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  She felt something wide and flat being propped next to her on the bunk, and then the boots retreated to the door. Slammed and bolted.

  Finality.

  She waited.

  "Aren't you gonna eat?" Marissa's voice, around a full mouth. "Shit, if you're not, can I have it?"

  Kit gave up and rolled over carefully to avoid knocking the aluminum pie tin off the bunk. Mr. Boots had placed it next to her thin pillow. On it was a sandwich: ham and white cheese on white bread. Mayonnaise and mustard packets. A paper napkin, folded.

  Kit wanted to throw it across the room.

  (Cell.)

  At Marissa. Make her eat it off the floor.

  But then her stomach gurgled in a most unladylike manner and she realized how empty she felt.

  Who knew when she'd eaten last, and she'd puked it all up twice. Who knew whether she'd get to eat again.

  Strength is better than no strength.

  The sandwich was as bland as could be, but she tore into it as if it were gourmet fare from a trendy Brady Street bistro. The thought just made her hungrier. She ignored the pain in her throat and swallowed without restraint.

  With the food rattling around in her upset stomach, Kit tried again to make sense of her situation. Logic over fear. She hoped.

  Irina was the key. They were after Irina, but mistakenly grabbed Kit. This was suddenly and clearly obvious to Kit, who had always wondered about Irina's many shady friends — people who looked at Kit with shark's eyes and shark smiles full of crooked, sharp teeth.

  She'd meant to talk to Irina about them, how uncomfortable they made her.

  But she hadn't.

  Irina was so glamorous, so exotic. Kit secretly admired her.

  There, that was it. She would never have admitted it, but the well-adjusted Kit lusted to be a little more like flighty, swanky, glamorous Irina. Kit had occasionally tried on Irina's cosmetics, only when she knew Irina was safely at work or school. Nail polish, lipsticks, mascaras, rouge, foundation. Kit had pretended to be exotic, playing dress-up with her roommate's clothes and make-up a half dozen times, afterwards carefully replacing everything exactly as she'd found it and scrubbing her face until it burned. She didn't want to become Irina, but she wanted to try being her. To Kit, there was a distinction. At least, a mild one. Her image was such that she should have shunned everything Irina stood for. And she did. But only for a little while, now and then, a morsel of the hated forbidden fruit tasted sweet indeed.

  But now she just knew that Irina was the key.

  Maybe they thought the two of them looked alike.

  Though they didn't.

  Maybe they'd followed them from home, not knowing which was which.

  The sandwich, simple as it was, had been heavenly. She lusted for another one. Even just a bite. She looked up.

  "What?" Marissa said, staring at her.

  She stared back. "Why are you staring at me?"

  Marissa broke the gaze and turned away. Her perky good looks were marred by a slightly hooked nose — the kind television actresses always have done, like who was it, that Jennifer Grey chick from the dancing movie.

  Kit listened to herself from safely inside her head and wondered what had happened to her. She was turning into someone else. Because she never would have cared about some actress chick and her hook nose.

  Marissa startled her by suddenly jumping up and approaching her bunk.

  Kit watched her, wary.

  This was too much like those weird movies her uncle liked. The Fifties science fiction movies in which people you thought you knew had become inexplicably strange — brainwashed, or replaced by aliens. Or people you met for the first time were insane or dangerous or both.

  Oh God, where are you, Uncle Rich?

  Marissa crept closer and if Kit had left any food, she'd have thought the chick was gunning for it. Red curls bobbing around her, Marissa leaned in and put her face as close to Kit's as she could get because of her chain. They were still a foot or two apart.

  "Don't you dare please them too much," she warned, whispering.

  "What?"

  "You heard me. I'm the favorite around here. I get more food. I get gifts." She held out her left wrist and showed off a shiny new cheap watch. "I don't want it to stop. So don't get to like it too much."

  "Don't worry," Kit muttered.

  Marissa lowered her cover girl face almost close enough for Kit to smell the cloying sweetness of her make-up and perfume. "Just don't forget it. Leave the guys alone."

  Her threat leveled, she backed away and returned to her bunk.

