Toys - James Patterson [87]
“From the looks of her, she delivered a baby within the last thirty-six hours. She got herself into grave trouble by running and falling down—too much activity too soon after giving birth.”
“How’d she get here?” Conklin asked.
“A couple—uh, here are their names. John and Sarah McCann. Found Avis lying in the street. Thought she’d been hit by a car. They told the police that they don’t know her at all.”
“Was Avis conscious when she came in?” I asked Dr. Rifkin.
“She was in shock. Going in and out of lucidity—mostly out. We sedated her, transfused her, gave her a D and C. Right now she’s in guarded but stable condition.”
“When can we talk with her?” Conklin asked.
“Give me a moment,” said the doctor.
She parted the curtains around the stall of the ICU where her patient was lying. I saw through the opening that the girl was young, white, and had lank auburn hair. An IV line was in her arm, and a vital-signs machine blinked her stats on a monitor.
Dr. Rifkin exchanged a few words with her patient, then came out and said, “She says that she lost her baby. But given her state of mind, I don’t know if she means that the baby died, or that she misplaced it.”
“Did she have a handbag with her?” I asked. “Did she have any kind of ID?”
“She was only wearing a thin plastic raincoat. Dime-store variety.”
“We’ll need the raincoat,” I said. “And we need her statement.”
“Give it a shot, Sergeant,” said Dr. Rifkin.
Avis Richardson looked impossibly young to be a mother. She also looked as though she’d been dragged behind a truck. I noted the bruises and scrapes on her arms, her cheek, her palms, her chin.
I pulled up a chair and touched her arm.
“Hi, Avis,” I said. “My name is Lindsay Boxer. I’m with the police department. Can you hear me?”
“Yuh-huh,” she said.
She half opened her green eyes, then closed them again. I pleaded with her under my breath to stay awake. I had to find out what happened to her. And by taking this case, Conklin and I had charged ourselves with finding her baby.
Avis opened her eyes again, and I asked a dozen basic questions: Where do you live? What’s your phone number? Who is the baby’s father? Who are your parents? But I might as well have been talking to a department-store dummy. Avis Richardson kept nodding off without answering. So after a half an hour of that, I got up and gave my chair to Conklin.
To say that my partner has “a way with women” is to play up his charm and all-American good looks, and cheapen his real gift for getting people to trust him.
I said, “Rich, you’re on deck. Go for it.”
He nodded, sat down, and said to Avis in his calm, manly voice, “My name is Rich Conklin. I work with Sergeant Boxer. We need to find your baby, Avis. Every minute that passes puts your little one in more danger. Please, talk to me. We really need your help.”
The girl’s eyes seemed unfocused. Her gaze shifted from Conklin, to me, to the door, to the IV lead in her arm. Then she said to Conklin, “A couple of months ago… I called the number. Help for pregnant girls? A man… he spoke with an accent. French accent. But… it wasn’t authentic. I met them… outside my school…”
“Them?”
“Two men. Their car was a blue four-door? And when I woke up, I was in a bed. I saw the baby,” she said, tears gathering in her eyes and spilling over. “It was a little boy.”
And now my heart was breaking apart.
What the hell was this crime? Baby trafficking? It was outrageous. It was a sin. Make that a lot of sins. I tallied up two counts of felony kidnapping before we even knew the fate of the baby.
Conklin said, “I want to hear the whole story from the beginning. Tell me what you remember. Okay, Avis?”
I couldn’t be sure, but it might have been that Avis Richardson was talking to herself. She said, “I saw my baby… then, I was on the street. Alone. In the dark.”
I STAYED AT Avis Richardson’s bedside for the next eight hours, hoping she’d wake up for real and tell me what had happened to her and to her newborn. Time passed. Her sleep only deepened. And every minute that went by made me more certain that