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

  I was traveling light, but I had brought the essential stuff: lipstick and my round trip business-class ticket to Reagan National that Joe had given me with his keys and a note saying, “This is your ‘come-to-Joe’ pass and it’s good anytime. XOXO, Joe.”

  I felt a little reckless as I boarded the plane. Not only was I leaving town with a major conflict unresolved but something else was giving me the jitters.

  Joe had made surprise visits to me, but I’d never dropped in unannounced on him.

  The glass of preflight champagne helped settle me down, and as soon as the plane lifted off, I lowered my seat into the reclining position and slept, waking up only when the pilot’s voice announced our imminent descent into DC.

  Once on the ground, I gave a cab driver Joe’s address in northwest DC.

  A half hour later, the cab swooped around the plantings and fountains in front of the deluxe, L-shaped Kennedy-Warren Apartment Complex. And only minutes after that, I stood in the densely carpeted top-floor hallway of the historic wing, ringing Joe’s doorbell.

  Well, I’m here.

  When he didn’t answer, I rang the bell again. Then I slipped the first key into the lower lock, used the second key on the dead bolt, and opened the door.

  I called out, “Joe?” as I stepped into his unlit foyer. I called again as I approached the kitchen.

  Now I was asking myself, Where was Joe?

  Why hadn’t he answered any of his phones?

  The kitchen opened into a large, attractive area that was both a dining and a living room. Hardwood floors glowed under the stream of light pouring through the windows at the far end, and I saw a terrace beyond.

  I noted that the richly upholstered and dark-wood furnishings were in neat, apple-pie order.

  My second look made my heart slam to a stop.

  A woman was curled up on a sofa, turned toward the windows, reading a magazine, the white cords of an iPod dangling from her ears.

  I was too shocked to move.

  Or speak a word.

  Chapter 27

  MY HEART RATE ZOOMED as my focus narrowed to the woman on the couch, a sandwich and cup of tea beside her on the coffee table.

  I took in her black tank top and workout pants, the thick, blond-streaked hair knotted behind her head, her bare feet.

  My body felt bloodless except for the tingling in my finger-tips. Had Joe been leading a double life while I was in San Francisco, waiting for his calls and visits?

  My face flushed with anger but also shame. I didn’t know whether to shout or run.

  How could Joe have been cheating on me?

  The woman must have caught my reflection in the glass. She dropped her magazine, put her hands to her face, and screamed.

  I screamed, too. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Who are you!” she shouted back, her hair tumbling out of its knot as she ripped the iPod out of her ears.

  “I’m Joe’s girlfriend,” I said. I felt naked and raw, wishing I had a badge to flash at her. Any badge.

  Oh, Joe, what have you done?

  “I’m Milda,” she said, jumping up from the couch, leading me into the kitchen. “I work here. I clean house for Mr. Molinari.”

  I laughed, not out of humor but out of shock.

  She yanked a check out of her pants pocket and stuck it out for me to see.

  But I was barely focusing on her. Images from the last few days were flying around inside my head.

  And now this young woman’s presence was undoing whatever hold I had over my emotions.

  “I finished early and I just thought I’d sit for a few minutes,” she said as she washed the dishes she’d used. “Please don’t tell him, okay?”

  I nodded numbly. “No. Of course not.”

  “I’m leaving now,” she said, turning off the taps. “I don’t want to be late to pick up my son, so I’m going now, okay?”

  I nodded.

  I went down a hall, pushed open the door to the bathroom. I opened the medicine chest and scanned the boxes and bottles, looking for nail polish, tampons, makeup.

  Coming up empty, I went to the bedroom, a large carpeted space with a view of the courtyard. I threw open Joe’s closet door, checked the floor for women’s shoes, ran my hands through the rack. No skirts, no blouses. What was I doing?

  I knew Joe, didn’t I?

  I turned back to the bed and was about to undo the bedding and inspect the linens when I saw a photo on the night table. It was of me and Joe six months ago in Sausalito, his arm around me as the breeze whipped my hair across my face. We both looked in love.

