12th of Never wmc-12

by James Patterson

  But we couldn’t.

  Fire engines doused the truck and the streets with CO2 and water, and even though the roads had been closed off, emergency vehicles kept coming.

  I stood by anxiously as a fire engine with a hydraulic lift jacked up the big rig. Another fire truck with a heavy-duty hydraulic winch got a hook into the squashed squad car and pulled it out from under the semi with a heavy steel cable.

  The child in the backseat was a toddler of about three. He screamed with everything he had and pawed the air with bloody hands. More blood streamed down the side of his head. Thank God he had been strapped into a sturdy car seat and that seat belts had been threaded through the back of it.

  His survival was nothing less than a miracle.

  Rescue workers applied the Jaws of Life to the back door of the squad car and three EMTs reached for the baby at the same time.

  I knew Lynn Colomello, the head paramedic.

  “Do you have an ID on this child?” she asked me.

  “I have no idea who he is.”

  “I’ll get him to the ER,” she said, “and I’ll stay with him, but I can’t even guess at his condition without X-rays. Here’s my number. Call me later.”

  Before the ambulance had left with the baby, I was on the driver’s side of the car, which was relatively intact. The door had been removed, the deployed air bag flattened. And I saw that the driver was either unconscious or dead, his head facedown on the steering wheel.

  I put my fingers to his neck and felt a pulse—but I didn’t feel facial hair, whiskers, or stubble. The driver was young, maybe a teenager, wearing the blues of a uniformed officer. He was still alive.

  How was this young man related to Fish, and whose baby was being rushed to the hospital?

  Fish was in the front passenger seat, crushed against the door. The engine block had blown through the fire wall, intruded into the passenger compartment, and was lying on Fish’s lap.

  From what I could see, his legs were mangled. Blood was pooling in the foot well, and I saw broken ribs coming through his shirt. Fish moaned. He was conscious.

  He saw me, took in a wheezing breath, and said, “Is she alive?” He spoke again. “Please, save her,” he said.

  Save her?

  Chapter 100

  I MOVED BLOOD-SOAKED hair away and looked more closely at the driver’s profile—and for a moment, I thought I had lost my mind.

  Just then, Conklin joined me beside the car. He said, “Did the driver make it?” He looked at the shock on my face, then dropped his gaze to the steering wheel. His eyes got huge when he saw her.

  “No, no,” he said. “This can’t be.”

  Conklin jerked around, cupped his hands, and yelled at every uniform within earshot. “Get her out. Get this woman the hell out of this car.”

  A rescue worker brought over a hydraulic ram, and bam—the dashboard was pushed back and Mackie Morales was unpinned. Two men extricated her carefully from the vehicle, lifted her onto a stretcher, and fitted an oxygen mask to her face.

  She’d been beaten up by the collision and looked like she was barely holding on to life.

  I said to Conklin, “The child in the backseat. Could he be hers?”

  “She has a three-year-old. Benjamin. He’s alive?”

  I told Conklin what I knew. My partner looked scared and confused, and he hovered around the stretcher as paramedics strapped Morales down.

  “Mackie. Mackie. It’s Rich.”

  She didn’t move or acknowledge him.

  Conklin spoke urgently to the EMT. “Her name is MacKenzie Morales. She works in Homicide, Southern District. How bad are her injuries? Is she going to make it?”

  “Go with her,” I said to my partner. “I’ll stay with Fish.”

  Conklin didn’t argue.

  He climbed into the ambulance, took a seat beside the stretcher, and was looking at Morales when the doors closed. The sirens came on, and so did the rain, precipitation ringing the lights with intermittent halos of bright, flashing red.

  I watched for a moment as the ambulance headed out. I didn’t know what Conklin and Morales had together, but if anyone could find out why she had become the serial killer’s wheelman, Rich Conklin had the means and the motive to do it.

  Chapter 101

  THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF blinking lights took on another dimension as helicopters landed and took off, medevac units shuttling victims to trauma centers in and out of the city. Media choppers had also arrived and were in contact with the press behind the barricades, sending live reports over the airwaves.

