“That’s just great. I’d like the names and phone numbers of everyone who can vouch for your whereabouts.”
“Am I suspected of something, Sergeant?”
“Let’s just say we think of you as a ‘person of interest.’ ”
Klassen leered at me as though I’d paid him a compliment. “You have lovely skin. You don’t spend a penny on makeup, do you?”
“Mr. Klassen, don’t screw around with me. Names and phone numbers, please.”
“No problem. I’ll print out a list.”
“Good. Have you seen this child?” I asked, showing him the class photo of Madison Tyler that I’d kept in my jacket pocket for the last three days.
I hated to let Klassen pass his slimeball eyes over Madison’s lovely face.
“That’s the newspaper guy’s kid, right? I’ve seen her on the news. Look,” Klassen said, smiling, nearly blinding me with his sparkling choppers, “I can make this very easy for all of us, all right? Come with me.”
Chapter 53
THE ELEVATOR IN KLASSEN’S PANTRY was a knotty-pine box about the size of a double-wide coffin. Conklin, Klassen, and I stepped inside, and I lifted my eyes to where the number board should have been, seeing only the numbers “one” and “four” — no stops in between.
The car opened on the top floor, a bright forty-by-fifty-foot space with furniture, lights, rolled-up carpets, and backdrops stacked against the walls. A high-tech computer station took up a back corner.
It was a wide-open space, but I scanned it anyway for signs of a child.
“It’s all done digitally these days,” Klassen was saying. He straddled a stool in front of a flat-screen monitor. “You shoot it, download it, and edit it all in one room.”
He threw a switch, rolled his mouse, and clicked an icon labeled Moonlight Mambo.
“This is the rough cut I shot on Saturday,” Klassen told us. “It’s my time-dated alibi — not that I need one. I started shooting at seven, and we worked the whole day.”
Latin music came through the computer’s speakers, then images jumped onto the screen. A young dark-haired woman wearing something black and scanty lit candles in one of the now-disassembled bedroom sets.
The camera panned the room, stopping at the bed — where Klassen fondled himself and uttered cornball come-ons as the woman did a seductive striptease.
“Ah, jeez,” I muttered.
Conklin stepped between me and the computer monitor.
“I’ll take a copy of that,” he said.
“My pleasure.” Klassen slipped a CD out of the drawer, put it in a red plastic case, and handed it to Conklin.
“You have any pictures or films of children on this computer?”
“Hell, no. I’m not into kiddie porn,” Klassen huffed. “Besides being in violation of my deal, it’s not my thing.”
“Yeah, that’s terrific,” Conklin said smoothly. “So now I’d like to take a quick search through your computer files while the sergeant walks through your house.”
“Looks like a neat place, Mr. Klassen,” I said. “I love what you’ve done with it.”
“What if I say it’s not okay?”
“We’ll take you in for questioning while we get a warrant,” Conklin told him. “Then we’ll impound your computer and search your house with dogs.”
“The stairs are that way.”
I left Conklin and Klassen at the computer console and strolled downstairs, poking my head into every room, opening doors, checking closets, looking and listening, hoping with all my heart to find a little girl.
Mr. Wu was changing the sheets in a second-floor bedroom when I showed him my badge and the picture of Madison Tyler.
“Have you seen this little girl?” I asked him.
He shook his head vigorously — no. “No children here. Mr. Klassen not like children. No children here!”
Ten minutes later, I was taking deep breaths of cold, clean air on the front steps when Conklin joined me, closing the heavy oaken door behind him.
“Well, that was fun,” I said.
“His alibi is going to check out,” said Conklin, folding a list of names and numbers into his notebook.
“Yeah, I know it will. Rich, you think that guy is straight?”
“I think he’ll twitch for anything that moves.”
Klassen was in his driveway when Conklin and I got into our squad car. He lifted a hand, gave us another cheese-eating smile, said, “Buh-bye.”
He was whistling to himself, buffing the silver haunch of his Jaguar, when our humble Ford shot away from the curb.
