James Patterson: 10th Anniversary

Welcome back, indeed.

I showed myself out, feeling like all eyes in the squad were on me as I crossed the room to find my partner.

DR. ARI RIFKIN was intense and busy, judging from the incessant buzz of her pager. Still, she seemed eager to brief me and my partner, Richard Conklin, aka Inspector Hottie. Conklin scribbled in his notebook as Dr. Rifkin talked.

“Her name is Avis Richardson, age fifteen. She was hemorrhaging when she was brought into the ER last night,” the doctor said, wiping her wire-rimmed specs with her coattail.

“From the looks of her, she delivered a baby within the past thirty-six hours. She got herself into grave trouble by running and falling down — too much activity too soon after giving birth.”

“How’d she get here?” Conklin asked.

“A couple — uh, here’s their names — John and Sarah McCann, found Avis lying in the street. Thought she’d been hit by a car. They told the police that they don’t know her at all.”

“Was Avis conscious when she came in?” I asked Dr. Rifkin.

“She was in shock. Going in and out of lucidity — mostly out. We sedated her, transfused her, gave her a D and C. Right now, she’s in guarded but stable condition.”

“When can we talk with her?” Conklin asked.

“Give me a moment,” said the doctor.

She parted the curtains around the stall of the ICU where her patient was lying. I saw through the opening that the girl was young and white, with lank auburn hair. An IV line was in her arm and a vital-signs machine blinked her stats onto a monitor.

Dr. Rifkin exchanged a few words with her patient and then came out and said, “She says that she lost her baby. But given her state of mind, I don’t know if she means that the baby died or that she misplaced it.”

“Did she have a handbag with her?” I asked. “Did she have any kind of ID?”

“She was only wearing a thin plastic poncho. Dime-store variety.”

“We’ll need the poncho,” I said. “And we need her statement.”

“Give it a shot, Sergeant,” said Dr. Rifkin.

Avis Richardson looked impossibly young to be a mother. She also looked as though she’d been dragged behind a truck. I noted the bruises and scrapes on her arms, her cheek, her palms, her chin.

I pulled up a chair and touched her arm.

“Hi, Avis,” I said. “My name is Lindsay Boxer. I’m with the police department. Can you hear me?”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

She half-opened her green eyes, then closed them again. I pleaded with her under my breath to stay awake. I had to find out what had happened to her. And by giving us this case, Brady had charged Conklin and me with finding her baby.

Avis opened her eyes again, and I asked a dozen basic questions: Where do you live? What’s your phone number? Who is the baby’s father? Who are your parents? But I might as well have been talking to a department-store dummy. Avis Richardson kept nodding off without answering. So, after a half hour of that, I got up and gave my chair to Conklin.

To say that my partner has “a way with women” is to play up his charm and all-American good looks and cheapen his real gift for getting people to trust him.

I said, “Rich, you’re on deck. Go for it.”

He nodded, sat down, and said to Avis in his deep, calm voice, “My name is Rich Conklin. I work with Sergeant Boxer. We need to find your baby, Avis. Every minute that passes puts your little one in more danger. Please talk to me. We really need your help.”

The girl’s eyes seemed unfocused. Her gaze shifted from Conklin to me, to the door, to the IV lead in her arm. Then she said to Conklin, “A couple of months ago … I called the number. Help for pregnant girls? A man … he spoke with an accent. French accent. But … it wasn’t authentic. I met them … outside my school …”

“Them?”

“Two men. Their car was a blue four-door? … And when I woke up, I was in a bed. I saw the baby,” she said, tears gathering in her eyes, spilling over. “It was a little boy.”

And now my heart was breaking apart.

What the hell was this crime? Baby trafficking? It was outrageous. It was a sin . Make that a lot of sins. I tallied up two counts of felony kidnapping before we even knew the fate of the baby.

Conklin said, “I want to hear the whole story from the beginning. Tell me what you remember, okay, Avis?”

I couldn’t be sure, but it could have been that Avis Richardson was talking to herself. She said, “I saw my baby.… Then, I was on the street. Alone. In the dark.”

I STAYED at Avis Richardson’s bedside for the next eight hours, hoping she’d wake up for real and tell me what had happened to her and her newborn. Time passed. Her sleep only deepened. And every minute that went by made me more certain that this girl’s baby would not be found alive.

I still didn’t know anything about what had happened to this teenager. Had she given birth alone and left the baby in a gas station bathroom? Had her child been snatched?

We couldn’t even get the FBI involved until we knew if a crime had been committed.

While I sat at Avis’s bedside, Conklin went back to the Hall and threw himself into the hands-on work of the case. He reached into the missing persons databases and ran searches for Avis Richardson or any missing Caucasian teenage girls matching her description.

He interviewed the couple who had brought Avis to the hospital and established the approximate area where they had found her: Lake Merced, near Brotherhood Way.

Working with the K-9 unit, Conklin went out into the field. Cops and hounds looked for the blood trail that Avis Richardson had surely left behind. If the house where she’d given birth could be located, there’d be evidence there, and maybe the truth.

As the hounds worked the scent, the crime lab processed the plastic poncho Avis had been wearing. It would hold prints, for sure, but a few dozen people at the hospital had handled that poncho. It didn’t make any sense that she was wearing a rain poncho but no clothes.

Another mystery.

I kept vigil with a sleeping Avis. And the longer I sat, the more depressed I became. Where were the worried friends and parents? Why wasn’t someone looking for this young girl?

Her eyelids fluttered.

“Avis?” I said.

“Huh,” she answered. Then she closed her eyes again.

I took a break at around four in the afternoon, pushed dollar bills into a vending machine, and ate something with peanut butter and oats in it. Washed it down with a cup of bitter coffee.

I contacted a dozen hospitals to see if a motherless baby had been brought in and got in touch with Child Protective Services as well. I came up with nothing more than a mounting heap of frustration.

I borrowed Dr. Rifkin’s laptop and went out to VICAP, the FBI’s Violent Crime Apprehension Program database, to see what they had on the abduction of pregnant women.

I found a few crimes against pregnant women — domestic violence mainly, but no cases that resembled this one.

After my fruitless Internet crawl, I went back to the ICU and slept in the big vinyl-covered reclining chair beside Avis’s bed. I woke up when she was wheeled out of the ICU and down the hall to a private room.

I called Brady, told him that we were still nowhere, my voice sounding defensive to my own ears.

“Anything on the baby?”

“Brady, this girl hasn’t said boo.”

When I hung up with Brady, my phone buzzed with an incoming call from Conklin.

“Talk to me,” I said.

“The hounds found her trail.”

I was instantly hopeful. I gripped my little phone, almost strangling it to death.