The apartment and its surroundings yielded no other immediately satisfying piece of evidence. The telephone answering machine gave out one succinct message: a man's bass voice said, "Tony? This is Dan. We could use a hand if you're free." There was no way of telling when the message had been left, but the state of the refrigerator indicated it had been some days since anyone had been in residence, and as the day wore on the neighbors interviewed confirmed that the last anyone had seen of him was before the big storm.
There were no papers, no address books or scribbled telephone numbers, no letters in the mailbox addressed to anyone other than Occupant. The neighbors could describe only a few of his numerous guests, and the only vehicle any of them had seen him with was the old pickup currently sitting in Tyler's metal shed.
That evening, Wednesday, Hawkin and Trujillo returned to the apartment house to catch the residents who had not been in during the day. It was tedious work, with little added to their meager store of information, until they rang the bell of number fifty-two. It was after nine o'clock, but the door was answered by a child of about ten or eleven with glossy black hair and a mouth full of braces, dressed in fuchsia-colored thermal pants and an oversized Minnie Mouse T-shirt. She peered at them gravely beneath the chain.
"Good evening, miss," said Hawkin. "I wonder if I might speak to your mother or father?"
"I do not know how I would produce my father," she said with considerable precision and an air of suffering fools, "but my mother may be available. May I tell her who's calling?"
Hawkin identified himself and Trujillo to the child, who looked unimpressed. She started to open her mouth when she was interrupted by a woman's voice from behind her.
"Who is it, Jules?"
The child stepped around so Hawkin could see her profile, which in another eight or ten years would be devastating.
"They claim," she said, "to be policemen. I was about to ask them for some identification."
"That is a very sensible idea, miss," said Hawkin firmly in an effort to retain some sort of control. He pulled his ID out of his pocket for the forty-seventh time that day and flipped it open for the benefit of the eyes, on two levels now, that peered through the gap. The door shut, the chain rattled, and the door opened again to reveal the paradigm on which the future devastatrix was modeled.
Ten pounds of gleaming blue-black hair balanced precariously on top of an oval face with brown in its genes and, intriguingly, golden-green eyes surrounded by eyelids that had been shaped somewhere in Asia. Damp tendrils curled gently around the collar of an ancient bathrobe like one that Hawkin's grandfather used to wear, of a particularly gruesome shade of purple, mercifully faded. She had bare feet and heavy horn-rim glasses of the sort Gary Grant might have removed to reveal a secretary of hitherto unseen beauty, and Hawkin was very glad that he was standing in front of Trujillo because he knew that his own face would reveal nothing, despite his immediate and intense awareness that beneath the robe, the rest of her was every bit as bare as her feet. Trujillo might take a moment to regain control of his face.
"Good evening, Ms. Cameron," he said coolly. "Sorry to bother you. We're trying to find some information on one of your neighbors, and wonder if you might be able to help us?"
"Certainly. Come in." She stood back and waved them into a room so utterly ordinary it might have come from a catalog of motel furniture, onto which had been strewn a solid layer of books, covering every flat surface—heavy books with dark leather bindings and titles in gold, gothic letters, in a number of languages. She gathered a few together to clear the second pair of the quartet of metal and vinyl chairs at the Formica table, then stacked the tomes onto the table and sat looking over them. She was not a short woman but looked small beneath the hair, within the robe, and behind the books.
"I'm afraid I won't be able to help much," she said. She had a sweet, low voice, and not so much an accent as a careful precision and rhythm to her speech. "We've only been here since January, and I'm so rarely home, I haven't had a chance to get to know my neighbors."
A voice came from the sofa, accompanied by one foot waving in the air. Hawkin had all but forgotten the younger generation of this incredible race of genius-goddesses.
"My mother was recently appointed to the chair of medieval German literature at the university," said the voice, and then volunteered, "I am going to practice criminal law." Hawkin blanched at the thought of such a defense lawyer and hoped he would be retired before she came on the scene. Her head appeared over the back of the chintz. "Which neighbor?"
"Mr. Tony Andrews, in number thirty-four." He dragged his attention back to the mother. "He's been missing for some days, and his family is beginning to worry."
The daughter snorted derisively.
"So they sent two high-ranking officers out to look for a missing person?"
"Jules," her mother began.
"Oh Mother, the police don't do things that way, and besides, I've seen them both on the news. They're working on that case of the little girls and the artist."
The mother turned a look on Hawkin that made him feel like a student who had been caught in a bit of plagiarism.
"Is this true?" she asked.
"We do work on more than one case at once, sometimes," Hawkin said, trying for sternness, but it sounded weak even to his own ears. He pulled himself together. "Mr. Andrews. Do you know him?"
"No, I don't think—"
"Yes, Mother, we met him last month, don't you remember? The day you were giving a paper in San Francisco and couldn't get the car started."
"Oh, yes, him. I had forgotten his name. Nice man."
"He was not," said Jules sternly.
"Well, I thought—"
"Pardon me, miss," interrupted Trujillo. "Why did you think he was not nice?"
For a moment the child was at an obviously uncharacteristic loss for words. She quickly mustered her forces, but her answer was given with a chin raised in half-defiant embarrassment.
"I don't have a reason, not really. Nothing concrete, I mean. It was simply an impression. I did not like the way he looked at my mother. It was," she paused to choose a word. "It was speculative, without the earthy immediacy with which most men react to her."
(Earthy immediacy? thought Hawkin, uncomfortably aware of the earthiness of his own first reaction to the woman. Where does this kid come from?)
"Jules!" her mother scolded. "You sound like a bad romance novel."
"I thought it was a good phrase," her daughter protested.
"It is inappropriate."
"But accurate." Accuracy was obviously the ultimate consideration in Jules Cameron's life and, judging by the capitulation of her mother, it was a family trait.
"Was that the only reason?" Hawkin interjected, before the conversation deteriorated into semantics. "The way he looked at your mother?"
"I also found his physical appearance, his untrimmed beard and dirty hands, didn't go with the clothes he was wearing. They seemed almost to belong to a different man entirely, although they fit him well. He helped us with the car," she concluded, as if to a panel of jurors, "but he was not a nice man."
"I see," said Hawkin, trying to. He spoke halfway between the two women. (Women?) "Did he say anything to you, about where he was going, friends, anything like that?" To his relief the mother picked up the story.
"He saw I was having trouble with the car. Jules and I were looking into the motor trying to find a loose wire or something obvious when he walked by and saw us. He rummaged around for a few minutes—"
"It was the alternator lead, as I told her," Jules put in.
"—although I said he mustn't get his suit dirty. He said not to worry, he was a mechanic and it would only take a minute, and it did—he got it going right away."