Women's Murder Club [06] The 6th Target Read online

  “I had some blood work done,” said Claire. “And Miss Cindy, as usual, is right.”

  “Ha!” Cindy cried out.

  Claire said, “If I hadn’t been in this hospital, I probably wouldn’t have even known I was pregnant until I started having contractions.”

  We were all yelling now. “What did you say?” “You’re not putting us on?” “How far along are you?”

  “The sonogram shows that my little one is fine,” said Claire, serene as a Buddha. “My wonder child!”

  Chapter 56

  I HAD TO PULL MYSELF AWAY from the celebration, overdue as I was for Tracchio’s meeting back at the Hall. As I entered his office, the chief was offering leather-upholstered armchairs to the Tylers, while Jacobi, Conklin, and Macklin dragged up side chairs, circling the wagons around the chief’s large desk.

  The Tylers looked as if they’d been sleeping standing up for the last eighty-four hours. Their faces were gray, their shoulders slumped. I knew they were painfully suspended between hope and despair as they waited to hear the audiotape.

  A tape recorder was set up on Tracchio’s desk. I leaned over and pressed the play button, and a terrifying, evil voice alternating with mine filled the room.

  A little girl’s voice cried out, “Mommy? Mommy?”

  I pressed the recorder’s stop key. Elizabeth Tyler reached out toward the tape recorder, then turned, grabbed her husband’s arm, buried her face into his coat, and sobbed.

  “Is that Madison’s voice?” Tracchio asked.

  Both parents nodded — yes.

  Jacobi said, “The rest of this tape is going to be even more difficult for you to hear. But we’re feeling optimistic. When this call came in, your daughter was alive.”

  I pressed the play button again, watched the Tylers’ faces as they heard the kidnapper say that Madison was fine but that she would never be seen again.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Tyler, do you have any idea why the kidnapper said you ‘made a big mistake calling the police’?” I asked.

  “No idea at all,” Henry Tyler snapped. “Why would they feel threatened? You’ve turned up nothing. You don’t even have a suspect. Where is the FBI? Why aren’t they trying to find Madison?”

  Macklin said, “We are working with the FBI. We’re using their sources and their databases, but the FBI won’t actively work this case unless we have some reason to believe that Madison was taken out of state.”

  “So tell them that she was!”

  Jacobi said, “Mr. Tyler, what we’re asking is, did you receive a communication from the kidnapper telling you not to call the police? Anything like that happen?”

  “Nothing,” said Elizabeth Tyler. “Henry? Did you hear from them at the office?”

  “Not a word. I swear.”

  I was thinking about Paola Ricci as I looked at the Tylers. I said, “You told us that Paola Ricci was highly recommended. Who recommended her?”

  Elizabeth Tyler leaned forward. “Paola came to us directly through her service.”

  “What kind of service is that?” Macklin asked, stress showing in the grinding of his jaw.

  “It’s an employment agency,” said Elizabeth Tyler. “They screen, sponsor, and train well-bred girls from overseas. They get their work papers and find them jobs. Paola had tremendous references from the agency and from back home in Italy. She was a very proper young woman. We loved her.”

  “The service gets their fees from the employers?” Jacobi asked.

  “Yes. I think we paid them eighteen thousand dollars.”

  The mentioning of money sent a prickling sensation along the tops of my arms and a swooping feeling in my stomach.

  “What’s the name of this service?” I said.

  “Westbury. No, the Westwood Registry,” said Henry Tyler. “You’ll speak to them?”

  “Yes, and please don’t say anything about this call to anyone,” Jacobi cautioned the Tylers. “Just go home. Stay near your phone. And leave the Westwood Registry to us.”

  “You’ll be in touch with them?” asked Henry Tyler again.

  “We’ll be all over them.”

  Chapter 57

  CINDY WAS ON THE PHONE with Yuki, loading the dishwasher as she talked.

  “He’s just too funny,” Cindy said about Whit Ewing, the good-looking reporter from the Chicago Tribune she’d met about a month ago at the Municipal Hospital trial.

