Women's Murder Club [10] 10th Anniversary

by James Patterson

  The dispatcher was in a glass booth, her cage separated from the street by a grill in the plate glass.

  I showed her my badge and told her my name, and she said her name was Marilyn Burns. She was forty, white, and petite and dressed in a blue-checked shirt hanging out over her jeans. She wore a wedding band and had a smoker’s gravelly voice.

  “I relieved Al right around six,” Burns told us through the grill. “He was in a hurry. Want me to call him? It’s not a problem.”

  “Have you seen this woman today?” Conklin asked, pulling out a photo of Cindy from his wallet.

  “No, I’ve never seen her.”

  “Then, yes, call Al,” I told Burns.

  Conklin and I heard her say, “Call me when you get this, Al. Police are looking for someone who might’ve come in on your shift. Girl with curly blond hair.”

  The dispatcher put down the phone and said, “If you give me your number—”

  “Okay if we take a look around?” Conklin said.

  He didn’t phrase it as a question, and Burns didn’t take it as a request. She buzzed us into the grungy ground floor of Quick Express and said, “I’ll take you on the tour.”

  Burns whistled up a cabbie to take over for her, and then the three of us walked between rows of parked cabs and past the ramp until we reached the stairs along the northern side of the building.

  I asked Burns questions and answered a few of hers as Conklin flashed his light into cab interiors. She explained to me how the cab traffic worked inside the garage.

  “Incoming cabs use their magnetic key card, enter the ramp on Turk,” she said. “Drivers leave their vehicles on one of the three floors, then walk up the stairs, hand me their logs and keys, and cash out.

  “When they start a shift,” Burns went on, “it’s the other way around. They pick up their log sheets on main, go down the stairs, take a cab down the ramp to Turk, and use their card to get out. We have a freight elevator goes down to Turk, but it’s not working.”

  “Can cabs come in and leave without you seeing them?”

  “We’ve got security cameras,” she said. “They’re not NASA-grade, but they work.”

  Taxis were parked on the perimeter and between the pillars on all three floors wrapping around the ramp in the center. We checked out minivan cabs and showed Cindy’s picture to a half dozen cabbies we met as we walked.

  No one admitted to having seen Cindy.

  I turned over various possibilities in my mind.

  Had Cindy met someone here who had a story for her? Was she interviewing that someone in a coffee shop with her phone turned off? Or was she drugged in the backseat of a taxi, one of the thousands cruising the streets of San Francisco?

  I was accustomed to Cindy getting between rocks and hard places and equally used to the idea that she could chop her way out. But a bad feeling was coming over me.

  Cindy had been missing for more than three hours.

  We kept saying, “If Cindy’s phone was turned off…”

  But Cindy never turned off her phone. The last contact her phone GPS chip made was within two hundred and fifty meters of this building.

  So where was she?

  And if she wasn’t here, and her phone wasn’t turned off, where was she?

  Where the hell had she gone?

  Chapter 103

  DISPATCHER MARILYN BURNS opened the stairwell door onto the lowest subterranean level, and Conklin and I were right behind her.

  The windowless space was dark and dank and twenty-five feet underground. The fluorescent lighting was so dim, it didn’t illuminate the corners of the room.

  I thought about the crap-quality surveillance cameras high up on the walls and pillars—they would record nothing but snow. I stood at the foot of the ramp and tried to get my bearings.

  Beyond the ramp was a motion-sensor and the magnetic key card–operated garage door that opened onto Turk Street. Beside that exit was the industrial-size freight elevator with its door rolled down and a hand-lettered sign duct-taped to it reading, “Out of Service.”

  To my right was the fire door to the stairwell we’d just come from. To my left was a door with another hand-lettered sign, this one marked “Storage.” It was faced with metal, and I could see a shiny new dead bolt from thirty feet away.

  “What’s in that room?” I asked Burns.

  “It’s empty now. We used to store parts in there,” she said, “but we moved the parts room to the main floor to cut down on thefts.”