  "What?" Kit couldn't hear what she'd half-whispered.

  "I heard tomorrow you're going to visit the Studio and the Showroom." Marissa chuckled. "I really like the Showroom. But not as much as the Studio. Then they might show you the Sales Floor!"

  Kit shuddered. She turned away, and the tears came.

  She could hear Marissa chuckling to herself for what seemed like hours. The food curdled in her belly and she fought off waves of nausea.

  FIVE

  Dawn had broken while they talked to Irina, and the city's holiday traffic patterns began their day by impeding Brant's driving just enough to irritate him further. There was no snow in the forecast, but a late winter might just mean an endless one at the other end. The city's bustle struck him as a personal insult.

  He dared Ralph to speak with the jut of his chin.

  The central precinct was an older building given a new life by what someone had considered judicious updates. At least, that was how the remodeling had been sold. Brant couldn't see it as anything but a set of expensive skin grafts. Sixties-style open Lannonstone walls in the main lobby and hallways had been dragged into the Nineties by sheer determination, but the results were incongruous. Modern trim and framed retro-deco art were meant to smooth the pseudo-Frank Lloyd Wright brick facades, though the result looked like badly applied paint. The marble floors were waxed and clean, but reminded him of numerous dingy train stations he had slept in. The designs were dated the day they'd been laid down, and the result felt disorienting. Such was the bane of public money spent on incestuous building contracts.

  He'd seen enough over his career.

  Don't go there.

  Yeah, I don't hear that phrase enough. He snorted.

  At the front desk, not nearly as imposing as it might have been in the movies, a harried, weary receptionist directed them to the third floor, where the detective squad was headquartered. Once there, having ridden a recently updated elevator that scraped and grumbled as it dragged them up through the apparently prickly core, Brant stopped and got his bearings.

  His memory of the squad room had grown useless. Modern cubicles had replaced the old rabbit-warren desk layout, and a row of conference rooms had sprung up along one side. Another row of offices along the back made an L-shape, the center of which consisted of half-height single and double cubicles marked by heads that poked above the partitions like prairie dogs out of their holes. The muted tapping of identical keyboards, the shrill ringing of phones, and the whirring of drives and faxes and laser printers gave the room a sort of casino atmosphere minus the major chord usually created by hungry slot machines. Brant realized that there were similarities in the atmosphere, however. Here, too, hopes were built up and dashed daily. He remembered the row of cells that once lined the back where the offices now stood, and he remembered what one specifically had smelled like. The air in the room was much cleaner now, but it was a fake clean.

  Superficial.

  Like the sympathy so easily given to victims and their families. Even television had managed to get that right, the blank-eyed uselessness of the words strung together as "I'm sorry for your loss."

  "Merry Christmas! May I help you?" a too-perky voice interrupted his onrush of memories and judgments.

  "Detective Zimmerman, please." he told another receptionist, hating the sound of the name.

  "You mean Lieutenant Zimmerman?"

 
She looked more like a librarian, gray-haired and bespectacled, than anyone who should have been here this early in the morning.

  The bastard had climbed. "Yes, is he in?"

  "Oh, yes, he's here very early every day."

  I don't doubt it, Brant thought. Probably hated by his wife and family and the family dog.

  "Fine, Ralph Brant to see him."

  "You're Mr. Brant?" she inquired, pen poised over a Post-It.

  "I'm one of them, yeah. He's Ralph." He jabbed a thumb at his brother, who slouched in a waiting room chair built for discomfort.

  As if flummoxed by the exchange, the receptionist hesitated. Then she picked up her phone, waving him into another seat.

  During the fifty minutes of their wait, Brant wanted to chew on the old magazines strewn across the end table next to him. He wanted to toss the water cooler in the corner. He wanted to bull his way to the desk and get on the horn to the sonofabitch who kept them waiting while something was happening to his niece. His Kit, who had disappeared just before Christmas, for Christ's sake.

  Zimmerman took over the space he occupied. It was his size, sure, but it was a strange combination of ego and capability. Somehow he exuded confidence and years of experience. At the moment he stepped from one of the offices and into the reception area, however, he exuded dislike.

