"Sure." I held the door for her, then closed it and went around to the other side.

Three girls with moussed hair and plastic clips and mahogany tans and pearl-white lip gloss walked past the Rabbit to a catch-me red Porsche 944 Turbo. I watched Traci watch them. She tried to do it sneaky, out the corner of her eye so they couldn't tell. The girls at the Porsche leaned against its fenders and looked past each other so they could see the Rabbit and me and Traci, and there was lots of laughter. One of them stared openly. I said, "You think they share the same lip gloss tube?"

Traci giggled. She looked at me sort of the same way she looked at them, out from under her eyes, as if she really didn't want you to know she was looking, as if she thought that if you knew, you'd say something sharp or do something hurtful. "Don't you think they look like clones?" she said. "They have no individuality. They're scared of being unique, and therefore alone, so they mask their fear by sameness and denigrate those who do not share their fear." She just tossed that off, like saying, Hey, buddy, how about a bag of nuts? She said, "They're talking about us, you know. They're wondering who's that guy and why are you sitting with me."

"I know that."

"I knew they would. That's why I wanted us to get into the car."

"I know that, too."

She looked at me a long time, then looked away.

"Do you think that's shallow? I hate to be shallow. I try not to be." Sixteen.

"Traci," I said, "I think maybe Mimi was mixed up with some people who might've had something to do with her kidnapping. People she might've thought were her friends and who she might've gone out with."

Traci pooched out her lips and chewed them and shrugged. "Friends?"

Even Traci Louise Fishman did it. I said, "Do you know a couple of Mimi's friends named Carol and Kerri?"

"Uh-uh."

"You sure?"

Traci chewed the lips some more and shrugged again. Nervous. "Why would I know them?"

"Because you guys were buddies."

Shrug.

I said, "Traci, I've seen seven letters that you wrote to Mimi last year when she was away. I've read them."

She looked shocked. "You read other people's mail?"

"Monstrous, isn't it?"

She chewed harder. "If you find her, what are you going to do?"

"Rescue her." Sir Elvis.

"You won't tell her that I'm the one who said?"

I said, "I know you want to protect your friend, babe, but you have to understand that right now she is in a world of trouble. We're not talking about her shoplifting a radio and you telling. Bad people have her and whatever you know might be able to help me find her."

She chewed harder and then she nodded. "You really think it was people she thought were her friends that did it?"

"Yes."

The irritated eyes grew pink and blinked faster. Maybe starting to cry. "It's just that Mimi liked to make things up, you know. She was always telling me about these stud guys and the parties they would have and how they would ride around in limousines and go to clubs and all these things that you just knew she'd made up."

"Bigger-than-life stuff."

"Uh-huh." She began to sniffle. "So when she told me about these new people, I didn't believe her at first. She said she had these new friends and that they weren't full of bullshit like everybody else in her life. She said she had a boyfriend and she said he was really buff and they partied every night and had real good cocaine and stuff and that they were the seeds of a revolution and all this crazy stuff, and after a while I said, 'Mimi, you're full of crap,' just like I always did, and she said it was true and she'd prove it."

Traci Louise Fishman dug through her purse and took out a battered red leather wallet and dug through that and pulled out a bent color snapshot. "A couple of days later she gave me this. Kerri's the girl with the white hair. I don't know about Carol. I really don't."

The photograph had been taken on the street at night and was of half a dozen smiling young men and women. Mimi Warren was standing next to a girl with white hair, but Mimi Warren wasn't Mimi Warren as I had ever seen her. She had blue electroshock hair and heavy emerald eye shadow and she was giving the finger to the camera. She was also standing beside a big, good-looking kid with huge shoulders. The big guy was giving us the bird with his right hand and had his left hand on Mimi's breast. I took a deep breath, then let it out. Carol and Kerri didn't matter anymore. The big kid was Eddie Tang.

I touched his image in the photograph. "And this is Mimi's boyfriend?"

"Uh-huh. That's what she said."

Chapter 21

One of the moussed girls by the 944 went around to the driver's side, got in, and leaned across to unlock the passenger door. The other girls climbed in, but the Porsche didn't start. One of the girls lit up. The one in the tiny back seat turned crosswise, and kept raking her fingers through her hair. Music blasted out of the Porsche's door-mounted speakers, rolling across the parking lot, and you could see them passing around an Evian bottle. They had gotten in the car, apparently, to better watch us from Black Forest comfort.

I looked at the photograph that Traci had given me and at the people in it. Eddie was the oldest, and the biggest. The other two guys were probably not out of their teens and were slight, one wearing narrow-legged jeans and a white shirt and a couple-of-sizes-too-big cloth jacket with a lot of buckles and studs, the other a uniform that looked like something a Red Chinese National would wear, all gray and plain with a single row of buttons down the front and a Nehru collar and a Red Army cap. The kid in the uniform was Asian. He didn't look like a yakuza thug, but maybe he was executive material. Kerri and the other woman were also Asian. The one Traci didn't know was dressed in Jordache jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a Swatch watch. Normal. Kerri was a Clorox blonde with a spike cut and a powdered face and neon-red lips and nails. There was a dog collar around her neck. Billy Idol. I said, "Traci, this is important. Did Mimi ever say what she talked about with these people?"

"Uh-huh."

"Was it about something called the Hagakure?"

"Uh-uh."

"What did she talk about?"

"Stuff I didn't understand. She said they were real. She said they loved her. She said they were the first people she'd ever met who truly had purpose." I looked out the window. Purpose. When you're sixteen, maybe all life is drama. I looked back at Traci. Her big eyes went from pink to red and she rubbed at them and said, "I gotta put in drops."

She took a little plastic bottle from her purse and put two drops of something into each eye and sat with her eyes closed for a couple of minutes. Trying not to cry.

"When was the last time you spoke to her?"

Nervous shrug. "About three weeks ago."

"Did she tell you what she would do when she was hanging out with these people?"

Traci stared at the photograph. I handed it back and watched her put it in her wallet like something precious that had to be handled carefully.

"She told me they went to all these clubs. She told me they did all these drugs and had sex and it sounded just like when she would make stuff up only this time I believed her. I said she ought not. I said she was gonna get in trouble or get fucked up or get arrested, and Mimi got real mad so I shut up. This one time she got so mad at me she didn't talk to me for a month. You have to be careful." Traci said it like she was telling me a secret that only she knew, like it was important and special and I had probably never heard anything like it ever before.

I said, "Mimi could sneak out, make herself up and change her clothes, and be with these people, then undo it all and go back home and be a different Mimi and her parents never knew."