Chapter 54
CONKLIN AND I SAT ACROSS from each other in the squad room. Beside my phone was a pile of unreturned messages from various tipsters who’d reported seeing Madison Tyler everywhere — from Ghirardelli Square to Osaka, Japan.
Dr. Germaniuk’s autopsy report of Paola Ricci was open in front of me. Bottom line — cause of death: gunshot to the head. Manner of death: homicide.
Dr. G. had stuck a Post-it note to his report. I read it out loud to my partner.
Sergeant Boxer,
Clothing went to crime lab. I did a sexual-assault kit, just to say I’ve been there, but don’t count on it coming back with anything positive due to total submersion, etc. Bullet was through and through. No projectile recovered.
Regards, H. G.
“Dead girl. Dead end,” Conklin said, running his hands through his hair. “The kidnappers have no problem with murder. And that’s all we know.”
“So what are we missing? We have a half-baked sighting from a witness who gave us nondescriptions of the perps and the car. We have no plate number, no physical evidence from the scene — no cigarette butts, no chewing gum, no shell casings, no tread marks. And no freaking ransom note.”
Conklin leaned back in his chair, said to the ceiling, “The perps acted like muscle, not like sexual predators. Shooting Paola within a minute of capturing her? What’s that?”
“It’s like the shooter was itchy. High on crack. Like the job was subbed out to gangbangers. Or Paola was excess baggage, so they offed her. Or she put up a fight and someone panicked,” I said. “But you know, Richie, you’re right. Totally right.”
His chair creaked as he returned it to an upright position.
“We have to turn this investigation on its head. Work on solving Paola Ricci,” I said, planting my hand palm down on the autopsy report. “Even dead, she could lead us to Madison.”
Conklin was putting in a call to the Italian Consulate when Brenda swiveled her chair toward me. She covered the mouthpiece of her phone with her hand.
“Lindsay, you’ve got a caller on line four, won’t identify himself. Sounds . . . scary. I asked for a trace.”
I nodded, my heartbeat ticking up a notch. I stabbed the button on the phone console.
“This is Sergeant Boxer.”
“I’m only going to say this once,” said the digitally altered voice that sounded like a frog talking through Bubble Wrap. I signaled to Conklin to pick up on my line.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Never mind,” said the voice. “Madison Tyler is fine.”
“How do you know?”
“Say something, Maddy.”
Another voice came over the line, breathy, young, broken. “Mommy? Mommy?”
“Madison?” I said into the phone.
The frog voice was back.
“Tell her parents they made a big mistake calling the police. Call off the dogs,” said the caller, “or we’ll hurt Madison. Permanently. If you back off, she’ll stay alive and well, but either way, the Tylers will never see their daughter again.”
And then the phone went dead.
“Hello? Hello?”
I jiggled the hook until I got a dial tone, then I slammed the phone down.
“Brenda, get the Call Center.”
“What was that? ‘They made a big mistake calling the police?” Conklin shouted. “Lindsay, did that little girl so
und like Madison?”
“Jesus Christ, I couldn’t tell. I don’t know.”
“What the hell?” Conklin said, hurling a phone book against the wall.
I felt dizzy, physically sick.
Was Madison really fine?
What did it mean that her parents shouldn’t have called the police? Had there been a ransom demand or a phone call that we didn’t know about?
Everyone in the squad room was looking at me, and Jacobi was standing behind me, literally breathing down my neck, when the radio room called back with the result of the phone trace.
The caller had used a no-name cell phone, and the location couldn’t be traced.
“The voice was altered,” I told Jacobi. “I’ll send the tape to the lab.”
“Before you do that, get the parents to listen to it. Maybe we can get a positive ID on the child’s voice.”
“Could still be a sicko getting his rocks off,” Conklin said as Jacobi walked away.
“I hope that’s what it is. Because we’re not ‘calling off the dogs.’ Not even close.”
I couldn’t say what I was thinking.
That we’d just heard Madison Tyler’s last words.
Chapter 55
BRENDA FREGOSI HAD BEEN the homicide squad assistant for some years and, at only twenty-five years old, was a natural mother hen.
