Women's Murder Club [06] The 6th Target

by James Patterson

  “I have to ask,” Elizabeth Tyler said softly, “was Maddy harmed in any way?”

  “She looks like she’s been through an ordeal,” I said to Madison’s mom. “She wasn’t given any kind of invasive exam because the doctors were waiting for your consent.”

  Elizabeth Tyler covered her mouth with both hands, stifled her tears.

  “You should know she’s barely said anything to anyone.”

  “That’s not like Maddy.”

  “Maybe she was warned not to talk or she would be hurt —”

  “Oh, God. Those animals!”

  “Why would they kidnap Maddy, then abandon her without trying to get a ransom?” Tyler was asking as we entered the ER.

  I let the question hang, because I didn’t want to say what I was thinking: Pedophiles don’t ask for ransom. I stood aside so that the Tylers could enter Maddy’s curtained stall in the ER ahead of me, thinking how overjoyed Madison would be when she saw her parents again.

  Henry Tyler squeezed my arm and whispered, “Thank you,” as he went through the curtains. I heard Elizabeth Tyler calling her daughter’s name — then cry out with an agonized moan.

  I jumped aside as she ran past me. Henry Tyler emerged next and put his face right up to mine.

  “Do you know what you’ve done?” he said, his face scarlet with rage. “That girl isn’t Madison. Do you understand? That’s not Madison. That’s not our baby!”

  Chapter 46

  I APOLOGIZED TO THE TYLERS sincerely and profusely as they exploded all over me in the hospital parking lot, then stood flat-footed as their car tore past me, leaving rubber on the asphalt. My cell phone rang on my hip, and eventually I answered it.

  It was Jacobi. “A woman just called saying her daughter is missing. The child is five. Has long blond hair.”

  The caller’s name was Sylvia Brodsky, and she was hysterical. She’d lost track of her daughter, Alicia, while shopping for groceries. Alicia must have wandered away, Mrs. Brodsky told the 911 operator, adding that her daughter was autistic.

  Alicia Brodsky could barely speak a word.

  Not long after Jacobi’s call, Sylvia Brodsky came to the hospital and claimed her daughter, but Conklin and I weren’t there to see it.

  We were back in our Crown Vic, talking it over, me taking responsibility for jumping the gun, saying, “I should have been more forceful when I told the Tylers that maybe we’d found their daughter, but we couldn’t be sure. But I did say that we needed them to make a positive ID, didn’t I, Rich? You heard me.”

  “They stopped listening after you said, ‘We may have found your daughter.’ Hey, it all clicked, Lindsay. She said her name was Maddy.”

  “Well. Something like that.”

  “The red shoes,” he insisted. “How many five-year-old blond-haired kids have blue coats and red patent leather shoes?”

  “Two, anyway.” I sighed.

  Back at the Hall, we interrogated Calvin for two hours, squeezed him until he wasn’t smirking anymore. We looked at the digital photos still inside his camera, and we examined the photos Conklin had found in his bedroom.

  There were no pictures of Madison Tyler, but we kept our hopes up until the last frame that Calvin might have accidentally photographed the kidnapping in progress.

  That maybe he’d caught the black van in his lens.

  But the Memory Stick in his camera showed that he hadn’t been taking pictures at Alta Plaza Park yesterday.

  Patrick Calvin made me sick, but the law doesn’t recognize causing revulsion as a criminal offense.

  So we kicked him. Turned him loose.

  Conklin and I interviewed three more registered sex offenders that day, three average-looking white males you’d never pick out of a crowd as sexual predators.

  Three men whose alibis checked out.

  I finally called it quits at around seven p.m. Emotionally speaking, my tank was dry.

  I entered my apartment, threw my arms around Martha, and promised her a run after my shower to rinse the skeezy images out of my brain.

  There was a note from Martha’s sitter on the kitchen counter. I went to the fridge, cracked open a Corona, and took a long pull from the bottle before reading it.

