With Child Read online

  “From that tree?”

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t Al, was it? Who shot…that man.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I didn’t think so. I mean, I was young then, and I sort of imagined it was Al up in the tree, even though I knew it wasn’t.”

  “Al doesn’t climb trees. It’s in his contract. So,” she said sharply before Jules could inquire about contract clauses or ask to see the bloodstains that lay, all but invisible to any eyes but Kate’s, three inches to the right of her foot, hidden beneath the new Tibetan carpet, “what is it you want me to do for you? ‘Professionally.’”

  It was a long and convoluted tale, filled with extraneous detail and looping into unnecessary excursions, speculations, and a preteenager’s philosophical reflections, mature and mawkish by turns, but Kate was an experienced interrogator, and if she lacked Al Hawkin’s natural ability to read and lead the person being questioned, she had at least learned how to keep things on track.

  Jules went to a private school. To the parent of a public school child, the idea of private school evokes high academic standards and close discipline, a broad education for already bright children balanced with encouraging each student to develop his or her own interests and abilities to the fullest. This paradisaical image loses some of its solidity once inside the walls of the ivory tower (“I mean,” commented Jules, “two of the high school girls got pregnant last year, how’s that for brains?”), but it can be said that the teaching is no worse than that of a public school, and classes are certainly smaller. Too, a privately funded school is safe from the state’s fiscal blackmailers, who had turned most of the schools in the area where Jules lived into year-round schools, with students popping in and out of one another’s desks for twelve months of the year. Where parents pay the bills, parents choose the calendar, and it was no accident that many of the parents whose children went to school with Jules taught on nine-month schedules at colleges and universities. The date for the school’s winter music program was always chosen with an eye to the university’s exam schedule. With this groundwork out of the way, and reduced to an adult perspective, Jules’s narrative amounted to the following.

  Immediately after university grades had been posted the previous June, Jani Cameron had picked up her bags and her daughter and flown to Germany to examine certain manuscripts in Köln, Berlin, and Düsseldorf. Jani spent the two weeks in quiet ecstasy and filled two notebooks with references and addenda to the manuscript she was hoping to finish before October.

  Her daughter was less than ecstatic. Jani had never gotten around to teaching Jules German, for one thing, and then she arbitrarily ruled that Jules could not go beyond hotel, park, or library without her mother—that is, she could not go. Kate had the strong impression that some dark unpleasantness had taken place, and her detective instincts stirred, but she was not sure how much of that impression was from Jules’s dramatization of a mere argument, so she decided not to allow herself to be distracted. At the end of the two weeks, as mother and daughter packed to leave for San Francisco, Jani was brought out of her academic dream to the harsh realization that her remarkable but normally reasonable little girl was deeply entrenched in a case of the adolescent sulks.

  No, Jules had not had a good time. She did not like to play in parks with children; she did not care for libraries filled with books she could not read; she did not think it unreasonable that she hadn’t learned German in fourteen days. Furthermore, she did not like having been taken from her friends and from a summer school offering in computer programming that interested her, just to tag along behind her mother.

  The two Cameron women fought with polite implacability all the way across the Atlantic, interrupted only by meals and the movie, which Jules watched while her mother pretended to sleep, trying desperately to absorb this radical change in her daughter. By the time the plane touched down in San Francisco, they had come to an agreement. The next morning, Jani sat down at her desk while Jules went off to talk her way into a late registration at the computer course. As they nodded off over their respective keyboards, both felt a sense of uneasy victory beneath the heavy fog of their jet lag, and a vague awareness of business unfinished.

  All of which was to say that, while Jani wrote her book and edged further into her relationship with Inspector Alonzo Hawkin of the San Francisco Police Department, Jules had a great deal of time on her own. She went to school four mornings a week to fill the crevices of her voracious mind with the intricacies of RAMs and ROMs, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, but the afternoons and weekends, which normally she might have spent at home reading or floating in their apartment house’s minuscule pool, she spent on her own, pointedly away from her mother’s presence. Friends were thin on the ground in July and August, sprinkled across the globe from Yosemite to Tashkent, but there were enough left to keep Jules from boredom, and there was her computer partner, and there were the library and the bilingual books her mother had ordered so that she could start on German, and there was the larger swimming pool in the park, and the park itself to read in.

  Which was where she had met Dio.

  “It must be a nickname,” said Jules. “I mean, who would name their kid God, except maybe a rock star or something? He said it was his real name, but another time he said his mother was secretly in love with some piano player named Claudio and named Dio after him. He never told me his last name.”

  Dio lived in the park. It was both an indication of Jules’s naïveté and the unlikely surroundings that she had not believed him. She’d seen him before, a few times in early July and then more often. Finally, in the last week of July, he came and sat next to her and asked what she was reading. He seemed baffled that she would want to learn German; he was more interested in one of her other books, a novel by Anne McCaffrey, and settled down at a distance from her for the rest of the afternoon, reading. He read slowly, and asked her what a couple of words meant, but he was possessed by the book. When it was time for Jules to go home, Dio asked hesitantly if she would mind if he borrowed it. It was a paperback and belonged to her, so she let him take it, said she’d be in the park again the following afternoon. She then went home to dinner.

