“This is her routine now.”
“Let me try to talk with her again tonight.”
“She’s going to tell you she’s got to do her homework and right after that she’ll say she’s too tired to talk and has to go to bed. John, I know you can’t possibly think about this right now. Was there any news at all today? Did they find anything in the caves?”
“No, but we’re going back tomorrow.”
At a little after 11:00 Maria came out of her room. Marquez was out on the deck with Katherine. Maria waved a hand good-night from the deck door and Katherine coaxed her out and hugged her, then stepped around her, leaving Maria with him. As she left, Maria said sharply, almost bitchily, “What was that about?”
“She loves you.”
“She shouldn’t try to control me then.”
“You’re the one in control.”
“Tell her that.”
“I haven’t said much to you about it yet, have I?”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to start tonight?”
“Why don’t you sit with me a few minutes?” She sat on the picnic bench and wouldn’t look directly at him. “If we didn’t say anything, we wouldn’t be worth anything as parents. I told you the mess I got myself in. I let things go too far, sometimes. Maybe you’re a little like that, too.”
“Oh, so now we’re alike.”
“We might have that in common. You ate and then went straight to the bathroom, right?”
“So you’re accusing me, too?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Why would I want to throw up?”
“Maybe you want to control your body, because maybe the rest of your life doesn’t feel like it’s under control.” She didn’t give a sign one way or the other. “Mine feels that way right now, too. What’s going on in your life?”
Maria deflected the question. “Mom says you shouldn’t be leaving tomorrow and should do what the FBI says.”
“Then I wouldn’t be in control.” That got the slightly crooked shy smile that was hers only, that was there when he’d met her when she was four. “But that’s not really it, either, Maria. Sue Petersen is missing and I have to do everything I can to try to find her. I stayed here today and shouldn’t have.”
“Mom says she might already be dead.”
“She might be, but if she’s alive she’s got to believe I’m look-ing for her.”
“Well, mom is always wrong.”
“She’s not wrong about you.” He paused a beat. “I know you, Maria, the lying has got to be making you feel lousy. You’ve got a problem here and you’ve got to face it, and if anyone has the will and the strength to do that, it’s you.”
Maria didn’t answer but something was happening. He saw her shoulders shaking and tears starting in her eyes. When she looked up the tears were streaming down her face and she cried silently, then shook her head, sobbing, confessing something he couldn’t make out initially. Her voice wavered, talking now about problems with her friends, feeling like an outcast, people ignoring her, calling her a freak behind her back.
“You don’t look like a freak.”
“Everybody says I do.”
“You don’t. You were bringing your weight down and maybe it got a little away from you and went further than you hoped. It’s the kind of mistake I would make.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“The thing about friends is you only have a few true ones in a lifetime, and I wouldn’t sweat the rest. If I hadn’t been there last night, then I wouldn’t have been Petersen’s true friend.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“Talk to me, talk to your mom, start there. We’re your friends. She’s all over you because she loves you, but she’ll back off when she sees you turn it around.”
“I mean at school.”
“You’re beautiful and bright, Maria. You’ve got it all going your way and you’re going to have to use that great will of yours to work this problem out. That’s what got you into this and that’s what’s going to get you out. But first you’ve got to try to figure out where it started.”
“I already know that.”
“Then go back to where it started and unravel it. Take it a day at a time. Two good days and maybe a bad day, then three good days in a row. Four good days. I’m having a real hard time with Petersen missing, but I’ve got to keep on with the SOU team. And you’ve got to keep going forward with school and what you have going. I’ll make a deal; I’ll tell you how it’s going for me and you tell me how it’s going for you. Can we make that deal?”
She nodded and got awkwardly to her feet. He followed her inside. From the hallway she turned and looked back to him, her face a vulnerable cross between child and woman.
The next morning he made coffee and stood on the back deck as high clouds to the east streaked with color. He drank a second cup, calling everyone in the unit, talking over the plan for the day, then called Chief Keeler.
“Douglas told me yesterday that Kline doesn’t experience ordi-nary emotions,” Keeler said, his voice strained and raw. “He doesn’t have any conscience, at least not in the way that we think of one.” Keeler added that he’d been up since two in the morning, thinking about Petersen. “Nothing like this could have ever happened when I started here thirty years ago. We couldn’t have imagined it. Every decade or so a state ranger or warden would get killed by poachers during a confrontation, but nothing like this cat and mouse with poachers who have better equipment than us. That goddamned Internet has done more to help criminals than anyone else.”
Marquez walked back into the house explaining why he was sending Alvarez back to check the Van Damme caves. The FBI hadn’t done their search for evidence at low tide and he wanted to do that. He picked a list of boats off the table, heard Katherine and Maria moving around in the back rooms.
“I got a list of boats yesterday, Chief, everything longer than sixty feet that has docked at a California port in the last month. I’m going to head up the coast this morning.”
“They asked that you remain available.”
“I’ll be back tonight and I’m available by phone.” Marquez paused a beat, unsure how Keeler would react, but he seemed okay with it. “The last place they had me go was up north. We lost a full day yesterday.”
Marquez hung up remembering a day years ago with Petersen when they’d been out at Point Reyes checking on an abalone bed. A tipster who was leaving her boyfriend but turning him in to Fish and Game first insisted he’d stripped it. Marquez had gone into the water and found the bed intact. Petersen had laughed when he’d surfaced and said the ab bed was there still. Then they’d sat in the warm sun along the beach and eaten sandwiches. She’d taken in the day and her fingers sifted the warm sand and they’d talked about what would come next and gathered up their lunch trash and headed on.
Marquez limped out of the house, one of his legs a little sore. He loaded equipment but was on the phone until after Katherine and Maria left. Now, he backed his truck around, registering that the new side window was the only one without dust. He saw a piece of folded paper under the windshield wiper just before taking off, and got out, picked it off the glass, and unfolded a lemon-colored piece of stationery.
“Thanks, John. I love you. Your daughter.”
He read it twice because there’d always been a careful accuracy to her signings, usually finishing any card or note to him with “your loving stepdaughter,” and he’d never asked her to pretend otherwise, although she almost never heard from her true father. Katherine had done the real child-raising and he’d helped out from the sidelines. With this current problem, Katherine had done the difficult part and he was just coming behind with some talk, and despite the note, there was no saying whether he’d made any dif-ference with Maria last night. Still, he folded the note and put it in his pocket, meaning to keep it.
Three hours later, Marquez left the coast highway and started up Guyanno Canyon. The road was narrow and laced with the tar used to repair cracks. He wound up through the trees, remembering the day he’d come to meet Davies and what had changed since then. He’d talked to Ruter yesterday afternoon and Ruter had volunteered that Davies was still his number one suspect in the Guyanno mur-ders and threw out an idea, that Davies had led Marquez down the coast to San Francisco, then ditched his boat before fleeing the country or at least California. Trying to make it look like some-thing had happened to him.