  "I should have made the connection to you," he said when he saw Brant. "Minute I heard the name, I should have hung up." He'd come through a nearby door.

  "Nice to see you, too." Brant didn't want to sour the police-citizen relationship for his brother. For Kit. But he wasn't sure he could make nice for long. There was too much history, too many secrets shared. "How's it hangin', Zim?"

  "It's Lieutenant Zimmerman, Brant. Or should I call you Loot? That was an appropriate nickname in the long run, wasn't it?" His smirk made the receptionist uncomfortable. Her job training said cops were super-nice to citizens, and this was going very wrong.

  "Lieutenant," she chipped in sprightly, "Mr. Brant and his brother-"

  "I know why they're here. What I don't know is why there are two of them. One is most certainly enough." The look he gave Ralph was that of someone who is aiming a foot at the helpless cockroach.

  Brant swallowed the words before they could boil of from between clenched lips. "Look, Lieutenant, I get it, you don't like me. Can we please have a minute of your time discussing the situation? I believe my niece has been kidnapped, and without any motive I can figure. A random snatch is what it looks like. I think you'd want to start before the Feds horn in?"

  Zimmerman sighed. "Fuck, I had great hope for today. For Christmas. You really fucked that up."

  He was Jewish.

  He waved them into the office after whispering something to the bewildered receptionist, who nodded and reached for the phone as if it were a lifeline.

  Bare of any sentimental touches, his office nevertheless struck Brant as comfortable. Two leather chairs faced Zimmerman's massive desk, which held a pile of folders and papers for each day of the week and a half dozen more as back-ups. A new flat-screen monitor flickered on a side-flap, its CPU hidden somewhere underneath. Zimmerman slumped in his chair but did not invite them to sit. Ralph stood meekly to one side, while Brant slouched against the doorway.

  Ralph cleared his throat. "Lieutenant, I-"

  Zimmerman cut him off with a curt hand gesture. "Before you start, I have someone coming in, one of my best." His eyes roved the office but avoided Brant.

  Brant smelled a hint of perfume and felt someone behind him. "Excuse me."

  He stepped aside slightly and a tall woman in a suede blouse and black pants angled past him into the office. The scent tickled his nose with memory. Something Abby had liked, dammit. Something the name of which would come if he thought about it, but he didn't want to.

  The woman's figure was lithe but mature. She was no beginner, and her reddish-chestnut hair bobbed around her face with a feminine natural bounce that belied her professional status. When she turned to look at him, Brant's breath caught in his throat. She looked familiar, like someone whose picture he'd seen before in a magazine. Long, straight nose separated her dark, smoky eyes beneath full eyebrows (untweezed and gloriously arched, he noticed). Her mouth was wide, generous and sensual, yet seemed made for laughing if the curl at its corners was any indication. When she smiled, strong straight teeth glinted in the early morning sun peeking through Zimmerman's blinds.

  "What's up, Zim?" she asked the Lieutenant, though she faced Brant after taking a quick glance at Ralph. When Brant's gaze didn't leave hers, one of her eyebrows tilted upward as if independently alive.

  "This is Detective Sergeant Danielle Colgrave," Zimmerman drawled, bored by the whole thing. "She'll be handling your case after we discuss the situation. If there is a situation. Teenage girls disappear, sometimes for days and weeks, and often for no particular reason. Or due to family abuse. Frankly, a daughter of yours wouldn't give me any confidence at all that she was in her right mind." He looked at Brant when he said it, though his body was angled towards Ralph. "There's so much past between you and me and my department, that I don't expect anything much can be done until this girl returns of her own free will." He smirked. "If she chooses to return — not much to return to, I'd say. I already know you, Loot, but I also ran your brother's name, and I'm not sure I liked what I saw."

  Brant felt the fury rise up. He raised a fist and opened his mouth.

  "Hold it right there!" Zimmerman said, his hand a hatchet. "Tell it to the little lady. I got real police work to do. Feel free to use my office."