  “The guy with the glasses, right? The one who tore out of the courtroom by way of the emergency exit? Set off the alarm?” Yuki chuckled, remembering.

  “Yeah. See . . . and he can goof on himself. Whit says he’s Clark Kent’s nerdy younger brother.” Cindy laughed. “He’s been threatening to fly into town and take me out to dinner. He’s even angling to be assigned to the Brinkley trial.”

  “Oh, so wait a minute,” Yuki said. “You’re not thinking of doing what Lindsay did. I mean, Whit lives in Chicago. Why start up an LDR when they’re so freaking doomed?”

  “I’m thinking . . . it’s been a while since I’ve had any, uh, fun.”

  “Been a while for me, too.” Yuki sighed. “I not only don’t remember when, I don’t remember with whom!”

  Cindy cackled, then Yuki put her on hold so she could take an incoming call. When Yuki came back on the line, she said, “Hey, girl reporter, Red Dog wants me. Gotta scoot.”

  “Go, go,” Cindy said. “See you in court.”

  Cindy hung up and turned on the dishwasher, then emptied the trash can. She tied a knot in the bag, went out into the hallway, and hit the elevator call button, and when the car clanked to a stop, she checked to make sure it was empty before she got in.

  She thought again about Whit Ewing, and about Lindsay and Joe, and about how long-distance relationships were, by definition, roller-coaster rides.

  Fun for a while, until they made you sick.

  And now here was another reason to have a boyfriend who stayed in town — the sheer creepiness of living in this building alone. She hit B for “basement,” and the newly paneled old elevator rocked as it descended. A minute later, Cindy stepped out into the dank bowels of the building.

  As she walked toward the trash area, she heard the sound of a woman crying, a sobbing that echoed and was joined by the screaming of a baby!

  What now?

  Cindy rounded a bend in the underground vault of the building and saw a blond-haired woman about her own age holding a baby over her shoulder.

  There was a black trash bag lying open at the woman’s feet.

  “What’s wrong?” Cindy asked.

  “My dog,” the stricken woman cried. “Look!”

  She bent, spread open the mouth of the trash bag so that Cindy could see the small black-and-white dog that was covered with blood.

  “I left him outside for only a few minutes,” she said, “just to take the baby into my apartment. Oh, my God. I called the police to report that someone had stolen him, but look. Someone who lives here did this. Someone who lives here beat Barnaby to death!”

  Chapter 58

  IT WAS WEDNESDAY MORNING, 8:30 a.m., four days after Madison Tyler’s abduction. Conklin and I were parked in a construction zone near the corner of Waverly and Clay, steam from our coffee condensing on the car windows as we watched the traffic weave around double-parked delivery vans, pedestrians spilling into the narrow, gloomy streets of Chinatown.

  I was eyeballing one building in particular, a three-story redbrick house halfway down Waverly. Wong’s Chinese Apothecary was on the ground floor. The top two floors were leased to the Westwood Registry.

  My gut was telling me that we’d find at least partial answers in that house — a link between Paola Ricci and the abduction . . . something.

  At 8:35 the front door to the brick house opened and a woman stepped out, took the trash down to the curb.

  “Time to rock and roll,” said Conklin.

  We crossed the street and intercepted the woman before she disappeared back inside. We flashed our badges.r />
  She was white, thin, midthirties, dark hair falling straight to her shoulders, her prettiness marred by the worry lining her brow.

  “I’ve been wondering when we’d hear from the police,” she said, one hand on the doorknob. “The owners are out of town. Can you come back on Friday?”

  “Sure,” Conklin said, “but we have a couple of questions for you now, if you don’t mind.”

  Brenda, our squad assistant, swoons over Conklin, says he’s a “girl magnet,” and it’s true. He doesn’t work it. He’s just got this natural, hunky appeal.

  I watched as the dark-haired woman hesitated, looked at Conklin, then opened the door wide.

  “I’m Mary Jordan,” she said. “Office manager, bookkeeper, den mother, and everything else you can think of. Come on in . . .”

