Women's Murder Club [10] 10th Anniversary

by James Patterson

  Still. This was not my job.

  “Please, Sergeant. Do something,” Candace Martin said, as I signaled to the guard to open the door. “I didn’t kill my husband. That girl is taking care of my kids while I’m in a cage and on trial for my life.”

  Chapter 26

  THE NEXT MORNING, Conklin and I were in the Richardsons’ posh wood-and-amber-toned luxury suite at the Mark Hopkins, simply one of the most elegant, beautiful hotels in San Francisco, with a view of the world from the top of Nob Hill.

  Conklin questioned Avis Richardson as her devastated, borderline-hysterical parents hovered in the background.

  Conklin was not only kind to Avis, he was sincere, and his first-class interview should have yielded more from her than “I don’t remember anything.”

  More than three days after she was admitted to the hospital, she still looked bombed-out and withdrawn. Her body language told me that she wasn’t really listening to Conklin, that her mind was on the far side of the moon.

  Paul Richardson paused in his pacing around the Oriental carpet to say, “Avis, try, for God’s sake. Give Inspector Conklin something to work with. This is life and death. Do you understand me? Do you?”

  Room service rang the doorbell.

  Sonja Richardson brought her daughter a mug of hot chocolate, then pulled me aside to say, “Avis is not herself. Normally, she’s quick. She’s funny. I tell you, she’s having a nervous breakdown. Oh my God, I can’t believe we listened to her. She begged us to let her stay here when Paul was transferred. She had friends, and the staff at Brighton… We felt she was safe at that school.”

  I went back to the sitting room and sat a few feet from Avis. Her eyes were vacant. She’d been physically hurt. Her baby was gone. And I was guessing that she blamed herself.

  Still, why didn’t Avis ask about her son? She should have had a lot of questions: What were we doing to find him? Was there any chance he was alive? But she didn’t ask a thing.

  Did she know that he was dead?

  Had she buried him herself?

  Was the baby’s father involved in this horror story?

  Conklin took a new tack. He said, “Avis, were you threatened? Is that it? Did someone tell you that if you spoke to the police they’d hurt the baby?”

  I could almost see the lightbulb go on over her head. Avis turned her eyes up and to the right and said, “Yeah. The Frenchman said he’d kill my baby if I talked to the police.”

  My bull-crap alarm went off, a three-alarm clamor.

  Avis had just lied.

  I stood up from the chubby armchair, cast my five-foot-ten shadow across the girl on the couch, and said, “I have to talk to Avis alone.”

  There was silence for a full three seconds and then Conklin said, “Mr. and Mrs. Richardson, let’s go into the other room. I need to get some contact information and so forth.”

  The girl looked up at me as the room cleared, and I saw fear in her eyes. She was afraid of me. Maybe she figured that Conklin was the good cop and I was the other one.

  She got that right.

  I said, “It’s time, Avis. I want to find your baby and I’m staying in your face, here or at the police station, until you tell me the truth. Do you understand?”

  “I’m the victim,” she whined. “I was kidnapped. You can’t hold me responsible.”

  “I can damn well hold you responsible. I can hold you as a material witness for forty-eight hours. During that time, I won’t be bringing you hot cocoa. I will make you as miserable as possible, and when I get tired, I’ll send in a fresh team of bullies.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Right now, cops are getting a warrant for your phone records,” I said, picking up the armchair and setting it down hard, closer to the couch. “We’re going to know the names of everyone you’ve spoken to in the past year. We will find something.”

  No comment.

  Her silence was infuriating.

  “Dammit, little girl. Your baby is missing. Maybe he’s dead. You’re his mother. You’re all he has. And you’re all I have. The bullshit stops now. Do you read me?”

  Avis Richardson shot a furtive look at the door. “They’ll kill me,” she said.

  I crossed the floor, locked the door to the adjoining room, threw the bolt, and sat back down. My heart was pumping like it was about to explode.

  Tears gathered in Avis Richardson’s eyes. Then she started to talk.