  I leaned in to the empty frame of the crashed squad car’s windshield and focused on a man I despised but who had become very important to me. Randy Fish had an IV in his arm, but he had pushed away the oxygen mask and was having a very hard time breathing. Every time he took in air, I expected him to let it out with a death rattle.

  But he was not going to die without answering my questions. I just wouldn’t accept that.

  “Randy. Can you hear me?”

  “Lin?”

  “Yes. It’s Lindsay. Who is Morales to you?”

  “I love … her,” he said. “I love …”

  I reached into the car, shook his shoulder. Blood was coming from his forehead, his chest, his twisted legs. His body was a sieve.

  “Stay with me, Randy,” I said to him. “Please stay with me. We’re going to get you out of here in just another minute. Hey! Randy.”

  Blood bubbled out of Fish’s mouth. He took another breath. I turned away from the car and toward the chaos around me. A fireman was six feet away from me, talking into his phone. Rain dripped from the brim of his hat.

  “We got a survivor in there,” I shouted, pointing to the car.

  “I know, Sergeant. We had to extract the ones who are going to make it first. But I didn’t forget him. I’ve got the Jaws coming back now.”

  The firefighter came back to the car and leaned his face through the windshield as I had done. He said to Fish, “I’m Deputy Chief Robert Wilson. I’m called Robbie. Take it easy, sir. Everything is going to be okay.”

  I had heard those words before, spoken in just the same way. And now I remembered the man called Robbie. The last time I’d seen him, I’d been naked, lightning blazing around me across the black sky. This man had helped deliver Julie.

  “Don’t I know you, Sergeant?” he said to me. “Sure I do. How’s your little girl?”

  My chest heaved. Tears welled, spilled, unnoticed in the rain. God, I was crying a lot these days. I sucked it up and pushed down the emotion that was on the verge of disabling me.

  I put my hand on Deputy Wilson’s arm and said, “Mr. Fish is an important witness to several unsolved homicides. I have to talk to him.”

  “Ma’am, that engine crushed his thighs and his pelvis. He’s got broken ribs, punctured lungs. He’s lost a lot of blood, and he’s either going to bleed out or the traumatic asphyxia is going to kill him.

  “He’s going in and out of consciousness now, you understand?” Deputy Wilson said. “He’s not leaving that car. If you want to talk to him, you should tell him that he’s got very little time. I’d tell him that right away.”

  Chapter 102

  THE AMBULANCE TOOK off like a rocket. I stood in the street and stared after the taillights and flashers until they became the size of pin lights, trying to understand what made no sense to me at all.

  Why had Mackie Morales, our summer intern, been driving a stolen squad car with her baby in the backseat? Had Fish gotten to her in some way? Had he threatened her or her baby?

  That had to be it.

  Why else would a bright young woman with a big future and a small child commit a felony? But if Fish had threatened her, how did that square with him saying that he loved her?

  Fire bloomed under a car that had been beached on the sidewalk under the marquee. The neon sign reading HOME OF THE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS flickered madly. Hoses came out, snaked around my feet, and that’s what broke t
he spell.

  I walked back to the twisted patrol car, where Randolph Fish was pinned under the weight of the big V-8. The car interior, such as it was, was bright from the surrounding headlights and halogen lamps. I saw that Fish was still taking in air, but his breathing was shallow and labored.

  I angled myself into the driver’s seat, said to the dying man, “Randy, it’s Lindsay. How’re you doing?”

  Fish opened his eyes and slowly turned his head so that he could see me.

  “Mackie?”

  “She’s on the way to the emergency room. My partner is with her. That’s all I know.”

  Blood oozed through his prison jumpsuit. The weight and pressure of the engine block on his lap was likely acting as a lower-torso tourniquet, keeping Fish from bleeding out.

  “Ben?” he asked me.

  “He’s at the hospital.”

