be tonight?'
'Here, maybe, or the hospital.'
'Al, you're going to end up in the hospital yourself if you don't take care.'
He looked at her blankly, noticed the long-ashed cigarette in his hand, and dropped it, grinding it under his heel.
'I'll call you later, okay?' she asked.
'Fine.'
She grasped his arm and squeezed hard, then left him.
She was fortunate going downhill, catching a ride with a sheriff's deputy who took her smoothly through the gate and dropped her at her rental car, unrecognized by the press. She had the car turned and away in thirty seconds, feeling the immense relief of an escape from the gates of hell. For once, she did not mean the media circus, but the site behind them.
Long before she reached the freeway, she had decided that what she needed was a meal and a quiet hotel room. She'd been up in the hills for five hours, but it felt like days since her plane had landed at Sea Tac. Her eyes were gritty, she craved a shower and badly needed a toilet, and her skin was twitchy with a combination of anxiety and adrenaline and simple lack of sleep.
Unfortunately, scores of law-enforcement personnel and media types had been there first, and the closest vacancy sign she came to was halfway to Olympia. She waited impatiently for the desk clerk to record her credit card number, then trotted across to her room. Half an hour later, bladder empty and hair still damp from the shower, she crossed over again and ordered from the 'all day breakfast' page of the menu: eggs and bacon, a short stack of blueberry pancakes and hash browns, orange juice and coffee. The newspapers, waitresses, and other customers were all full of the arrest.
Back in her room, she eyed the telephone, decided she needed to sleep, and lay down with her shoes on, pulling the nylon bedspread over her, prepared to give herself over to the exhaustion loosed by the food.
Twenty minutes later, wide awake and tense as a drawn bowstring, she finally gave up, flung back the bedspread, and picked up the phone.
Lee answered.
'Hello, sweetheart,' Kate said. 'I thought I'd check in.'
'Where are you?'
Kate told her, and gave her the motel's phone number.
'Have you seen Al?'
'Yeah.'
'Is he holding up?'
'Barely. Jani's in the hospital.' Her narrative punctuated by noises of distress from Lee, Kate told her what she had heard from Al. When she finished, she waited for Lee to speak. Eventually, Lee did.
'And?'
'What do you mean?'
'And so, if Al doesn't want you and D'Amico won't have you, why are you calling me from a hotel in Olympia instead of from the airport, telling me when your flight gets in?'
'I'll go nuts if I come home.'
'Tell me more,' Lee prompted. Kate had a vivid image of her settling back attentively into the therapist's listening position.
'I'm sure they're right - D'Amico and the FBI. This man Lavalle picked up Jules, and he killed her.'
'But you're not sure, completely sure.'
'No, I am, really. They're very good, Lee. They don't make stupid mistakes; they don't overlook things.'
'Then what is the problem?'
'I don't know. I just know I can't stand the thought of walking away from it.'
'Walking away from Jules,' Lee said quietly.
'You could say that. Not without clear evidence of what happened to her. If she was on those tapes, or if they found her diary, her fingerprints, anything, I'd feel… well, not better about it, but resigned, I guess.'
'The word you want is
'That's right.'
'You can't grieve until you know.'
Kate did not answer.
'You may never have it. You know that, Kate.'
As often as the idea had skirted the edges of Kate's mind, Lee's saying it hit her like a physical blow.
'I know. I do know.'
'You'll have to face it sooner or later, Kate. Here or in Olympia. There may be no closure to this; you may need to make your own.' Kate was silent. 'Are you crying, my love?'
'I wish I could.'
'I think you should come back home, Kate.'
'I will, in a few days. I just need to satisfy myself that she didn't go to Seattle.'
'Why would she have gone to Seattle?'
'She talked about it once. She and Jani lived there when Jules was very small. There's a chance she got it into her head to go back to her past, by herself.' It sounded even thinner aloud than it had in thinking about it. Kate tried to elaborate. 'You see, one of the things that's come out in all the conversations I've had about Jules is that she had a growing need for her own past. She found out this last summer that her father was like something out of a bad novel, violent and possessive. Jani left him when Jules was small, and he was killed in prison a while later. So she has a thing about her past, a need to find her roots. She talked about family a lot in the days before she disappeared.'
'And you think she walked away from you to make her way - what, two hundred miles? - to a city you were going to anyway?'
'She had some money. And if she was going to Seattle, she wouldn't have waited to jump ship there, because it would have become the first place I'd have looked for her. Jules is a clever girl.' Kate heard her own use of the present tense, and she felt obscurely cheered, as at an omen.
'How would you find her?'
'Shelters, halfway houses, squats. Bridges.'
'It's a big place.'
'And she's a distinctive girl. Oh, that reminds me: There're some pictures of her in the camera that I didn't get around to developing. Could you have Jon take the film into that one-hour place, and then choose one or two and have twenty copies of each made? Tell them they have to make a rush job of it. I'll give you a place to overnight them to when I get up there.'
'Aren't there posters of her all over? I understood that's one thing they were doing.'
'Sure, but I want a color photograph of her with short hair.'
'All right.' Lee's voice, patient and reserved, caught Kate up short.
'I have to do this, Lee. You do understand?'
'Not entirely, no.'
'Lee —' How to say this? How to tell Lee that Jules had been the only thing to get Kate through this terrible autumn? 'Lee, Jules and I became friends while you were away. Good friends. She reminded me of my kid sister Patty. You remember her?'
'I do. She was killed in an automobile accident when you were at Cal.'
'I love Jules, Lee. She's family. I can't just walk off and leave it to the big boys.'
'Even if there's no point in what you're doing?'
'Even if there's no point in what I'm doing.'
Kate heard a sigh coming down the line, but no more objections. 'Get those pictures together,' she said. 'I'll call you from Seattle. Oh, and I meant to tell you, my beeper extends this far up, if you need to reach me.'
'Take care, sweetheart.'
'You, too.'
Now, Kate could sleep.