  I pressed my hands to my eyes.

  I was so ashamed. The sobs simply poured out of me. I just stood there in Joe’s bedroom and cried.

  And then I left and went back to California.

  Part Two

  BROWN-EYED GIRL

  Chapter 28

  MADISON TYLER HOPSCOTCHED over the lines in the sidewalk, then raced back to her nanny’s side, grabbing her hand as they walked toward Alta Plaza Park, Madison saying, “Were you listening, Paola?”

  Paola Ricci squeezed Madison’s small hand.

  Sometimes the little girl’s enchanting five-year-old precocity was almost more than Paola could understand.

  “Of course I was listening, darling.”

  “As I was saying,” the girl said in the funny grown-up way she had, “when I play Beethoven’s Bagatelle, the first notes are an ascending scale, and they look like a blue ladder —”

  She trilled the notes.

  “Then, the next part, when I play C-D-C, the notes are pink-green-pink!” she exclaimed.

  “So you imagine that those notes have colors?”

  “No, Paola,” the little girl said comically, patiently. “The notes are those colors. Don’t you see colors when you sing?”

  “Nope. I guess I’m a ninny,” Paola said. “A ninny-nanny.”

  “I don’t know what a ninny-nanny is,” Madison said, her dazzling smile setting off sparks in her big brown eyes. “But it sounds very funny.”

  The two laughed hard, Madison grabbing Paola around the waist, burying her face in the young woman’s coat as they passed the exclusive Waldorf School, only a block and a half from where Madison lived with her parents.

  “It’s Saturday,” Madison whispered to Paola. “I don’t have to even look at school on Saturday.”

  Now the park was only a block away, and seeing the stone walls surrounding it, Madison got more excited and changed subjects.

  “Mommy says I can have a red Lakeland terrier when I get a little older,” Madison confided as they crossed Divisadero. “I’m going to name him ‘Wolfgang.’ ”

  “What a serious name for a little dog,” Paola said, intent on crossing the street safely. She barely glanced at the black minivan idling outside the park’s fence. Expensive black minivans were as common as crows in Pacific Heights.

  Paola swung Madison’s arm, and the child jumped up onto the curb, then stopped suddenly as someone got out of the vehicle and came quickly toward them.

  Madison said to her nanny, “Paola, who is that?”

  “What’s wrong?” Paola called to the man stepping out of the van.

  “Trouble at home. You’ve both got to come with us right now. Madison, your mom took a fall down the stairs.”

  Madison stepped out from behind her nanny’s back, shouting, “My daddy told me never to ride with strangers! And believe me, you’re strange.”

  The man picked up the child like a bag of birdseed, and as she shouted, “Help! Put me down,” he tossed her into the backseat of the van.

  “Get in,” the man said to Paola. He was pointing a handgun at her chest.

  “Either get in or kiss this kid good-bye.”

  Chapter 29

  RICH CONKLIN AND I had just returned to the squad room after a grim morning of investigating a brutal drive-by shooting when Jacobi waved us into his office.

  We crossed the gray linoleum floor to the
glass box and took our seats, Conklin perched on the edge of the credenza where Jacobi used to sit, me in the side chair next to Jacobi’s desk, watching him get comfortable in the chair that was once mine.

  I was still trying to get used to this turn of events. I looked around at the mess Jacobi had made of the place in just under two weeks: newspapers piled on the floor and windowsill, food odors coming out of the trash can.

  “You’re a pig, Jacobi,” I said. “And I mean that in the barnyard sense.”

  Jacobi laughed, a thing he’d done more in the last few days than he’d done in the last two years, and despite the chop to my ego, I was glad that he wasn’t huffing up hills anymore. He was a great cop, good at managing the unmanageable, and I was working myself around to loving him again.

  Jacobi coughed a few times, said, “We’ve got a kidnapping.”

  “And we’re catching it?” Conklin asked.