  I shot a grin at Conklin as we followed Ms. Jordan across the threshold and down a hallway to her office. It was a small room, her desk at an angle facing the door. Two ladder-back chairs faced the desk, and a framed picture of Jordan surrounded by a dozen young women, presumably nannies, hung on the wall behind her.

  I found Jordan’s apparent anxiety noteworthy. She chewed on her lower lip, stood up, moved a stack of three-ring binders to the top of a file cabinet, sat down, picked at her watch strap, twiddled a pencil. I was getting seasick just watching her.

  “What are your thoughts on the abduction of Paola and Madison Tyler?” I asked.

  “I’m at a complete loss,” Jordan said, shaking her head, and then she continued, barely pausing to take a breath.

  Jordan said that she was the registry’s only full-time employee. There were two tutors, both women, who worked when needed. Apart from the co-owner, a fifty-year-old white man, there were no men associated with the registry and no minivans, black or otherwise.

  The owners of the Westwood Registry were Paul and Laura Renfrew, husband and wife, Ms. Jordan told us. At the moment, Paul was calling on potential clients north of San Francisco and Laura was off recruiting in Europe. They’d left town before the kidnappings.

  “The Renfrews are nice people,” Jordan assured us.

  “And how long have you known them?”

  “I started working for the Renfrews just before they relocated from Boston, about eight months ago. The business isn’t breaking even yet,” Jordan went on. “Now, with Paola dead and Madison Tyler . . . gone . . . that’s not very good publicity, is it?”

  Tears filled Mary Jordan’s eyes. She pulled a pink tissue from a box on her desk, blotted her face.

  “Ms. Jordan,” I said, leaning across her desk, “something’s eating at you. What is it?”

  “No, really, I’m fine.”

  “The hell you are.”

  “It’s just that I loved Paola. And I’m the one who matched her up with the Tylers. It was me. If I hadn’t done that, Paola would still be alive!”

  Chapter 59

  “THE RENFREWS HAVE AN APARTMENT down here,” Ms. Jordan said as she walked us around the administrative floor. She pointed to the green-painted, padlocked door at the end of a hallway.

  “Why the padlock?” I asked.

  “They lock up only when they’re both away,” Jordan said. “It’s a good thing. This way I don’t have to worry about the girls poking around where they don’t belong.”

  The bumping sound of footsteps came through the floor above.

  “The common room is over there,” Jordan said, continuing the tour. “The conference room is on your right, and the dorm is upstairs,” she said, looking up at the wooden stairway.

  “The girls live at the registry until we place them with families. I live up there, too.”

  “How many girls are here?” I asked.

  “Four. After Laura gets back from her trip, we’ll probably bring over four more.”

  Conklin and I spent the remainder of the morning interviewing the young women as they came downstairs, one by one, to the conference room. They ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-two, all European, with good-to-excellent English.

  None had a clue or a suspicion or a bad thought about the Renfrews or about Paola Ricci.

  “When Paola was here, she said her prayers on her knees every night,” a girl named Luisa insisted. “She was a virgin!”

  Back at Ms. Jordan’s desk, the Renfrews’ office manager threw up her hands when we asked her if she had any idea who might have kidnapped Paola and Madison. When she answered a ringing phone, Conklin asked me, “Want me to bust that padlock?”

  “Want your next career to be with the sanitation department?”

  “It could be worth it.”

  “You’re dreaming,” I said. “Even if we had probable cause, Madison Tyler isn’t in there. The den mother would spill.”

  We were leaving the house, walking down the front steps, when Mary Jordan called out, caught up with us, clutched Conklin’s arm.

  “I’ve been debating with myself. This could be gossip or just plain wrong, and I don’t want to make trouble for anyone,” she said.

  “You can’t worry about that, Mary,” Conklin said. “Whatever you think you know, you’ve got to tell us.”

  “I’d just started with the Renfrews,” Jordan said, darting her eyes to the door of the house, then back to Conklin.

  “One of the girls told me something and made me swear not to tell. She said that a graduate of the registry left her employers without notice. I’m not talking about bad manners — the Renfrews had her passport. That girl couldn’t get another job without it.”

  “Was the missing girl reported to the police?”

