Now, in her solitary life, the arid landscape showed signs of softening. Rosalyn Hall, a minister in the gay community, invited her to help at the church's annual Halloween bash for the neighborhood kids. Kate dutifully went, a cop doing a community service, but long after the neighborhood had retrieved its well-sugared offspring, and even after the minister's adopted daughter had been put to bed for the fourth and final time, Kate was still there, sitting and talking and drinking beer with Rosalyn and her partner, Maj.
"Do you know the word for that shape of a liquid when it sticks up over the top of a glass?" she asked, examining her freshly filled glass with a somewhat owlish seriousness. The two women shook their heads in equally inebriated interest. "It's called meniscus." Kate had finally found a use for a "word of the day." The word, and the evening, were successes, and when the two women asked her for Thanksgiving dinner, she went, not as a cop, but a family member.
She even had a single, sort of, almost date, when a woman she knew in the DA's office called and asked if Kate wanted to use a theater ticket intended for a friend, who was sick with the flu. Before leaving the house, Kate contemplated the thin gold band on her left hand. She even pulled it off, briefly, but in the end it stayed on her hand for the world to see, and the evening remained merely friendly. Which, she decided later, was much the better. The last thing she needed was another complication in her life.
As Kate's muscles toughened along with her attitude, other physical pleasures took the place of the one. She found she enjoyed the sensation of wearing her leathers and her cycle boots. She rediscovered the joys of growing physical strength and ability, and she thought about rejoining a martial art group.
But the true high point in the month was Jules's thirteenth birthday. Following a lengthy consultation with Al and Jani, Kate arrived at the Cameron apartment on the Saturday following the actual day, in her full cycle regalia and carrying a box under one arm. That afternoon, Jules rode behind her on the cycle, wearing the new (secondhand) leather jacket and the helmet that Kate had bought for the back of the Kawasaki.
They went to San Francisco, at Jules's request. They cruised the streets, circling the tourist sites and through Chinatown, up the steep hills and down the drop-offs. Toward the end of the day, Jules decided that she wanted to parade through the Hall of Justice to show off her finery. Kate told her that few of Hawkin's colleagues would be in, but Jules wanted to go, so to the Hall of Justice they went, with Jules swaggering through the corridors in Kate's wake.
It wasn't until they reached the Homicide Department that Kate began to realize that this wasn't such a hot idea, but by then it was too late. When they stepped out of the elevator, two men she knew slightly were getting on, and as Kate paused to exchange a word with one of them, the other looked at Jules's retreating back, glanced at Kate, and then in a loud and jovial voice said, "Isn't she kind of young for you, Martinelli?"
Kate whipped around to find Jules, but the girl had already cleared the corner. When she looked back at the man, the elevator door was closing, but she heard the other man saying, "Jesus, Mark, put your foot in it, why don't you? That was the daughter of Al Hawkin's —' The door closed on the rest of it.
It had probably not been meant cruelly, or even crudely; the man Mark was simply one of those who thought that the way to demonstrate tolerance for gay women was to treat them as one of the boys. Still, when Kate caught up with Jules, she looked closely for red ears or other signs of discomfort, and was relieved when she found it obvious that the girl had not heard him. Kate got her out of there as soon as she could, infinitely grateful that the bad taste was only in her own mouth.
And still, all that fall, she looked for Dio. Once a week, she made the rounds of the homeless, asking about him. Always she asked among her network of informants, the dealers and hookers and petty thieves, whenever she saw one of them, and invariably received a shake of the head. Twice she heard rumors of him, once at a house for runaway teenagers, where one of the current residents had a friend who had met a boy of his description, over on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, or it might have been College Avenue, though it might have been Dion instead of Dio; and a second time, when one of her informants told her there was a boy-toy of that name in a house used by pederasts over near the marina. She phoned a couple of old friends in the Berkeley and Oakland departments to ask them to keep an ear out, and she arranged to be in on the raid of the marina house, but neither came up with anything more substantial than the ghost she already had. She doubted he was in the Bay Area, and told Jules that, but she also kept looking.
That autumn, in one of those flukes that even the statistician will admit happens occasionally, it seemed for a while that every case the Homicide Department handled involved kids, either as victim or perpetrator, or both. A two-year-old with old scars on his back and broken bones in various states of mending died in an emergency room from having been shaken violently by his eighteen-year-old mother. Three boys aged sixteen to twenty died from gunshot wounds in less than a month. Four bright seventeen-year-old students in a private school did a research project on explosives, using the public library, and sent a very effective pipe bomb to a hated teacher. It failed, but only because the man was as paranoid as he was infuriating, and had called the police before he touched the parcel; the four were charged with conspiracy and attempted murder, and might well be tried as adults. A seven-year-old in a pirate costume was separated from his friends on Halloween; he was found the next morning, raped and bludgeoned to death; the investigation was pointing toward a trio of boys only four years older. Kate saw two of her colleagues in tears within ten days, one of them a tough, experienced beat cop who had seen everything but still couldn't bring himself to look again at the baby in the cot. The detectives on the fourth floor of the Department of Justice made morbid jokes about it being the Year of the Child, and they either answered the phone gingerly or with a snarl, according to their personalities.
NOVEMBER,
DECEMBER
SIX
The end of November drew near.
Christmas lights went up in celebration of the feast of Thanksgiving, and the following morning, still bloated from her dinner at the house of Rosalyn and Maj, Kate rode around Union Square on her way to the Hall of Justice, just to look at the windows of the big stores, filled with lace and gilt, velvet and silks, sprinkled with white flakes to evoke the wintery stuff seen in San Francisco perhaps twice in a century, set up to attract throngs of shoppers anxious to recapture the fantasies of a Victorian childhood, no matter the cost. The pickpockets and car thieves had a merry season, a coke dealer in the Tenderloin took to wrapping his packets in shiny red and green foil, Al and Jani set their date for the eighteenth of December, and people went on killing one another.
It was wet and miserable outside three days later, on the last Monday of November - a fact Kate could well attest to, as she'd been out in it a fair part of the day, following up witnesses to a domestic shooting in Chinatown. She had used departmental vehicles for the trips out, but she was now faced with either climbing into her damp moon-walk outfit, which would keep her mostly dry on the motorcycle, or getting a ride up the hill and having to cope with public transport in the morning.
The phone on her desk rang. She eyed it sourly, making no move to answer it. At the fourth ring, the man at the next desk looked up.
"Hey, Martinelli," he called. "That thing's called a tel-uh-phone. You pick it up and talk into one end, voices come from the other. Really fun, you should try it."