  “Major Crimes has been on it for a few hours, but a witness came forward and now it looks like there could be a murder,” said Jacobi. “We’ll be coordinating with Lieutenant Macklin.”

  A humming sound came from the computer as Jacobi booted up, a thing he’d never done before getting his new badge. He pulled a CD off the pile of crap on his desk and clumsily slid it into the CD/DVD tray of his computer.

  He said, “Little girl, age five, was going to the park with her nanny at nine this morning when they were snatched. The nanny is Paola Ricci, here on a work visa from Cremona, Italy. The child is Madison Tyler.”

  “Of the Chronicle Tylers?” I asked.

  “Yep. Henry Tyler is the little girl’s father.”

  “Did you say there’s a witness to the kidnapping?”

  “That’s right, Boxer. A woman walking her schnauzer before going to work saw a figure in a gray coat exit a black minivan outside Alta Plaza Park on Scott Street.”

  “What do you mean, ‘figure’?” Conklin asked.

  “All she could say was a person in a gray coat, didn’t know if it was a man or a woman because said person was turned away from her and she only looked up for a second. Likewise, she couldn’t identify the make of the vehicle. Said it happened too fast.”

  “And what makes this a possible homicide?” I asked.

  “The witness said that as soon as the car rounded Divisadero, she heard a pop. Then she saw blood explode against the back window of the van.”

  Chapter 30

  JACOBI CLICKED HIS MOUSE a few times, then swung the laptop around so Conklin and I could see the video that was playing on the screen.

  “This is Madison Tyler,” he said.

  The camera was focused on a small blond-haired child who came out from behind curtains onto a stage. She was wearing a simple navy-blue velvet dress with a lace collar, socks, and shiny red Mary Janes.

  She was absolutely the prettiest little girl I’d ever seen, with a look of intelligence in her eyes that canceled any notion that she was a baby pageant queen.

  Applause filled Jacobi’s office as the little girl climbed onto a piano seat in front of a Steinway grand.

  The clapping died away, and she began to play a piece of classical music I didn’t recognize, but it was complicated and the child didn’t seem to make any mistakes.

  She finished the piece with a flourish, stretching her arms as far as they could go down the keyboard, releasing the last notes to loud bravos and rousing applause.

  Madison turned and said to the audience, “I’ll be able to do much better when my arms grow.”

  Fond laughter bubbled over the speakers, and a boy of about nine came out from the wings and gave her a bouquet.

  “Have the parents gotten a call?” I asked, tearing my eyes from the video of Madison Tyler.

  “It’s still early, but no, they haven’t heard anything from anyone,” said Jacobi. “Not a single word. Nothing about a ransom so far.”

  Chapter 31

  CINDY THOMAS WAS WORKING from the home office she’d set up in the small second bedroom of her new apartment. CNN was providing ambient sound as she typed, immersed in the story she was writing about Alfred Brinkley’s upcoming trial. She thought of not answering the phone when it rang next to her elbow.

  Then she glanced at the caller ID — and grabbed the phone off the hook.

  “Mr. Tyler?” she said.

  Henry Tyler’s voice was eerily hollow, nearly unrecognizable. She almost thought he was playing a joke, but that wasn’t his style.

  Listening hard, gasping and saying, “No . . . oh, no,” she tried hard to understand the man who was crying, losing his thoughts, and having to ask Cindy what he’d been saying.

  “She was wearing a blue coat,” Cindy prompted.

  “That’s right. A dark-blue coat, red sweater, blue pants, red shoes.”

  “You’ll have copy in an hour,” Cindy said, “and by then you’ll have heard from those bastards saying how much you have to pay to get Maddy back. You will get her back.”

  Cindy said good-bye to the Chronicle’s associate publisher, put down the receiver, and sat still for a moment, gripping the armrests, reeling from a sickening feeling of fear. She’d covered enough kidnappings to know that if the child wasn’t found today, the chances of finding her alive dropped by about half. It would drop by half again if she wasn’t found tomorrow.

  She thought back to the last time she’d seen Madison, at the beginning of the summer when the little girl had come to the office with her father.