  Tears shot out of Fish’s eyes, ran together with the blood on his cheeks, dropped from his chin. Christ. I thought psychopaths didn’t have feelings. I reached over and tugged at the oxygen mask so that it covered his nose and mouth. He took a ragged breath.

  I felt his life leaving him. It didn’t take an MD to see that he was going to die, right here, right now.

  I spoke to him over the noises on the street; men calling to each other, winches and engines grinding and roaring, sirens near and far.

  “I have to ask you some questions.”

  He nodded.

  “Who is Mackie to you?”

  I moved the mask.

  “Ben is. Our. Boy.” He sighed.

  “Yours and Mackie’s?”

  He nodded.

  My thoughts scattered yet again and I did my best to corral them into a cohesive pattern.

  If Fish wasn’t lying or fantasizing, he’d known Morales for at least four years. Mackie Morales was a college girl, then and now. She was dark-haired, slim, definitely his type.

  But instead of killing her, he’d fallen in love with her? Was that right? And they’d had a child together? And then, while he was in a coma, she had gotten an internship at the SFPD?

  If all that was true, Mackie Morales was a plant.

  She’d embedded herself in our squad, the squad that had brought Fish down.

  The idea was within my grasp, but it was slippery and I thought there was more to it that I didn’t get at all.

  I held the mask for Fish so he could get oxygen to his brain. I wanted to know about him and Mackie, how long the escape had been planned, and why, if Fish could love a woman, he had killed so many women so viciously.

  But Stone Phillips wasn’t here and there was no time to do the in-depth Dateline interview. Shouts got louder as a lot of men and machines converged outside the car.

  The rescue team had returned with power tools to extract Randolph Fish from the wreck of the Ford Crown Vicky. It was highly likely that when the engine was lifted, Fish’s blood pressure would plummet and he would die.

  I moved the mask away and said, “Randy? I’ve got something important to tell you. Are you listening to me?”

  Chapter 103

  RANDY FISH HAD all the starch and vigor of a sock puppet. His chin rested on his collarbone. His hands lay limp on the engine block. Could he still hear me?

  “Randy? Are you with me, bud?”

  I called his name several times, and then he exhaled a groan.

  “Randy, listen to me. I’m sorry to have to give you some bad news. Your injuries are severe. Your lower body, your internal organs are crushed. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Your injuries are not survivable.”

  He took in a breath, spoke on the exhale.

  “Need doc …”

  “Doctors want me to tell you that you have very little time.”

  A moment passed and Fish didn’t inhale. Was he still alive? Or had he wandered down the tunnel toward the light?

  “I’m tough,” he said.

  He was making a joke as he faced death, with thoughts of loved ones who might also be dying or dead. I thought of Ben, the little boy who’d survived the horrific crash, and I felt sorry for Randy Fish.

  Which pissed me off.

  Fish was a sexual predator who had maimed, tortured, raped, and murdered his victims, getting off on causing as much pain as he could. He had never confessed and had never expressed remorse. He was filth, a heinous psycho, one of the worst.

  But I needed him to trust me, to tell me where he’d hidden the unrecovered bodies. It wasn’t easy to find the right words.

  “A miracle could happen, Randy. No one is giving up. But to be honest, you probably only have a few minutes left.”

  He closed his eyes, then opened them.

  “You want to get right with people who love you, Randy. You want your son to know that you helped the parents of those dead girls—”

  “Sonoma,” he said thickly.

  “What about Sonoma?”

  “Dow off …”

  Dow off? What was this? Had his mind veered to the stock market?

  Fish’s head dropped forward even farther. He was blacking out, but I squeezed his arm and I think the pain brought him back. He tried hard to give me answers. He spoke in broken sentences punctuated by moans, and somehow, using the GPS on my phone, asking questions that required one-word answers, I was able to get Fish to string together enough words to give me a picture and a map.

  There was an abandoned typewriter factory, Dow Office Machines, in Sonoma. Fish had dumped the girls in the woods behind the machine shop.

  I named the murdered girls whose bodies had not been found and he nodded at each one, but when I said “Sandra Brody,” he shook his head no and then said, “Not mine.”

