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

by James Patterson

  “Sergeant Boxer,” Sherman said, “it’s rare for a killer to turn himself in to a police officer at home, isn’t it?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “And Fred Brinkley specifically wanted to turn himself in to you, isn’t that true?”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “Did you know Mr. Brinkley?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “So why did Mr. Brinkley ask you to arrest him?”

  “He told me that he’d seen me on TV, asking for information about the ferry shooter. He said he took that to mean that he should come to my home.”

  “How did he find out where you live?”

  “He said that he’d gone to a library and used a computer. Got my address off the Internet.”

  “You’ve testified that you disarmed Mr. Brinkley. You took away his gun, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Same gun he used to do the shootings?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’d brought a written confession with him to your doorstep, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “So to get this all perfectly straight,” Mickey said, “my client heard your appeal to the public on television and interpreted that as an appeal to him personally. He Googled your name in a library and went to your front door as if you’d ordered takeout. And he was still carrying the handgun he used to kill four people.”

  “Objection, Your Honor. Argumentative,” Yuki said.

  “I’ll allow it, but please get to the point, Mr. Sherman.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” Mickey walked over to me, gave me his full-bore, brown-eyed “you can trust me” look.

  “Here’s what I’m getting at, Sergeant. Wouldn’t you agree that for a killer to keep the murder weapon and bring it to the home of a homicide inspector is not only unusual but off the wall?”

  “It’s unusual, I’ll give you that.”

  “Sergeant, did you ask Mr. Brinkley why he shot those people?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did he say?”

  I wanted to dig in, refuse to answer Mickey Sherman’s question, but of course I didn’t have that option. “He said he did it because voices told him to do it.”

  “Voices in his head?”

  “That’s how I interpreted his statement.”

  Mickey smiled at me as if to say, Oh, yes. The defense is having a very good day. “That’s all I have. Thanks very much, Lindsay.”

  Chapter 79

  YUKI SAT ACROSS FROM ME at a table by the door at MacBain’s. She looked more than just worried. She looked as if she were beating herself up horribly.

  “I should have done a redirect,” Yuki said to me after we’d ordered. The place was absolutely jammed with lawyers and their clients, cops, and Hall of Justice workers of all kinds. Yuki had to raise her voice to be heard over the din. “I should have asked you what you thought when Brinkley told you about the voices.”

  “Who cares what I thought? It’s no big deal.”

  “Oh, it’s a big deal, all right.” Yuki raked her hair back with her hands. “Sergeant Boxer, what did you think when Mr. Brinkley said he was hearing voices directing him to kill?”

  I shrugged.

  “Come on, Lindsay. You would have said that you thought he was already staging his insanity defense.”

  “Yuki, you can’t nail everything down. You’re doing a first-class job. I mean, really.”

  Yuki snorted. “Mickey is successfully flipping every negative into a positive. ‘My client killed people for no reason? That means he’s insane, right?’ ”

  “That’s all he’s got. Look, Brinkley seemed rational, and I said so. The jury’s not going to take Brinkley’s word that he was hearing voices.”

  “Yeah.” Yuki shredded her paper napkin. “I wonder what Marcia Clark’s best friend said to her just before the jury found O. J. Simpson ‘not guilty.’ ‘Don’t worry, Marcia. Nobody’s going to care about that glove.’ ”

  I sat back in my seat as Syd brought our burgers and piles of fries. “Hey,” I said, “I saw Mickey on the steps of the courthouse, mobbed by reporters. Funny how much we loved his magic act with the press last summer. Now I think, You media hog.”

  Yuki didn’t laugh.

  “Yuki,” I said, circling her wrist with my fingers, “you’re coming off smart, on top of your case, and most of all you sound right.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said, “I’m done whining. Thanks for your testimony. Thanks for your support.”

  “Do something for me, girlfriend.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Put some calories inside your body and have a little faith in yourself.”

  Yuki lifted her hamburger, then put it back down on the plate without biting into it. “You know what’s going on with me, Linds? I made a mistake. In a case like this one, you don’t make mistakes. Not even one. And for the first time, I really see that I could lose.”

