James Patterson - 12th of Never

She was astonished by this new version of Lynnette Lagrande, who was not only a changeling but an ugly person through and through.

Lynnette said, “I said , pay attention, Yuki.”

Yuki considered launching a couple of stinging come-backs, but decided to take the high road. She ignored the insult and again asked Lynnette Lagrande to tell her what she knew about Lily’s disappearance and whereabouts between the first of March the previous year and last week.

Lynnette spoke with her trademark good diction and grammar, and she named names. Yuki put her notebook away and slammed the lid on her briefcase. She said, “I’ll get back to you.”

“When? How long do I have to stay here?” Lynnette called after Yuki as she exited the interrogation room.

Yuki went out into the hallway, found people stacked three deep at the elevator bank, and headed down the fire stairs. When she got to the third floor, she opened the door leading to the homicide squad room.

Brenda greeted her with a smile and said, “The boss is in.”

Yuki thanked Brenda, breezed through the gate, and crossed the bull pen to the corner office. She knocked on the glass door and Lieutenant Jackson Brady got to his feet, opened the door, and asked Yuki to come in.

“Are you okay?”

Yuki took the seat across from Brady and said, “You’ve got to hear this.”

Brady punched all his phone lines so that no calls could come through.

“You’ve got my full attention,” he said.

“Lynnette Lagrande just told me who was keeping Lily Herman for the last year, and I’ve got their full names. Marcia Kohl, née Kransky, and Alan Kohl.”

Brady typed the names into a known-criminals law enforcement database.

“They’re low-level jerkoffs. Insurance fraud. Petty theft. Last known address was Bolinas,” he said.

“Right. Well, according to Lynnette, they did some insurance schemes with Keith Herman. They slipped in restaurants. Fell down in front of expensive cars that were slowing for traffic lights. Herman went after the insurance companies, split the take with the Kohls.”

“Okay, here we go,” said Brady. “Alan Kohl, insurance fraud, charges dismissed August 2007. Attorney, Keith Herman.”

“That was Keith Herman working his way up to full-blown dirtbag criminal defense attorney,” Yuki said.

“So how does Lily Herman fit into this?”

“Lynnette says she overheard Keith talking to the Kohls about babysitting Lily. She presumes he wanted to get the child out of the house and away from Jennifer. Then Jennifer turned up in garbage bags and Keith was arrested. Lynnette thinks the Kohls continued to babysit and charge Keith for their services.”

Brady printed out the Kohls’ address, then said to Yuki, “We’ve got probable cause.”

“Yes, we do.”

“Want to ask Arthur Nussbaum for a search warrant?”

Chapter 85

YUKI SAT IN the passenger seat beside Brady, who was driving the squad car, responding to radio calls, and taking quick glances in the rearview mirror at the cop cars behind him, bumping up the narrow dirt road that ran out from the town toward the far-flung farmlands beyond it.

They were just outside Bolinas, a town of 1,600 people about thirty miles north on the coast, known for its remote location and reclusive townspeople, who habitually removed highway signs to keep strangers out.

Thickets of trees lined the road, and behind the trees were private properties, separated from each other by fences and high hedges. Brady nodded his head toward a driveway coming up on the left, marked by a couple of garbage cans and a dinged-up mailbox.

He said to Yuki, “That’s it.” Then he took the mike and told the cars behind him to slow and prepare to turn.

Yuki leaned forward and gripped the armrest. She had never been as humiliated as when her case against Keith Herman had blown up in her face. Far worse, the charges against him had been dropped, and now Keith Herman, presumed innocent, was as free as thought.

Yuki didn’t know what Keith Herman had to do with hiding his daughter, but she had an idea. Maybe Lily had witnessed or heard something that would prove her father had killed his wife. With luck, the Kohls would fill in the blanks.

Brady turned up the overgrown driveway and drove uphill to a clearing, where an old wood-shingled house clung to the side of the hill.

He said to Yuki, “Stay here.”

She said, “Oh, yeah, right.”

“I mean it, Yuki. I don’t know what we’re going to find.”

She got out of the car.

“Watch me. Stay with me,” Brady said.

Yuki said, “Okay,” and trudged behind Brady and four cops up the weedy lawn and broken walkway to the front door.

Brady knocked and announced, repeated both actions, and then footfalls could be heard coming toward them. The door creaked open and a good-looking man of fifty said, “What do you want?”

“Alan Kohl, we have a warrant to search your premises. Is anyone else at home?” Brady asked.

“My wife, Marcia. She’s in the kitchen. What’s this about?”

“It’s about Lily Herman,” Brady said.

“Lily who? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

Yuki handed the warrant to Kohl. Then she and the cops entered the house.

“Don’t touch anything. Don’t mess the place up,” Alan Kohl said. “You need something, just ask me.”

The old two-bedroom house smelled of mold and was almost pathologically neat. Boxes and cartons were stacked against the walls, counters were clean, and closets were filled with folded linens and properly hung clothing. Yuki stayed with Brady until he went upstairs, but then, following a hunch, she went down a flight of wooden steps to a half basement that ran under the back of the house.

Chapter 86

THE DARK HALF BASEMENT had a low ceiling, a dirt floor, three walls lined with shelves, and a two-door metal utility cabinet backed up against the fourth wall.

Yuki opened the cabinet doors expecting to see neat shelves of tools, but the cabinet was empty. The back of the cabinet had been replaced with a rectangle of painted plywood fitted with a hook on one side and hinges on the other. Yuki unhooked the plywood board and swung it open.

There was nothing behind the board—truly nothing but air. Yuki reached into her jacket pocket and took out her keys. She had a flashlight on her key chain, a small one with a pretty bright LED beam. She flashed the light into the back of the closet and saw a tunnel, seemingly endless, that was cut into the hill.

Yuki took out her phone and called Brady.

“Come to the basement,” she said. “I think I found something.”

The opening was four feet high by three feet wide by too deep for the flashlight to find the end of it. Yuki stooped, pulled her elbows in tight to her sides, and stepped into the rabbit hole.

She followed her flashlight’s beam, and after about twelve feet the tunnel took a soft turn to the left and joined a concrete conduit—it looked like a drainage pipe. Yuki aimed her light and saw that down at the end of the conduit was a metal door.

Her phone rang. Jackson.

“I’m in the basement. Where are you?” he said, sounding both annoyed and worried.

“There’s a tunnel, Jackson. Open the utility cabinet.”

Yuki knew she should wait for him, but she had to keep going. The door at the end of the conduit had a latch with an open padlock dangling from it. She lifted the padlock, put it on the floor, and opened the metal portal.

There was an immediate rush of air from a vent overhead. Yuki put her hand on the wall and flipped a switch. Light flooded the tiny room from an overhead fixture, illuminating every square inch of it.

The cell was six feet by six feet, five feet high, with cement walls. There was a rough wool blanket and a thin uncovered pillow on a narrow cot up against the wall. Yuki saw a bucket in one corner with a toilet seat on it, a small flat-screen TV on a wooden crate, and a hook on the wall with a rag of a nightgown hanging from it. Her eyes went to a child’s crayon drawing of a kitten on the opposite wall, which bore the words POKEY BY LILY.