James Patterson - 10th Anniversary

I desperately needed an hour at Susie’s. Conklin and I had spent the day looking for a newborn baby. We’d walked with cadaver dogs, checked in with divers at the edge of Lake Merced, and made an all-day, fruitless canvass of houses in the area, with Avis Richardson’s photo in hand, asking, “Have you seen this girl?”

Then, ten minutes ago, a stunning call had come in to Jacobi. Avis Richardson had turned up behind the locked doors of a schoolmate’s parents’ apartment on Russian Hill. These “do-gooders” were keeping Avis away from the cops until her parents could arrive from New Zealand. So Avis had been located, but we still had no leads on her baby, who was either missing or dead.

Probably both.

Claire and I drove to Susie’s together in my car and parked in a miraculously empty spot on Jackson Street near the corner of Montgomery. We came through the door into the lilting beat of steel drums and laughter, and waved to casual friends. We passed the bar and took the narrow and aromatic aisle past the kitchen to the cozy back room where Yuki was already holding down our booth.

Lorraine called out, “Hey, y’all,” and brought over a frosty pitcher of beer, along with Yuki’s watermelon margarita. Yuki cannot hold her liquor, but that doesn’t stop her from drinking it.

I slid into the banquette next to Yuki, while Claire took the other side of the booth. Yuki lifted her glass of pink liquid mind-bender and took a slug.

“ Sip it! ” we shouted to her in unison.

Yuki snorted tequila up her nose and sputtered, “I have earned the right to get drunk. I made a brilliant opener and then the judge gets a call. His sick mother is fading fast. He adjourns court for the day. By tomorrow, Phil Hoffman will have read the transcript and will pick my bones clean in his opener.”

At that, Cindy, dependably the last to arrive, scooted into the booth next to Claire and bumped her hip, saying, “Give me a couple of inches here, girlfriend.”

Claire said, “Are you all going to listen to what happened to me today? Or do I have to fight for the talking stick? Because I will do it.”

“You go first,” Yuki said, holding up her empty glass to the light. Claire didn’t wait for anyone to object.

“I get called to go to this house in the Sacramento Delta,” she said. “A friend of mine called in a favor. So I drive to this swampland — can only get there by these veiny little roads and levees — and I find this hunting cabin.

“This old dude who lives there paid all his bills two weeks in advance and hasn’t been seen since. Now people are starting to ask, ‘What happened to Mr. Wingnut?’”

Cindy was thumbing the keys on her Crackberry while Claire told her story.

“There’s this long lump under the bedcovers,” Claire said, plucking the PDA out of Cindy’s hand, putting it in her pocket, treating Cindy like she was a little girl.

“Hey!” said Cindy.

I had to laugh — and I did.

Claire went on, ignoring Cindy pawing at her pocket and retrieving her phone. “I pull back the blankets and the dead man has been mummified by the heat and he’s holding a freakin’ AK forty-seven in his hands.”

Cindy stopped what she was doing and stared at Claire.

“He was dead? Holding an AK forty-seven?”

“He killed himself with that gun,” Claire said. “Sent my pulse rocketing into the low one-eighties. You can believe that.”

Cindy looked stricken.

“I’m okay, now, sugar,” said Claire. “It was just a scare.”

Cindy swiveled her head toward me, her blond curls bouncing, her clear blue eyes locking on mine.

“That text I just got was from Metro Emergency,” she said. “Another girl thinks she was raped.”

“Another girl? Thinks she was raped?”

“Linds, I feel it in my gut. A very wonky story is brewing. Do me a favor, will you? Give me a lift to the hospital.”

I GUNNED MY CAR along Columbus Avenue to Montgomery Street and past the Transamerica Pyramid, my siren whooping to clear a lane in the dinner-hour rush.

Beside me Cindy clung to her armrest and told me about Laura Rizzo, a woman who might have been drugged and assaulted the same night Avis Richardson was found wandering under a moonless sky fifteen miles north of the city.

I had to check out Cindy’s “wonky story.”

Two girls had been assaulted now, maybe three — and none of them had memories of the assaults? Could there be a connection to Avis Richardson? Or was I just wishing for a lead — any lead?

I brought Cindy up to speed on the Richardson case as I reached the intersection of Montgomery and Market streets. I came close to clipping a big-assed Lexus and ran onto the trolley tracks along Market. I jerked the wheel again and put the traffic jam behind me. Cindy was pale, but I just kept driving.

“A teenage girl was brought into Metro ER by passersby a couple of nights ago,” I told Cindy. “That’s off the record.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? Seriously.”

“Yes, Lindsay. O. Kay. It’s off the record.”

I nodded, took a hard right, and turned onto Mission on two wheels, flying past Yerba Buena Gardens on my left. You almost had to get promises from Cindy in writing. She’s honest, but what can I say? She’s a reporter. And we weren’t ready to churn the waters with a kidnapped baby story.

I still didn’t know what we had. Was Avis Richardson a victim of multiple savage crimes? Or had she killed her own child? I kept my foot on the gas as if that would actually bring the Richardson baby home.

“This teenager had recently given birth,” I went on, taking the car through the heart of the Hispanic area of town. We passed check-cashing holes-in-the-wall and cheap souvenir vendors selling T-shirts out of the old 1920s theaters under their cracked and faded marquees.

I turned right onto 26th, still talking. “But the thing is, Cindy, no baby was found. The girl didn’t remember the delivery, and now that the shock is wearing off and she might be able to talk to us, she won’t do it.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I swear I don’t know.”

Cindy made me promise to tell her whatever I could, whenever I could, on the record. I nodded yes as I turned left on Valencia and parked my old heap in front of the hospital.

CINDY AND I entered the crowded lobby of Metropolitan Hospital and found Cindy’s friend, Joyce Miller, waiting for us at the main desk. She was a dark-haired woman, maybe thirty-five, wearing a nurse’s uniform.

She pumped my hand with both of hers.

“Thanks for coming, Lindsay. Thanks so much.”

We followed Joyce down a number of branching linoleum-tiled corridors, around corners, and then through the ER, an obstacle course of gurneys and wheelchairs, before we came to a partitioned stall where we met Anne Bennett, a possible rape victim.

Ms. Bennett was a travel agent in her early forties. She looked as fatigued as if she’d been running on a treadmill for the past eight hours.

Her voice quavered as she said that she remembered taking a cab to her office this morning but she woke up behind a Dumpster in an alley a block from her house.

“I don’t remember a damned thing,” Ms. Bennett told me. “My blouse had been buttoned wrong. My pantyhose were gone, but I was still wearing my black pumps with the gold buckles. My handbag was on my chest and my phone and my wallet were still in it. Forty-four bucks. Just what I’d had.”

“And you remember nothing of the ten hours between leaving for work and waking up?”

“It was as if someone had turned off my lights,” Anne Bennett said, looking up at me with bloodshot eyes.