  For about twenty minutes Madison had twirled around in the chair across from Cindy’s desk, scribbling on a steno pad, pretending that she was a reporter who was interviewing Cindy about her job.

  “Why is it called a ‘deadline’? Do you ever get afraid when you’re writing about bad guys? What’s the dumbest story you ever wrote?”

  Maddy was a delightful kid, funny and unspoiled, and Cindy had felt aggrieved when Tyler’s secretary had returned, saying, “Come on, Madison. Miss Thomas has work to do.”

  Cindy had impetuously kissed the child on the cheek, saying, “You’re as cute as ten buttons, you know that?”

  And Madison had flung her arms around her neck and returned the kiss.

  “See you in the funny papers,” Cindy had called after her, and Madison Tyler had spun around, grinning. “That’s where I’ll be!”

  Now Cindy turned her eyes to her blank computer screen, paralyzed with thoughts of Madison being held captive by people who didn’t love her, wondering if the girl was tied up inside a car trunk, if she’d been sexually molested, if she was already dead.

  Cindy opened a new file on her computer and, after a few false starts, felt the story unspool under her fingers. “The five-year-old daughter of Chronicle associate publisher Henry Tyler was abducted this morning only blocks from her house. . . .”

  She heard Henry Tyler in her head, his voice choked with misery: “Write the story, Cindy. And pray to God we’ll have Madison back before we run it.”

  Chapter 32

  YUKI CASTELLANO SAT three rows back in the gallery of Superior Court 22, waiting for the clerk to call the case number.

  She’d been with the DA’s office only about a month, and although she’d worked as a defense attorney in a top law firm for several years, switching to the prosecution side was turning out to be dirtier, more urgent, and more real than defending white-collar clients in civil lawsuits.

  It was exactly what she wanted.

  Her former colleagues would never believe how much she was enjoying her new life “on the dark side.”

  The purpose of today’s hearing was to set a trial date for Alfred Brinkley. There was an ADA in the office whose job it was to attend no-brainer proceedings like this one and keep the master calendar.

  But Yuki didn’t want to delegate a moment of this case.

  She’d been picked by senior ADA Leonard Parisi to be his second chair in a trial that mattered very much to Yuki. Alfred Brinkley had murdered four people. It was sheer luck that he hadn’t also kil
led Claire Washburn, one of her dearest friends.

  She glanced down the row of seats, past the junkies and child abusers, their mothers and girlfriends, the public defenders in ad hoc conferences with their clients.

  Finally she homed in on Public Defender Barbara Blanco, who was whispering to the ferry shooter. Blanco was a smart woman who, like herself, had drawn a hell of a card in Alfred Brinkley.

  Blanco had pleaded Brinkley “not guilty” at his arraignment and was certainly going to try to get his confession tossed out before the trial. She would contend that Brinkley was bug-nuts during the crime and had been medicated ever since. And she’d work to get him kicked out of the penal system and into the mental-health system.

  Let her try.

  The clerk called the case number, and Yuki’s pulse quickened as she closed her laptop and walked to the bench.

  Alfred Brinkley followed meekly behind his attorney, looking clean-cut and less agitated than he had at his arraignment — which was all to the good.

  Yuki opened the wooden gate between the gallery and the court proper, and stood at the bench with Blanco and Brinkley, looking up into the slate-blue eyes of Judge Norman Moore.

  Moore looked back at them fleetingly, then dropped his eyes to the docket.

  “All right. What do you say we set this matter soon, say Monday, November seventeenth?”

  Yuki said, “That’s good for the People, Your Honor.”

  But Blanco had a different idea. “Your Honor, Mr. Brinkley has a long history of mental illness. He should be evaluated pursuant to 1368 to determine his competence to stand trial.”

  Moore dropped his hands to his desktop, sighed, and said, “Okay, Ms. Blanco. Dr. Charlene Everedt is back from vacation. She told me this morning that she’s got some free time. She’ll do the psych on Mr. Brinkley.”