With Child by Laurie R. King Read Free Book Online Page B

scribbled messages that would take most of the day to decipher and deal with. Among them she found a flyer with the grainy photograph of a young girl with short hair, and she did not need to read the description of the missing girl to know that the police in Washington - no, she corrected herself, this one was from Oregon - were afraid that the so-called Snoqualmie Strangler had claimed a sixth victim. It had been several days since Kate had heard or read any news, but Jules was no doubt more up to date: This was the maniac who worried Jules, although there was no boy among his victims. Kate thought briefly of the girl's apprehension - no, her fear - that the telephone call had caused, and then her own phone rang.
    Despite what she had told Jules, people did die in San Francisco on a Tuesday afternoon. In this case it was a drive-by shooting, in broad daylight, in the Castro district, with three dozen eager and contradictory witnesses to sort out; she would not have much opportunity to doze off over her files that night.
    Dropping the flyer into her wastebasket, Kate retrieved her gun and her thermos, and went out to do her job.

THREE
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    With September began the phone calls from Jules. In the first week, the girl called twice, to check on the search for Dio. They were brief calls, depressing for both of them. Kate was, in fact, looking for him, even after Al Hawkin had returned, because although Al had told Kate to concentrate on her own work, not sweat over some kid Jules shouldn't have been talking to in the first place, Kate could hear the pride and the loneliness in Jules's voice, and she remembered what it was like to feel abandoned by the adults you loved. Jules was going through a bad patch, and Kate could justify only just so many hours at work, so anything that filled the hours at home was all right with her - even talking to an angry twelve-year-old.
    The tone of these telephone conversations evolved rapidly under the pressures from both sides. After the brief, uncomfortable calls of the first week, Kate half-expected that Jules would not try again; instead, the calls began hesitantly to take on a life of their own. Under the impetus of her summer experience, Jules's inevitable back-to-school essay of "What I Did During Vacation" evolved into a major project on homelessness, with Kate as her primary resource.
    Even after the paper had been turned in to the astonished but pleased teacher, the phone calls continued, always beginning with the ritual "Anything about Dio?" before wandering off into twenty, even thirty minutes of discussion about homelessness; the ethics of capitalism; the lack of good teachers in the universe; her word for the day
(meniscus, braggadocio
, and
haruspex
were among the sesquipedalian ones, but the shorter
mensch, spirit
, and
vagrant
interested her, as well); the difficulties of getting a good education when surrounded by fools who were obsessed with clothing, hair, and boys; the psychological need for a peer group; the homeless again, and what they did for companionship; the friends Jules had made in her new home; the difference between a boyfriend and a boy friend; clothing, hair, and boys; the politics of clothing, hair, and boys; the pros and cons of short versus long hair; a boy friend called Josh; Kate's work; life in general; life in particular. To her surprise, Kate found herself patient with these adolescent maunderings, and, more than that, positively missing them when three or four days passed without a phone call.
    The truth was, the house on Russian Hill was too damn big and too damn quiet. One night, she came home and found a message on the answering machine: Jon was thinking of hopping over to London, since Lee was not there to need his assistance; he would ring when he got back to Boston. "Cheerio, ducks." He did not explain how he knew that Lee was still away. Pride kept Kate from calling him back on the number he had left, but the inevitable