'Why didn't you guys ever take that off?'
'Weldon said it wasn't right to break things in the squat.' Kate turned to stare at him, but he was serious. She followed him, shaking her head at the logic of a man who would shoot a cop but not break a lock.
At the car, he asked again, 'Are we going to open it?'
'I'm going to take you home.'
'Please. I really want to see what's in it.'
Oh hell, Kate thought, he deserves it. And I'm not about to take it into the lab without opening it, anyway.
She cut the envelope open on Wanda Steiner's kitchen table. Wanda had placed a paper towel down to protect the scrubbed wood from the dirty paper, and she'd given Kate a lethally sharp kitchen knife with a long, narrow blade. Kate slit the paper, leaving the tape intact, lifted the slit open with the tip of the knife, and slid out the thing inside.
It was a small, lumpy wad of tissue paper wrapped around something. With the tip of the knife and the end of a fingernail she began to undo it. The object whispered slightly inside the paper, the metallic whisper of a chain shifting, and with a shudder of premonition she knew what would be inside the envelope.
She was right: dog tags.
A set of dog tags, scratched and dull from long wear.
The name stamped onto them was KIMBAL, MARSHAL J.
Kate stood up. Her body felt numb with cold, but she was vaguely aware of relief that her brain was still functioning.
'I've got to talk to Al,' she said, looking at Lee.
'Do you have his number?'
'It's at home. I left everything at home.'
'Jon's probably back, if you don't want to wait.'
'He'll find it for me.' Kate went to the phone on the kitchen wall, and only when she had begun to punch in her home number did she realize that it was a strange phone, and then she noticed that she had an audience. Awkwardly, she held out the receiver to the Steiners. 'Do you mind if I…'
'Of course not.'
She turned to complete the dial sequence and remembered something. 'None of you touch that paper or the dog tags,' she ordered. After a minute, she frowned. 'He's got the answering machine on.'
'He may be screening calls. Leave a message.'
Kate nodded, and when the recorded message had played to the end, she started to say in the stilted tones of someone speaking into a recording device, 'Jon, it's Kate here. Lee and I will be home in —'
The others in the room heard the phone give forth a whoop, and then a loud and vastly relieved voice was shouting into Kate's ear.
'Kate, darling! My God, it's been like Grand Central Station around here. Where on earth are you?'
'Why? What's wrong?'
'Something about some pictures you sent to Al Hawkin. You've stirred up a veritable ant's nest there, dear. I thought he —'
'Pictures? What pict - B.J. Montero's photographs. Jon, what about them?' she said urgently.
'I don't know; he wouldn't tell lowly old me. Just said that there's a man in them who shouldn't be, or something.'
'Was it Lavalle?'
'Well, you know,' said Jon, 'I really don't think so. Anyway, you'd better call the poor man before he ruptures a blood vessel or something. He was sounding a wee bit stressed.'
Al wasn't the only one, Kate thought. She hadn't heard Jon this arch in months.
'Right. Did he give you a number?'
'Only a few dozen times. Do you have a pen?'
'Just a minute. Lee? Hand me that pencil? Okay,' she said to him. He gave her a Portland number. She repeated it, hung up, punched in the lengthy sequence that would bill it to her credit card, and when it rang she asked for Al Hawkin. He was there in a matter of seconds.
'Kate? Thank God. Where the hell did you get those pictures?'
'It's a long story, but they were taken at a rest stop south of Portland where Jules and I went - in the afternoon, a few hours before she disappeared. Some people were there, taking pictures of one another, and I tracked them down. I sent them to you on the off chance Lavalle's car was there.'
'Not Lavalle, no. Jesus. When I got them, I didn't know what the hell they were. Nobody else recognized them, so I stuck them in the team room - I'm back in Portland - and Jani saw them when she came to bring me some lunch.' Jani's on her feet again, Kate noted in passing. 'She just looked through them. In fact, she'd put them down and walked away, when it hit her. I thought she was going to pass out again.'
'She saw Marsh Kimbal,' Kate said.
But for the background noise, she would have thought he had hung up. Eventually, he spoke, his voice high and breathless.
'How the fuck did you know that?'
'I've been busy, Al. I just found out. He's been sending Jules messages. He sent her a present, too - his old army dog tags. I assume he was in the army?'
'Yes. Jani… Jani told me he was dead. I still don't know if she honestly thought he was, or if she told herself he was so many times that she began to believe it herself, or - Anyway, that doesn't matter. What matters is, if Jules's father snatched her, there's a good chance she's still alive.'
'Al, tell me, please tell me there's something visible on his car's license plates,' she prayed.
'The car's registered to a Mark Kendall. He lives in the middle of nowhere in southern Oregon, two, three hours from Medford.'
'It's him?'
'Sounds like. We've stayed away until we knew what the hell we were dealing with, but the FBI's already set up a team in Lakeview.'
'I'll leave tonight, be there before morning. Where should I go?'
'They've taken over a building at - where the hell's that address? Here it is.' He read it off to her. 'It's a bank that just went bust; the FBI is borrowing it.'
'Where will you be?' she asked him.
'I'll be there,' he said, and hung up.
She lifted the receiver from her ear and placed it gently on the base that was mounted on the wall, staring at it for a long moment before she turned to the others. Struggling to contain the riot of emotions set off by the rebirth of hope, she looked first at Lee, then at Dio.
'Jules may be alive,' she said.
TWENTY-FIVE
'His name is Marshal James Kimbal, known as Marsh,' the FBI man had begun, but that had been a long, weary time ago, and Kate now felt as if she'd been sitting for a week in this chair around the long table in the anonymously corporate boardroom in this building in southern Oregon. She'd arrived here at some ungodly hour on Monday morning, having driven through the night, and had sat here, it seemed, ever since. It was now Wednesday, and as far as she could see, they were setting off on a second full day of the same circular discussion that had occupied part of Monday and all day Tuesday.
Even the photograph of Jules that was pinned to the wall, blurry from enlargement and the dust in the air between the girl and the telephoto lens, failed to charm anymore. When she'd first seen it on Monday afternoon, she couldn't take her eyes off it for the sheer joy of seeing evidence of Jules alive. Now her attention, what was left of it, was all for the man who walked in front of Jules, the man with the gun in his hand, the man who had tracked Jani and found Jules and taken her out from under Kate's unconscious nose.
Since those introductory words on Monday afternoon, the compilers of evidence - those not occupied with Anton Lavalle two hundred miles to the north - had been in high gear. Photographs, a couple of nearly inaudible long-range recordings, and a detailed history of an obsessed father had been wheeled in, and analysts and
