“Hey, Phil,” I said as he pulled up next to the spot where I’d parked my Explorer. I took off my jacket and tossed it into the backseat.
“Lindsay, I need your help.”
“Can we talk tomorrow?” I asked him. “I’ve been slogging through hell all day,” I said, thinking of the dozens of consecutive hours I’d been working on finding the Richardson baby.
“This will only take a minute.”
“Okay, then. Shoot.”
“You’re aware of Candace Martin?”
“Sure. My colleague Paul Chi worked the Martin case. And Yuki, of course.”
“Yes. That’s right,” Hoffman said, putting his briefcase down on the asphalt. He ran a hand through his hair. “Something new has come up regarding the testimony of one of the witnesses. I asked Yuki to hear me out, but I’m the enemy. She’s not inclined to believe anything I say.”
“Phil, why don’t you just say your piece in court?”
“If I could get Yuki’s ear out of court, it would be better for all concerned. This new information I have is going to reverse the trial. Let me be clear. The case will be dismissed and you’ll be booking someone else for Dennis Martin’s murder.”
My mind spun. I heard what he said, but I didn’t get why Hoffman was talking to me. “How can I help you?”
“I want you to talk to my client.”
“Me?”
“Yes. After that, maybe you can get Yuki to hear me out.”
“So if I get this right, this is the long way around in getting Yuki to talk to you.”
Everything about Hoffman’s request was inappropriate. I was the wrong cop and he was going around everyone in the Hall of Justice. But Paul Chi reported to me. I had to worry if the SFPD and the District Attorney’s Office had the wrong person in the dock.
Hoffman’s request made me uncomfortable. But off the record? Unofficially?
Phil Hoffman had definitely gotten my attention.
Chapter 24
INSPECTOR PAUL CHI is a certified genius and a lifelong student of criminal behavior. It was hard to believe that he had arrested the wrong person for the murder of Dennis Martin.
So what was Hoffman up to?
I left Joe a message saying I’d be late, then retraced my steps into the stream of Justice Department workers leaving the lobby of 850 Bryant.
Chi and McNeill were with Brady in the corner office when I rapped on the glass. Brady waved me in and Cappy McNeill stood, sucked in his stomach so I could get past him, and then gave me his chair. McNeill has five years on me both in age and time in grade. He’s not ambitious, but he’s steady. He’s all about instinct and experience and bringing down the bad guys.
As for Brady, I’d seen him go through a firestorm and confront a killer who had nothing to lose. Brady had guts to spare, but he was new to San Francisco. He didn’t know Phil Hoffman, and he hadn’t been in charge of Homicide when Candace Martin was investigated for murder.
I reset my ponytail and then laid out my conversation with Hoffman in the parking lot. “Bottom line, Hoffman says the wrong person is being charged with murder. He says we should withdraw the charges, reopen the case, and bring in the person who really killed Dennis Martin.”
“Really? And who does Hoffman say did it?” Chi asked me.
“Hoffman said his client will tell me.”
“Ah, shit, Lindsay,” McNeill grumbled. “Candace Martin damn well is the doer. Hoffman is cornered, so he’s working any angle he can dream up. And I gotta give him credit. This angle is pretty damned creative.”
“This case opened and shut itself,” said Chi. “And then it tied itself with a big red bow.” He started ticking off the physical evidence on his fingers: gun, prints, GSR.
“You’re saying that no innocent person has ever been convicted?” I asked Chi.
“What’s in this for you, Sergeant, because I just don’t get where you’re going,” Brady said. He texted a message, closed the phone, and put his eyes on me. “How many hours have you worked in the past twenty-four?”
“I don’t keep track.”
“I do. You’ve gone about eighteen hours straight. The Martin case was closed — what, a year ago? It’s in the hands of the justice system. So go home, Boxer. Get some sleep. Tomorrow let’s see some progress on Richardson.”
