Джеймс Паттерсон - The 18th Abduction

I nodded my agreement. Any guy walking past Carly’s door could have pushed her in and killed her. He might’ve even had a clean white shirt in his suitcase.

“You did good,” Jacobi said to me and Conklin.

It was after 9:00 p.m. when Conklin and I got into our car and headed out toward Russian Hill.

Carly Myers had been murdered. How, by whom, and why were still pieces of a mystery, and that was devastating. We weren’t quite back to square one, but we might as well have been.

Where were Susan and Adele?

No freaking clue.

Conklin and I parked on Filbert Street in front of a nice apartment building where the Myers family lived, waiting for us to bring them good or at least hopeful news.

Tragically, all we had was that Carly had been murdered in a motel frequented by prostitutes on possibly the skeeziest block in the city. We didn’t have a suspect, but to stem the grief over Carly’s death, we would promise to find her killer.

Right now that promise wouldn’t hold a drop of water.

My partner and I got out of the car and psychologically buckled up. What we had to tell Carly’s parents was going to change their lives forever.

Chapter 26

I’d left Joe sleeping when I headed out of our apartment before seven this morning.

Now, more than fifteen hours later, I was done and done in. All the lights were on in the living room when I shuffled through the front door. I dropped my keys onto the console, stowed my gun belt in the cabinet, and hugged my dog.

I called out to Joe, but he didn’t answer.

I wanted to tell him all about my day. The leads that had run us into stone walls, a killer who’d scrubbed away evidence, and maybe worst of all, parents who wanted to die rather than live without their murdered daughter.

When Jacobi gets stuck on a case, he turns it upside down, looks at it from a different person’s point of view, or from an opposite angle. I turned my case over as I unlaced my shoes.

Three women had last been seen leaving a restaurant bar after having a good time. They’d been drinking, but none of them had been stumbling drunk.

One of them had been found three days later, a day and a half postmortem, hanged from a showerhead in a motel that she’d frequented in her part-time night job as a prostitute.

That was a mindblower from any angle, but I turned it over in my brain. Was Carly broke?

A drug addict?

Under someone’s thumb?

Her sometimes date, Tom Barry, had told us that Carly had a dark side. Jake Tuohy had said she was turning tricks—not what I’d thought Barry meant by “dark side.”

Was this possible? Schoolteacher by day, whore by night?

Karin Slaughter, the assistant dean, was Carly’s friend. She would have rung the bell if Carly were using drugs. Carly’s parents weren’t wealthy but surely could have helped her out if she couldn’t make do on her $70K annual salary. As far as I could tell, she had a safety net. So—why turn to prostitution?

In fact, we had only Jake Tuohy’s word for that.

Similarly, Adele and Susan had friends, jobs, parents. They, too, seemed to have safety nets. But you never knew what was going on beneath the surface. Had their support systems failed?

Were they alive, in mortal danger? Or were they in similar creepy motel rooms, hanged by their necks, as yet undiscovered?

The search warrants for all three of the women’s apartments had been executed, and no additional phones, laptops, or tablets had been found.

I had interviewed Adele’s roommate, Patricia Sanders, who was torn up by fear. She had no idea what could have happened to her friend. According to Patricia, Adele had left for work on Monday morning, running late. She’d said she was going out for dinner and thrown a kiss as she raced out the door.

The roommate confirmed that Adele carried her phone and a laptop in a shoulder bag.

CSI had the electronics, and so far nothing had jumped out of them, making it more certain that the women had been nabbed by a person or persons they hadn’t known.

At the same time, there had been no ransom notes or calls to any of the women’s parents, and the hounds hadn’t picked up a scent of any of the three women beyond the Bridge’s parking lot.

If this was an abduction, how had it happened? By force? Willingly? And if willingly, what had the kidnapper used to bait the hook?

My shoes were off and lined up under the coatrack.

Martha was wriggling in front of my feet and telling me she’d missed me. I grabbed her up and kissed her and snuggled her. After telling my sweet doggy girl how much I loved her, I went into the living room to find Joe.

Chapter 27

I found my Joe reclined in his big chair, papers stacked around him, his laptop open on his thighs, and deep in sleep.

It was after ten o’clock and I wanted to sleep, too, but I wanted to talk to Joe more. Maybe my own special agent would see a flaw in my reasoning or a door I hadn’t opened.

I called his name, walked over, and kissed his head, and he started awake.

“Joe, honey,” I said. “I really need to talk to you.”

He righted his chair into a sitting position and said, “I really need to talk to you, too. In fact, I may need to talk to you more.”

“You first,” I said to my man. “But I have a confession. I stink.”

“Do not.”

“Do.”

By the time I’d showered, gotten into pj’s, and made ham and mayo sandwiches with tea for two, Joe was back with Martha from their nighttime walk around the block.

I brought our dinner over to the coffee table, and Joe and I relaxed into the inviting embrace of the long leather sofa. I urged Joe to start talking. And he did.

“It’s about Anna,” he said. “Anna is the woman I met sitting on Golden Gate Avenue.”

“I know who you mean.”

“Well, here’s the thing. I didn’t open a case file on her that night. She looked like she’d been through hell, and I was right. In fact, I didn’t know a fraction of it. So I said ‘screw protocol’ and gave her a lift home.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad, Joe. You can walk the protocol back, right?”

Joe picked up his sandwich, looked at it as though he’d never seen such a thing before, and put it back down on the plate.

“I should have done it before I started investigating Slobodan Petrović. I didn’t know if Anna’s story was for real or if she was having flashbacks to the nightmare of nightmares. If I’d opened a file, she would have had to meet with a duty officer and she would have been questioned. Extensively. What if he didn’t believe her? There was a good chance of that. And Bosnia isn’t exactly on our patch.

“I didn’t think it through.”

I remembered Joe’s face when he told me Anna’s story on the night he’d met her. He’d been this close to breaking down when he told me about the scorched-earth destruction of her town. The savage murders of her husband and child.

“You did the humane thing, hon. Subjecting Anna to an FBI grilling without first vetting her story could have been worse for her, and you, too.”

“That’s what I told myself. But what I’m doing now, having people in other offices do research, digging into government files on behalf of my concern for this woman…I’m acting like I’m a PI, not a federal agent. It’s inexcusable. Let me be more precise: I could get beached.”

Joe Molinari was a straight arrow. Solid. Honest. Some would say a hero. He’d taken a hell of a chance for a stranger. A woman. I tried not to let that bother me.

I asked, “What can you do to fix this?”

“Now that I’ve gone this far, I want to bring this to the supervisor as a real thing. If Petrović is living on Fell Street legally, I want to know how that happened. Why is he here? Is he in a witness protection program? Is he being managed? What’s his deal? If Anna is wrong and this is a Petrović look-alike, I’ll talk her down and save her the grief of being interrogated by the FBI. And I’ll fess up.”