Getting things done was Yuki’s specialty. Don’t get in her way when she’s in gear. Even if she’s in the wrong gear.
“Yuki, wait,” I called as she rushed out the door. I turned to Claire and saw that she was holding up what used to be called a foundation garment. It was bony and forbidding.
“I don’t mind wearing a dress that makes me look like a cupcake, but how in the hell am I supposed to get into this?”
“I love my dress,” said Cindy, fingering the peach silk organza. First bridesmaid in the world to express that sentiment, but Cindy was terminally lovesick. She turned her pretty face toward me and said dreamily, “You should get ready.”
Two yards of creamy satin slid out of the garment bag. I wriggled into the strapless Vera Wang confection, then stood with my sister in front the long, free-standing mirror: a pair of tall, brown-eyed blondes, looking so much like our dad.
“Grace Kelly never looked so good,” said Cat, her eyes welling up.
“Dip your head, gorgeous,” said Cindy.
She fastened her pearls around my neck.
I did a little pirouette, and Claire caught my hand and twirled me under her arm. She said, “Believe it, Linds? I’m going to dance at your wedding.”
She didn’t say finally, but she was right to think it, having watched me live through my roller-coaster long-distance romance with Joe, which was punctuated by his moving to San Francisco to be with me, my house burning down, a couple of near-death experiences, and a huge diamond engagement ring that I’d kept in a drawer for most of a year.
“Thanks for keeping the faith,” I said.
“I wouldn’t call it faith, darling,” Claire cracked. “I never expected to see a miracle, let alone be part of one.”
I gave her a playful jab to the arm. She ducked and feinted. The door opened and Yuki came in with my bouquet—a lavish bunch of peonies and roses tied with baby-blue streamers.
“This hankie belonged to my grandmother,” Cindy said, tucking a bit of lace into my cleavage, checking off the details. “Old, new, borrowed, blue. You’re good.”
“I cued up the music, Linds,” said Yuki. “We’re on.”
My God.
Joe and I were really getting married.
RAIN WAS BATTERING the hood and sheeting down the windshield as I pulled my ancient Explorer into the lot next to the Medical Examiner’s office on Harriet Street, right behind the Hall of Justice. I had some anxiety about returning to work after taking time off to get married.
In a few minutes, I was going to have some catching up to do, and then there was this new fact I would have to deal with.
I would be reporting to a new lieutenant.
I was prepared for that—as much as I could be.
I pulled up the collar of my well-used blue blazer and made a wild, wet dash for the back entrance of the Hall, the granite building that housed the Justice Department, the Criminal Court, two jails, and the Southern Station of the SFPD.
I flashed my badge to Kevin at the back door, then took the stairs at a jog. When I got to the third floor, I opened the stairwell door to the Homicide Division and pushed through the double-hinged gate to the squad room.
It was a zoo.
I said “Hey, there” to Brenda, who stood up and gave me a hug and a paper towel.
“I wish you so much happiness,” she said.
I thanked Brenda, promised wedding pictures, and mopped up my face and hair with the paper towel. I took a visual inventory of who was on the job at 7:45 a.m.
The bull pen was packed.
The night shift was straightening up, sinking refuse into trash baskets, and a half dozen day-shift cops were waiting for their desks. Last time I was here, Jacobi still occupied what we laughingly call the corner office: a ten-square-foot glass cubicle overlooking the James Lick Freeway.
Since then, Jacobi had been bumped upstairs as Chief of Police, and the new guy, Jackson Brady, had scored the lieutenant’s job.
I had a little history with Brady. He had transferred to San Francisco from Miami PD only a month before, and in his first weeks as a floater, he had shown heroism in the field. I worked with him on that explosive, multiple-homicide case, which put him on the short list for Jacobi’s old job.
I’d been offered the job, too, thanks very much, but I’d turned it down. I’d already held down the corner office for a few years until I got sick of the administrative overload—the budgets, payrolls, meetings with everyone, and layers of bureaucratic bull.
Brady could have the job with my blessings.
I just hoped he’d let me do mine.
I saw Brady through the walls of his cube. His white-blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and he wore a shoulder holster over a starched blue cotton shirt that stretched across his massive chest.
He looked up and signaled to me to come to his office. As I got there, he hung up the phone. Reaching across the desk that was once mine, he shook my hand and congratulated me.
“Are you using Boxer or Molinari?” he asked me.
“Boxer.”
“Well, have a seat, Sergeant Boxer,” he said, waving me toward the chair across from his desk. “I got a call from Major Case Division about ten minutes ago. They’re short on manpower and asked for help. I want you and Conklin to check it out.”
“The case is a homicide?” I asked.
“Could be. Or maybe not. Right now it’s an open case. Your open case.”
What kind of bull was this?
Step out of line for a couple of weeks and the only open case was a spillover from another unit? Or was Brady testing me—alpha-dog management style?
“Conklin has the case file,” Brady said. “Keep me in the loop. And welcome back, Boxer.”
Welcome back indeed.
I showed myself out, feeling like all eyes in the squad were on me as I crossed the room to find my partner.
DR. ARI RIFKIN was intense—and busy, judging from the incessant buzz of her pager. Still, she seemed eager to brief me and my partner, Richard Conklin, aka Inspector Hottie. Conklin scribbled in his notebook as Dr. Rifkin talked.
“Her name is Avis Richardson, age fifteen. She was hemorrhaging when she was brought into the ER two hours ago,” the doctor said, wiping her wire-rimmed specs with her coattail.
“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 o
n 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 this girl’s baby would not be found alive.
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 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Book Two: The Secret Life of Skunks
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
&n
bsp; Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Book Three: The European Tour
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Book Four: Toys, Toys, Toys for All Good Little Girls and Boys
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Epilogue: A Beautiful Time to be Alive
About the Authors
Books by James Patterson
Copyright
About the Authors
JAMES PATTERSON has had more New York Times bestsellers than any other writer, ever, according to Guinness World Records. Since his first novel won the Edgar Award in 1977, James Patterson’s books have sold more than 205 million copies. He is the author of the Alex Cross novels, the most popular detective series of the past twenty-five years, including Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider. Mr. Patterson also writes the bestselling Women’s Murder Club novels, set in San Francisco, and the top-selling New York detective series of all time, featuring Detective Michael Bennett.