  Lindsay, hi, when I didn’t see your car, I took Martha for a walk! :( Remember I told you my parents are letting me have the house in Hermosa Beach through Christmas? I should take Martha with me. It would be good for her,

  Lindsay!!!

  Let me know. K.

  I felt sick knowing that I’d abandoned my dog without calling her sitter. And I knew Karen was right. I wasn’t doing Martha any good right now. My new hours included double shifts and all-work weekends. I hadn’t taken a real break since the ferry shooting.

  I stooped down for a kiss, lifted Martha’s silky ears, looked into her big brown eyes.

  “You want to run on the beach, Boo?”

  I picked up the phone and dialed Karen’s number.

  “Excellent,” she said. “I’ll pick her up in the morning.”

  Chapter 47

  IT WAS MONDAY MORNING, half past dawn.

  Conklin and I were at the construction site below Fort Point, the huge brick fort that had been built on the edge of the San Francisco peninsula during the Civil War and now stood in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  A damp breeze kicked up whitecaps on the bay, making the fifty-degree temperature feel more like thirty-five.

  I was shaking, either because of the windchill factor or from my sickening sense of what we were about to find.

  I zipped up my fleece-lined jacket, put my hands inside my pockets as the whipping wind brought moisture to my eyes.

  A welder who was working on the bridge retrofit came toward us with containers of coffee from the “garbage truck,” a food wagon outside the chain-link fence that separated the construction site from the public area.

  The welder’s name was Wayne Murray, and he told me and Conklin how when he’d come to work that morning, he’d seen something weird hung up on the rocks below the fort.

  “I thought at first it was a seal,” he said mournfully. “When I got closer, I saw an arm in the water. I never saw a dead body before.”

  Car doors slammed, men coming through the chain-link gate, talking and laughing — construction workers, EMS, and a couple of Park Service cops.

  I asked them to rope off the area.

  I turned my eyes back to the dark lump down on the rocks below the seawall, a white hand and foot trailing in the foam-flecked water that streamed toward the ocean.

  “She wasn’t dumped here,” Conklin said. “Too much chance of being seen.”

  I squinted up at the silhouette of the bridge security officer patrolling the structure with his AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

  “Yeah. Depending on the time and the tides, she could have been dropped off one of the piers. The perps must’ve thought she’d float out to sea.”

  “Here comes Dr. G.,” Conklin said.

  The ME was chipper this morning, his damp white hair still showing comb marks, his waders pulled up to midchest, his nose pink under the bridge of his glasses.

  He and one of his assistants took the lead, and we joined them, walking awkwardly across the jagged rocks that sloped at a forty-five-degree angle, fifteen feet down to the lip of the bay.

  “Hang on, there. Be careful,” Dr. Germaniuk said as we approached the body. “Don’t want anyone to fall and touch something.”

  We stood our ground as Dr. G. scrambled down the boulders, approached the body, put his scene kit down. Using his flashlight, he began his preliminary in situ assessment.

  I could see the body pretty well in his beam. The victim’s face was darkened and swollen.

  “Got some skin slippage here,” Dr. G. called up to me. “She’s been in the water a couple of days. Long enough to have become a floater.”

  “Does she have a gunshot wound to the head?”

  “Can’t tell. Looks like she’s been ban
ged up on the rocks. I’ll give her a head-to-toe X-ray when we get her back to home base.”

  Dr. G. photographed the body twice from each angle, his flash popping every second or two.

  I took note of the girl’s clothing — the dark coat, the turtle-neck sweater, her short hair, similar to the distinctive bowl cut I’d seen in her driver’s license picture when I’d gone through her wallet two days before.

  “We both know that’s Paola Ricci,” Conklin said, staring down at the body.

  I nodded. Except that yesterday we’d blown it, broken the Tylers’ hearts by jumping to conclusions.

  “Right,” I said. “But I’ll believe it when we get a pos-itive ID.”

  Chapter 48

  CLAIRE WAS SITTING UP IN BED when I walked through the door of her hospital room. She stretched out her arms, and I hugged her until she said, “Take it easy, sugar. I’ve got a hole in my chest, remember?”

