James Patterson: 10th Anniversary

“She went to this hole-in-the-ground by herself on Monday,” Conklin said. “She talked to the day dispatcher. A guy name of Wysocki. If she came back today, it had to be to see him. What do you think, Lindsay? Has Cindy taken this investigative reporter crap too far? Am I wrong?”

I saw the blinking neon signs up ahead on Jones, QUICK EXPRESS TAXI and CORPORATE ACCOUNTS WELCOME. Conklin parked at the curb in front of the grimy storefront before I could answer him.

The dispatcher was in a glass booth, her cage separated from the street by a grill in the plate glass.

I showed her my badge and told her my name, and she said her name was Marilyn Burns. She was forty, white, and petite and dressed in a blue-checked shirt hanging out over her jeans. She wore a wedding band and had a smoker’s gravelly voice.

“I relieved Al right around six,” Burns told us through the grill. “He was in a hurry. Want me to call him? It’s not a problem.”

“Have you seen this woman today?” Conklin asked, pulling out a photo of Cindy from his wallet.

“No, I’ve never seen her.”

“Then, yes, call Al,” I told Burns.

Conklin and I heard her say, “Call me when you get this, Al. Police are looking for someone who might’ve come in on your shift. Girl with curly blond hair.”

The dispatcher put down the phone and said, “If you give me your number —”

“Okay if we take a look around?” Conklin said.

He didn’t phrase it as a question, and Burns didn’t take it as a request. She buzzed us into the grungy ground floor of Quick Express and said, “I’ll take you on the tour.”

Burns whistled up a cabbie to take over for her, and then the three of us walked between rows of parked cabs and past the ramp until we reached the stairs along the northern side of the building.

I asked Burns questions and answered a few of hers as Conklin flashed his light into cab interiors. She explained to me how the cab traffic worked inside the garage.

“Incoming cabs use their magnetic key card, enter the ramp on Turk,” she said. “Drivers leave their vehicles on one of the three floors, then walk up the stairs, hand me their logs and keys, and cash out.

“When they start a shift,” Burns went on, “it’s the other way around. They pick up their log sheets on main, go down the stairs, take a cab down the ramp to Turk, and use their card to get out. We have a freight elevator goes down to Turk, but it’s not working.”

“Can cabs come in and leave without you seeing them?”

“We’ve got security cameras,” she said. “They’re not NASA-grade, but they work.”

Taxis were parked on the perimeter and between the pillars on all three floors wrapping around the ramp in the center. We checked out minivan cabs and showed Cindy’s picture to a half dozen cabbies we met as we walked.

No one admitted to having seen Cindy.

I turned over various possibilities in my mind.

Had Cindy met someone here who had a story for her? Was she interviewing that someone in a coffee shop with her phone turned off? Or was she drugged in the backseat of a taxi, one of the thousands cruising the streets of San Francisco?

I was accustomed to Cindy getting between rocks and hard places and equally used to the idea that she could chop her way out. But a bad feeling was coming over me.

Cindy had been missing for more than three hours.

We kept saying, “If Cindy’s phone was turned off …”

But Cindy never turned off her phone. The last contact her phone GPS chip made was within two hundred and fifty meters of this building.

So where was she?

And if she wasn’t here, and her phone wasn’t turned off, where was she?

Where the hell had she gone?

DISPATCHER MARILYN BURNS opened the stairwell door onto the lowest subterranean level, and Conklin and I were right behind her.

The windowless space was dark and dank and twenty-five feet underground. The fluorescent lighting was so dim, it didn’t illuminate the corners of the room.

I thought about the crap-quality surveillance cameras high up on the walls and pillars — they would record nothing but snow. I stood at the foot of the ramp and tried to get my bearings.

Beyond the ramp was a motion-sensor and the magnetic key card-operated garage door that opened onto Turk Street. Beside that exit was the industrial-size freight elevator with its door rolled down and a hand-lettered sign duct-taped to it reading, “Out of Service.”

To my right was the fire door to the stairwell we’d just come from. To my left was a door with another hand-lettered sign, this one marked “Storage.” It was faced with metal, and I could see a shiny new dead bolt from thirty feet away.

“What’s in that room?” I asked Burns.

“It’s empty now. We used to store parts in there,” she said, “but we moved the parts room to the main floor to cut down on thefts.”

I moved my flashlight beam across the door and under the surrounding taxis — and then I saw something that just about stopped my heart.

Under a cab, about fifteen feet from the storage room, was a collapsible umbrella. It was red with a bamboo handle. Cindy had an umbrella just like that.

My hands shook as I put on gloves and picked up the umbrella and handed it to Rich. “This had to have fallen out of a cab,” I said. “Doesn’t it look familiar?”

Conklin blinked at the umbrella, then said to Marilyn Burns, “You have the key to that storeroom?”

“Al keeps the keys. All of them. He manages this place.”

I opened my phone. The words “no signal” flashed. I told Rich and he said to Burns, “Go upstairs and call nine one one. Say officers need backup. Lots of it. Do it now.”

I held my light on the storage room door, and Conklin pulled his gun, aimed, and fired three shots into the lock.

The sounds of the three shots multiplied as the echoes ricocheted throughout the underground cavern. But we didn’t wait for the cracking booms to stop.

I took a stance behind Conklin. My gun was drawn as he pulled open the storage room door.

IN THE SPLIT SECOND before my flashlight beam hit the room, pictures flashed through my mind of what I was afraid to find: Cindy lying dead on the floor, a man pointing a gun at my face.

I found the switch on the wall, and the lights went on.

The windowless room was a cube about twelve feet on all sides. Coils of ropes and tools hung from hooks on the walls. A dark-stained wooden worktable was in the center of the floor. Was this the rapist’s party room?

Was that blood staining the table?

I turned toward Rich, and that’s when I heard a muffled sneeze coming from outside the storage room.

“Did you hear that?” I asked.

There was a second, more drawn-out sneeze, definitely female, followed by an unforgettable grinding of large gears and winches. That cacophony of midtwentieth-century machinery could only be coming from the out-of-service elevator — and it was on the move.

I ran to the elevator, mashed the button, but the car didn’t pause. Burns had told me that the only entrance to the freight elevator was right where we were standing and that the elevator emptied out onto Turk Street, three floors up.

Conklin beat on the elevator door with the butt of his gun, yelling, “ SFPD! Stop the elevator! ”

There was no answer.

I tried to make sense of what was happening.

No one could have gotten into that elevator since Conklin and I had come to Quick Express fifteen minutes before. Whoever was inside it had to have been inside it before we arrived.

Conklin and I stared at each other for a fraction of a second, then took off in tandem across the garage floor, heading toward the stairwell door.