I felt the little hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. First time I’d ever felt this kind of opposition from Chi and McNeill. As for the new lieutenant? I didn’t know if his mind was just closed — or if he was right.
I threw up my hands, said okay, and left the squad room again. I called Hoffman from the stairwell and told him I’d meet him on the seventh floor in five minutes.
He thanked me and said, “You won’t be sorry.”
I was already sorry. Phil Hoffman’s story had gotten to me, and now I was bucking the boss with absolutely nothing to gain.
Chapter 25
THERE ARE TWO JAILS at the Hall, each with separate elevators that go only from the lobby to the jail. Prisoners awaiting trial are held in the jail on the seventh floor, and that’s where I met Phil Hoffman.
Hoffman’s expression showed that he was relieved to see me, but my stomach heaved with anxiety. I didn’t belong here, doing this. Not my job.
“Thanks for coming, Lindsay,” Hoffman said. Doors buzzed open as we walked along grimy, overlit corridors toward a meeting room used for prisoners and their lawyers.
“I’m doing this on my own time, Phil. Nothing official about it.”
“I understand and I appreciate it.”
A moment later, Candace Martin was escorted by a guard into the room. She was wearing jailhouse orange, and somehow it looked good on her. She wore no makeup and had her blond hair tucked behind her ears, and she looked younger than her forty years. Hoffman introduced us and we all sat down.
“Candace, tell Sergeant Boxer what you told me.”
“First, thanks for coming, Sergeant Boxer,” she said. “I know you’re doing a big favor for Phil.”
“I only have a few minutes.”
Candace Martin nodded and said, “Ellen flat out lied. I never had a gun in my office. The gun came into my house with the killer,” she said. “So why did Ellen lie? It makes no sense, unless she’s trying to get me convicted.”
“Why would she want to do that?” I asked.
“My husband was handsome and a self-described sex addict. He would screw a tree if it breathed. He liked to tell me that Ellen was ‘a treasure,’ and he’d put a little spin on it to see what I would do. But I never gave him the satisfaction of a reaction.”
Now Candace Martin clenched her fists on the tabletop. “You know what I cared about, Sergeant? The kids. Caitlin and Duncan love Ellen. I wanted to trust her, so I did.”
I said, “I don’t see where this is going, Dr. Martin. Whatever was going on between Ellen Lafferty and your husband, why would she commit perjury? Why would she accuse you of murder?”
“Here’s what I think, Sergeant. I didn’t understand why an intruder would shoot Dennis. But today, when Ellen turned the air purple with her lies, it clicked.
“What if Dennis was screwing her? What if he was making promises to her about divorcing me, and it wasn’t happening fast enough? What if she gave him an ultimatum and he didn’t go for it? What if she was the so-called intruder who shot my husband?”
I said, “That’s a lot of what ifs and no evidence at all.” I stood up, already projecting myself out of the Hall, heading home to my husband, leaving this whole questionable action behind me.
“I know, I know,” Candace said, putting her head in her hands. “I know it’s just speculation, but if you knew what a manipulative prick Dennis was, you’d see how he could use her to enrage me — and use me to enrage her.”
“Sorry, Dr. Martin. It’s an interesting theory,” I said, “but that’s all it is.”
I was acting tough, but Candace Martin was getting to me. I’d once been on trial, accused o
f wrongful death, and had been abandoned by everyone but my attorneys. What Candace Martin said made sense. I sympathized with her and I even liked her.
Still. This was not my job.
“Please, Sergeant. Do something,” Candace Martin said, as I signaled to the guard to open the door. “I didn’t kill my husband. That girl is taking care of my kids while I’m in a cage and on trial for my life.”
Chapter 26
THE NEXT MORNING, Conklin and I were in the Richardsons’ posh wood-and-amber-toned luxury suite at the Mark Hopkins, simply one of the most elegant, beautiful hotels in San Francisco, with a view of the world from the top of Nob Hill.
Conklin questioned Avis Richardson as her devastated, borderline-hysterical parents hovered in the background.