  I pulled back, kissed her on both cheeks, and sat down beside her.

  “What’s the latest from your doctor?”

  “He said I’m a big, strong girl . . .” And then Claire started coughing. She held up the hand that wasn’t covering her mouth, managing to finally say, “It hurts only when I cough.”

  “You’re a big, strong girl and . . . what?” I pressed her.

  “And I’m going to be fine. Getting out of this joint Wednesday. Then some time at home in bed. After that I should be good to go.”

  “Thank God.”

  “I’ve been thanking God since that asshole shot me, whenever that was. You lose track of time when you don’t have an office job.”

  “It happened two weeks ago, Butterfly. Two weeks and two days.”

  Claire pushed a box of chocolates toward me, and I took the first one my hand fell on.

  “You been sleeping in the trunk of your car?” she asked me. “Or did you trade Joe in for an eighteen-year-old boyfriend?”

  I poured water for both of us, put a straw in Claire’s glass, handed it to her, said, “I didn’t trade him in. I just kinda let him go.”

  Claire’s eyebrows shot up. “No, you didn’t.”

  I explained what happened, aching as I talked. Claire watched me warily but kindly. She asked a few questions but mostly let me spill.

  I sipped some water. Then I cleared my throat and told Claire about my new rank with the SFPD.

  Shock registered in her eyes. Again. “You got yourself bumped down to the street and you told Joe to hit the bricks — at the same time? I’m worried about you, Lindsay. Are you sleeping? Taking vitamins? Eating right?”

  No. No. No.

  I threw myself back into the armchair as a nurse came in, bearing a tray with Claire’s medication and dinner.

  “Here you go, Dr. Washburn. Down the hatch.”

  Claire slugged down the pills, pushed her tray away once the nurse had gone. “Slop du jour,” she said.

  Had I eaten today? I didn’t think so. I appropriated Claire’s meal, mashing the overcooked peas and meatloaf together on the fork, getting to the ice-cream course before telling her that we had identified Paola Ricci’s body.

  “The kidnappers shot the nanny within a minute of taking her and the child. Couldn’t get rid of her fast enough. But that’s all I’ve got, Butterfly. We don’t know who did it, why, or where they’ve taken Madison.”

  “Why haven’t those shits called the parents?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question. Way too long without a ransom request. I don’t think they want the Tylers’ money.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah.” I dropped the plastic spoon onto the tray and leaned back in the chair again, staring out at nothing.

  “Lindsay?”

  “I’ve been thinking that they’d shot Paola because she’d witnessed Madison’s kidnapping.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “But if Madison witnessed Paola’s murder . . . they’re not going to let the child live after that.”

  Part Three

  THE ACCOUNTING

  Chapter 49

  CINDY THOMAS LEFT her Blakely Arms apartment, crossed the street at the corner, and began her five-block walk to her office at the Chronicle.

  Two floors above Cindy’s apartment, facing the back of the building, a man named Garry Tenning was having a bad morning. Tenning gripped the edges of the desk in his workroom and tried to stifle his anger. Down in the courtyard, five floors below, a dog was barking incessantly, each shrill note stabbing Tenning’s eardrums like a skewer.

  He knew the dog.

  It was Barnaby, a rat terrier who belonged to Margery Glynn, a lumpen, dishwater-blond single mother of god-awful Baby Oliver, all of them living on the ground floor, usurping the back courtyard as if it were theirs.

  Again, Tenning pressed on his special Mack’s earplugs, soft wax that conformed exactly to the shape of his ear holes. And still he could hear Barnaby yappa-yappa-yipping through his Mack’s.

  Tenning rubbed the flat of his hand across the front of his T-shirt as the dog’s brainless yapping ripped the fabric of his repose. The tingling was starting now in his lips and fingers, and his heart was palpitating.

  Goddamn it.

  Was a little quiet too much to ask?

  On the computer screen in front of him, neat rows of type marched down the screen — chapter six of his book, The Accounting: A Statistical Compendium of the Twentieth Century.

