Toys - James Patterson [88]
I still didn’t know anything about what had happened to this teenager. Had she given birth alone and left the baby in a gas station bathroom? Had her child been snatched?
We couldn’t even get the FBI involved until we knew if a crime had been committed.
While I sat at Avis’s bedside, Conklin went back to the Hall and threw himself into the hands-on work of the case. He reached into the missing-persons databases and ran searches for Avis Richardson, or any missing Caucasian teenage girls who matched her description.
He interviewed the couple who had brought Avis to the hospital and established the approximate area where they had found her: Lake Merced, near Brotherhood Way.
Working with the K-9 unit, Conklin went out into the field. Cops and hounds looked for the blood trail Avis Richardson had surely left behind. If the house where she’d given birth could be located, there’d be evidence there—and maybe the truth.
As the hounds worked the scent, the crime lab processed the plastic raincoat Avis had been wearing. It would hold prints, for sure, but a few dozen people at the hospital had handled it already. It also didn’t make any sense that she was wearing a raincoat but no clothes.
Another mystery.
I kept vigil with a sleeping Avis. And the longer I sat, the more depressed I became. Where were the worried friends and parents? Why wasn’t someone looking for this young girl?
Her eyelids fluttered. “Avis?” I said.
“Huh?” she answered. Then she closed her eyes again.
I took a break at around four in the afternoon. I pushed dollar bills into a vending machine and ate something with peanut butter and oats in it. Washed it down with a cup of bitter coffee.
I contacted a dozen hospitals to see if a motherless baby had come in, and I called Child Protective Services as well. I came up with nothing more than a mounting heap of frustration.
I borrowed Dr. Rifkin’s laptop and logged onto ViCAP, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension program database, to see what they had on the abduction of pregnant women.
I found a few crimes against pregnant women—domestic violence, mainly—but no cases that resembled this one.
After my fruitless Internet crawl, I went back to the ICU and slept in the big vinyl recliner beside Avis’s bed. I woke up when she was wheeled out of the ICU and down the hall to a private room.
I called Brady, told him that we were still nowhere. My voice sounded defensive to my own ears.
“Anything on the baby?”
“Brady, this girl hasn’t said boo.”
When I hung up with Brady, my phone buzzed with an incoming call from Conklin.
“Talk to me,” I said.
“The hounds found her trail.”
I was instantly hopeful. I gripped my little phone, almost strangling it to death.
“She bled for about a mile,” Conklin told me. “She put down a circular path at the southernmost part of Lake Merced.”
“That sounds like she was looking for help. Desperately looking.”
“The hounds are still on it, Lindsay, but the searchable area is expanding. They’re working a grid on the golf course now. The gun-club area is next. This could take years.”
“I haven’t found anything in missing persons,” I said.
“Me neither. I’m in the car calling people with the name of Richardson in San Francisco. There are over four hundred listings.”
“I’ll help with that. You start at A. Richardson, I’ll start at Z. Richardson, and we’ll work toward the middle,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the letter M.”
When I hung up with Richie, Avis opened her pretty green eyes. She focused them on me.
“Hey,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
I had a white-knuckle grip on the rails of her bed.
“Where am I?” the girl asked me. “What happened to me?”
I quashed the words Ah, shit, and told Avis Richardson what little I knew.
“We’re trying to find your baby,” I said.
Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
A Preview of 10th Anniversary
Extinction
Toy
Prologue: 7-4 Day
Book One: Fall from Grace
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter