"If 'coming down hard' means expressing anger, then no, I will not. I will, however, strongly urge her mother and Alonzo to educate her as to the dangers the world holds for young girls. Talking to a boy in a well-populated public park is one thing; taking a bus to San Francisco without telling anyone is quite another. Her mother has a strong tendency to be overly protective, and to avoid unpleasant topics with her daughter. She must be shown that it only makes the darkness beneath Julia's brilliance all the greater. I shall speak to Alonzo about it, I think. It was very perceptive of you to see beneath the armor of Julia's mind, Ms Martinelli."
For a cop, Kate supposed she meant.
"The name is Kate. Here, let me give you my phone number, in case anything else comes up. That's my number at work, and - do you have a pen? This," she continued, writing on the back of the card, "is my home number. I have to run, but would you tell Jules I'll call her tomorrow night? Maybe you'd better give me your number, too," she said, taking back the pen and writing down the number. As Rosa escorted her to the door the two girls reappeared, clutching scraps of bright nylon and brighter towels. Kate sidled past them into the hallway and, reassuring Jules that she was going to look into Dio's absence, that she would be in touch, and that she would be discreet, she made her escape.
Kate parked on the far side of the park from the swimming pool, in case Jules ended up there. Kate had no intention of allowing Jules to tag along while she followed her nose to what might turn up as a two-day-old decomposing corpse bent over a spray-paint canister. Jani - and Al - would not thank her for that.
However, a circuit of the park, which took less than half an hour, brought no whiff of the utterly unmistakable, primally unnerving smell of a rotting human being. The park was partly grass and playground, partly scrub woodland around an arroyo - masses of tick bush, madrone, live oak, and great billows of poison oak beginning to take on the spectacular red of its autumnal coloring. She went back to the car and drew out a mechanic's coverall that she kept there, more as emergency-clothing-cum-rag than because she worked on the car in it. It was made of tightly woven gabardine, and as she zipped it up, she felt as if she had stepped into a sauna. She also put on socks and running shoes and a pair of driving gloves. She thought of tying her hair in a towel, but decided that would be just too awful. She locked the car and walked along the road that wrapped the wilderness portion of the park until she found a vague deer trail, then pushed her way into the stifling, hot, dusty, fragrant brush. When that trail petered out, she reversed her steps and tried another.
Forty minutes later, she found the boy's lair. He must have been immune to poison oak, because Kate had to swim in the stuff, and twice she had gone past the low entrance before registering that one of the branches seemed even more dead than the others.
There was a tent, brown and dusty and pushed in among the bushes on all sides, carefully zipped up, but with the flaps only casually draped across the door and left down at the windows. She cleared her throat and said the boy's name loudly, but the only movement was a blue jay over her head. With a beat of apprehension she pulled up the door flap and looked through the screen into the tent, claustrophobic in its branch-crowded windows. There was no body, sprawled and swelling. There was a pair of cloth high-top tennis shoes, mostly holes, in one corner next to a neat pile of folded clothes which, she soon found, consisted of a pair of shorts and one of jeans, a T-shirt, two graying pairs of undershorts, a pair of mismatched, once-white athletic socks, and a sweatshirt. There were also half a dozen two-liter plastic soft-drink bottles filled with water that appeared dirty with the beginnings of algae; a worn beach towel; a sleeping bag with several holes and a broken zipper; and half a dozen shoe boxes in a neat pile. Some of these last were empty, others held a variety of undoubtedly scrounged treasures: two or three half-empty notepads stained with what, coffee grounds? - three pencils, two pens. Another shoe box held string, twine, elastic bands, broken shoelaces, a snarl of twist ties, and some neatly folded plastic grocery bags. Another - surprise: jewelry. Most of it was of the costume variety, but there was also a man's gold signet ring with a small diamond, the metal scratched and slightly misshapen as if it had been buried in sand, and three odd earrings for pierced ears, all of which had lost the post's anchor. One of the earrings had three gold chains, each ending in a small ruby and dangling from a center stud with a larger ruby, to Kate's eyes genuine and worth a few dollars at a pawnshop or jeweler's. She closed the shoe boxes and put them back as she had found them, then continued her search. Inside a cracked plastic file box about a foot square and with a rock on top of it, she found Dio's library, including a hardback science fiction novel from the local public library, due the following week. Checked out to Jules? After an inner battle, she removed it from the others, most of them worn paperback classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, David Copperfield, and Peter Pan. Deliberately collected, she wondered as she thumbed through them, or just what someone in the neighborhood happened to throw out? There was no rainbow notebook, no identifying papers aside from the much handled photograph of a woman with large teeth laughing into the camera on a beach. It was the only thing in the tent that she thought Dio might regret, were it to be damaged by rain, so for safekeeping she stuck it inside the library book and put that to one side.
No sign of a struggle; on the other hand, it was doubtful that he'd pack up and leave without the bits of jewelry that could buy a hungry boy several meals. But there was nothing more she could do here, except… She took one of the pads and a pencil stub out of the appropriate box and wrote her home phone number on it. Below it, she added: I'm a friend of Jules. Please call collect.
She left the pad on the sleeping bag, picked up Jules's book, and let herself out of the tent, where the close day seemed cool compared with the stifling tent. She fastened the zip and pulled the door flap across the tent, then pushed her way back out of the brush.
By the time she had gained the road, she could barely keep from ripping off the drenched and sticking coverall. She did unzip it completely, stuffing the gloves into a pocket. Oh God, she thought, I'm itching already, and scratched her head.
She had company. A sheriff's car had pulled authoritatively, if ineffectually, across the front of her car, and the two deputies were standing side by side, watching her puff up the road.
Kate knew immediately that these two would drawl, though they had probably been born in California, that they'd make some remark about her clothes, and that they would attempt to bracket her at close quarters to strut their power. Well, they'd just chosen the wrong woman on the wrong day for that little game. She walked past them without a glance, went to the trunk of her car, unlocked it, tossed in the library book, and took out two bottles of mineral water. One she drank, letting it spill down her throat. She bent over and let the other one glug across her face and into her hair. Still ignoring the two deputies, who were now standing on either side of her, she capped the bottles, tossed them into the trunk, ran her fingers through her shaggy hair to comb it roughly into place, and brought her right foot up to the bumper to untie her shoe. Only now did one of the young men speak, the one on her left.
"Afternoon there, Miss."
"Martinelli. And it's Ms."
"Why, we got us a card-carrying feminist, Randy," said the second.
"Randy," she snorted, kicking her shoe into the trunk and bending to untie the other one. "And I suppose your partner's name is Dick." Before he could figure it out, she distracted him by shrugging out of the coverall and tossing the filthy garment in after the shoes and socks, then reaching in for a pair of rubber thongs, dropping them to the ground, and slipping her feet into them. "You drive that car?" she asked.