there was a staircase in the middle of the concrete floor that went up to QT’s living quarters.
Conklin called out to me and I crossed to the far side of the room, where he was standing behind QT.
“We’re getting somewhere,” Conklin said.
QT grinned up at me with his large, bright choppers. His bald head gleamed. His long white fingers spanned the curving keyboard. He was good-looking in a naked-mole-rat kind of way.
“Cindy has a GPS in her phone,” QT told me, “but it’s not sending a signal. It’s either turned off or underwater. I had to dump her phone logs to find her last ping.”
Dump her phone logs without a warrant, I thought. Whatever it took to find Cindy, to know that she was okay.
Peering over QT’s shoulder, I took in his computer screen, a map of San Francisco dotted with flags standing for cellular tower locations.
The best geek in the state of California clicked on an icon that stood for a tower in the Tenderloin. A circle appeared on the screen. He clicked on another tower, and then a third, and overlapping circles came up as he triangulated Cindy’s last cell phone signal. I saw one small irregular patch that was common to all three towers.
QT said, “I can get accuracy up to two hundred and fifty meters. The location of that last ping isn’t far from here. This is Turk,” QT said, pointing with the cursor.
“Turk and what?” Conklin asked, completely focused on the screen. “Turk and Jones?”
“Yeppers. You nailed it, Rich.”
“That’s where that cab company is.”
“What cab company?” I asked. “What’s this about?”
“Quick Express Taxi,” Quentin said, zooming in on the intersection, rolling his cursor over it.
“Her phone isn’t underwater,” Conklin said. “It’s underground.”
I didn’t understand any of this, but I read the urgency in my partner’s face.
“Let’s go,” he said to me.
Chapter 102
I’D GOTTEN INTO the passenger seat of Conklin’s unmarked car and barely closed the door when he jammed on the gas. The car leapt forward, slid sideways, then sent up a wake as we sped over the slick pavement.
Weaving around double-parked cars and inebriated pedestrians, Rich negotiated the six-minute drive through the traffic-choked streets toward an intersection in one of the roughest blocks in the Mission.
Conklin talked as he drove, telling me that Cindy had been poking around in taxi garages for a minivan cab with a movie ad on the side. So far, one vague sighting by one of the three rape victims was the slim and only clue to the identity of the rapist.
“She went to this hole-in-the-ground by herself on Monday,” Conklin said. “She talked to the day dispatcher. A guy name of Wysocki. If she came back today, it had to be to see him. What do you think, Lindsay? Has Cindy taken this investigative reporter crap too far? Am I wrong?”
I saw the blinking neon signs up ahead on Jones, QUICK EXPRESS TAXI and CORPORATE ACCOUNTS WELCOME. Conklin parked at the curb in front of the grimy storefront before I could answer him.
The dispatcher was in a glass booth, her cage separated from the street by a grill in the plate glass.
I showed her my badge and told her my name, and she said her name was Marilyn Burns. She was forty, white, and petite and dressed in a blue-checked shirt hanging out over her jeans. She wore a wedding band and had a smoker’s gravelly voice.
“I relieved Al right around six,” Burns told us through the grill. “He was in a hurry. Want me to call him? It’s not a problem.”
“Have you seen this woman today?” Conklin asked, pulling out a photo of Cindy from his wallet.
“No, I’ve never seen her.”
“Then, yes, call Al,” I told Burns.
Conklin and I heard her say, “Call me when you get this, Al. Police are looking for someone who might’ve come in on your shift. Girl with curly blond hair.”
The dispatcher put down the phone and said, “If you give me your number —”
“Okay if we take a look around?” Conklin said.
He didn’t phrase it as a question, and Burns didn’t take it as a request. She buzzed us into the grungy ground floor of Quick Express and said, “I’ll take you on the tour.”
Burns whistled up a cabbie to take over for her, and then the three of us walked between rows of parked cabs and past the ramp until we reached the stairs along the northern side of the building.
I asked Burns questions and answered a few of hers as Conklin flashed his light into cab interiors. She explained to me how the cab traffic worked inside the garage.
“Incoming cabs use their magnetic key card, enter the ramp on Turk,” she said. “Drivers leave their vehicles on one of the three floors, then walk up the stairs, hand me their logs and keys, and cash out.
“When they start a shift,” Burns went on, “it’s the other way around. They pick up their log sheets on main, go down the stairs, take a cab down the ramp to Turk, and use their card to get out. We have a freight elevator goes down to Turk, but it’s not working.”
“Can cabs come in and leave without you seeing them?”
“We’ve got security cameras,” she said. “They’re not NASA-grade, but they work.”
Taxis were parked on the perimeter and between the pillars on all three floors wrapping around the ramp in the center. We checked out minivan cabs and showed Cindy’s picture to a half dozen cabbies we met as we walked.
No one admitted to having seen Cindy.
I turned over various possibilities in my mind.
Had Cindy met someone here who had a story for her? Was she interviewing that someone in a coffee shop with her phone turned off? Or was she drugged in the backseat of a taxi, one of the thousands cruising the streets of San Francisco?
I was accustomed to Cindy getting between rocks and hard places and equally used to the idea that she could chop her way out. But a bad feeling was coming over me.
Cindy had been missing for more than three hours.
We kept saying, “If Cindy’s phone was turned off …”
But Cindy never turned off her phone. The last contact her phone GPS chip made was within two hundred and fifty meters of this building.
So where was she?
And if she wasn’t here, and her phone wasn’t turned off, where was she?
Where the hell had she gone?
Chapter 103
DISPATCHER MARILYN BURNS opened the stairwell door onto the lowest subterranean level, and Conklin and I were right behind her.
The windowless space was dark and dank and twenty-five feet underground. The fluorescent lighting was so dim, it didn’t illuminate the corners of the room.
I thought about the crap-quality surveillance cameras high up on the walls and pillars — they would record nothing but snow. I stood at the foot of the ramp and tried to get my bearings.
