Джеймс Паттерсон - The 18th Abduction

I flashed my badge, introduced my partner and myself, and asked if he was Tom Barry.

“Why do you ask?”

I pulled my phone and showed him the parking lot photo. I asked him if he was the man in the picture.

“Looks like me. Yeah. That’s my leather jacket.”

“Who’s that with you?”

“Uh. Carly?”

“You were with her a few nights ago,” I said.

“Nope. I saw her last week, Tuesday. That’s when we went out. What’s going on?”

Conklin sidestepped the question, asking Barry if he knew where we could find Carly.

“Me? No. We’re not that close. If we’re drinking in the same bar, we sometimes go out for a bite and a roll.”

“She’s missing,” Conklin said. “She hasn’t been seen in a few days.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Barry said, drawing back, showing alarm.

The horses on the screen overhead were clearing the back turn and pounding into the stretch. The crowd in the bar broke out in yelling and rooting.

Barry glanced up at the screen, yelled, “Oh, come ooon, Fast Talker, come oooon.” Then he remembered we were standing beside him, and turned back to us in disgust.

“I don’t know anything about Carly. You’re wasting my time.”

I said, “We believe you, Mr. Barry. But if you care about Carly at all, we need your help.”

“Christ. I don’t even have her phone number.”

Conklin said in that nice, nonthreatening way he has, “Sometimes people know more than they think. We’d appreciate you coming with us to the station, Mr. Barry. You might be able to shine a light on this situation.”

“Look, I have to be at work at two, okay? I manage the car wash over on Third.”

“You’ll be back in plenty of time,” I lied.

Barry slapped a ten down on the bar, and I noticed his knuckles were scraped up. He’d swung at someone or something recently and connected. While he struggled into his leather jacket, Conklin snaked a hand around him, picked up the beer glass by the rim. While I further distracted Barry by putting the photo of him back in his face, asking, “This is the parking lot at the Bridge, right?,” Conklin got a plastic bag from the bartender.

“I guess so,” Barry muttered.

With his prints on a bagged glass under Conklin’s Windbreaker, we escorted him out onto the street and into the back of our car. As Conklin drove, I checked out Thomas Barry on the MDC built into the console.

Barry had a minor-league record: an arrest for drunk and disorderly one night at Casey’s a couple of years back, a fender bender last year, and a DUI. His juvenile record was sealed.

I had an image in mind of Carly Myers and Barry, and he didn’t look, smell, or feel like a match for her. What did she see in him?

My interest was piqued. So much so that I was cautiously optimistic that Tom Barry held a key to the whereabouts of the missing schoolteachers.

Chapter 17

The Hall of Justice was a large, rectangular granite building on Bryant Street, home to the criminal court, the DA’s office, a jail, and the Southern Station of the SFPD, which included the homicide squad, where Conklin and I worked in the bullpen on the fourth floor.

Despite its storied past and understated charm, the HOJ was rat infested, prone to flurries of asbestos and sewage leaks, and seismically unstable.

We’d been working here for so long that Conklin and I hardly noticed that the Hall was hazardous to our health. Whenever we talked about it, we agreed that we would miss the old wreck when it was eventually demolished.

But at that moment, with a possible suspect in tow, we were only thinking about the missing schoolteachers.

Conklin, Tom Barry, and I were seated at a metal table inside a small interrogation room down the hall from our squad room. Lieutenant Warren Jacobi, our old friend and commanding officer, was behind the glass.

I took the lead in the interview and began by asking Barry to help us out. He responded by pushing my buttons, first denying knowing anything about Carly yet once more, then becoming argumentative and belligerent. He had quite an act. And the truth was, we had nothing on him.

He could walk out anytime.

Conklin took a turn.

“Mr. Barry, cut it out. This is very damned serious. We’re trying to save lives here, and you’re acting like you’ve got something to hide. If you’re innocent, act like it, okay?

“You went out with Carly, spent time with her, so give us something to go on. Where would she be if she went somewhere on her own after work and after dark?”

“I. Do. Not. Know. Look, I wasn’t attached to her. At all. We talked baseball, football, and especially soccer. We screwed. Once in my place. Once in hers. I didn’t buy her a Valentine. I didn’t introduce her to my mother. The relationship was casual. What don’t you get?”

After an hour of this combative back-and-forth, I thought I’d wrung everything out of Thomas Barry that he had to give; not only his work schedule but also the name of a woman who could vouch for him the night Carly, Susan, and Adele went missing. He gave us names of two other women he’d rolled with on the two nights after that. Thomas Barry was a player. We would send his prints to the lab, my thought being that maybe his prints would be found on Carly Myers’s car.

It was quarter to two in the afternoon.

Barry said, “Can I go now? I don’t want to get fired.”

I said, “I’ll have an officer give you a lift.”

“Okay. Finally.”

He stood to put on his jacket and gave me a peculiar look, which I read as a sign he was about to do us a favor.

“Sergeant, I had nothing to do with Carly being missing. Or any of them. If I were you, I’d be looking into Carly. My take is that she’s no angel. She has a dark side. That much I can tell you.”

There was a knock on the door and Jacobi came in, looking stricken.

He said, “Mr. Barry, I’ve got you a ride. Thanks for your help. Boxer, Conklin, I need to see you right away.”

I handed Barry off to Officer Mahoney and headed back to Jacobi’s glass-walled office at the back of the squad room.

He and Conklin were waiting for me.

I pulled out a chair, saying, “Waste of time. We don’t have enough cause to get a warrant—”

Jacobi cut me off.

“We’ve got a body. Might be Carly Myers. Big Four Motel, room 212. Call me when you get there.”

Chapter 18

Richie lost the coin flip, so I drove.

We reached Ellis Street in record time, then closed in on the Big Four, slowing only for the aimless druggies wandering down and across Larkin.

I pulled into the parking spot at the front of the seedy, rent-by-the-hour, no-tell motel, switched off the engine, and took a breath. We weren’t alone. A dozen homeless, impoverished, drug-dependent residents of the Tenderloin were camped out on the macadam between the parked cars.

They were about to lose their campground.

The parking lot was a secondary crime scene and would have to be vacated and taped off from the street.

Conklin and I got out of the car. My mind was racing with questions, none of which would be answered until we got into room 212.

Question one: Was the dead woman Carly Myers?

Questions two and three: If the DB was Carly, what had killed her? And why here?

A handful of the motel’s guests stood under the awning outside the manager’s office, complaining loudly that they needed to get into their goddamn rooms.

The manager said just as loudly, “Cops said when they’re done, they’re done. Nothing I can do.”

I interrupted the dispute to get the manager’s name, Jake Tuohy, and to tell him to stick around. We’d be back.

Room 212 was at the rear of the motel. My partner and I rounded the corner of the three-story stucco building and saw a small fleet of first responders: two cruisers, an ambulance, and two CSI vans, all empty.