  He stalked out of the room before anyone could react. Brant's fist trembled. It was a miracle he didn't chase down and slug the sanctimonious bastard. But he was taken by surprise — he'd expected animosity, not nonchalance.

  Colgrave's cheeks were speckled with red. Apparently the "little lady" comment had caught her unawares, too.

  Brant sensed something there, between the two cops. Something thorny. It was almost as if Zimmerman had decided to dump both problems onto each other. Maybe they'd cancel out. Maybe one would take out the other. Either way, he himself was out.

  "Can I get you some coffee?" Colgrave tried smiling, but she didn't seem as confident as when she'd entered. Zimmerman had cut them all off at the knees.

  "Asshole." Brant's whisper was loud and clear.

  For a second it seemed Colgrave wanted to argue the point. But then she shrugged and half-smiled. Brant liked that half-smile.

  "Yeah," she said. "He can be."

  She meant, that's exactly what he is, all the time every day.

  Brant read it in her dark eyes. Definitely history there, and not good.

  Brant swore silently. Clearly Zimmerman was punishing them both. Not getting his hands dirty, for one. Covering himself by assigning one of his best.

  "No coffee for me, thanks," Brant said drily. No one cared whether Ralph wanted any.

  Colgrave began. "You understand — if your daughter was a minor, I'd issue an Amber Alert and we'd be rolling. But this is gray area stuff. Lieutenant Zimmerman is right about one thing. When they're college students, they can get crazy sometimes. They fall in with the wrong friends. I'm sure you remember that UW student who faked her own kidnapping a few years ago..."

  "I also remember college students found floating in rivers, one after the other, and rather recently," Brant interrupted. "They didn't all fall or jump in."

  "No, of course not—"

  "And Kit — Kate — isn't like that. She's even-tempered and

  well-adjusted." Everything her father isn't. He left that part unsaid.

  Sergeant Colgrave looked back and forth between them. She raised an eyebrow at Ralph, but when he didn't respond to her prompt she jumped in, directing herself to Brant. "I'll do my best, Mr. Brant. You can be sure I'm sympathetic—"

  "Jesus, cut the crap! You and I both know that sympathy only gets us so far. After that, it's some tough police work and maybe a policy of
listening to what we're telling you." Brant sighed and leaned into the doorway, suddenly tired by the quick flash of his anger.

  His sigh was matched by Colgrave's, who looked at him and half-smiled again. "Tell me what happened."

  Let's make the best of this, her eyes said. It's not my fault my boss hates us both.

  Brant nodded. "Fine." She did seem capable, and a hell of a lot better looking than that old sonofabitch Zimmerman.

  Ralph and Brant recited the story as they knew it, with one detail held back. Colgrave took notes with a tiny, precise hand. She said nothing more until they were finished.

  "I'll canvass the girls' apartment building later today. But

  first I'll check with mall security." She glanced at her watch. "Public Safety, they call it. They don't open for a few hours yet. We'll see if they have any reports of an assault, or even a scuffle. There could have been witnesses who didn't come forward, though."

  "Any ransom demands?"

  "No, not yet. And I have a feeling there won't be any."

  "A feeling? Mr. Brant, we have to go on more than feelings. You'll let me know immediately if there's a ransom call."

  "Of course." But there won't be.

  "What about the Amber thing?" Ralph pitched meekly.

  "That's only if the victim is a juvenile. Your daughter is theoretically old enough to act on her own, even if you don't agree with her behavior." She turned back to Brant. "I'll call the roommate and drop in for a few questions, but we're not sure a crime was committed yet."

  Brant shook his head. "When Ralph called me early this morning, he said that Irina had told him Kit was kidnapped. 'Somebody's got her,' he said. Now, she didn't have much to judge by other than the exchange at the mall with the strange guy. But later, when we went over to the apartment, somebody was listening at the door. I had a scuffle with the guy, and took a Glock off him."

  "What? Why didn't you tell me?" Colgrave's eyes turned to slits. "Maybe Zimmerman's right about you."

  "Hear me out. Irina says the guy's not the same guy from the mall, or she's not sure. But why would somebody armed with a Glock be skulking around their hallway early in the morning?"