'I can't see you very well, but your daughter's gorgeous.'
'She's not my daughter,' Kate said before she could stop herself. Something in her voice gave her away.
'Who is - What are you after? Is this - Oh shit. Oh Jesus. Is this about that last girl who was killed by the Strangler? The policeman's daughter?'
'It is.'
'And is this her, in the picture? That means…' The voice trailed off.
'That's her, yes. And she disappeared a few hours after you took that picture.'
'And you think he was there? Stalking her? You want my pictures as evidence.'
This was much the same thing as Peter Franklin had thought, and Kate again rejected the complicated truth in favor of keeping things simple. 'That's what we're hoping. Are there any cars or people in the other pictures?'
A pause while Montero looked at the remaining pictures. 'Well, yes, there's a bunch. Maybe a dozen cars and RVs, six or eight people walking around - people who weren't from my bus, that is. And a few more people inside cars, though of course you can't see them very well. What does Lavalle look like?'
Kate made her decision. 'I'd like to ask you for the pictures and the negatives,' she said.
'You can have them,' Montero said emphatically and with revulsion. 'Do you want me to mail them to you?'
'Would it be possible,' Kate said slowly, 'for you to meet me at the airport?'
TWENTY-TWO
On the ground, in the hotel room that had come to vibrate with frustration during the four days that Kate had occupied it, the decision to fetch B.J. Montero's photographic efforts herself had seemed logical enough. A combination of desperation and a vague sense of preserving some semblance of an evidence chain had made the trip seem almost necessary.
Inside the plane, however, with the credit card receipts for hotel, car, and airplane ticket weighing heavily in her pocket, it was a different matter. She nearly got off before the attendants shut the door; probably the only thing that kept her in her seat was the knowledge of how difficult and unlikely a refund would be.
How much had she spent on this fruitless quest? With something approaching horror, she counted up the charges put on her credit card in the last two months, beginning with the waterproof shoes she had bought Jules in Berkeley the day they headed out. Where were those shoes now? she wondered. God, the card must be nearly at the max now. How would she ever pay for it? And what good had it done anyone? In the end, Jules would still be gone, and she would be working to pay off an expensive wild goose.
The plane lumbered and rose, and three hours later dropped into Los Angeles. A remembered figure, wearing a much prettier hat, stood at the gate, manila envelope in her right hand and a large boyfriend at her left. She held out the envelope tentatively.
'Kate Martinelli?'
Kate took the envelope and held out her right hand, first to the woman, then to the man. 'BJ. Montero? Good to meet you. I'm Kate Martinelli,' she said to the boyfriend.
'This is Johnny,' Montero said by way of introduction. He grunted and crushed Kate's hand a bit, in warning perhaps, or revenge for all the disturbance she had caused, or maybe just because he was a poor judge of his own strength.
'Good to meet you, Johnny.' Kate extracted her hand. 'Want to go for some coffee? I have half an hour before my return flight.' The last flight to San Francisco, she thought, wondering why no one had written a song with that title. She then wondered if she wasn't getting a little light-headed. 'A drink, maybe?'
'Sure,' B.J. said, without so much as a glance at her companion. The top of her head was in line with the center of his biceps, but she handled him with all the ease of a mother.
Kate paid for two coffees and a beer for Johnny ('I'm driving,' said B.J.) and, once at the table, opened the envelope. There were nine photographs, not eight. Middle-class gypsies in Afghan hats were caught in motion; the elderly fisherman stood in the frigid water, looking like a frost-rimed sculpture; Kate and Jules stood on opposite sides of the car, taking a last glance at the scene. Kate's door was open, as was the girl's mouth. Jules had been saying something about Montero's sheepskin coat, Kate thought, and remembered the blast of cold air against her nearly shaven scalp when she took off her hat before getting into the car, a jolt that seemed to have set off the headache.
The five remaining pictures were snapshots, hastily composed, though well focused. The focal points, however, were on the young people close to the lens, not on the cars parked in the slots or on the ordinary people walking to and from them. Kate glanced through them, not knowing what she thought she might see, but they were only pictures, memories of someone else's good times.
'You see anything?' B.J. asked. Kate tore her gaze from the picture and reached for her coffee. She shook her head.
'I didn't really expect to.'
'You mean the man isn't there? Lavalle?' B.J. sounded both disappointed and relieved.
'I don't know what he looks like.'
'You don't?'
Kate, seeing her astonishment, pulled herself together and gave a laugh. 'I haven't been in on the interviews yet, and I wasn't there when he was arrested. A case like this, there're hundreds of people working on it. I'm only one.' She glanced at her watch. 'I better get moving. Let me give you a receipt, and if you'd just sign the backs of those photographs, so we know whose they are.' A chain of evidence, as if anyone would ever look at them in a court of law. Would ever look at them, period.
Kate could feel herself beginning to run down. The brief push of zeal that had been set off by Peter Franklin at the bus company and the photographs taken by his driver was fading. If she hadn't already made an arrangement with the police photographic lab technician, she would have gone straight home from the airport, but instead, carried along by routine, she dutifully went to the lab, marked the photos for cropping and enlargement, and pointed out the faces and license plates she wanted brought out.
Then she went home.
It was nearly ten o'clock when she woke up the next morning, and the house was filled with the rich aroma of bread baking. She felt rested, but the sensation of being a piece of run-down machinery persisted. The last few days seemed unreal, like some stupid and pointless dream that had seemed profound at the time. Lee was home and Jon was baking. It was a sunny Thursday morning as she lay in bed while the rest of the world was hard at work. A bird was singing in the tree outside the window, and a dog barked somewhere.
And Jules was dead.
That brilliant, sweet, troubled, funny girl was gone, victim of the most revolting kind of killer. Kate had loved her, had been loved by her, and now she was gone.
She lay among the rumpled sheets, thinking bleak thoughts on a beautiful morning, and when the doorbell rang down below, she was caught up in a memory of another morning, in late August, when Jules had arrived on her doorstep and rung the bell, backpack over her shoulder, bandage on her knee, her hair still worn in long, childish braids, to ask Kate's help in looking for a friend. Kate had found him, and lost her, and suddenly, hit by an overwhelming upsurge of the grief that she had so long pushed away, she turned her face into the pillow and allowed the tears to come.
She didn't hear the sound of the bedroom door opening and then closing, but a minute later the mattress sank as Lee sat down on it, and she felt Lee's hand stroking her hair. Neither of them said anything for a long time, until Kate finally lifted her head, found a Kleenex, and turned onto her back.
The manila envelope Lee held was much thicker than it had been the night before. Kate took it from her without comment and slid the pictures out onto the bedcovers.
'A courier brought it from the lab,' Lee said. 'I thought it might be urgent.'
Kate picked up one enlargement that she hadn't asked for but that had been done anyway: she and Jules on either side of the Saab, two heads of cropped hair, one on an ill-looking cop, the other on a girl with her life ahead of her. Except it wasn't life that awaited her a short distance up the road.
Urgent? These? No. The whole thing was pointless, a delaying tactic to avoid facing the truth, and she had finally admitted it.