  He was there the next day, and the next. He returned the book as if it were a precious stone, she gave him another one, and they read in odd companionship for the rest of that week.

  And he was odd, she had to admit that. Or, no, not odd himself, but there was something strange about him. It was not merely that his hair was long, though clean, or that he seemed to have only two T-shirts—neither of these made him stand out even in a wealthy neighborhood. However, he seemed to have no family or friends, he never bought an ice cream or brought a snack, and he seemed uneasy at accepting anything from Jules. Then she discovered that he did not have a library card—an inconceivable impoverishment to Jules. He was vague about where he lived, what school he went to. And he wouldn’t come to dinner when Jules invited him. That was the final straw.

  “What is it with you?” she had asked irritably. “You’re this big mystery man all the time. Every time I ask anything about you, you look off into space and mutter. I don’t care if your father’s a garbage-man or something, or if you don’t have one. I don’t have a father, but that doesn’t mean I won’t go to a friend’s house for dinner. I thought we were friends, anyway. Aren’t we?”

  Well, um, er, yes, but.

  “You don’t have to invite me to your house if it’s dirty or something. Mom’s making hamburgers, is all, and she said I could invite you.”

  “You told your mother about me? What did you tell her? What’d she say?”

  “I told her there was a new kid I’d met in the park who liked to read, and she said, ‘That’s nice, honey,’ and went back to work. She’s writing a book.” That distracted him.

  “What kind of book?”

  “Like I told you, her field is medieval German literature. This one is on marriage as a symbolic something or ot
her. Pretty boring, really. I looked at a few pages, and even I couldn’t make any sense of them. So, will you come to dinner?”

  “Your mother will ask questions, and her cop boyfriend”—“Sorry, Kate, that’s what he said,” Jules explained—“will come looking for me.”

  “Why, are you some kind of criminal?”

  “No! I mean, in a way. He might think I was. Thing is, Jules, I live here, in the park.”

  There followed a lengthy discussion with an incredulous Jules slowly being convinced that yes, a person could actually sleep here, could live in the gaps of her own staid community. Actually, Kate had to admit, the boy sounded smart, and he had found an ideal place for a residence—for the summer, at any rate. He bathed in the backyard swimming pools of dark houses; he ate from the garbage cans of the rich and the fruit trees and tomato vines of the weekend gardeners. He even earned a bit of money, posing as a neighborhood kid willing to mow lawns and do chores (of whom Kate could imagine there were few enough in that particular town). He probably did his share of trying for unlocked back doors and helping himself to small items from cars, but without a criminal brotherhood to back him up, he would have found it a problem to fence goods or sell drugs on any scale. No, he sounded like a springtime runaway who had discovered a superior resting place, an urban Huck Finn’s island, until the winter drove him in, into the arms of the city’s predators. Kate wished him luck, but she had seen too many of them to hold out much hope, or to feel a great urgency to action.

  Jules, however, was worried. Not just because he was without a home—she, too, had read enough Mark Twain to take the edge off the reality the newspapers told her about—and not for fear of what the harder life of October would push him toward. She was worried because he had disappeared.

  Kate let her talk on, half-hearing the anxious recital of her visit to the police and sheriff’s office, the patrolman who had laughed at her, the park maintenance man who had told her to go home, the downstairs neighbor, Señora Hidalgo, who had thrown a fit when she heard Jules admit to speaking to a stranger and then had listened no more. Kate had known what was coming from the moment Jules had mentioned a boy in the park with an unlikely name. The only surprises were the resourcefulness of the runaway and the persistence of the girl who had befriended him. Kate also noticed, when she more or less automatically got a physical description of the boy from Jules, the complete lack of romance in the girl’s words. Dio was clearly a friend, not an adolescent fantasy.

  “I know that Al would help,” Jules was saying, “but he and Mom won’t be back until the day after tomorrow, and I would have called him and asked him to make the police listen to me, but then I remembered you, and I thought you might help me look for Dio, at least until Al gets back.”

  Kate felt her professional cynicism gently nudged by this declaration of faith—until she called forcefully to mind just whom she was dealing with here, stared hard into the large, innocent, barely-out-of-childhood hazel eyes before her, and saw reflected in them the dim, cool glow of a computer display. Kate, Kate, she chided herself, lack of sleep is no excuse for being taken in by the patter of a twelve-year-old con woman. The kid knew damn well that Kate would jump through flaming hoops for her. Al Hawkin was Kate’s partner, but he was also her superior; Al was fighting hard to make points with Jani Cameron; the way to Jani Cameron was through her daughter; therefore, performing this small service would ultimately boost her, Kate’s, position. Kate might even work harder to find Dio than Al would—but that was getting too cold-blooded, and surely the timing of Al’s absence was coincidental.

