James Patterson: 10th Anniversary

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

“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.

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 residential 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.

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.