She was clucking sympathetically as I spoke to Henry Tyler on the phone, and when I hung up, she handed me a message slip.
I read her spiky handwriting: “Claire wants you to come to the hospital at six this evening.”
It was almost six now.
“How did she sound?” I asked.
“Fine, I think.”
“Is this all she said?”
“This is what she said exactly: ‘Brenda, please tell Lindsay to come to the hospital at six. Thanks a lot.’ ”
I’d just seen Claire yesterday. What was wrong?
I drove toward San Francisco General, my mind swirling with terrible, sinking thoughts. Claire once told me this thing about brain chemistry, the nub of it being that when you’re feeling good, you can’t ever imagine feeling bad again. And when you’re feeling bad, it’s impossible to imagine a time when you won’t be circling the drain.
As I sucked on an Altoids, a little girl’s voice was crying, “Mommy,” in my head, and it was mixed up with the bad knee-jerk reaction I had to hospitals ever since my mother died in one almost fifteen years ago.
I parked in the hospital lot on Pine, thinking about how good it had been having Joe to talk to when I felt this low, frustrated from three days of staggering blindly into dead ends.
My thoughts turned back to Claire as I stepped into the hospital elevator. I stared at my fried reflection in the stainless steel doors. I fluffed my bangs uselessly as the car climbed upward, then when the doors slid open, I stepped out into the antiseptic stink and cold white light of the post-op unit.
I wasn’t the first to arrive at Claire’s room. Yuki and Cindy had already moved chairs up to her bed, and Claire was sitting up, wearing a flowered nightgown and a Mona Lisa smile on her face.
The Women’s Murder Club was assembled — but why?
“Hey, everyone,” I said, walking around the bed, kissing cheeks. “You look gorgeous,” I said to Claire, my relief that this wasn’t a life-support emergency bringing me almost to the point of giddiness. “What’s the occasion?”
“She wouldn’t tell until you got here,” Yuki said.
“Okay, okay!” Claire said. “I do have an announcement to make.”
“You’re pregnant,” said Cindy.
Claire burst out laughing, and we all looked at Cindy.
“You’re crazy, girl reporter,” I said. A baby was the last thing Claire needed at age forty-three, with two near-grown-up sons.
“Give us a clue,” Yuki blurted out. “Give us a category.”
“You guys! Stomping on my surprise with your cleats on,” said Claire, still laughing.
Cindy, Yuki, and I swiveled our heads toward her.
“I had some blood work done,” said Claire. “And Miss Cindy, as usual, is right.”
“Ha!” Cindy cried out.
Claire said, “If I hadn’t been in this hospital, I probably wouldn’t have even known I was pregnant until I started having contractions.”
We were all yelling now. “What did you say?” “You’re not putting us on?” “How far along are you?”
“The sonogram shows that my little one is fine,” said Claire, serene as a Buddha. “My wonder child!”
Chapter 56
I HAD TO PULL MYSELF AWAY from the celebration, overdue as I was for Tracchio’s meeting back at the Hall. As I entered his office, the chief was offering leather-upholstered armchairs to the Tylers, while Jacobi, Conklin, and Macklin dragged up side chairs, circling the wagons around the chief’s large desk.
The Tylers looked as if they’d been sleeping standing up for the last eighty-four hours. Their faces were gray, their shoulders slumped. I knew they were painfully suspended between hope and despair as they waited to hear the audiotape.
A tape recorder was set up on Tracchio’s desk. I leaned over and pressed the play button, and a terrifying, evil voice alternating with mine filled the room.
A little girl’s voice cried out, “Mommy? Mommy?”
I pressed the recorder’s stop key. Elizabeth Tyler reached out toward the tape recorder, then turned, grabbed her husband’s arm, buried her face into his coat, and sobbed.
“Is that Madison’s voice?” Tracchio asked.
Both parents nodded — yes.
Jacobi said, “The rest of this tape is going to be even more difficult for you to hear. But we’re feeling optimistic. When this call came in, your daughter was alive.”