Conklin was not only kind to Avis, he was sincere, and his first-class interview should have yielded more from her than “I don’t remember anything.”
More than three days after she was admitted to the hospital, she still looked bombed-out and withdrawn. Her body language told me that she wasn’t really listening to Conklin, that her mind was on the far side of the moon.
Paul Richardson paused in his pacing around the Oriental carpet to say, “Avis, try, for God’s sake. Give Inspector Conklin something to work with. This is life and death. Do you understand me? Do you?”
Room service rang the doorbell.
Sonja Richardson brought her daughter a mug of hot chocolate, then pulled me aside to say, “Avis is not herself. Normally, she’s quick. She’s funny. I tell you, she’s having a nervous breakdown. Oh my God, I can’t believe we listened to her. She begged us to let her stay here when Paul was transferred. She had friends, and the staff at Brighton … We felt she was safe at that school.”
I went back to the sitting room and sat a few feet from Avis. Her eyes were vacant. She’d been physically hurt. Her baby was gone. And I was guessing that she blamed herself.
Still, why didn’t Avis ask about her son? She should have had a lot of questions: What were we doing to find him? Was there any chance he was alive? But she didn’t ask a thing.
Did she know that he was dead?
Had she buried him herself?
Was the baby’s father involved in this horror story?
Conklin took a new tack. He said, “Avis, were you threatened? Is that it? Did someone tell you that if you spoke to the police they’d hurt the baby?”
I could almost see the lightbulb go on over her head. Avis turned her eyes up and to the right and said, “Yeah. The Frenchman said he’d kill my baby if I talked to the police.”
My bull-crap alarm went off, a three-alarm clamor.
Avis had just lied.
I stood up from the chubby armchair, cast my five-foot-ten shadow across the girl on the couch, and said, “I have to talk to Avis alone.”
There was silence for a full three seconds and then Conklin said, “Mr. and Mrs. Richardson, let’s go into the other room. I need to get some contact information and so forth.”
The girl looked up at me as the room cleared, and I saw fear in her eyes. She was afraid of me. Maybe she figured that Conklin was the good cop and I was the other one.
She got that right.
I said, “It’s time, Avis. I want to find your baby and I’m staying in your face, here or at the police station, until you tell me the truth. Do you understand?”
“I’m the victim,” she whined. “I was kidnapped. You can’t hold me responsible.”
“I can damn well hold you responsible. I can hold you as a material witness for forty-eight hours. During that time, I won’t be bringing you hot cocoa. I will make you as miserable as possible, and when I get tired, I’ll send in a fresh team of bullies.”
“No.”
“Yes. Right now, cops are getting a warrant for your phone records,” I said, picking up the armchair and setting it down hard, closer to the couch. “We’re going to know the names of everyone you’ve spoken to in the past year. We will find something.”
No comment.
Her silence was infuriating.
“Dammit, little girl. Your baby is missing. Maybe he’s dead. You’re his mother. You’re all he has. And you’re all I have. The bullshit stops now. Do you read me?”
Avis Richardson shot a furtive look at the door. “They’ll kill me,” she said.
I crossed the floor, locked the door to the adjoining room, threw the bolt, and sat back down. My heart was pumping like it was about to explode.
Tears gathered in Avis Richardson’s eyes. Then she started to talk.
Chapter 27
“I DIDN’T WANT my parents to know that I was … pregnant,” Avis Richardson said.
She sat scrunched against the back of the couch, her knees tucked up to her chin, her black-painted toenails peeking out from under a blanket. “I saw an ad on Prattslist a couple of months back,” she said.
Prattslist. It was a message board for virtual tag sales and personal ads, and it also functioned as the yellow pages for prostitutes and sex offenders and predators of all types and stripes prowling for victims.
“Tell me about the ad,” I said.
“It said something like ‘Pregnant? We’ll help you from birth to … uh, placement with your baby’s new parents.’” She gave me a glancing look. “So I called the number.”
