the man's intense need for privacy, and she held her hands out to his shoulders, hovering over his jacket for a long time, before she lowered them gently to touch him.
The tears he cried were few and small and bitter, and in barely a minute, he drew in a long breath and sat up straight. He threw his head back, blinking wide-eyed at the treetops and taking sharp breaths through his open mouth before he remembered his handkerchief and used it.
'I've got to get back,' he said eventually, not looking at her.
She laid a hand on his arm. 'Al, let me help. I'll finish looking at the tapes for you. I'd recognize her as well as you would.'
'No,' he said quickly.
'Al, I —'
'No! Martinelli, I sent you back to San Francisco. What the hell are you doing here, anyway?'
'I thought —' She caught herself, and instead of saying, I thought you wanted me to come, she said, 'I thought I might be of some use.'
'There's nothing for you to do here.'
It was probably true; the place was swarming with cops already.
'I'll talk to D'Amico.'
'I wouldn't,' he warned. 'He'll take your head off.'
Kate sat on the fallen tree and watched her partner pick his way along the pathway, and she continued to sit, with the smell of the killer's garbage mixing with the clean smell of woods and the diesel whiff from the growling generator, and she thought.
No, she would not again beg D'Amico for a meaningless task. However, she could not bear to go back to San Francisco, not yet. She had not even had time to think about the questions raised by the previous evening's interviews, and unfortunately Hawkin was in no condition to talk them over. All he could do was keep his shoulder on the load he had taken to himself. She had to admit that, other than stand by his side, there was nothing for her to do here, but she refused to go home and meekly return to work; she would at least carry through on the line of investigation she had started the day before, pointless though it undoubtedly was.
Assume, for the moment, that Jules was not lifted from the motel parking lot as a random girl by a recreational murderer. This left, as Kate saw it, three options. One, that Jules had chosen to leave, on her own and without so much as a note, for reasons unknown. Two, that there was a second killer, or a copycat, in the Pacific Northwest. Or three, that someone had been after Jules Cameron specifically.
The first one her mind recognized as a real possibility, despite her gut feeling that Jules would have left a note, however misleading its contents. The second, too, was possible, if statistically unlikely. But the third…
If someone had wanted Jules particularly, what would this mean? Why near Portland? And could it have had any connection with those strange telephone calls Jules had been receiving? 'You're mine, Julie,' the man had said. Was she now his? And why? Were there links to Dio? Or to Al? Or even to the Russian-speaking computer conversation, for God's sake?
Kate sat on her log a long time before she became aware of the cold and her stiffness. She pulled herself off the tree and went back to the command post, which seemed quieter now that the strobes of the car flashers were off. She found Al outside with a cigarette, not so much smoking it as allowing it to burn itself down while he leaned against a car and stared off into the distance. The words rose up in her throat: Al, would Jules have the skills to survive on the streets? Al, how unbalanced is she? What didn't I see? She wanted badly to ask him, to take advantage of his experience and his ability to see things she often missed. She even tried to tell herself that offering him another option would be a kindness, but when she saw him, she knew that she could not. The familiar rituals of investigation, torturous as they were, were the only thing holding him together now. Remove those props and this man could break.
'I'm going now, Al,' was all she said. 'I have my pager; it seems to work up here. Do you know where you'll