  Chapter 80

  “MACKLIN JUST CALLED,” Jacobi said the minute I returned to the squad room after lunch. Conklin and I walked Jacobi to his office, Jacobi saying, “A kid was snatched off the street in Los Angeles three hours ago. A little boy. Described as some kind of math genius.”

  I didn’t even sit down.

  I fired a flurry of questions at Jacobi: Had the child been abducted by someone in a black van? Was there any evidence at the scene? A tag number, a description — anything? Had the parents of the child been checked out? Had they heard from the kidnapper? In short, did this abduction resemble the kidnapping of Madison Tyler?

  “Boxer, curb your enthusiasm, will ya?” Jacobi said, chuck-ing the remains of his cheeseburger into the trash can. “I’ll give you everything I’ve got, every single detail.”

  “Well, make it snappy.” I laughed. I sat down and leaned forward, putting my elbows on the desk as Jacobi filled us in.

  “The parents were inside their house, and the kid was playing in the backyard,” Jacobi told us. “Mother heard a squeal of brakes. She was on the phone, looked out the window onto the street, and saw a black van speeding around the corner. She didn’t think too much about it. A couple of minutes later, she looked into the backyard, realized the boy was gone.”

  “The kid wandered out to the front yard?” Conklin asked.

  “Possibly. The gate was open. Kid could’ve opened it — he’s smart, right? — or maybe someone else did it. The LAPD put out an Amber Alert, but the father, not taking any chances, called the Feds.”

  Jacobi pushed a fax toward me, headed with the logo of the FBI. The second page was a photocopy of an adorable little boy — big round eyes, dimples, looked to be a perfect little sweetheart.

  “The boy’s name is Charles Ray, age six. The LAPD did an analysis of the tire marks outside the Ray house, and they match the type that comes standard with a late-model Honda minivan. That said, there’s no proof that the vehicle was involved in the abduction. They haven’t pulled any useful prints off the gate.”

  “Did the child have a nanny?” I asked.

  “Yes. Briana Kearny. She was at the dentist when Charlie was taken. Her alibi checks out. It’s a long shot, Boxer. Maybe the same party who kidnapped Madison Tyler is involved, maybe not.”

  “We should interview the parents,” Conklin said.

  “Like I could stop the two of you if I wanted to,” said Jacobi. “Pair of freakin’ attack dogs.”

  Jacobi pushed two more sheets of paper over to our side of his desk — electronic airline tickets in my name and Conklin’s, San Francisco to LAX, round-trip.

  “Listen,” Jacobi said, “until we learn otherwise, we’re treating this boy’s abduction as part of the Tyler case, so report back to Lieutenant Macklin. And keep me in the loop.” Jacobi looked at his watch. “It’s two fifteen. You could be in LA by four or so.”

  Chapter 81

  SQUAD CARS WERE PARKED on the one-lane street outside the Rays’ wood-frame cottage. It was one of several dozen simila
r houses butting up against one another, lining both sides of the street.

  Cops were talking on the sidewalk. They greeted us when we flashed our badges. “The mother’s home,” a uniform told us.

  Eileen Ray came to the door. She was white, early thirties, five nine, looked to be about eight months pregnant and terribly, terribly vulnerable. Her dark hair was banded up in a ponytail, and her face was raw and red from crying.

  I introduced Conklin and myself, and Mrs. Ray invited us inside, where an FBI tech was wiring up the phone. “The police have been . . . wonderful, and we’re so grateful,” Mrs. Ray said, indicating a sofa and chair for us to sit on.

  The living room was crammed with stenciled cabinets, baskets, birdhouses, and dried flowers, and folded-down cardboard boxes were stacked on the floor near the kitchen table. The pervasive fragrance of lavender added to the gift-shop effect of the Ray abode.

  “We work at home,” Mrs. Ray said, answering my unasked question. “EBay.”

  “Where is your husband now?” Conklin asked.

  “Scotty and an FBI agent are driving around with Briana,” she told us. “My husband is hoping to God that he might see Charlie wandering out there, lost.