I shook my head, sick that this girl who could have had the best medical care in the world had hidden her pregnancy from people who cared about her. Then she’d turned her life over to an anonymous phone number on Pervs “R” Us. I said, “Go on.”
Avis said that her call had been answered by the man with a French accent who told her to call again when she was in labor. He’d said there would be papers to sign.
“He said that he was a doctor and that the delivery would be as safe as if I were in a hospital. He told me that the adopting parents would be completely vetted. And he said I’d be reimbursed ten thousand dollars for prenatal expenses.”
Holy crap. Avis Richardson had sold her baby.
I was furious, frustrated, and still hopeful that the child was alive, but I kept emotion out of my voice.
I said, “You believed all this, Avis? You weren’t suspicious at all?”
“I was grateful.”
I didn’t know whether to spit or go blind.
Avis Richardson had known what had happened to her baby from the start. She had lied to the SFPD, and we’d pressed half of our resources into a phony dragnet that had wasted time and manpower and could never have turned up her baby.
Well, at least the time for lying was over.
If Avis didn’t want to sleep in general holding tonight, she was going to tell me the truth about everything she knew.
Chapter 28
AVIS RICHARDSON PICKED at her nail polish as she told me that two months after her first call to “the Frenchman” she’d found on Prattslist, she started having contractions. She called the number again and arranged to be picked up a couple of blocks from the school.
“You’ve got the number?”
“No one answers it anymore.”
And then she returned to her story.
“I was nervous that someone might see me standing on the street like that,” she said. “When the car pulled up, I saw that it was a regular four-door type. Dark color. Clean. I ducked into the backseat really quick.”
Rental car, I thought.
Avis said there were two men in the front seat of the car, but their faces were in shadow and after she was inside, all she saw were the backs of their heads. She was told to lie down on the floor in back and cover herself with a blanket.
“How long was the drive?” I asked. “Did you hear anything that could help us figure out where you were taken?”
“I don’t know how long I was in the car. An hour? They turned on the radio,” Avis told me. “Lite music station. Pretty soon after that, I felt a needle stab my hip, right through the blanket. Next thing I knew, I was being hustled out of the car and he
lped up a walk toward a house. Sergeant Boxer, I was in agony.”
“What can you remember about the house? Color? Style? Was it on a residential block?”
“I don’t know. I was hanging on to the men’s arms, looking at my feet. … I think I heard the door slam behind me, but I was knocked out again, and when I woke up, I was in a bed having contractions every couple of minutes,” she said.
I sighed. Put my anger down. This was such a bleeping awful story. Maybe the only way the kid could deal with what had happened to her was to distance herself as she had done.
“Next time I woke up, there was a light shining in my face. It was clipped to a door. One of those aluminum bowl-shaped lights?”
I nodded and noted the non-clue detail.
“I couldn’t see anyone because of the light in my eyes, and I was numb,” she said. “They gave me some water out of a red bottle with a sippy straw.
“I heard the baby cry. I asked to see it,” she went on, her voice and expression as flat as a photograph. “I was told, no, it wouldn’t do me any good. That he was a healthy baby boy. And then I woke up on the street,” she told me.
“It was dark,” Avis said. “I didn’t know where I was. Then I saw a street sign that said Lake Merced. My clothes were bloody and disgusting. I found a rain poncho blown into some bushes, so I took off my clothes and put it on.”
The green plastic poncho, the only hard evidence we had, hadn’t even been handled by the men who’d taken her. So much for the thirty-six hours of lab time spent processing traces off it.
“They could have killed me,” she said.
I nodded. “It’s hard to say you were lucky, but you were.”
The girl’s sharpest memories were utterly useless. Fake French accent. Dark sedan. Aluminum lamp. Red bottle with a sippy straw. Green plastic poncho that had never had contact with the perps. Everything led to nothing.
I understood why Avis had blocked more traumatic memories.
But her continued lack of interest in the baby stunned me. It didn’t matter that she didn’t care. I cared.