The 6th Target (9 page)

I looked for references to Henry Tyler, and Paola referred to him infrequently, but when she did, she called him “Mr. B.”

However, she embellished the initial of someone she called “G.”

Paola reported charged looks and sightings of “G,” but I got the clear impression that whoever he was, she was more anticipating having sex with “G” than actually having it.

The person mentioned most often in Paola’s diary was Maddy. That’s where I really saw Paola’s love for the child. She’d even pasted some of Madison’s drawings and poems onto the pages.

I read nothing about plans, assignations, or vengeance.

I closed Paola’s little red book, thinking it was the journal of an innocent abroad.

Or maybe she’d planted this diary to make us think so.

Henry Tyler followed Conklin and me out to the front step. He grabbed my arm.

“I appreciate your downplaying this for my wife, but I understand why you’re here. Something may have already happened to my daughter. Please, keep me up to date on everything. And I insist that you tell me the truth.”

I gave the distraught Henry Tyler my cell phone number and promised to check in often during the day. Techs were wiring up the Tylers’ phone lines, and inspectors from the Major Crimes Squad were canvassing the houses on Washington Street when Conklin and I left.

We drove to Alta Plaza Park, a historic, terraced gem of a place with breathtaking views.

Along with the nannies and toddlers and dog owners recreating within the park’s tranquil greens were cops doing interviews.

Conklin and I joined the canvass, and between us all, we talked to every nanny and child who knew Madison, including one nanny with the initials ME, the friend Paola had mentioned in her diary.

Madeline Ellis broke into tears, telling us about her fear for Paola and Maddy.

“It’s like everything I know has been turned upside down,” she said. “This place is supposed to be safe!”

Madeline rocked the carriage with a baby inside, her voice choking as she said, “She’s a nice girl. And she’s very young for her age.”

She told us that the “G” in Paola’s diary was George, last name unknown, a waiter at the Rhapsody Café. He had flirted with Paola, and she with him — but Madeline was positive that Paola and George had never had a date.

We found George Henley working the tables outside the Rhapsody Café on Fillmore, and we questioned him. We drilled him, tried to scare him, but my instincts told me he wasn’t involved in a kidnapping or a murder.

He was a kid, just a regular kid, working his way through night school, trying to get his degree in fine arts.

George wiped his hands on his apron, took Paola’s driver’s license from my hand, looked at her picture.

“Oh, sure. I’ve seen her around here with her girlfriends,” he said. “But until this minute, I never knew her name.”

THE SUN WAS GOING DOWN on Pacific Heights as we left the apartment of a handyman named Willy Evans who lived over the garage of one of the Tylers’ neighbors. Evans was a creep with unbelievably dirty fingernails and two dozen terrariums inhabited by snakes and lizards. But as slithery as Willy Evans was, he had a solid alibi for the time Madison and Paola were abducted.

Conklin and I buttoned our coats and joined the canvass of the neighborhood, showing pictures of Paola and Madison to homeowners just returning from work.

We scared the hell out of a lot of innocent people and didn’t get a single lead in return.

Back at the Hall, we converted our notes and thoughts into a report, noting the interviews we’d done and that the Devines, a family living next door to the Tylers, were on vacation before, during, and after the abduction and weren’t interviewed, and that Paola Ricci’s friends thought she was a saint.

A deep sadness was weighing on me.

The only witness to the abduction had told Jacobi that she’d heard a pop and saw blood explode on the inside of the rear window of the van at nine this morning.

Did the blood belong to Paola?

Or had the child put up a struggle and gotten a bullet to shut her up?

I said good night to Conklin and drove to the hospital.

Claire was sleeping when I came into her room.

She opened her eyes, said, “Hi, sugar,” and fell back asleep. I sat with her for a while, leaned back in the leatherette armchair and even dozed fitfully for a moment or two before kissing my friend’s cheek and telling her good-bye.

I parked my Explorer on the uphill slope a few doors from my apartment and got out my keys, thoughts of Madison Tyler still cycling through my mind as I walked up the hill.