  The book was more than a conceit or a pet project. The Accounting was his raison d’être and his legacy. He even cherished the rejection letters from publishers turning down his book proposal. He lovingly logged these rejections into a ledger, filing the originals in a folder inside his lockbox.

  He’d get his laugh when The Accounting was published, when it became a critical reference work for scholars all over the world — and for generations to come.

  Nobody would be able to take that away from him.

  As Tenning willed Barnaby to shut the hell up, he ran his eyes down the line of numbers — the fatal lightning strikes since 1900, the inches of snowfall in Vermont, the verified sightings of cows sucked into the air by tornadoes — when a garbage truck began its halting clamor up the block.

  He thought his fricking skull would crack open.

  He wasn’t crazy, either.

  He was having a perfectly reasoned response to a horrific assault on the senses. He clapped his hands over his ears, but the squeals, screeches, galvanized shimmies, came through — and they set off Oliver!

  The goddamned baby.

  How many times had he been interrupted by that baby?

  How many times had his thoughts been derailed by that shitty-ass rat dog?

  The pressure in Tenning’s chest and head was building. If he didn’t do something, he would explode.

  Garry Tenning had had it.

  Chapter 50

  EVEN WITH QUIVERING FINGERS, Tenning quickly tied the laces of his bald-treaded Adidas, stepped out into the hallway, and locked the apartment door behind him, pocketing his big bunch of keys.

  He used the fire stairs to get down to the basement level — he never took the elevator.

  He passed the laundry room and entered the boiler room, where the senior furnace mumbled in its pipes and the hateful new furnace roared with freshly minted enthusiasm.

  An eighteen-inch length of pipe with a rusted ball joint affixed to one end leaned against the concrete-block wall. Tenning hefted it, socked the ball joint into the cupped palm of his hand.

  He turned right, walking down the incline toward the blinking light of the EXIT sign, murderous ideas igniting in his mind like a chain of firecrackers.

  The lock bar on the exit door opened against his forearm. He stood for a minute in the sunshine, getting his bearings. Then he turned the brick corner of the building, heading toward the patio of keystones and the planters that were added since the building’s conversion.

  Seeing Tenning coming toward him, Barnaby started yapping. He lunged at the l
eash connecting his collar to the chain-link fence.

  Beside him was the baby carriage, where Oliver Glynn fretted in the dappled shade. He was howling, too.

  Tenning felt a flame of hope rush through him.

  Two birds with one stone.

  Clutching the valve-capped pipe, he edged along the side of the building toward the shrieks and howls of the Nasty Little Animals.

  Just then, Margery Glynn, her bland blond hair knotted up and stabbed into place with a pencil, stepped out of her apartment. She bent low, displaying several square feet of milky-white thigh, and lifted Oliver out of his carriage.

  Tenning watched, unseen.

  The baby quieted instantly, but Barnaby only changed his tune, his excited yips stabbing, stabbing, stabbing.

  Mistress Margery shushed him, put one hand under the baby’s ass, and pressing his wet face to her deflated bosom, carried him inside her apartment.

  Tenning advanced on Barnaby, who paused midyowl and licked his chops, hoping for a pat perhaps or a run in the park. Then he sent up his yapping alarm — again.

  Tenning lifted his club and swung it down hard. Barnaby squealed, made a feeble grab for Tenning’s arm as the club rose high against the cloudless sky and then slammed down a second time.

  The rat dog was completely still.

  As Tenning stuffed its body into a garbage bag, he thought, RIBP.

  Rest in bloody peace.

  Chapter 51

  THREE DAYS HAD PASSED since Madison Tyler had been taken from Scott Street and her nanny murdered only a few yards from Alta Plaza Park.

  We were all in the squad room that morning: Conklin, four homicide inspectors from the night tour doing overtime, Macklin, a half-dozen cops from Major Crimes, and me.

  Macklin looked around the small room and said, “I’ll make this quick so we can get to work. We’ve got nothing. Nothing but the talent in this room. So let’s keep doing what we’re doing, good solid police work. And for those of you who pray — put in a word for a miracle.”