James Patterson - 10th Anniversary

“That part was all my fault,” said Avis Richardson.

HALLELUJAH. Avis Richardson was finally about to take some responsibility. If she admitted something that led us to her baby, I thought I could possibly forgive her for driving us crazy for the past week.

How about it, Avis? Gonna give us a break?

I went to the fridge in the kitchenette, brought back a bottle of soda, and poured three glasses, no ice.

“Toni said she and Sandy would stay with me until I felt well,” Avis told Conklin and me. “Then they were going to take the baby home.”

“Did they say where home was?” Conklin asked.

“Nuh-uh,” Avis said.

I was still comparing and contrasting Avis’s new story with what she’d told us before, and the two versions hardly matched up.

The French-speaking man was on the cutting-room floor. The kidnapping was history. The father of her baby was her English teacher. Avis had answered an ad from two women , and now Avis said she had given up her baby voluntarily.

Was she capable of telling the truth? Toni and Sandy. I wondered if she’d made up those names on the spot.

“When I was in that house, right after I had the baby, Toni gave me her phone so I could call Jordan and tell him to come and get me,” Avis said. “But when I handed the phone to Toni so she could give him directions, Jordan hung up.”

Incoming phone calls would show up in Jordan Ritter’s phone records. So maybe we would yield something .

“I just wanted to get out of there. I didn’t want to be around the baby, so I waited for an opportunity and sneaked out the back door. I hitched a ride as far as Brotherhood Way, but the people who gave me the ride were going east, so I got out.

“What kind of car, Avis? Did you get the name of a person or a plate number? We’re trying to connect the dots. Get me?” I said.

“I wasn’t thinking of anything like that. I’d just run away, and I was still in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t have my handbag, my phone, nothing, and I was starting to bleed again. And then I was bleeding really hard. I didn’t expect that.”

Finally the girl was starting to show signs of distress. She was sweating, wringing her hands. Thinking of her own pain.

Conklin said, “Can you go on, Avis? Or do you need to take a break?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “There’s not much more to tell. I found a rain poncho in the weeds near the lake, so I took off my clothes and put it on. I was feeling faint as I walked and I fell down a few times. A car stopped for me and took me to the hospital. I met you ,” she said, trying to give me an evil eye.

“Is Jordan in trouble because I’m underage?”

“Jordan will be fine,” I lied. “The most important thing, Avis. More important even than Jordan Ritter, is to find out where your baby is and if he’s okay.”

That was the truth.

Where was that baby?

If these women were real and not more characters from Avis Richardson’s creative-writing workshop, had they kept him?

Was he in a warm room somewhere covered with a little blue blanket? Did he have a full tummy? A teddy bear? Was he safe?

Or had he been smuggled out of the country with heroin in his colon, gutted as soon as he reached shore?

“How did they pay you?” I asked.

Please, God, let them have given this naive little girl a check.

“They didn’t pay me. I didn’t want the money. That would’ve been illegal, right? To sell my baby? I didn’t sell him. So, what are you going to do now?” Avis asked Conklin.

“Everything is going to be all right,” Conklin told her.

Really? For whom?

WHEN WE LEFT the Mark Hopkins, Avis was being comforted by her parents. They barely looked up when Conklin said we’d call later, and we left their suite.

My partner and I had a little confab outside my car — or rather, he listened to me rant about the stupidest, most morally challenged girl on the planet — and then we headed out to our respective homes for the night.

I called Quentin Tazio from my cell phone on the drive home.

Quentin is a police resource, a tech consultant who has been described as a “brain in a bottle.” He lives in a dungeon of his own devising, a dark and drab two-floor flat tricked out with a million dollars in computer equipment.

It’s how he spent his inheritance from his father, and it had made Quentin absolutely the happiest man I knew.

I told QT, as he liked to be called, about the ad on Prattslist, the call to Jordan Ritter’s phone, and the two names, Sandy and Toni, which may have been real names, nicknames, or pseudonyms the women made up to use on Avis.

Maybe, for once, Avis had told us the truth to the extent that she knew it.

I cooked dinner for Joe and had a jumbo glass of merlot with my pasta. We went for a long walk with Martha and I told my husband the latest episode in the Avis Richardson story.

Joe said, “I have a hunch QT is going to find something for you, Linds.”

Joe has first-class, FBI-trained hunches.

I had a great night’s sleep wedged between Joe and Martha, and when I got to the Hall at 8:30 a.m., I discovered that QT had called.

I called him back, and while I waited for him to get my message and return my call, Brady asked me to come to his office and update him on Richardson. I gave him a detailed but concise report, and he asked good questions. I only wished I had something worthwhile to tell him.

“Get traction on this thing, or we’ll send it down the line to Crimes Against Persons and move on,” he said.

My phone was ringing when I got back to my desk. I was hoping it was QT, but I saw from my caller ID that it was Dean Hanover of the Brighton Academy.

“Boxer,” I said, picturing the man with the polka-dot bow tie in his buttoned-up office.

“Sergeant, I’m glad I reached you.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Avis Richardson is missing,” the dean told me. “She came back to school yesterday, but she wasn’t in her dorm room this morning. Now I just found out that one of our teachers is missing, too. Jordan Ritter didn’t show up to class this morning. That’s very unusual for him. Both of them are gone. No note, no nothing. They’re just gone.”

LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR hours earlier, Phil Hoffman had been in his office, rehearsing his defense strategy, when a phone call from the SFPD radically upped his client’s chances for acquittal. It had sure felt to him like an act of God.

Now he stood behind the defense table in Judge LaVan’s courtroom and said, “The defense calls Bernard St. John.”

Bernard St. John entered the courtroom. He was wearing an expensive chalk-striped suit and a blue silk shirt. Not a spiked hair was out of place. After he had been sworn in and was seated, Hoffman approached the witness stand.

As expected, Yuki shot to her feet. “Your Honor,” she said, “we only learned about this witness last night and haven’t had a chance to do any investigation.”

Hoffman said to the judge, “I only became aware of this witness myself yesterday evening, and we sent an e-mail to Ms. Castellano immediately.”

LaVan peered through his glasses, looking down from the bench, and said, “Ms. Castellano, you’ll have your chance to question the witness. Mr. Hoffman, you may proceed.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. Mr. St. John, what kind of work do you do?”

“I play the piano for events, and I am also a piano teacher.”

“Are you currently employed as the Martin children’s piano teacher?”

“No. I was let go four months ago. The children were busy with a number of activities, and piano lessons were apparently not a priority.”