I had to blink a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

Joe was waiting outside my apartment, sitting on the steps, a leash looped around his wrist, an arm around Martha.

He stood and I walked into his big hug, swayed with him in the moon shadows.

It felt so good to be in his arms.

AS FAR AS I KNEW, Joe had never found out about my misadventure in Washington, and now didn’t seem like the time to tell him.

“You’ve fed Martha?” I asked, hugging him closer, reaching my arms up around his neck for his kiss.

“Walked her, too,” he murmured. “And I bought a roasted chicken and some vegetables for the human folk. Wine’s in the fridge.”

“Someday, I’m going to walk into my apartment and shoot you by accident.”

“You wouldn’t do that, would you, Blondie?”

I pulled back, smiled up at his face, saying, “No, I wouldn’t do it, Joe.”

“You’re my girl.”

Then he kissed me again, a true toe curler, and my body melted against his. We walked up the stairs to my apartment, Martha barking and herding us together, making us laugh so hard we were weak by the time we got to the top floor.

As was our habit . . . the food had to wait.

Joe took off my clothes and his, turned on the shower until the temperature was just right, and once we were both inside the stall, put my hands on the wall and washed me gently and slowly, working me up until I wanted to scream. He wrapped me in a bath sheet and walked me to my bed, lowered me down, turned on the small lamp by the night table, the one with the soft pink light. He unwrapped me as if this were our first time together, as if he were just now discovering my body.

And that gave me the time to admire his broad chest, the way the pattern curls led my eyes downward — and when I reached out to touch him, he was ready.

“Just lie back,” he said into my ear.

The brilliant thing about going so long without Joe was that when I was with him, there was the element of “the unknown” along with the safety of familiarity.

I lay back on the pillows, my palms turned up, and Joe drove me crazy as he kissed me everywhere, ran teasing fingers over hot spots and pressed his hard body against mine.

I was dissolving in the heat, but as much as I was dying for him, something else was going on in my head. I was fighting my feelings for Joe, and I didn’t know why.

Then the answer came:
I don’t want to do this
.

I FELT
CRAZY
, wanting Joe and not wanting him at the same time.

I rationalized at first that I was still swimming in worry for Madison and Paola, but what came to mind was my shame at showing up at Joe’s place nearly two weeks ago, needing him so much, feeling as though I’d gone where I didn’t belong.

He was lying beside me now, his hand on the plane of my belly.

“What is it, Lindsay?”

I shook my head —
No, nothing’s wrong
— but Joe turned me toward him, made me look into his deep blue eyes.

“I had a horrible day,” I told him.

“Sure,” he said, “that’s not new. But your mood is.”

I felt tears spring from my eyes, and that embarrassed me. I didn’t want to be vulnerable with Joe. Not now anyway.

“Start talking, Blondie,” he said.

I rolled toward him and put my arm over his chest, tucked my head under his jaw. “I can’t take this, Joe.”

“I know, I know how you feel. I want to move here, but it’s not the right time.”

My breathing slowed as he talked about the current state of the war, next year’s elections, the bombings in major cities, and the focus on Homeland Security.

At some point, I stopped listening. I got out of bed and put on a robe.

“Are you coming back?” Joe asked.

“There it is,” I said. “I’m
always
asking myself that question about you.”

Joe started to protest, but I said, “Let me talk.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, said, “As good as this can be, that’s how
bad
it is because I can’t count on you, Joe. I’m too old for jack-in-the-box love.”

“Linds —”

“You know I’m right. I don’t know when I’ll be seeing you, if I’ll reach you when I call. Then you’re here, and then you’re gone, and I’m left behind, missing you.

“We have no time to relax together, be normal, have a life. We’ve talked and talked about your moving here, but we both know it’s impossible.”

“Lindsay, I swear —”

“I can’t wait for the next administration or the war to be over. Do you understand?”

He was sitting up now, legs over the side of the bed, so much love in his face I had to turn away.