  “Right,” she said dryly, letting Jules know that she hadn’t fallen for it. Nonetheless, she would look. Sure, the boy was likely to be in Los Angeles, or working the streets closer to home, but she was not about to tell that to Jules. Not her job, thank God, to educate a privileged and protected girl about the monsters lurking in the shadows, about the parents with the moral awareness of three-year-olds who, when faced with the problems of a child, be it a crying infant or a prickly teenager, took the simple response of hitting it or getting rid of it. Disposable children, Dio and thousands like him, thrown away by his family, picked up by a pimp for a few years, and thrown away again to die of drugs and disease and the depredations of life in the streets. He had started by bathing in the swimming pools of affluent families, but that wasn’t what he was doing now.

  None of this to Miss Jules Cameron, however. Something prettier.

  “Jules, the policeman you talked to was probably right. I know street people, and the chances are very good he just left—for a few days or weeks, or permanently. Yes, I know he wouldn’t have left without telling you, but what if he had to? What if, say, his parents showed up and he didn’t want to go home? Wouldn’t he then just take off without a word until the coast was clear?” Kate hurried over the thin patches in this argument. “Does he know how to get in touch with you?”

  “Yes. I gave him a notebook for a present, a little one, to fit in his pocket. It had a rainbow on the front. He told me he didn’t know when his birthday was, which is ridiculous, of course. I still can’t think why he wouldn’t tell me that—you can’t trace someone by his date of birth, can you? Anyway, I gave him an unbirthday party, made him some microwave brownies with candles and some ice cream, though by the time we ate it, the ice cream was melted and we had to use it like a sauce, and for his present I bought him the notebook. I wrote his name on the front page, just Dio, but in Gothic script, using a calligraphy pen, and on the second page I put my name and address and phone number. You think he’s in trouble, don’t you?” she said abruptly. “Kidnapped by a serial killer and tortured to death, like that one up in Seattle, or the man you and Al caught, Andrew Lewis. You just don’t want to tell me.”

  So much for pretty deceptions. Kate ran her fingers through her still-damp hair, thinking idly that she would really have to get it cut. “That was a completely different thing, Jules, you know that.”

  “But there is someone killing people up in Seattle. He just goes on and on. What if he moved down here?”

  “Jules,” Kate said firmly, “stop trying to frighten yourself. He’s killing young women, not homeless boys.” Five of them so far, and granted, all were young and small and most of them had cropped hair, but still.

  “You’re right,” Jules said, and let out a long sigh. “I always let my imagination run away with me. In fact, sometimes I—” She stopped, and looked away.

  “Sometimes you what?”

  “Oh, nothing. It’s stupid. It’s just that when I was little, I used to believe that if I could imagine something bad, it wouldn’t happen to me. Childish, huh?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Kate said slowly. “It’s always the unexpected things that knock you for a loop.”

  Jules glanced at her quickly, then away again. “Yeah, well. It was probably some psychological interpretation of a statistical probability, like saying lightning won’t strike the same place twice. I used to lie in bed at night trying to think of all the terrible things that might happen, and it was always a relief to come up with something really awful, because if I could imagine it clearly enough, it was as if it had actually happened, and then I would know that at least I was safe from that.”

  The adult vocabulary combined with the earnestness of youth made it difficult to get a grip on Jules Cameron, but for the moment Kate put aside the question of what Jules was telling her and went for the most immediate consideration.

  “Jules, I truly do not think you need to worry about serial killers and torture murders. The newspapers make you think that kind of thing happens all the time, and sure, there are a lot of things someone like Dio can get into, things that are not very nice. The world isn’t a good place for a kid on his own. But I think it’s much more likely that, for reasons known only to himself, Dio decided suddenly to move on. And I do honestly think he may just show up again. Without more information, I can’t do much for you, and of course you realize that I person
ally have very little authority outside of San Francisco. However, I will go and ask a few questions, see what I can find out about him, see if I can set the ball rolling. Okay?”

  “Thank you.” She practically whispered it, overcome by the relief of a burden handed over. For a moment, she looked very young.

  “I want you to remember two things, Jules. First of all, Dio seems to be pretty resourceful at taking care of himself. Most kids end up living in boxes under an overpass and falling in with some real shit—with some really rotten characters. Your Dio sounds fairly clever, and I’d say that if he manages to avoid drugs, he has a good chance of staying on his feet.”

  “He hates drugs. He told me once they make him sick, and they killed his mother. It’s the only time he said anything about her, when he was telling me where his name came from, and I think he meant it. Both parts of it.”

  Jules did not seem to have faced the implication that if the boy knew that drugs made him ill, he at least had to have tried something, but Kate was not about to point this out, either.

  “I hope so. The other thing to remember is, even if he has taken off, even if, God forbid, he’s dead, he had a friend—you. A lot of runaways never do make friends, not normal friends. It’s something to be proud of, Jules.” To Kate’s horror, the child’s lips began to twitch and her eyes fill. Jesus, after the last few days, all she needed was another scene. She moved to cut it off. “However, I also agree with Señora Hidalgo. Befriending some stranger in a park is a damn fool thing to do, and if I were your mother, I’d turn you over my knee.”

  As the words left her mouth, Kate wondered why on earth conversing with a child invariably turned her into a cliché-mouthing maiden aunt, alternately hearty and judgmental. Don’t interrupt, child. It’s not polite to point. Wash your mouth out with soap. However, in this case it did the trick: Jules’s eyes went instantly dry, her chin rose.