  I moved my flashlight beam across the door and under the surrounding taxis—and then I saw something that just about stopped my heart.

  Under a cab, about fifteen feet from the storage room, was a collapsible umbrella. It was red with a bamboo handle. Cindy had an umbrella just like that.

  My hands shook as I put on gloves and picked up the umbrella and handed it to Rich. “This had to have fallen out of a cab,” I said. “Doesn’t it look familiar?”

  Conklin blinked at the umbrella, then said to Marilyn Burns, “You have the key to that storeroom?”

  “Al keeps the keys. All of them. He manages this place.”

  I opened my phone. The words “no signal” flashed. I told Rich and he said to Burns, “Go upstairs and call nine one one. Say officers need backup. Lots of it. Do it now.”

  I held my light on the storage room door, and Conklin pulled his gun, aimed, and fired three shots into the lock.

  The sounds of the three shots multiplied as the echoes ricocheted throughout the underground cavern. But we didn’t wait for the cracking booms to stop.

  I took a stance behind Conklin. My gun was drawn as he pulled open the storage room door.

  Chapter 104

  IN THE SPLIT SECOND before my flashlight beam hit the room, pictures flashed through my mind of what I was afraid to find: Cindy lying dead on the floor, a man pointing a gun at my face.

  I found the switch on the wall, and the lights went on.

  The windowless room was a cube about twelve feet on all sides. Coils of ropes and tools hung from hooks on the walls. A dark-stained wooden worktable was in the center of the floor. Was this the rapist’s party room?

  Was that blood staining the table?

  I turned toward Rich, and that’s when I heard a muffled sneeze coming from outside the storage room.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked.

  There was a second, more drawn-out sneeze, definitely female, followed by an unforgettable grinding of large gears and winches. That cacophony of midtwentieth-century machinery could only be coming from the out-of-service elevator—and it was on the move.

  I ran to the elevator, mashed the button, but the car didn’t pause. Burns had told me that the only entrance to the freight elevator was right where we were standing and that the elevator emptied out onto Turk Street, three floors up.

  Conklin beat on the elevator door with the butt of his gun, yelling, “SFPD! Stop the elevator!”

  There was no answer.

  I tried to make sense of what was happening.

  No one could have gotten into that elevator since Conklin and I had come to Quick Express fifteen minutes before. Whoever was inside it had to have been inside it before we arrived.

  Conklin and I stared at each other for a fraction of a second, then took off in tandem across the garage floor, heading toward the stairwell door.

  I was right behind my partner as we raced up the stairs toward the light.

  Chapter 105

  THOSE SNEEZES had given me hope that Cindy was alive.

  But Conklin and I had been unprepared for the elevator to start moving. If the car stopped between floors, if we got to the top floor and then the elevator descended, or if whoever was in the elevator beat us to the exit on Turk Street, we had very little chance of stopping him.

  Conklin and I took the stairs two at a time, using the banisters to launch ourselves around corners. Conklin stiff-armed the NO EXIT fire door to Turk Street, and a piercing alarm went off.
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  I pounded behind him out onto the sidewalk, where I saw an assortment of law enforcement vehicles screaming onto Turk and Jones: fire trucks, cruisers, plainclothes detectives, and narcs pulling up in unmarked cars. Every law enforcement officer in the Mission had responded to the call.

  I yelled out to two beat cops I knew.

  “Noonan, Mackey, lock this garage down! No one comes in or goes out!”

  Conklin was running up Turk toward the elevator exit, and I had to put on speed to catch up with him. He’d just reached the freight bay when the elevator door began to roll up.

  A yellow cab was revealed by inches inside the mouth of the elevator. Conklin took a shooting stance square on the opening and was gripping his 9-millimeter with both hands when the cab rolled out of the elevator.

  It was dark, but the driver and the backseat passenger were lit by headlights and streetlights. I could tell the passenger was Cindy from the light limning her curls.

  The cab’s headlights were full-on.

