10th Anniversary - James Patterson [75]
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.
Chapter 102
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 side. 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