The 6th Target (7 page)

I pulled my car into a parking spot, set the hand brake, and sat there stupidly, looking at nothing, wishing that I could see Joe.

And then a bright idea broke through.

Hey, I can.

I DIDN’T LOOK LIKE ANYONE ELSE in the flight lounge, all men in gray suits and red or blue ties — and me. I’d dressed in a new butter-colored cashmere V-neck, tight jeans, and a waist-skimming tweed jacket. My hair gleamed like a halo. Men stole glances, gave my ego a boost.

As I waited for the plane to board, I checked things off in my mind: That Martha’s dog sitter was on duty. That I’d locked up my gun and badge in my dresser drawer. That I’d left my cell phone in my car. Actually, leaving my cell phone was an oversight, but I didn’t need a shrink to tell me that by shedding my hardware, I was telling the Job to go straight to hell.

I was traveling light, but I
had
brought the essential stuff: lipstick and my round trip business-class ticket to Reagan National that Joe had given me with his keys and a note saying, “
This is your ‘come-to-Joe’ pass and it’s good anytime. XOXO, Joe
.”

I felt a little reckless as I boarded the plane. Not only was I leaving town with a major conflict unresolved but something else was giving me the jitters.

Joe had made surprise visits to me, but I’d never dropped in unannounced on
him
.

The glass of preflight champagne helped settle me down, and as soon as the plane lifted off, I lowered my seat into the reclining position and slept, waking up only when the pilot’s voice announced our imminent descent into DC.

Once on the ground, I gave a cab driver Joe’s address in northwest DC.

A half hour later, the cab swooped around the plantings and fountains in front of the deluxe, L-shaped Kennedy-Warren Apartment Complex. And only minutes after that, I stood in the densely carpeted top-floor hallway of the historic wing, ringing Joe’s doorbell.

Well, I’m here.

When he didn’t answer, I rang the bell again. Then I slipped the first key into the lower lock, used the second key on the dead bolt, and opened the door.

I called out, “Joe?” as I stepped into his unlit foyer. I called again as I approached the kitchen.

Now I was asking myself,
Where
was
Joe
?

Why hadn’t he answered any of his phones?

The kitchen opened into a large, attractive area that was both a dining and a living room. Hardwood floors glowed under the stream of light pouring through the windows at the far end, and I saw a terrace beyond.

I noted that the richly upholstered and dark-wood furnishings were in neat, apple-pie order.

My second look made my heart slam to a stop.

A woman was curled up on a sofa, turned toward the windows, reading a magazine, the white cords of an iPod dangling from her ears.

I was too shocked to move.

Or speak a word.

MY HEART RATE ZOOMED as my focus narrowed to the woman on the couch, a sandwich and cup of tea beside her on the coffee table.

I took in her black tank top and workout pants, the thick, blond-streaked hair knotted behind her head, her bare feet.

My body felt bloodless except for the tingling in my finger-tips.
Had Joe been leading a double life while I was in San Francisco, waiting for his calls and visits
?

My face flushed with anger but also shame. I didn’t know whether to shout or run.

How could Joe have been cheating on me?

The woman must have caught my reflection in the glass. She dropped her magazine, put her hands to her face, and screamed.

I screamed, too. “
Who the hell are you
?”

“Who are
you
!” she shouted back, her hair tumbling out of its knot as she ripped the iPod out of her ears.

“I’m Joe’s girlfriend,” I said. I felt naked and raw, wishing I had a badge to flash at her. Any badge.

Oh, Joe, what have you done?

“I’m Milda,” she said, jumping up from the couch, leading me into the kitchen. “I work here. I clean house for Mr. Molinari.”

I laughed, not out of humor but out of shock.

She yanked a check out of her pants pocket and stuck it out for me to see.

But I was barely focusing on her. Images from the last few days were flying around inside my head.

And now this young woman’s presence was undoing whatever hold I had over my emotions.

“I finished early and I just thought I’d sit for a few minutes,” she said as she washed the dishes she’d used. “Please don’t tell him, okay?”

I nodded numbly. “No. Of course not.”

“I’m leaving now,” she said, turning off the taps. “I don’t want to be late to pick up my son, so I’m going now, okay?”

I nodded.

I went down a hall, pushed open the door to the bathroom. I opened the medicine chest and scanned the boxes and bottles, looking for nail polish, tampons, makeup.

Coming up empty, I went to the bedroom, a large carpeted space with a view of the courtyard. I threw open Joe’s closet door, checked the floor for women’s shoes, ran my hands through the rack. No skirts, no blouses.
What was I doing
?

I knew Joe, didn’t I?

I turned back to the bed and was about to undo the bedding and inspect the linens when I saw a photo on the night table. It was of me and Joe six months ago in Sausalito, his arm around me as the breeze whipped my hair across my face. We both looked in love.

I pressed my hands to my eyes.

I was so ashamed. The sobs simply poured out of me. I just stood there in Joe’s bedroom and cried.

And then I left and went back to California.

MADISON TYLER HOPSCOTCHED over the lines in the sidewalk, then raced back to her nanny’s side, grabbing her hand as they walked toward Alta Plaza Park, Madison saying, “Were you
listening
, Paola?”

Paola Ricci squeezed Madison’s small hand.