“I love you, Lindsay. Please, let’s not fight. I have to leave in the morning.”

“You have to leave
now
, Joe,” I heard myself say. “It kills me to say this, but I don’t want any more well-intentioned promises,” I said. “Let’s end this, okay? We had a great time. Please? If you love me, let me go.”

After Joe kissed me good-bye, I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling for a long time, tears soaking my pillow. I wondered what the hell I had done.

IT WAS SATURDAY NIGHT, almost midnight. Cindy was sleeping in the bedroom of her new apartment at the Blakely Arms — alone — when she was awoken by a woman shouting her lungs out in Spanish on a floor somewhere over her head.

A door slammed, there were running footsteps, then a hinge creaked and another door slammed, this one closer to Cindy’s apartment.

Maybe it was the door to the stairwell?

She heard more shouting, this time down on the street. Men’s voices rose up to her third-floor windows, then there was the sound of scuffling.

Cindy was having thoughts she’d never had in her old apartment building.

Was she safe here?

Was the great buy she got on this place a poor bargain after all?

She threw back the covers, left her bedroom, and went out to her new airy living room and foyer. She peeked through the peephole — saw no one. She twisted the knob of the dead bolt, left-right-left-right, before going to her desk.

She ran her hands through her hair, pulled it up into a band.
Jeez. Her hands were shaking
.

Maybe it wasn’t just the nightlife in the building. Maybe she was giving herself the creeps because of the story she was writing about child abduction. Since Henry Tyler’s phone call, she’d been surfing the Web, reading more than she’d ever known about the thousands of children who were abducted in the United States every year.

Most of those kids were taken by family members, found, and returned. But a few hundred children every year were strangled, stabbed, or buried alive by their abductors.

And the majority of those kids were murdered within the first hours of their abduction.

Statistically it was far more likely that Madison had been grabbed by an extortionist than a child-molesting, murdering freak. The only problem with that scenario was that it left a huge, chilling question in her mind.

Why hadn’t the Tylers been contacted about paying a ransom?

Cindy was halfway back to her bedroom when the doorbell rang. She froze, heart jumping inside her chest.
She didn’t know a soul in this building
.

So who could be ringing her doorbell?

The bell rung again, insistently.

Clutching her robe, Cindy went to the door and peered through the peephole. She couldn’t believe who was peering back.

It was Lindsay.

And she looked like hell.

I WAS ABOUT TO TURN AND GO when Cindy opened the door in her pink PJs, her curls rubber banded into a pom-pom on the top of her head. She was looking at me as if she’d just seen the dead.

“You okay?” I asked.

“
Me
? I’m fine, Lindsay. I live here, remember? What’s wrong with
you
?”

“I would’ve called,” I said, hugging my friend, using the moment to try to get a grip on myself. But clearly Cindy had scanned and memorized the shock on my face. And frankly she didn’t look so good herself. “But I didn’t know I was coming until I was here.”

“Come in, and for God’s sake, sit down,” she said, staring at me anxiously as I made for the couch.

Cardboard cartons were stacked against the walls, and layers of Bubble Wrap wafted around my feet.

“What’s happened, Lindsay? As Yuki would say, ‘You look like you’ve been dragged through a duck’s ass.’ ”

I managed a weak laugh. “That’s about how I feel.”

“What can I get you? Tea? Maybe something stronger.”

“Tea would be great.”

I fell back onto the sofa cushions, and a few minutes later, Cindy returned from the kitchen, pulled up a footstool to sit on, and handed me a mug. “Talk to me,” she said.

No joke, Cindy was a perfect paradox: all pink ruffles and curls on the outside, never leaving home without lipstick and the perfect shoes, but inside that girlie-girl was a bulldog who would get a grip on your leg and hang on until you had no choice but to tell her what she wanted to know.

I suddenly felt idiotic. Just seeing Cindy changed my mood for the better, and I no longer wanted to open myself up and talk about Joe.

“I wanted to see your apartment.”

“Give. Me. A. Break.”

“You’re relentless —”