  There was no way the driver didn’t see Conklin.

  Conklin yelled, “Police!” He shot out the left front tire, but the driver gunned the engine and the car leapt forward. Conklin was lit by the headlights, and yet the cab kept rolling, driving straight at him.

  Conklin yelled, “Stop!” and then fired two shots high into the windshield. He jumped away in time to avoid being run down, but the cab kept moving, out of control now. It sideswiped a squad car on the far side of Turk, caromed off it, and plowed into a fire hydrant.

  The cab rocked, then tipped, hanging on two wheels before settling down on all four. Water spewed. People screamed.

  Conklin pulled at the passenger-side door, but he couldn’t get it open.

  “I need help here!” he shouted.

  The fire crew came with the Jaws of Life and wrenched open the back door. Cindy lay crumpled on the slanted floor of the cab, wedged between the backseat and the divider. Conklin leaned all the way in, calling her name.

  “Rich, is she okay?” I yelled to him.

  “She’s alive,” Conklin said. “Thank God. She’s alive.”

  He hooked Cindy’s arms around his neck and pulled her out into the air. Cindy was fully dressed and I saw no blood. Conklin’s voice cracked as he said to her, “Cindy, it’s me. I’m right here.”

  She opened her eyes halfway and said, “Heyyyyy.”

  Conklin held her so tight, I thought he was going to crush the air right out of her.

  And then her eyes closed and she started snoring softly, her cheek on his shoulder.

  Chapter 106

  MARILYN BURNS was screaming, “God, oh God, I can’t believe this. What happened?”

  She peered between her fingers and identified the dead man with one neat hole in his forehead, another in his neck, as Albert Wysocki.

  I joined Conklin as he helped the paramedics strap Cindy in and load the gurney into the ambulance. He was panting and he was pale, and I knew he wanted to go to the hospital with Cindy. But he’d shot a man. He had to follow protocol for a shooting that was witnessed by thirty law enforcement officers. Conklin would have to wait for the ME, the Crime Scene Unit, and Brady to arrive.

  I touched his shoulder, and his eyes met mine. His expression was flat, drained of emotion.

  I’ve done what he had done. I’ve felt the same adrenaline overload covering rage and fear and the emotional numbness of shock.

  “Is Wysocki dead?” my partner asked me. “Did I kill him?”

  “It was him or you, Richie. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “I’m glad I nailed the bastard.”

  “Heeyyyy… Lindsayyyy,” Cindy called out to me from inside the ambulance.

  “I’m right here, girlfriend,” I called back.

  “You’ll go with Cindy to the hospital?” Conklin asked me.

  I nodded and climbed up into the ambulance. I gripped Cindy’s hand and told her that I loved her and that everything was going to be okay.

  “Did I get the story?” she asked me.

  “You sure did.”

  Conklin stood at the rear doors. He said, “Lindsay?”

  “I’ll stay with her until you get to the hospital,” I said to him. “She’s going to be fine.”

  Chapter 107

  LIGHT FROM THE SUNRISE was streaking through the windows when I greeted Martha inside the front door. I stripped off my jacket, my holster, and my shoes, and tiptoed down the hall to the master bathroom. I stepped into the “car wash,” let it blast me pink, and then put on my cloudy blue pj’s that were on the hook behind the door where I’d left them what seemed like a year ago.

  Déjà vu all over again.

  When I edged under the covers, Joe woke up and opened his arms to me, and that was good, because I wanted to tell him everything that had happened since I’d called him from the hospital.

  “Hey,” he said, kissing me. “How’s Cindy?”

  “Honestly? It’s like it never even happened,” I told him. “She was asleep a minute after she got into the cab and woke up in a hospital bed five hours later.”

  “Is she… all right?”

  “He didn’t get around to raping her,” I said. “Thank God.”

  I made myself comfortable under Joe’s arm, fitting my whole body tightly against him, my left leg over his, my left arm across his chest. “The doctor says she’ll be fine when the drugs wear off.”

