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, 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
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 could 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.”
Chapter 4
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 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 matching 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 that 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 poncho Avis had been wearing. It would hold prints, for sure, but a few dozen people at the hospital had handled that poncho. It didn’t make any sense that she was wearing a rain poncho 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, 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 been brought in and got in touch with Child Protective Services as well. I came up with nothing more than a mounting heap of frustration.
I borrowed Dr. Rifkin’s laptop and went out to VICAP, the FBI’s Violent Crime 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-covered reclining chair 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 sounding 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 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 bit back the words “Ah, shit” and told Avis Richardson what little I knew.
“We’re trying to find your baby,” I said.
Chapter 5
I PUT MY KEY in the lock of the front door to our apartment, and at that precise moment, I remembered that I hadn’t called Joe to say I wouldn’t be home for dinner. Actually, I hadn’t spoken to him in about twelve hours.
Way to go, Lindsay. Brilliant.
My border collie, Martha, heard me at the front door, barked, and, with toenails clattering across the wooden floor, hurled herself at my chest.
I cooed to her, ruffled her ears, and then found Joe in the living room. He was sitting in an armchair, reading light on, with eight different newspapers lying on the floor around the chair in sections.
He looked at me with reproach in his eyes.
“Your mailbox is full.”
“My mailbox?”
“Your phone.”
“Is it? I’m sorry, Joe. I had to turn my phone off. I was in the hospital ICU all day. A new case I’m working.”
“We were supposed to take my folks out for dinner tonight.”
“Oh my God. I’m sorry,” I said as my stomach dropped toward my toes. Joe had told me that we were going to take them out for some quality time and first-class steak at Harris’. I’d filed that information in a folder at the back of my mind and never looked back.
“They’re on the flight back to New York.”
“Honey, I’ll call them tomorrow and apologize. I feel like crap. They’re so great to me.”