  Chapter 27

  “I DIDN’T WANT my parents to know that I was… pregnant,” Avis Richardson said.

  She sat scrunched against the back of the couch, her knees tucked up to her chin, her black-painted toenails peeking out from under a blanket. “I saw an ad on Prattslist a couple of months back,” she said.

  Prattslist. It was a message board for virtual tag sales and personal ads, and it also functioned as the yellow pages for prostitutes and sex offenders and predators of all types and stripes prowling for victims.

  “Tell me about the ad,” I said.

  “It said something like ‘Pregnant? We’ll help you from birth to… uh, placement with your baby’s new parents.’ ” She gave me a glancing look. “So I called the number.”

  I shook my head, sick that this girl who could have had the best medical care in the world had hidden her pregnancy from people who cared about her. Then she’d turned her life over to an anonymous phone number on Pervs “R” Us. I said, “Go on.”

  Avis said that her call had been answered by the man with a French accent who told her to call again when she was in labor. He’d said there would be papers to sign.

  “He said that he was a doctor and that the delivery would be as safe as if I were in a hospital. He told me that the adopting parents would be completely vetted. And he said I’d be reimbursed ten thousand dollars for prenatal expenses.”

  Holy crap. Avis Richardson had sold her baby.

  I was furious, frustrated, and still hopeful that the child was alive, but I kept emotion out of my voice.

  I said, “You believed all this, Avis? You weren’t suspicious at all?”

  “I was grateful.”

  I didn’t know whether to spit or go blind.

  Avis Richardson had known what had happened to her baby from the start. She had lied to the SFPD, and we’d pressed half of our resources into a phony dragnet that had wasted time and manpower and could never have turned up her baby.

  Well, at least the time for lying was over.

  If Avis didn’t want to sleep in general holding tonight, she was going to tell me the truth about everything she knew.

  Chapter 28

  AVIS RICHARDSON PICKED at her nail polish as she told me that two months after her first call to “the Frenchman” she’d found on Prattslist, she started having contractions. She called the number again and arranged to be picked up a couple of blocks from the school.

  “You’ve got the number?”

  “No one answers it anymore.”

  And then she returned to her story.

  “I was nervous that someone might see me standing on the street like that,” she said. “When the car pulled up, I saw that it was a regular four-door type. Dark color. Clean. I ducked into the backseat really quick.”

  Rental car, I thought.

  Avis said there were two men in the front seat of the car, but their faces were in shadow and after she was inside, all she saw were the backs of their heads. She was told to lie down on the floor in back and cover herself with a blanket.

  “How long was the drive?” I asked. “Did you hear anything that could help us figure out where you were taken?”

  “I don’t know how long I was in the car. An hour? They turned on the radio,” Avis told me. “Lite music station. Pretty soon after that, I felt a needle stab my hip, right through the blanket. Next thing I knew, I was being hustled out of the car and helped up a walk toward a house. Sergeant Boxer, I was in agony.”

  “What can you remember about the house? Color? Style? Was it on a r
esidential block?”

  “I don’t know. I was hanging on to the men’s arms, looking at my feet…. I think I heard the door slam behind me, but I was knocked out again, and when I woke up, I was in a bed having contractions every couple of minutes,” she said.

  I sighed. Put my anger down. This was such a bleeping awful story. Maybe the only way the kid could deal with what had happened to her was to distance herself as she had done.

  “Next time I woke up, there was a light shining in my face. It was clipped to a door. One of those aluminum bowl-shaped lights?”

  I nodded and noted the non-clue detail.

  “I couldn’t see anyone because of the light in my eyes, and I was numb,” she said. “They gave me some water out of a red bottle with a sippy straw.

  “I heard the baby cry. I asked to see it,” she went on, her voice and expression as flat as a photograph. “I was told, no, it wouldn’t do me any good. That he was a healthy baby boy. And then I woke up on the street,” she told me.

