Beyond the ramp was a motion-sensor and the magnetic key card-operated garage door that opened onto Turk Street. Beside that exit was the industrial-size freight elevator with its door rolled down and a hand-lettered sign duct-taped to it reading, “Out of Service.”
To my right was the fire door to the stairwell we’d just come from. To my left was a door with another hand-lettered sign, this one marked “Storage.” It was faced with metal, and I could see a shiny new dead bolt from thirty feet away.
“What’s in that room?” I asked Burns.
“It’s empty now. We used to store parts in there,” she said, “but we moved the parts room to the main floor to cut down on thefts.”
I moved my flashlight beam across the door and under the surrounding taxis — and then I saw something that just about stopped my heart.
Under a cab, about fifteen feet from the storage room, was a collapsible umbrella. It was red with a bamboo handle. Cindy had an umbrella just like that.
My hands shook as I put on gloves and picked up the umbrella and handed it to Rich. “This had to have fallen out of a cab,” I said. “Doesn’t it look familiar?”
Conklin blinked at the umbrella, then said to Marilyn Burns, “You have the key to that storeroom?”
“Al keeps the keys. All of them. He manages this place.”
I opened my phone. The words “no signal” flashed. I told Rich and he said to Burns, “Go upstairs and call nine one one. Say officers need backup. Lots of it. Do it now.”
I held my light on the storage room door, and Conklin pulled his gun, aimed, and fired three shots into the lock.
The sounds of the three shots multiplied as the echoes ricocheted throughout the underground cavern. But we didn’t wait for the cracking booms to stop.
I took a stance behind Conklin. My gun was drawn as he pulled open the storage room door.
Chapter 104
IN THE SPLIT SECOND before my flashlight beam hit the room, pictures flashed through my mind of what I was afraid to find: Cindy lying dead on the floor, a man pointing a gun at my face.
I found the switch on the wall, and the lights went on.
The windowless room was a cube about twelve feet on all sides. Coils of ropes and tools hung from hooks on the walls. A dark-stained wooden worktable was in the center of the floor. Was this the rapist’s party room?
Was that blood staining the table?
I turned toward Rich, and that’s when I heard a muffled sneeze coming from outside the storage room.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
There was a second, more drawn-out sneeze, definitely female, followed by an unforgettable grinding of large gears and winches. That cacophony of midtwentieth-century machinery could only be coming from the out-of- service elevator — and it was on the move.
I ran to the elevator, mashed the button, but the car didn’t pause. Burns had told me that the only entrance to the freight elevator was right where we were standing and that the elevator emptied out onto Turk Street, three floors up.
Conklin beat on the elevator door with the butt of his gun, yelling, “
There was no answer.
I tried to make sense of what was happening.
No one could have gotten into that elevator since Conklin and I had come to Quick Express fifteen minutes before. Whoever was inside it had to have been inside it before we arrived.
Conklin and I stared at each other for a fraction of a second, then took off in tandem across the garage floor, heading toward the stairwell door.
I was right behind my partner as we raced up the stairs toward the light.
Chapter 105
THOSE SNEEZES had given me hope that Cindy was alive.
But Conklin and I had been unprepared for the elevator to start moving. If the car stopped between floors, if we got to the top floor and then the elevator descended, or if whoever was in the elevator beat us to the exit on Turk Street, we had very little chance of stopping him.
Conklin and I took the stairs two at a time, using the banisters to launch ourselves around corners. Conklin stiff-armed the NO EXIT fire door to Turk Street, and a piercing alarm went off.
I pounded behind him out onto the sidewalk, where I saw an assortment of law enforcement vehicles screaming onto Turk and Jones: fire trucks, cruisers, plainclothes detectives, and narcs pulling up in unmarked cars. Every law enforcement officer in the Mission had responded to the call.
I yelled out to two beat cops I knew.
“Noonan, Mackey, lock this garage down! No one comes in or goes out!”
Conklin was running up Turk toward the elevator exit, and I had to put on speed to catch up with him. He’d just reached the freight bay when the elevator door began to roll up.
A yellow cab was revealed by inches inside the mouth of the elevator. Conklin took a shooting stance square on the opening and was gripping his 9-millimeter with both hands when the cab rolled out of the elevator.
It was dark, but the driver and the backseat passenger were lit by headlights and streetlights. I could tell the passenger was Cindy from the light limning her curls.
The cab’s headlights were full-on.
There was no way the driver didn’t see Conklin.
Conklin yelled, “
Conklin yelled, “
The cab rocked, then tipped, hanging on two wheels before settling down on all four. Water spewed. People screamed.
Conklin pulled at the passenger-side door, but he couldn’t get it open.
“I need help here!” he shouted.
The fire crew came with the Jaws of Life and wrenched open the back door. Cindy lay crumpled on the slanted floor of the cab, wedged between the backseat and the divider. Conklin leaned all the way in, calling her name.
“Rich, is she okay?” I yelled to him.
“She’s alive,” Conklin said. “Thank God. She’s alive.”
He hooked Cindy’s arms around his neck and pulled her out into the air. Cindy was fully dressed and I saw no blood. Conklin’s voice cracked as he said to her, “Cindy, it’s me. I’m right here.”
She opened her eyes halfway and said, “Heyyyyy.”
Conklin held her so tight, I thought he was going to crush the air right out of her.
And then her eyes closed and she started snoring softly, her cheek on his shoulder.
