The 6th Target

Chapter 46

I APOLOGIZED TO THE TYLERS sincerely and profusely as they exploded all over me in the hospital parking lot, then stood flat-footed as their car tore past me, leaving rubber on the asphalt. My cell phone rang on my hip, and eventually I answered it.

It was Jacobi. "A woman just called saying her daughter is missing. The child is five. Has long blond hair."

The caller's name was Sylvia Brodsky, and she was hysterical. She'd lost track of her daughter, Alicia, while shopping for groceries. Alicia must have wandered away, Mrs. Brodsky told the 911 operator, adding that her daughter was autistic.

Alicia Brodsky could barely speak a word.

Not long after Jacobi's call, Sylvia Brodsky came to the hospital and claimed her daughter, but Conklin and I weren't there to see it.

We were back in our Crown Vic, talking it over, me taking responsibility for jumping the gun, saying, "I should have been more forceful when I told the Tylers that maybe we'd found their daughter, but we couldn't be sure. But I did say that we needed them to make a positive ID, didn't I, Rich? You heard me."

"They stopped listening after you said, 'We may have found your daughter.' Hey, it all clicked, Lindsay. She said her name was Maddy."

"Well. Something like that."

"The red shoes," he insisted. "How many five-year-old blond-haired kids have blue coats and red patent leather shoes?"

"Two, anyway." I sighed.

Back at the Hall, we interrogated Calvin for two hours, squeezed him until he wasn't smirking anymore. We looked at the digital photos still inside his camera, and we examined the photos Conklin had found in his bedroom.

There were no pictures of Madison Tyler, but we kept our hopes up until the last frame that Calvin might have accidentally photographed the kidnapping in progress.

That maybe he'd caught the black van in his lens.

But the Memory Stick in his camera showed that he hadn't been taking pictures at Alta Plaza Park yesterday.

Patrick Calvin made me sick, but the law doesn't recognize causing revulsion as a criminal offense.

So we kicked him. Turned him loose.

Conklin and I interviewed three more registered sex offenders that day, three average-looking white males you'd never pick out of a crowd as sexual predators.

Three men whose alibis checked out.

I finally called it quits at around seven p.m. Emotionally speaking, my tank was dry.

I entered my apartment, threw my arms around Martha, and promised her a run after my shower to rinse the skeezy images out of my brain.

There was a note from Martha's sitter on the kitchen counter. I went to the fridge, cracked open a Corona, and took a long pull from the bottle before reading it.

Lindsay, hi, when I didn't see your car, I took Martha for a walk!:(Remember I told you my parents are letting me have the house in Hermosa Beach through Christmas? I should take Martha with me. It would be good for her,

Lindsay!!!

Let me know. K.

I felt sick knowing that I'd abandoned my dog without calling her sitter. And I knew Karen was right. I wasn't doing Martha any good right now. My new hours included double shifts and all-work weekends. I hadn't taken a real break since the ferry shooting.

I stooped down for a kiss, lifted Martha's silky ears, looked into her big brown eyes.

"You want to run on the beach, Boo?"

I picked up the phone and dialed Karen's number.

"Excellent," she said. "I'll pick her up in the morning."

Chapter 47

IT WAS MONDAY MORNING, half past dawn.

Conklin and I were at the construction site below Fort Point, the huge brick fort that had been built on the edge of the San Francisco peninsula during the Civil War and now stood in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge.

A damp breeze kicked up whitecaps on the bay, making the fifty-degree temperature feel more like thirty-five.

I was shaking, either because of the windchill factor or from my sickening sense of what we were about to find.

I zipped up my fleece-lined jacket, put my hands inside my pockets as the whipping wind brought moisture to my eyes.

A welder who was working on the bridge retrofit came toward us with containers of coffee from the "garbage truck," a food wagon outside the chain-link fence that separated the construction site from the public area.

The welder's name was Wayne Murray, and he told me and Conklin how when he'd come to work that morning, he'd seen something weird hung up on the rocks below the fort.

"I thought at first it was a seal," he said mournfully. "When I got closer, I saw an arm in the water. I never saw a dead body before."

Car doors slammed, men coming through the chain-link gate, talking and laughing – construction workers, EMS, and a couple of Park Service cops.

I asked them to rope off the area.

I turned my eyes back to the dark lump down on the rocks below the seawall, a white hand and foot trailing in the foam-flecked water that streamed toward the ocean.

"She wasn't dumped here," Conklin said. "Too much chance of being seen."

I squinted up at the silhouette of the bridge security officer patrolling the structure with his AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

"Yeah. Depending on the time and the tides, she could have been dropped off one of the piers. The perps must've thought she'd float out to sea."

"Here comes Dr. G.," Conklin said.

The ME was chipper this morning, his damp white hair still showing comb marks, his waders pulled up to midchest, his nose pink under the bridge of his glasses.

He and one of his assistants took the lead, and we joined them, walking awkwardly across the jagged rocks that sloped at a forty-five-degree angle, fifteen feet down to the lip of the bay.

"Hang on, there. Be careful," Dr. Germaniuk said as we approached the body. "Don't want anyone to fall and touch something."

We stood our ground as Dr. G. scrambled down the boulders, approached the body, put his scene kit down. Using his flashlight, he began his preliminary in situ assessment.

I could see the body pretty well in his beam. The victim's face was darkened and swollen.

"Got some skin slippage here," Dr. G. called up to me. "She's been in the water a couple of days. Long enough to have become a floater."

"Does she have a gunshot wound to the head?"

"Can't tell. Looks like she's been banged up on the rocks. I'll give her a head-to-toe X-ray when we get her back to home base."

Dr. G. photographed the body twice from each angle, his flash popping every second or two.

I took note of the girl's clothing – the dark coat, the turtle-neck sweater, her short hair, similar to the distinctive bowl cut I'd seen in her driver's license picture when I'd gone through her wallet two days before.

"We both know that's Paola Ricci," Conklin said, staring down at the body.

I nodded. Except that yesterday we'd blown it, broken the Tylers ' hearts by jumping to conclusions.

"Right," I said. "But I'll believe it when we get a pos-itive ID."