  “Charlie must be terrified!” Eileen Ray cried out. “Oh, my God, what he must be going through! Who would take him?” she asked, her voice breaking. “And why?”

  Conklin and I had no answers, but we lobbed questions at Mrs. Ray — about her movements, her relationship with her husband, and why the gate to the yard was open.

  And we asked if anyone — family, friend, or stranger — had shown excessive or inappropriate attention to Charlie.

  Nothing she told us lit up the board.

  Eileen Ray was twisting a handkerchief in her hands when Scott Ray came home with the FBI agent and the nanny, a baby-faced young woman who was still in her teens.

  Conklin and I split up, Conklin interviewing Scott in the child’s bedroom while I talked to Briana in the kitchen. Unlike the Westwood Registry’s European imports, Briana Kearny was a second-generation American, a local girl who lived three blocks away and looked after Charlie on a per-hour basis.

  In other words, Briana was a babysitter.

  Briana cried deep, heart-wrenching sobs as I pressed her, asking about her friendships, about her boyfriend, and if anyone had questioned her about the Rays and their habits.

  Conklin and I finally closed our notebooks and said our good-byes, leaving the homey little cottage right as the electric candles in the windows came on.

  “That girl had nothing to do with the child being snatched,” I said.

  “I didn’t get anything bad off the husband, either,” my partner told me. “This feels like a ‘pedophile lures the kid into a van’ thing.”

  “Yeah. It’s just too fricking easy to steal a child. Perv says, ‘Want to see my puppy?’ Kid toddles over. Perv drags the kid inside and takes off. No witness. No evidence. And now,” I said, “the long wait for a phone call . . . that never comes.”

  Chapter 82

  SIX-YEAR-OLD CHARLIE RAY had been abducted more than seven hours before, and the kidnappers had not called his parents. The Rays, unlike the Tylers, were in a socio-economic bracket that wouldn’t normally indicate a kidnapping for ransom.

  And that was a bad thing.

  We sat in Captain Jimenez’s office while FBI agent David Stanford briefed us. Stanford was a blue-eyed man with a graying ponytail who’d been working undercover on another case before being pulled into this one.

  I took a flyer from the stack on the captain’s desk, studied Charlie Ray’s perfectly round eyes, baby teeth, and short-cropped dark curls.

  Would his body be found weeks or months from now in a dump, or in a shallow grave, or washed up on the beach after a storm?

  When the meeting broke up, I called Macklin and filled him in. And then Agent Stanford gave me and Conklin a lift to the airport. As we took the freeway exit, Stanford suggested we stop for a drink at the Marriott LAX before our flight. He wanted to hear everything we knew about Madison Tyler and her abduction.

  Speaking for myself, I was ready for a drink. Possibly two.

  The Latitude 33 lounge had a full bar and restaurant. Over beer and peanuts, we discussed Madison, then Stanford told us about a hideous child-abduction case he’d worked months before.

  A ten-year-old girl had been snatched off the street as she walked home from school. She’d been found twenty-four hours later, raped and strangled, left on the altar of a church, her hands folded as if in prayer. The killer still hadn’t been found.

  “How often do these kidnappings end in a rescue?” I asked.

  “The majority of the time, child abductions are done by family members. In those cases, the child is usually returned unharmed. When the kidnapper is a stranger, the recovery rate is about fifty-fifty.” Stanford’s voice was strained as he said, “Call it passion or maybe obsession, but I believe that the more child predators I can take down, the safer the world is for my three kids.”

  Chapter 83

  “HOW ABOUT KEEPING ME COMPANY over dinner?” Stanford suggested.

  Our waiter brought menus to the table, and as the eight o’clock flight to SFO had just departed without us, we took Stanford up on his offer.

  The agent ordered a bottle of pinot grigio, and Conklin and I filled him in on what we knew about Paola Ricci’s abduction and murder.

  “Honestly, we’re stuck,” I told Stanford. “Our dead ends are turning up even more dead ends. We’re in about the fifth generation of dead ends.”