  “I think so. All I know is what I was told. And I was told that Helga Schmidt went missing and was never heard from again.”

  Chapter 60

  THE TENANTS’ MEETING HAD HEATED UP to a full boil by the time Cindy got there. A couple hundred people, more or less, were crammed into the lobby. President of the Board Fern Galperin was a small, pretty woman with wire-frame glasses, her head barely visible over the crowd as she tried to quell the clamor.

  “One at a time,” Ms. Galperin shouted. “Margery? Please go on with what you were saying.”

  Cindy saw Margery Glynn, the woman she’d met in the garbage room yesterday, sitting on a love seat, jammed between three other people.

  Glynn cried out, “The police sent me a form to fill out. They’re not going to do anything about Barnaby, and Barnaby was family. Now I feel even more at risk because he’s gone. Should I get another dog? Or should I get a gun?”

  “I feel as scared and sick as you do,” Galperin said, clutching her own small dog to her bosom. “But you can’t be serious about getting a gun! Anyone else?”

  Cindy put down her computer bag, whispered to a striking brunette woman standing next to the refreshment table, “What’s going on?”

  “You know about Barnaby?”

  “Afraid so. I was in the garbage room when Margery found him.”

  “Nasty, huh? Barnaby was kind of a pest, but for somebody to kill him? It’s certifiably crazy. What is this . . . New York?”

  “Catch me up, will you? I’m new here.”

  “Sure, okay. So Barnaby wasn’t the first. Mrs. Neely’s poodle was found dead in a stairwell, and that poor woman blamed herself because she’d forgotten to lock her door.”

  “I take it someone in the building doesn’t care for dogs.”

  “I mean, yeah,” the brunette woman continued. “But there’s more. A month ago, Mr. Franks, a real nice guy who lived on the second floor, had a moving van come, like, in the middle of the night. He left Fern a packet of threatening letters that had been slipped under his door over a number of months.”

  “What kind of threats?”

  “Death threats. Can you believe it?”

  “Why didn’t he call the police?”

  “I guess he did. But the letters were anonymous. The cops asked a few questions, then let the whole thing drop. Typical crap.”

  “And I assume Mr. Franks had a dog?”
r />   “No. He had a stereo. I’m Debbie Green, by the way.” The woman smiled broadly. “2F.” She shook Cindy’s hand.

  “I’m Cindy Thomas. 3B.”

  “Nice to meet you, Cindy. Welcome to A Nightmare at the Blakely Arms.”

  Cindy smiled uncertainly. “So aren’t you scared?”

  “Kinda.” Debbie sighed. “But my apartment is fantastic. . . . I’m dating someone now. I think I’ve talked him into moving in.”

  “Lucky you.” Cindy turned her attention back to the meeting as a stooped elderly gentleman was recognized by the board president.

  “Mr. Horn.”

  “Thank you. What bothers me the most is the stealth,” he said. “The notes under the doors. The murdered pets. I think Margery is on to something. If the police can’t help us, we must form a tenants’ patrol —”

  Voices erupted, and Ms. Galperin cried out, “People, raise your hands, please! Tom, you have something to say?”

  A man in his thirties stood up. He was slight and balding, standing far across the room from Cindy.

  “A tenants’ patrol scares the hell out of me,” he said. “Who-ever is terrorizing the Blakely Arms could sign up to be on a patrol — and then he wouldn’t have to sneak around. He could walk the halls with impunity. How scary would that be?

  “About three hundred eighty-five people live in this building, and more than half of us are here tonight. The odds are nearly fifty-fifty that our own private terrorist is in this room. Right now.”

  Chapter 61

  YUKI HAD NEVER SEEN Leonard Parisi mad before. “Red Dog,” as he was called, was red haired, tall, more than two hundred pounds, usually affable and avuncular — but right now his dark eyes were pumping bullets as he pounded the conference table with his fist.

  Platters of leftover Chinese food jumped.

  The five new ADAs around the table looked shocked, with the exception of David Hale, who’d had the bad judgment to remark that the Brinkley case was a “slam dunk.”