  “What did you find out about the bad guy?”

  “He was some kind of lowlife freak, Joe. A friendless, unmarried, psychotic loner, fifty-five years old. He put in about eighteen hours a day in the Quick Express garage. Apparently he slept there in his car half the time.”

  I told Joe that Wysocki had managed the place for some guy who lived in Michigan, so he had run of the place. Had the keys. Kept the log sheets. Ran the scheduling.

  “No one questioned anything he did. And so he hangs an ‘Out of Service’ sign on the freight elevator, and that box becomes his own private real estate.”

  “A big fish in a mud puddle,” said Joe.

  “Exactly,” I said. “We found a date book in Wysocki’s jacket pocket. Actually had the words ‘Date Book’ inked on the cover. Inside, he’d written a list of his victims, six of them, and times, dates, places, what they were wearing.

  “He had Cindy’s name in there,” I said. “Just made me sick to see her name written in that lineup.”

  “He called it a date book?” Joe said. “So maybe he was acting like he was on a date.”

  “That makes some kind of psycho sense, I suppose. He picks up a girl, drugs her. Drives her back to his little out-of-service boudoir. I’m guessing he waits until his victims are semiconscious, then rapes them before the drugs wear off. Oh, yeah. Always the gentleman, he drives them home—or to a nearby alley. Perfect evening for Al Wysocki. Doesn’t even have to send flowers the next day.”

  “How’s Conklin doing?”

  “Crazed. A wreck. He says to Cindy at the hospital, ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’ She says, ‘What? Catch a cab?’ ”

  We both laughed.

  My indomitable friend Cindy.

  Joe turned onto his side and kissed me. I melted against him.

  “I love you so much,” I said. “I think I loved you even before I met you.”

  He laughed, but I saw that there were tears in his eyes.

  Chapter 108

  LOOKING INTO JOE’S EYES, I remembered the first time his baby blues locked on mine. We were working a case together. I was the lowest-ranking person there, and he was a top-of-the-heap Federal guy: Deputy Director of Homeland Security.

  I liked his looks—his thick brown hair and solid build—and not only was he smart but he had an easy, confident manner, too.

  He passed me his business card and touched my fingers, and we did a double take as electricity arced between us. It didn’t take long for us to get involved, but our sizzling new connection had been disrupted repeatedly and for months by missed pla
nes and crossed schedules.

  Joe lived in Washington, DC and I lived in the City by the Bay, and both of us had taken recent blows to the heart.

  He’d been recovering from a savage divorce, and I was still suffering from the loss of someone close who had been shot and killed on the job.

  Neither of us was prepared for the frustrating up-and-down year of long-distance dating that was later complicated even more by an insane—and unconsummated—crush between Conklin and me.

  Through all of it, Joe had been a rock, and I’d hung in like I was clinging to a cliff by my fingernails. I knew what was good for me. And I loved Joe. But I couldn’t give myself over to the permanence of the relationship.

  Finally Joe got tired of it. He called me out on my ambivalence. Then he quit his job and moved to San Francisco. Somehow, while negotiating the zigs and zags, we’d found ourselves in each other.

  “I just love you so much,” I said to Joe. I kissed the corners of his eyes. He put his hand on my cheek, and I kissed his palm.

  He said, “I love you almost too much, Linds. I can’t stand it when you’re not here and I’m lying in the dark, thinking about bullets coming at you. It’s terrible to have thoughts like that.”

  “I’m very careful,” I said. “So don’t think about bullets.”

  I bent to kiss him, my hair making a curtain around our faces. That kiss went deep and it stirred me up. Stirred Joe up, too.

  We smiled as we looked into each other’s eyes. There were no walls between us anymore.

  I said, “I sure would like to make a baby with you, Joe.”

  I’d said it before. In fact, I’d said it every month for a while now. But right this minute, it was more than a good idea. It was an overwhelming desire to express my love for my husband in a complete and permanent way.