Stephen White - Cold Case

"They're looking at her husband. They're separated. He's a jerk. Some violence in the history."

"But the local cops aren't sure?" "No," I said.

"They're not sure."

"She's the one who was in the line of fire with you at the Welle fund-raiser, wasn't she?"

"Yes"

"Nothing new on that, though?"

"I've been checking the papers, haven't seen anything."

"But this reporter friend of yours? She's been both shot at and kidnapped within a forty-eight-hour period?"

"I guess."

He slowly moved his eyes away from the two young women who had just been seated at the next table and froze me with his glare.

"What the hell are you messed up in this time, Alan?"

Nine o'clock had come and gone by the time I'd finished regaling Sam with the details of my visit to Steamboat to be a supplicant in Ray Welle's regal court at the Silky Road Ranch. Nine-thirty had finally rolled around when I was done adding the fine points to the story of Dorothy Levin's disappearance. I traipsed back to the pay phone, where I had to wait in line while a drunken man named Lou-"Come on, babe, it's me, Lou"-tried to lure a recalcitrant woman named Jessica to join him for a pitcher of beer and a game of pool. Jessica wisely wanted none of it. Lou finally hung up, or at least gave up. The receiver never quite made it back into the cradle.

I called home and got the machine again. Worried, I tried Lauren's cell phone and heard an out-of-service recording. I walked back to the dining room with as much calm as I could muster.

"I can't reach Lauren, Sam."

He spotted the concern in my eyes, wisely searching the edges for telltale signs of paranoia.

"She should be home?"

"She should have been home over an hour ago. She was at some committee meeting."

"It wouldn't have run late?"

"Unlikely. If it did she would have called."

I watched as his mind ticked through some mental checklist. Calmly he asked, "Is she on call for the DA tonight?"

"You know, I didn't even think about that. I don't have her call schedule with me."

"But it's possible?"

"Sure."

"Do you know the number of the pager she carries when she's on call?"

"No, I don't have it memorized. It's in my appointment book."

"Which you don't have with you, right?"

"Right. He successfully refrained from criticizing me. I was grateful for the effort.

"I can get it from the department dispatchers. I'll be back in a minute.

Do you have any quarters?"

I handed him all my change and watched him stride from the room. I waited at the table for about three minutes before my anxiety rose to a level that my false patience couldn't arrest. I followed Sams trail to the pay phone and ran into him outside the men's room.

He held up his hand like a traffic cop controlling an intersection.

"Its cool.

She got called in on a rape. She's right down the street at Community. Said she just left you a message on the home machine. She's fine. Said to tell you she loves you but that she'll probably be a while." Sam showed absolutely no discomfort passing along the message about my wife's affection.

"Thank God. Thanks."

He put his arm around my shoulder and said, "Let's you and me go home. You haven't had a very good day."

Better than Dorothy's, I thought.

I wasn't ready to sleep when I got home, so I parked myself in front of the computer and continued my narrative report to A. J. Simes. I wrote about my summons to Steamboat. My meeting with Ray Welle at his ranch about his treatment records. Dorothy Levin's disappearance.

By the time I printed the report and faxed it to D.C. the clock told me it was almost eleven-thirty. I waited up until after midnight for Lauren to get home.

We had both witnessed a lot of misery that day and talked for at least another hour before we fell asleep.

The phone woke me up at 6:45 the next morning. After I identified the noise as emanating from the telephone, my first thought was that they had found Dorothy Levin's body. I managed a pasty-mouthed

"Hello."

A wrong number. Someone wanted to speak to Patricia.

Her father had surprised me so much during my brief visit to see him in Vancouver that I cautioned myself not to have preconceptions about what Satoshi Hamamoto would be like. I was certain I would fail to imagine her correctly.

On the congested drive south down the Peninsula from the San Francisco airport my mind, despite my intentions, continued to conjure images of her. The portraits I composed were mosaics of fragments of the various photographs I'd seen of Satoshi's dead sister, Mariko. Without ever having met her, I was unable to picture Satoshi as anything more than a composite of her sister. My mind insisted on perceiving Satoshi as Mariko was at sixteen-her skin tawny, her smile alluring. For some reason, my imagination would not allow Satoshi to have an identity separate from her sister. I concluded that I was so eager to actually know Mariko that I was desperate for her sister to be her twin. I wanted Satoshi to be a window into her sister's life, and I wanted to gaze through that glass and see what had led Mariko to walk with her killer.

In 1988, when Tami and Miko disappeared, the two friends were sixteen years old.

Satoshi was younger, thirteen or so-a girl. But the person I was about to meet in Palo Alto was somewhere around twenty-five, a woman.

She'd asked me to meet her on campus at Stanford. I found the building where we were to meet without too much trouble. Locating the specific room was not so simple. The room numbers made little sense and the building was chockablock with culs-de-sac and dead ends. I begged for directions at least three times.

The students I asked for help seemed to be as clueless to their surroundings as I was.

My watch told me that I had found the appointed room with only a few minutes to spare. The door was open and I stepped in after a cursory knock. Satoshi wasn't there. No one was.

I suspected from my own days in graduate school that this room functioned as a group office that was shared by at least four grad students. Desks and tables were crammed against three walls. The fourth was lined with shelves and file cabinets. Computer equipment, some new and some old enough to be considered quaint, littered every horizontal surface.

"Dr. Gregory?"

The voice came from behind me. It was light and friendly and almost without accent.

I turned and saw a young woman standing on the far side of the hallway outside the door. In one hand she held a can of Coke. The other hand gripped a laptop that she was pressing tightly against her chest.

The woman was certainly of Japanese ancestry. I said, "Satoshi Hamamoto?"

She said, "I've been thinking that it's too nice a day to stay in here. Would you mind if we go outside to the courtyard? Is that okay?" I said, " I'll follow you."

As I walked toward her she stepped back from me. First one step, then quickly, two more.

She said, "This is awkward, but…" Satoshi's black hair was pulled back and it mostly disappeared beneath a floppy beret the color of dying bluegrass. Her head swayed slightly from side to side as she asked, "May I see some ID? Maybe your… drivers license?"

The request puzzled me but I didn't have a reason not to comply. I tugged my wallet from my pocket and fished out my Colorado license.

She juggled the can and her computer and examined my ID for half a minute before she handed it back to me.

"I'm sorry that was necessary. But thank you."

This time she didn't shy away as I moved closer to her. Satoshi was tall and thin, like her father. Her face was narrower than Mariko's had been, though her cheeks were full, the bones below taking on definition only when she smiled.