The 6th Target - James Patterson [33]
It was Jacobi. “A woman just called saying her daughter is missing. The child is five. Has long blond hair.”
The caller’s name was Sylvia Brodsky, and she was hysterical. She’d lost track of her daughter, Alicia, while shopping for groceries. Alicia must have wandered away, Mrs. Brodsky told the 911 operator, adding that her daughter was autistic.
Alicia Brodsky could barely speak a word.
Not long after Jacobi’s call, Sylvia Brodsky came to the hospital and claimed her daughter, but Conklin and I weren’t there to see it.
We were back in our Crown Vic, talking it over, me taking responsibility for jumping the gun, saying, “I should have been more forceful when I told the Tylers that maybe we’d found their daughter, but we couldn’t be sure. But I did say that we needed them to make a positive ID, didn’t I, Rich? You heard me.”
“They stopped listening after you said, ‘We may have found your daughter.’ Hey, it all clicked, Lindsay. She said her name was Maddy.”
“Well. Something like that.”
“The red shoes,” he insisted. “How many five-year-old blond-haired kids have blue coats and red patent leather shoes?”
“Two, anyway.” I sighed.
Back at the Hall, we interrogated Calvin for two hours, squeezed him until he wasn’t smirking anymore. We looked at the digital photos still inside his camera, and we examined the photos Conklin had found in his bedroom.
There were no pictures of Madison Tyler, but we kept our hopes up until the last frame that Calvin might have accidentally photographed the kidnapping in progress.
That maybe he’d caught the black van in his lens.
But the Memory Stick in his camera showed that he hadn’t been taking pictures at Alta Plaza Park yesterday.
Patrick Calvin made me sick, but the law doesn’t recognize causing revulsion as a criminal offense.
So we kicked him. Turned him loose.
Conklin and I interviewed three more registered sex offenders that day, three average-looking white males you’d never pick out of a crowd as sexual predators.
Three men whose alibis checked out.
I finally called it quits at around seven p.m. Emotionally speaking, my tank was dry.
I entered my apartment, threw my arms around Martha, and promised her a run after my shower to rinse the skeezy images out of my brain.
There was a note from Martha’s sitter on the kitchen counter. I went to the fridge, cracked open a Corona, and took a long pull from the bottle before reading it.
Lindsay, hi, when I didn’t see your car, I took Martha for a walk! :( Remember I told you my parents are letting me have the house in Hermosa Beach through Christmas? I should take Martha with me. It would be good for her,
Lindsay!!!
Let me know. K.
I felt sick knowing that I’d abandoned my dog without calling her sitter. And I knew Karen was right. I wasn’t doing Martha any good right now. My new hours included double shifts and all-work weekends. I hadn’t taken a real break since the ferry shooting.
I stooped down for a kiss, lifted Martha’s silky ears, looked into her big brown eyes.
“You want to run on the beach, Boo?”
I picked up the phone and dialed Karen’s number.
“Excellent,” she said. “I’ll pick her up in the morning.”
Chapter 47
IT WAS MONDAY MORNING, half past dawn.
Conklin and I were at the construction site below Fort Point, the huge brick fort that had been built on the edge of the San Francisco peninsula during the Civil War and now stood in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge.
A damp breeze kicked up whitecaps on the bay, making the fifty-degree temperature feel more like thirty-five.
I was shaking, either because of the windchill factor or from my sickening sense of what we were about to find.
I zipped up my fleece-lined jacket, put my hands inside my pockets as the whipping wind brought moisture to my eyes.
A welder who was working on the bridge retrofit came toward us with containers of coffee from the “garbage truck,” a food wagon outside the chain-link