  “It was dark,” Avis said. “I didn’t know where I was. Then I saw a street sign that said Lake Merced. My clothes were bloody and disgusting. I found a rain poncho blown into some bushes, so I took off my clothes and put it on.”

  The green plastic poncho, the only hard evidence we had, hadn’t even been handled by the men who’d taken her. So much for the thirty-six hours of lab time spent processing traces off it.

  “They could have killed me,” she said.

  I nodded. “It’s hard to say you were lucky, but you were.”

  The girl’s sharpest memories were utterly useless. Fake French accent. Dark sedan. Aluminum lamp. Red bottle with a sippy straw. Green plastic poncho that had never had contact with the perps. Everything led to nothing.

  I understood why Avis had blocked more traumatic memories.

  But her continued lack of interest in the baby stunned me. It didn’t matter that she didn’t care. I cared.

  I would find that baby boy or die trying.

  “Do you know where your baby is?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been honest with me?”

  “Yes. I swear,” Avis said.

  My bullshit meter went on the blink. I couldn’t tell if she was lying or not. But there was another entire line of inquiry we hadn’t yet pursued.

  “Who is the baby’s father?” I asked.

  Chapter 29

  BRIGHTON ACADEMY is in the Presidio Heights area, tucked away, nearly hidden behind trees and a neighborhood of sleepy, Victorian-lined streets. It was a surprise to turn a corner and see four handsome stone buildings set in a square around a compact campus of clipped lawns punctuated with carved boxwood cones and hedges.

  High-school kids played field hockey and tennis, and others were grouped on benches or lying under trees in the quad.

  The whole place smelled green. Greenback green.

  Like Hogwarts for the really, truly rich.

  Conklin and I checked in at the Administration Office, where we met with Dean Hanover, a big man wearing a pink shirt and polka-dot bow tie under his blue blazer.

  We told him about our investigation into the possible kidnapping of Avis Richardson and the disappearance of her child. Hanover was sweating on a cool day, and I knew why. The dean had a big problem.

  “This goes beyond nightmare,” Hanover said to me. “That poor kid. And, of course, her parents are going to sue us to the walls.”

  I got the dean’s in loco parentis permission to interview Avis’s boyfriend, E. Lawrence Foster, as well as my short list of Avis’s six best friends.

  “Tell me about these kids,” I said.

  “Foster is an average kid, friendly. Parents own a magazine in New York. He’s got a lot of friends, but I confess I don’t know much about his relationship with Avis.”

  Hanover gave us one-paragraph bios on the other kids: all children of wealthy parents who lived in other states or other countries. Avis’s roommate, Kristin Beale, was no exception. Her parents were in the military, stationed overseas.

  We left the sweaty dean, headed out through the stone-arch entrance to the Administration Office, and took one of the shrub-lined paths toward the main hall.

  “You want to be the good cop for a change?” Rich asked me.

  “I would if I could,” I told him.

  Chapter 30

  WE FOUND LARRY FOSTER in the high-tech chemistry lab in the southernmost wing of the school. He was as the dean had described him: a friendly, good-looking tenth-grader from the East Coast. He was neatly dressed in the school uniform—blazer, necktie, gray pants, and state-of-the-art cross-trainers.

  We invited Larry into an empty classroom and seated ourselves at desks. I sent up a prayer that this teenage boy would know something that would lead us to his son.

  “You think I’m the father? I’m not,” Larry Foster said. His sleepy gray eyes opened wide. His lower lip quivered. “Avis and I are friends. That’s all.”

  “Friends, huh,” said Conklin. “Avis said you were closer than that. Why would she lie?”

  “I don’t know why she would lie. We never hooked up, not ever,” the kid said. “I never had those kinds of feelings about Avis, I swear.”

  “You knew she was pregnant?” I said.

  “Yeah, like since last week, and I didn’t tell anyone. Avis said she was having the baby for an infertile couple. I told her she was full of it, and she said, ‘Yeah, full of baby.’ And then I thought, Hey, she hasn’t called me back the past couple of days. Is she okay?”