I pressed the play button again, watched the Tylers’ faces as they heard the kidnapper say that Madison was fine but that she would never be seen again.
“Mr. and Mrs. Tyler, do you have any idea why the kidnapper said you ‘made a big mistake calling the police’?” I asked.
“No idea at all,” Henry Tyler snapped. “Why would they feel threatened? You’ve turned up nothing. You don’t even have a suspect. Where is the FBI? Why aren’t they trying to find Madison?”
Macklin said, “We are working with the FBI. We’re using their sources and their databases, but the FBI won’t actively work this case unless we have some reason to believe that Madison was taken out of state.”
“So tell them that she was!”
Jacobi said, “Mr. Tyler, what we’re asking is, did you receive a communication from the kidnapper telling you not to call the police? Anything like that happen?”
“Nothing,” said Elizabeth Tyler. “Henry? Did you hear from them at the office?”
“Not a word. I swear.”
I was thinking about Paola Ricci as I looked at the Tylers. I said, “You told us that Paola Ricci was highly recommended. Who recommended her?”
Elizabeth Tyler leaned forward. “Paola came to us directly through her service.”
“What kind of service is that?” Macklin asked, stress showing in the grinding of his jaw.
“It’s an employment agency,” said Elizabeth Tyler. “They screen, sponsor, and train well-bred girls from overseas. They get their work papers and find them jobs. Paola had tremendous references from the agency and from back home in Italy. She was a very proper young woman. We loved her.”
“The service gets their fees from the employers?” Jacobi asked.
“Yes. I think we paid them eighteen thousand dollars.”
The mentioning of money sent a prickling sensation along the tops of my arms and a swooping feeling in my stomach.
“What’s the name of this service?” I said.
“Westbury. No, the Westwood Registry,” said Henry Tyler. “You’ll speak to them?”
“Yes, and please don’t say anything about this call to anyone,” Jacobi cautioned the Tylers. “Just go home. Stay nea
r your phone. And leave the Westwood Registry to us.”
“You’ll be in touch with them?” asked Henry Tyler again.
“We’ll be all over them.”
Chapter 57
CINDY WAS ON THE PHONE with Yuki, loading the dishwasher as she talked.
“He’s just too funny,” Cindy said about Whit Ewing, the good-looking reporter from the Chicago Tribune she’d met about a month ago at the Municipal Hospital trial.
“The guy with the glasses, right? The one who tore out of the courtroom by way of the emergency exit? Set off the alarm?” Yuki chuckled, remembering.
“Yeah. See . . . and he can goof on himself. Whit says he’s Clark Kent’s nerdy younger brother.” Cindy laughed. “He’s been threatening to fly into town and take me out to dinner. He’s even angling to be assigned to the Brinkley trial.”
“Oh, so wait a minute,” Yuki said. “You’re not thinking of doing what Lindsay did. I mean, Whit lives in Chicago. Why start up an LDR when they’re so freaking doomed?”
“I’m thinking . . . it’s been a while since I’ve had any, uh, fun.”
“Been a while for me, too.” Yuki sighed. “I not only don’t remember when, I don’t remember with whom!”
Cindy cackled, then Yuki put her on hold so she could take an incoming call. When Yuki came back on the line, she said, “Hey, girl reporter, Red Dog wants me. Gotta scoot.”
“Go, go,” Cindy said. “See you in court.”
Cindy hung up and turned on the dishwasher, then emptied the trash can. She tied a knot in the bag, went out into the hallway, and hit the elevator call button, and when the car clanked to a stop, she checked to make sure it was empty before she got in.
She thought again about Whit Ewing, and about Lindsay and Joe, and about how long-distance relationships were, by definition, roller-coaster rides.
Fun for a while, until they made you sick.
And now here was another reason to have a boyfriend who stayed in town — the sheer creepiness of living in this building alone. She hit B for “basement,” and the newly paneled old elevator rocked as it descended. A minute later, Cindy stepped out into the dank bowels of the building.
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