  A week ago, about eight of us had bushwhacked through the woods with cadaver dogs, dug up old deer antlers, and had our hopes raised, then shattered, so that Fish could smell fresh air.

  He’d been messing with us then.

  Was he screwing with me now?

  “Don’t lie to me. That girl is still missing. She’s just your type. You told us that you had killed her. I need to find her body, Randy. Give her back to us. I’m asking you, please.”

  Deputy Chief Robbie Wilson appeared in the frame of the windshield. He said, “We’re getting you out, Mr. Fish. This could hurt, so brace yourself.”

  Wilson gave me a look that seemed to say, “Sergeant, you brace yourself.”

  The hydraulic cutters chomped through the passenger-door hinges. Heavily gloved hands wrenched the door away. A hook came in from above and Wilson positioned it under the engine block.

  I heard Ron Parker calling, “Wait. Wait.”

  He ran as if he were in a steeplechase, clearing hurdles of twisted metal as he galloped toward the car. The hydraulic winch whined. Metal clanked as the hook got purchase and five hundred pounds of steel began to rise.

  Fish’s face stretched in pain. He looked at me, said, “Love you. Mackie.”

  And then he died.

  Parker was right outside the wreckage when it happened. He was panting, leaning forward, his hands on his knees.

  “I had more questions for him.”

  “Sorry,” I told him. “He took the express train to hell.”

  “Shit. I didn’t get to wish him a good trip,” he said.

  I put my fingers on Fish’s eyelids and closed them. The last person he’d seen in this life was me. I didn’t want him to look at me anymore.

  I was done with Randolph Fish. Done.

  Chapter 104

  RICH CONKLIN BRACED himself inside the rear of the ambulance as it sped over the slick streets toward Metropolitan Hospital. He kept his eyes on Mackie Morales, who looked like she’d been catapulted into a brick wall.

  Air bags deploy at about a hundred miles an hour, and Mackie had gotten the full blunt force of the bag. She had also been whipsawed during and after the collision as the car was dragged along 3rd Street.

  She hadn’t regained consciousness, even though they were traveling in a stream of screa
ming sirens, the ambulance jerking and swerving around traffic.

  Right now, she was immobilized by a C-Spine collar and strapped to a long board to protect her head, neck, and spine. She could have brain damage, internal bleeding, broken bones—all of it was possible.

  Conklin reached over and squeezed her hand, got no response. He wanted to hold her, tell her she was going to be okay, and somehow make that be true.

  But even as he worried about Mackie, he was completely mystified as to why she had been driving the killer’s getaway car. Had she fired the flashbang into the storage unit? Was she the cop who had bundled Fish into the passenger seat? Why would she do that?

  What didn’t he know about Morales?

  The ambulance took a hard right on Valencia, a sharp left on 26th Street, then blew into Metro’s ambulance bay. The EMTs had the back doors open the instant the vehicle braked to a stop. Rich jumped down, then ran with the EMTs as they transported Mackie’s gurney into the emergency room.

  The ER was noisy and full. Victims of the multicar crash were being treated in curtained cubicles, and those who weren’t in danger of dying had been parked in wheelchairs and on gurneys wherever space permitted.

  Mackie, on the board, was lifted onto an exam table in a trauma room. Medical personnel crowded in, began assessing the damage.

  The attending physician was about forty, wiry, efficient. Her name was Emily Bruno and she and Conklin had met many times in circumstances like this one.

  Bruno said to Conklin, “What’s the patient’s name? What happened to her? Do you know anything about her medical history?”

  Conklin said, “This is MacKenzie Morales, twenty-six, single mother, and I don’t know her medical history. She drove the car into that semi outside the ballpark. Two fatalities so far. I’ve got to talk to her.”

  Dr. Bruno threw a loud, exasperated sigh.

  “Okay, you know the drill, Conklin. Stand back. Turn off your phone. Don’t get in anyone’s way.”

  Conklin said, “Understood.”