Джеймс Паттерсон - The 18th Abduction

She nodded and said, “I need to get home.”

I wasn’t done, so I pressed on.

“Nancy, we’re not there yet. We have a hypnotist on call. Dr. Friedlander can come in and put you into a hypnotic state. You’ll be able to visualize the moment you saw this man and freeze the picture. Get a good look at him through the lens of your own memory.”

“How long will that take?”

“Do you want to call your uncle and tell him that you’re helping the police find a killer and you have to stay here until you give them a clue?”

She looked genuinely distressed.

“I have to go. I don’t want to be hypnotized.”

“Then answer my questions, Nancy. Truthfully. Do you think that Denny was Carly’s client or a friend? Or do you think she worked for him?”

“Oh, my God. Now that you mention it, another time I think I saw her give him—or someone like him—a wad of money.”

It was another might have statement, but it felt like I’d finally gotten somewhere. And I thought of the woman who worked at the laundromat across from the Big Four. Edna Gutierrez. She’d told Jacobi that she’d seen a man drop Carly off in front of the motel in what she thought was a black or blue SUV.

I asked Koebel, “What kind of car did Denny drive?”

“I didn’t notice a car. Look. I need to get back to my uncle’s and pack my two sets of clothes and my toothbrush. He’ll be coming to get me in a couple of hours, and we’re driving to Toronto.”

Conklin looked at me as if to ask, Anything else?

I sighed.

I asked Nancy for her phone number and thanked her again for helping out the SFPD. I left her in the box with Richie, putting a statement together, and headed back to the bullpen and my desk.

Before I reached the swinging door, Conklin called me back.

I turned. He said, “There’s more.”

I went back into the interrogation room. Nancy Koebel was sitting where she’d been when I left the room.

“I remember something,” she said. “I’m not 100 percent sure.”

I sat back down.

“Tell Sergeant Boxer what you told me.”

“I saw them standing next to a car when she handed him the money. It was a boxy kind of thing, like an SUV, and if this is the right car, there was a decal on the side, a logo for Taqueria del Lobo. And once when I was cleaning out room 212, I found a paper bag with the same lettering on it. I think the address was Valencia Street.”

Did Denny work at the take-out taco joint on Valencia? I danced back to my desk. Maybe we had a lead made of diamonds. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Susan Jones. Adele Saran. Hang on, please. We’re doing everything we can do to find you.

Chapter 50

I told Jacobi what I had and my feeling that it all added up to a lead.

Nancy Koebel was almost sure she’d seen Carly Myers giving a roll of money to a guy named Denny, a man known as Carly Myers’s sometime pimp. She had further linked that meeting and cash payment to an SUV with the logo of a takeout taco joint on Valencia Street called Taqueria del Lobo.

Jacobi exhaled and said to me, “Go get him.”

Once Koebel was on her way home, I searched the DMV database for a vehicle registered to the taco shop on Valencia Street. I got a hit on a blue Chevy Tahoe belonging to the taqueria’s owner, Jose Martinez.

The records told me that Martinez was thirty-four, had been honorably discharged from the army, and lived on Shotwell Street, a few blocks away from his shop. He had no police record, and his DMV photo didn’t match the ATM shot of Denny. That was too bad, but I was still interested in the taco truck’s connection to Carly Myers.

I called my girl Yuki and spelled out the short version of the story. She said, “Stay right there.”

Yuki came up to Homicide, and after Conklin and I filled her in on the Koebel interview and what it meant to our case, she jogged back down to the DA’s office and got busy. Yuki is fast and thorough; by 6:00 p.m. I had a search warrant for the Chevy Tahoe in my pocket.

The six o’clock news came on as Conklin and I got ready to leave the Hall. I buttoned my jacket, left a message for Jacobi, shut down my computer, and boosted the volume on the tube.

The top-of-the-hour broadcast began with the heartbreaking pleas of Harold and Marjory Jones and William and Cora Saran, the parents of the missing teachers. They wept, begged the kidnapper to bring back their daughters, and offered rewards with no questions asked for information leading to their return.

After the grieving parents spoke, the mayor made a no-news announcement that every member of the SFPD was on the job, and that the FBI was also on the case.

So far there was nothing to report.

I felt sick to my stomach. My gut told me that those girls were dead and their bodies had been dumped. But for the sake of my mental health, I looked at the positive side. Until we found their bodies, there was hope.

We hadn’t shared Denny’s low-resolution ATM photo with the FBI. He was a local character, and this was still our case.

Conklin jangled a set of car keys until I turned to face him.

“Ready, Sergeant?”

I followed him down the fire stairs and out the front doors to Bryant, where we picked up our regulation gray Chevy squad car. Conklin took the wheel, and we made good time as we sped from the Hall to the Mission, a diverse and vibrant neighborhood with a bustling nightlife. It also had sketchy areas known for crime: crack houses and drug dealers, streetwalkers and gangs, criminals of all types and customers looking for some type of good time.

The Mission is gentrifying now, but five years ago, when we were working this case, it was dangerous after sunset. Even armed, I was on edge as the light faded out and the fog that usually evaded the Mission rolled in.

Rich slowed the car and we crawled down Shotwell, both of us searching the darkening streets for a taco delivery vehicle and a man called Denny, last name unknown, no verified ID, who was maybe a pimp and was definitely a person of interest.

We passed the intersections of Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth.

Men with hoods obscuring their faces clustered on the unlit street corners, drug deals going down in plain sight. We passed Nineteenth and came upon Shotwell’s, on the corner of a seemingly quiet street known as the prostitution hub of the area.

Chapter 51

Something about this area—or maybe it was just the darkness of this case, the specter of a man who got off on torturing women—was stirring up memories for me. I’d worked the Mission as a beat cop, and I’d spent a lot of time on these streets. San Francisco had been a different city then. After years of gentrification, the city barely had anything that qualified as a “bad neighborhood.” Although the building had some polish now, I remembered Shotwell’s being a lot grittier.

It was a personal landmark for me. When I was still a rookie, this tavern was an off-site HQ used by female cops. It was a meeting place to discuss how to deal with being ignored, belittled, and sexually harassed by the men of the SFPD.

And with the fonder memories of those nights drinking with some of the toughest women I’d ever known, Shotwell’s brought back vivid images of a crime I’d worked when I was still green. Still unaccustomed to the shock of human savagery.

I recalled every detail of that night that had begun with a crackling radio call. “Calling all cars. Homeless down at Shotwell and Twentieth.”

My partner, Lisa Frazer, and I had answered the call.

Lisa had ten years on the Job and was a wife, mom of two, and top marksman. As she proved often in the squad car, she could also carry a tune. Lisa was singing and driving as we patrolled the Mission that night, and when dispatch called at midnight, we responded.