  “We have reason to believe that Avis got pregnant the regular way,” Conklin said. “If that is true, who’s your first guess for the father of her baby?”

  “No idea. I didn’t even know she was with anyone,” the kid said.

  Next up was Brandon Tucker, a kid with a future as a professional soccer player. He was taller than me and he had a disarmingly wicked smile. I’d seen a lot of pictures of this kid on Avis’s Facebook page.

  Was he baby Richardson’s father?

  After the preliminary introductions, I asked Tucker what he knew about Avis—her pregnancy, her baby, and her whereabouts over the past three days.

  “Ma’am, I don’t know anything about a baby,” said Tucker. “I only heard that she was pregnant, like, a week ago. And I was, like, totally shocked. Avis is a very quiet girl. And heavy. I just thought she was bulking up.”

  “So, what was she to you?” I asked. “She has you on her Facebook friends list.”

  “Like that means anything. She asked to friend me. I said okay. She used to help me with my French,” he laughed. “She tutored me for exams once in a while. I paid her by the hour. For tutoring,” he said.

  “You ever hook up with Avis?” Conklin asked.

  The kid looked offended.

  “Me? Hell, no. Not my type, dude. Not even if I was drunk—she just wasn’t my type.”

  “Who was her type?” I asked.

  “Larry Foster, right?”

  We used the same classroom to talk to three other teens, and by this time, they all knew why we were there. Not one of those kids admitted to knowing that Avis was pregnant until a week ago, and no one knew the identity of the father of her child.

  We were told repeatedly that she was a quiet girl, intelligent, not popular, not an outcast, either. She got good grades and kept to herself.

  Even the girls we interviewed, when implored to help us find the baby, said they didn’t have an idea in the world.

  “You believe this?” Conklin said to me when the last kid had left the room. “A school like this. Avis was nine months pregnant, and no one knew nothin’.”

  “Reminds me of something I once heard,” I said to my partner. “How do you know if a teenager is lying?”

  “How?” Conklin asked.

  “Their lips are moving.”

  Chapter 31

  AVIS AND KRISTIN BEALE had been bunking in the same room for more than a year. Logically, of all the people who knew Avi
s, her roommate, given their daily contact, should have had the most intimate knowledge. I figured she might very well know what Avis had been thinking, doing, and planning for herself and her baby.

  Kristin Beale was our best hope—and maybe our last.

  Conklin knocked on the paneled door in a corridor lined with them. A voice called out, “Come innnnn.”

  We did—and the smell of marijuana came out to greet us.

  The dorm room was just big enough for two beds, two closets, and two desks. It looked out over the Presidio, and I could see a sliver of the bay over the tops of trees.

  In front of the view was Kristin Beale.

  She was lying on her back in the window seat, her long legs bent, her bare feet pressed against the wall. She was pretty, with a wild mop of dark brown hair, and had on footless leggings and a man’s dress shirt. White wires were plugged into her ears.

  The girl startled when she saw us, straightened her legs and sat up, and pulled out her earbuds. She was thin—too thin.

  She said, “Who are you?”

  As I did the introductions and told her why we had come, I looked the girl over. Even from fifteen feet away, I could see that Kristin Beale’s pupils were dilated.

  I also took in the state of the room.

  Kristin’s side had a post-tornado, morning-after look. The floor around her unmade bed was strewn with clothes, books, and candy wrappers.

  The other side, Avis’s side, was as tidy as a banker’s desk. A pillow on the bed was embroidered with the letter A, and there was a picture of the Richardson family on her dresser.

  Avis’s closet was open. I quickly went through her clothes and saw that she had them in two sizes. Size eight and extra large.

  Her computer was turned off on her desk, untouchable without a warrant.

  “Is Avis okay?” Kristin asked, in a tone that told me she didn’t care at all.

  “She’s with her parents,” I said. “She’s doing okay, but she’s been through an ordeal. Kristin, has Avis called you or written to you? We’re trying to find her baby.”