10th Anniversary (23 page)

“You girls want coffee and dessert?” she asked.

“Hell, yes,” I said. “We’re eating for four.”

Lorraine laughed and read off the dessert menu. I picked chocolate mud pie, and Claire went for a spiced-apple tart.

I called Cindy while we were drinking our coffee and left her a snarky message. I left another one when we paid the check, and then my cell phone battery died.

I don’t know why, but I wasn’t worried about Cindy.

I should have been. But I never saw it coming.

I GOT HOME at eight-something that evening, left my wet shoes on the doormat, and went inside. Martha came wiggling up to me, her fur still damp, and I bent to hug her and got my face washed for me.

I called out to Joe, “Hey, sweetie, thanks for walking Martha.”

I found him on the phone in the living room, teetering towers of papers stacked all around him. I heard him call the person on the phone “Bruno” and say something about containers, which meant he was talking to the director of Port of L.A. Security. This was Joe’s freelance job that was supposed to last a month but had been his steady paycheck for the better part of a year.

Joe waved at me, and I waved back and headed to the shower: a six-head, low-flow, spa-type contraption that made
me feel like royalty. I took some time in what I liked to call the car wash, lathered my hair with a lavender shampoo I love, and let my mind drift in the steam.

I toweled off with a man-size bath sheet and threw on my favorite pj’s—blue flannel with clouds. Joe came in and hugged and kissed me and we got into it a little. Then Joe remembered and said, “Conklin called.”

“When was that?”

“Just before you came in.”

“Did he say what was up?”

“Nope. Just ‘tell Lindsay to call’ and ‘can you believe the Niners, that dumb play in the last quarter?’ ”

I said, “I’d better call him.”

Joe grabbed my ass and I smacked his. I wriggled out of his arms, saying, “Later, buddy.”

I called Conklin from the bedside phone.

He picked up on the first ring. “Cin?”

“It’s Lindsay,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I can’t reach her,” he said. “She’s not picking up, not returning my calls.”

I didn’t like the sound of his voice. He was scared, and that scared me.

“She didn’t show up to dinner, Rich. I called her a couple of times, left messages. Maybe her phone died. Did you try her at the office?”

“Yeah. I’ll try her there again.”

“Call me back.”

I was hunting for my softy spa socks when Conklin called again.

“I got her voice mail, Linds. This isn’t like Cindy. I called QT. I’m going over there.”

“What are you thinking?” I asked him.

“I’m thinking this is probably unfounded panic on my part and she’s going to be blistering mad. But what can I say? I love the girl.”

“I’ll see you at QT’s,” I said.

I took off my pj’s and hung them on a hook on the back of the bathroom door.

I’D BEEN TO Quentin Tazio’s combination home and computer forensics lab many times, always when we were in a jam that required him to apply his skills in a strictly outside-the-box kind of a way.

His place is on Capp Street in the Mission, a former machine shop—squat, gray, two-story, and cement-faced with roll-up garage doors on the street level.

At nine-thirty at night, the streets were rockin’ with people going in and out of taquerias, galleries, restaurants, and bars. Traffic was clogged and impatient. A drunk peed against one of the young trees dotting the sidewalk.

As I parked my car parallel to Conklin’s, I told myself that Cindy was fine, that she’d just gotten involved in a story and lost track of the time. That said, Cindy pushed herself into
ugly situations and always worked against her fear, a trait we shared. But there was a difference between us.

I was a trained cop with a gun and a badge and a department behind me. Cindy had a press pass and a BlackBerry.

I put an SFPD card on the dash, then went to the doorway and pressed the button next to Tazio’s name.

QT’s digitized voice came through the speaker, and a second later I was buzzed in.

I hooked a left at the end of a narrow hallway and stepped into a vast, cold space lit by the glow of plasma screens. Monitors hung edge-to-edge on the walls, a built-in desktop went around three sides of the space, and there was a staircase in the middle of the concrete floor that went up to QT’s living quarters.

Conklin called out to me and I crossed to the far side of the room, where he was standing behind QT.

“We’re getting somewhere,” Conklin said.

QT grinned up at me with his large, bright choppers. His bald head gleamed. His long white fingers spanned the curving keyboard. He was good-looking in a naked-mole-rat kind of way.

“Cindy has a GPS in her phone,” QT told me, “but it’s not sending a signal. It’s either turned off or underwater. I had to dump her phone logs to find her last ping.”

Dump her phone logs without a warrant, I thought. Whatever it took to find Cindy, to know that she was okay.

Peering over QT’s shoulder, I took in his computer screen, a map of San Francisco dotted with flags standing for cellular tower locations.

The best geek in the state of California clicked on an icon that stood for a tower in the Tenderloin. A circle appeared on the screen. He clicked on another tower, and then a third, and overlapping circles came up as he triangulated Cindy’s last cell phone signal. I saw one small irregular patch that was common to all three towers.

QT said, “I can get accuracy up to two hundred and fifty meters. The location of that last ping isn’t far from here. This is Turk,” QT said, pointing with the cursor.

“Turk and what?” Conklin asked, completely focused on the screen. “Turk and Jones?”

“Yeppers. You nailed it, Rich.”

“That’s where that cab company is.”

“What cab company?” I asked. “What’s this about?”

“Quick Express Taxi,” Quentin said, zooming in on the intersection, rolling his cursor over it.

“Her phone isn’t underwater,” Conklin said. “It’s underground.”

I didn’t understand any of this, but I read the urgency in my partner’s face.

“Let’s go,” he said to me.

I’D GOTTEN INTO the passenger seat of Conklin’s unmarked car and barely closed the door when he jammed on the gas. The car leapt forward, slid sideways, then sent up a wake as we sped over the slick pavement.

Weaving around double-parked cars and inebriated pedestrians, Rich negotiated the six-minute drive through the traffic-choked streets toward an intersection in one of the roughest blocks in the Mission.

Conklin talked as he drove, telling me that Cindy had been poking around in taxi garages for a minivan cab with a movie ad on the back. So far, one vague sighting by one of the three rape victims was the slim and only clue to the identity of the rapist.

“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.