had studied her long and hard through the glass in the front door, stared at the red hair that clearly refused to obey any bidding of brush or comb, did she realize that it was the FBI agent who had interviewed her in the hospital. What was her name, she wondered as she opened the door?
“Mrs. Desmond.” The visitor stepped inside.
She remembered then. “Officer Chang.”
“Agent Chang.” She smiled to show that no offense had been taken. “Just Chang. Or you can call me Roby, if you like, there’s no need to be formal.” When Catherine still looked blankly at her, she added, “Roby. As in Roberta.” She saw the familiar puzzlement and waited for the customary question. Catherine Desmond’s glance took in her decidedly Asian face, heart-shaped, sloe-eyed, and went up to the frizzy hair. At least she put the question a bit differently from most.
“You must get told a lot, that doesn’t sound Chinese.”
“Not as much as I hear, ‘funny, you don’t look Jewish’.”
Catherine laughed briefly. She must have done that often, before, Roby Chang thought, and felt her throat tighten with anger at what had been done to this woman. Watching her, she was surprised to discover how beautiful Catherine Desmond was. When she had seen her earlier, in the hospital, her face had been purpled with bruises, her head swathed in bandages. The gold hair, glinting with its own copper highlights, had mostly grown back out, the bruises had faded from a face that just missed classically beautiful and was the better for it. She was taller, too, than Chang had realized. Five nine, she guessed, maybe five ten, and full-figured. She was no fashion model, but rather what the boys described as “a babe.”
“Daddy’s the Chinese part,” she said aloud, “Momma was a Jewish princess. Still is, to tell the truth, but she would have a fit if she heard me say it. That explains this, too.” She put a hand up to her spiky orange hair. “I’m afraid I’m the classic American mongrel.”
Who looked not at all like an F.B.I. agent, Catherine thought. It wasn’t just that she was little, nor that her heart shaped face and the frizzy red hair gave her a comic-cute look entirely at odds with any kind of police work. Her costume, too, was something less than authoritative: jeans, a gore-tex jacket, some kind of boots that Catherine couldn’t put a name to.
“Maybe hybrid is the better word,” she said aloud. Really, she chided herself, how was she to know what an F.B.I. agent should look like? “Come in, please. Can I get you something? Coffee? A drink?”
“Nothing, thanks, I won’t stay long.” She looked around, avoiding Catherine’s eyes.
“Have you come with news? Have you found them?” Catherine asked, hope flaring for a moment.
Chang looked directly at her then and Catherine knew the answer before the agent shook her head. “Nothing, unfortunately. Actually, I was hoping you might have something for me. I thought maybe you had remembered something after all this time, some detail that you forgot earlier.” Her look was so earnest, so pleading, that Catherine hated having to disappoint her.
“Nothing that I didn’t tell you before.”
Chang hesitated a moment. “There’s been another one. Several, actually, over the last few months, but a couple of them look awfully similar to your...your case. Yesterday a girl got snatched from a shopping mall. The mother got just a glimpse, but the description she gave us sounded like the same two men.”
“That poor woman. I wish...I wish I could do something to help her.” Catherine swallowed a lump that rose in her throat and looked away. “There’s something that I’ve...I’ve struggled for hours at a time to understand: how anyone could do what these men do? Can you help me to understand that, Agent Chang?”
Roby Chang sighed deeply. She had struggled with that same question many times and every answer she came up with ultimately seemed inadequate.
“I think it’s the innocence of their victims,” she said. “These animals—I won’t call them men, they aren’t that—they see that innocence, what we perceive of as something beautiful and precious, and to them it appears as a stain, as a flaw in their scheme of things, and they feel compelled to remove that stain.” Like all the others, this answer too sounded inadequate when she tried to put it into words.
“So this comes down to a philosophical question?”
Chang shrugged helplessly. “It’s difficult for people like us to understand these creatures. There’s more to it than that, of course. Money.”
“But, they never asked for ransom. They didn’t even...there wasn’t time for that.”
Crapola, Chang thought silently. She took a deep breath. She wished she didn’t have to say this, but she knew that it had to be said. “Often, they take pictures, films. There is a big market for that sick sort of thing. Kiddie porn, it’s called.”
Catherine turned away from her and leaned against the window frame, head bent. After a moment, she asked in a breaking voice, “Are you telling me that somewhere there are pictures, movies, floating around that show—that show my Becky being violated?”
“There may well be. What I don’t get is, why did they...?” For a moment she had gone into agent-mode, thinking aloud. She caught herself and gave Catherine an apologetic look. “I’m sorry.”
“No. Go on, please. What is it that you don’t get?”
“Well, I...are you all right with this?”
“No, but go on anyway. I want to hear.”
“Well, like I said, there’s movies and pictures, they’re worth a lot of money. And then, after that, usually, they, you know, they pass them on.”
“For sex, you mean?”
“Yes.” Chang was clearly embarrassed with the information she was imparting to Catherine’s back. Should she go on? Or try to soft pedal it? Yet her instinct was that this woman truly wanted—needed—to know. “The point is, these children are worth far more to them alive than dead.”
“Then why...?”
“If I knew that....” Chang shrugged again.
Catherine was quiet for so long that Chang wondered if perhaps she should simply leave. When Catherine finally did speak, it was to say, her voice cracking, “I tried to protect her. I tried to shield her from the evil of the world.”
“Yes, of course you did. Who could dream that such evil would come down upon you?” She had seen this same bewildered grief in other parents who had lost a child to murder. You wanted to protect, and when you failed, when something of this magnitude happened, you felt as if it were you who was at fault. She had seen marriages, families torn apart by such guilt. Even when justice was served, even when memory faded, no one ever really recovered, no parent of a murdered child ever afterward swam blissfully in the river of forgetfulness.
She pulled her shoulders back and thrust her chin forward. “Mrs. Desmond, I want you to know, I mean to get these monsters. And I will, I promise you. However long it takes, I’m going to see them burn in the chair before I’m finished.”
Catherine suddenly turned toward her, fists clenched, and said, with a fervor long missing from her voice, “I want to see it. I want to be there to