  Our steaks arrived, and Stanford ordered another bottle of wine. And for the first time that long day, I finally relaxed, glad for the company and the chance to brainstorm while listening to the country-and-western music floating in from the live band in the lounge.

  I was also becoming aware of Conklin’s long legs next to mine under the table, his brown suede jacket brushing up against my arm, the now familiar cadence of his voice, and the wine slipping smoothly down my throat as the evening flowed into night.

  At around 9:15, Dave Stanford picked up the tab, told us that he’d keep us posted after the Rays’ phone records were dumped and that he’d alert us of anything that could help us with the Ricci/Tyler case.

  We’d missed another flight back to San Francisco, and as Rich and I said good-bye to Stanford, we prepared ourselves for an hour’s wait outside the United Airlines gate.

  We were almost out the door when the band kicked up something from the Kenny Chesney collection, and the girl singer began exhorting the patrons into a line dance.

  The bar crowd was made up of smashed young road warriors and airline personnel, and they started getting into the dance — a new spin on the Electric Slide.

  Rich smiled and said, “You wanna get stupid out there?” and I grinned back, saying, “Sure. Why the heck not?”

  I followed Rich’s lead onto the dance floor and into a good time, hustling to the music, bumping into giddy strangers, and best of all laughing.

  It had been a while since I’d doubled over with belly laughs, and it felt great.

  When the song ended, the crooner unhooked the mic from the stand, licked her lips, and sang along with the guy at the electric piano as he played “Lyin’ Eyes.”

  Couples paired up. When Rich stretched out his arms, I stepped in close. My God, my God, it felt so good to have Richie Conklin’s arms around me.

  The room was spinning a little, so I closed my eyes and held on to him, the space between us closing because there was just no room to move on that little dance floor. I even stretched up onto my toes to rest my head on his shoulder — and he gripped me more tightly.

  When the music stopped, Rich said, “Man, I really don’t want to go to the airport, do you?”

  I remember saying that a case could be made that at that late hour, after the long workday and, by the way, having drunk a whole lot of wine, we had several bona fide, expense-reportable reasons to spend the night in LA
.

  Still, I was torn as I handed my credit card to the desk clerk at the Marriott LAX, telling myself this didn’t mean a thing. I wasn’t going to do anything but go to my room and sleep. That was all.

  Rich and I stood at opposite sides of the elevator, a weary couple between us, as the mirrored car climbed ten silent flights. I hated to admit it, but I missed being in his arms.

  When we stepped out of the elevator, I said, “Good night, Rich.” Then I turned my back on him as I slipped the key card into the slot, aware that he was now doing the same in a door across the hall.

  “See you in the morning, Lindsay.”

  “Sure thing. Sleep tight, Richie.”

  The tiny green light went on, and the door handle opened under my hand.

  Chapter 84

  I CLOSED AND BOLTED THE DOOR to my room, my mind reeling with longing and desire, relief and regret. I stripped off my clothes, and a minute later, the blood was pounding in my temples as I stood under the hot spray of the shower.

  Clean and glowing pink, I buffed my body with warm terry-cloth towels and blew my hair dry. I toweled the steam off the mirror over the sink and assessed my naked self. I still looked young and good and desirable. My breasts were firm, my tummy flat, and my sandy blond hair cascaded in waves to below my shoulders.

  Why hadn’t Joe called me?

  I wrapped myself in a white hotel robe, went to the bedroom, checked the empty voice mail on my cell phone, much like my stubborn answering machine at home.

  It had been six days since I’d seen Joe.

  Was it really, truly over between us?

  Would I never see him again? Why hadn’t he come after me?

  I pulled the drapes shut, folded the gold-quilted spread, and fluffed the pillows. Dizzy from the wine and the heat of the shower, I lay down.

  Eyes closed, I found that the fading images of Joe were replaced by more urgent fantasies.

  I was drawn back to only a half hour earlier, when Rich had held me. I relived the moment when dancing with him had gone from good to too good, when I’d felt him hard against me, when I’d put my arms around his neck and pressed my body against his.