She took her roll over to the wall and studied his handiwork. Her original map had been replaced by a contiguous series of large-scale topographical maps, taped together and tacked to the wall. Houses and buildings were drawn in with small blue squares (even the octagonal, circular, and rhom-boidal ones), some of which had red check marks in them. Scraps of paper, mostly pieces of computer printout, but also handwritten notes, a few Xeroxed newspaper clippings, and several photographs, were taped and pinned in clusters, with a line leading from each collection to a blue square. On a number of the papers Kate saw green frames around words or paragraphs.
"Why?"
"Why what?" Hawkin grunted, trimming a length of paper and pinning it up to the wall.
"Why all this fuss? I've got all of it in the computer, if you want to retrieve it."
"I hate computers," he said absently. "Glorified filing cabinets that are always locking themselves up just when you need them. Computers don't think, they just suck up information and tyrannize the people using them into thinking the way they do: yes, no; A, B. It's limiting, and it's no way to catch a murderer."
"Is that—" Kate bit her tongue.
"Speak, Martinelli."
"Well, you have to admit it's unusual for someone to make lieutenant and then willingly take another job that means a reduction in rank. I was just wondering if being allergic to computers had something to do with it."
"It had nothing to do with it, Martinelli, and don't be so damned superior. My mistrust of computers isn't a phobia, it's common sense. I am in the vanguard of a new age, the post-computer age, when our race turns from the worship of silicon idols and recognizes anew the superiority of the human brain. As for the other," he said, stabbing up a note in green ink, "I dumped the job because I was too damned good at it. There was no challenge. Now, if you're not going to help me with this you can go buy some coffee."
"What are the red check marks?" she asked, peering at his wall collage.
"When I'm satisfied that we have relatively complete information on each person in the house, no large gaps, I put a check."
"And the green looks like it marks evidence." She was looking here at the first name attached to the farthest-left blue square, which was Tyler's. His pieces of paper included a note of two years' residence in the same town as Amanda Bloom's mother and the fact that Anna grew up less than ten miles from Samantha Donaldson's neighborhood. Both of those facts were marked in green ink, along with the word keys, circled in green, and the note Jag—hairs, similarly colored.
As the morning wore on, the leaves of paper on the wall multiplied and fluttered like aspen leaves whenever the door opened. The red checks gradually progressed in from both ends, a few green marks were added, and Kate's back began to ache. The telephone rang steadily throughout the morning with names to add, alibis checked, information received. Shortly after noon Kate picked it up to hear Trujillo's indistinct voice.
"That you, Casey? Sorry this line is so bad. It's actually down across the road, but it still works, if I can keep the press from driving over it too much. I wanted to tell you that I've been up the Road to the washout, and we probably won't be able to bridge it until tomorrow at the earliest. They're working on it from both sides, but the water in the creek is still pretty hairy. What's that? I couldn't hear you."
"I said," she shouted, "what about from the upper side, through the reserve?"
"Even worse, apparently. There's a lot of big trees gone down, and a major slide across the Road. Sounds like an ungodly mess. Look, this line is getting pretty bad. If you want to reach me you'll need to use the radio. I'll call you in a couple of hours. Ciao."
Ciao? she thought, looking at the phone. The man's up to his nicely tailored behind in mud and reporters, and he still manages to be trendy?
"That Trujillo?" Hawkin had been running his hands through his hair while he stood staring at his map, and he looked very rumpled.
"None other. The Road's out until at least tomorrow."
"Thought it would be. Christ, what a mess. At least there aren't any brown-haired six-year-old girls living on the Road, or I'd have to have somebody go in and haul her out." By the way he said her, Kate knew he meant Vaun Adams. "Let's take a break, I'm seeing contour lines in front of my eyes. Time for lunch."
Lunch was two beers and a hamburger for Hawkin, one beer and a chicken salad for Kate. After that it was back to the computer screen and the wall, and standing and thinking and half waiting for the telephone call, which finally came at two-forty. Kate took it, listened for a minute, and then interrupted.
"Hang on just a sec. Al? I think you should hear this." She waited until he picked up the other extension. "Go ahead, start again."
The words tumbled out over the telephone in a rush, as if the speaker did not want to stop and consider too closely what he was saying.
"Jim Marsh. Trujillo sent me to try and track down the owner of that ring we found in the Jaguar yesterday, and I think I've got it. I'm sorry it took me so long, but the roads are pretty bad all over. I started with the Donaldsons, but nobody there or at her school recognized it, and the same story with the Blooms. I went to the Merrill house, then to the child's school, and her teacher, who was just leaving, said she thought it might belong to the girl who was Tina's best friend. She gave me the address, and the child's mother said it looked like one her daughter had been given for her birthday last November, but she thought the kid had lost it. So we talked to the girl—she was scared, thought I was going to arrest her I guess—and she finally told me that she'd given it to Tina on her last day in school. Tina told her that it was a magic ring and that she was going to use it to fly to Never-Never-land—their teacher had been reading them Peter Pan, you see—and this kid was convinced that's where Tina was, in Neverland. She wanted—" His voice broke, and Kate realized how young he sounded. "She wanted to know when Tina was coming back. If you talk to Trujillo tell him I'm home getting drunk." The line went dead, and Kate slowly hung up, watching Hawkin do an imitation of a stone.
"That's it, then." He hung up his receiver.
"Are you going to have Trujillo pick her up?"
"No, damn it, I'm not. If she hasn't made a run for it by now, she's not going to, and I want to see her face when she hears about the ring."
"If you go like that, you'll ruin a nice suit," Kate noted mildly.
"Hell, you're right. We'll have to go by my place on the way. What about you?"
"Al, the last few days have turned me back into a Girl Scout, always prepared. I have a bag in the car."
12
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Tyler's Creek runs year-round. Ten months out of the year it is a tidy, attractive, well-behaved little stream where salamanders creep and damselflies skip. On a lazy August afternoon, when the kids laugh and haul rocks for a dam and the deepest pools are barely waist-high to an adult, it is very difficult to visualize the process by which that snarl of tree roots ten feet up the bank came to be wedged there or to imagine the force that caused the convenient sunning spot of a flat granite boulder to come to rest half a mile downstream from the nearest granite outcropping. Moss turns sere and brown, tadpoles become frogs, water bugs dimple the surface on a hot August afternoon.
Kate stood well back from the gaping edge of Tyler's Creek and realized that living in San Francisco, with the occasional power outage and blocked storm drain, did not fully prepare one for this. The image that had come to mind with the phrase "the road is out" combined a deeper degree of rutting, a lot of mud, and a bit of a gap across which some boards could be put; certainly nothing like this.