Sometimes the little girl’s enchanting five-year-old precocity was almost more than Paola could understand.

“Of course I was listening, darling.”

“As I was saying,” the girl said in the funny grown-up way she had, “when I play Beethoven’s
Bagatelle
, the first notes are an ascending scale, and they look like a blue ladder —”

She trilled the notes.

“Then, the next part, when I play C-D-C, the notes are pink-green-pink!” she exclaimed.

“So you
imagine
that those notes have colors?”

“No, Paola,” the little girl said comically, patiently. “The notes
are
those colors. Don’t you see colors when you sing?”

“Nope. I guess I’m a ninny,” Paola said. “A ninny-nanny.”

“I don’t know what a ninny-nanny
is
,” Madison said, her dazzling smile setting off sparks in her big brown eyes. “But it sounds very funny.”

The two laughed hard, Madison grabbing Paola around the waist, burying her face in the young woman’s coat as they passed the exclusive Waldorf School, only a block and a half from where Madison lived with her parents.

“It’s Saturday,” Madison whispered to Paola. “I don’t have to even
look
at school on Saturday.”

Now the park was only a block away, and seeing the stone walls surrounding it, Madison got more excited and changed subjects.

“Mommy says I can have a red Lakeland terrier when I get a little older,” Madison confided as they crossed Divisadero. “I’m going to name him ‘Wolfgang.’ ”

“What a serious name for a little dog,” Paola said, intent on crossing the street safely. She barely glanced at the black minivan idling outside the park’s fence. Expensive black minivans were as common as crows in Pacific Heights.

Paola swung Madison’s arm, and the child jumped up onto the curb, then stopped suddenly as someone got out of the vehicle and came quickly toward them.

Madison said to her nanny, “Paola, who is that?”

“What’s wrong?”
Paola called to the man stepping out of the van.

“Trouble at home. You’ve both got to come with us right now. Madison, your mom took a fall down the stairs.”

Madison stepped out from behind her nanny’s back, shouting, “My daddy told me never to ride with strangers! And believe me, you’re
strange
.”

The man picked up the child like a bag of birdseed, and as she shouted, “
Help! Put me down
,” he tossed her into the backseat of the van.

“Get in,” the man said to Paola. He was pointing a handgun at her chest.

“Either get in or kiss this kid good-bye.”

RICH CONKLIN AND I had just returned to the squad room after a grim morning of investigating a brutal drive-by shooting when Jacobi waved us into his office.

We crossed the gray linoleum floor to the glass box and took our seats, Conklin perched on the edge of the credenza where Jacobi used to sit, me in the side chair next to Jacobi’s desk, watching him get comfortable in the chair that was once mine.

I was still trying to get used to this turn of events. I looked around at the mess Jacobi had made of the place in just under two weeks: newspapers piled on the floor and windowsill, food odors coming out of the trash can.

“You’re a pig, Jacobi,” I said. “And I mean that in the barnyard sense.”

Jacobi laughed, a thing he’d done more in the last few days than he’d done in the last two years, and despite the chop to my ego, I was glad that he wasn’t huffing up hills anymore. He was a great cop, good at managing the unmanageable, and I was working myself around to loving him again.

Jacobi coughed a few times, said, “We’ve got a kidnapping.”

“And
we’re
catching it?” Conklin asked.

“Major Crimes has been on it for a few hours, but a witness came forward and now it looks like there could be a murder,” said Jacobi. “We’ll be coordinating with Lieutenant Macklin.”

A humming sound came from the computer as Jacobi booted up, a thing he’d never done before getting his new badge. He pulled a CD off the pile of crap on his desk and clumsily slid it into the CD/DVD tray of his computer.

He said, “Little girl, age five, was going to the park with her nanny at nine this morning when they were snatched. The nanny is Paola Ricci, here on a work visa from Cremona, Italy. The child is Madison Tyler.”

“Of the
Chronicle
Tylers?” I asked.

“Yep. Henry Tyler is the little girl’s father.”

“Did you say there’s a witness to the kidnapping?”

“That’s right, Boxer. A woman walking her schnauzer before going to work saw a figure in a gray coat exit a black minivan outside Alta Plaza Park on Scott Street.”

“What do you mean, ‘figure’?” Conklin asked.

“All she could say was a person in a gray coat, didn’t know if it was a man or a woman because said person was turned away from her and she only looked up for a second. Likewise, she couldn’t identify the make of the vehicle. Said it happened too fast.”

“And what makes this a possible homicide?” I asked.

“The witness said that as soon as the car rounded Divisadero, she heard a pop. Then she saw blood explode against the back window of the van.”

JACOBI CLICKED HIS MOUSE a few times, then swung the laptop around so Conklin and I could see the video that was playing on the screen.

“This is Madison Tyler,” he said.

The camera was focused on a small blond-haired child who came out from behind curtains onto a stage. She was wearing a simple navy-blue velvet dress with a lace collar, socks, and shiny red Mary Janes.

She was absolutely the prettiest little girl I’d ever seen, with a look of intelligence in her eyes that canceled any notion that she was a baby pageant queen.

Applause filled Jacobi’s office as the little girl climbed onto a piano seat in front of a Steinway grand.

The clapping died away, and she began to play a piece of classical music I didn’t recognize, but it was complicated and the child didn’t seem to make any mistakes.

She finished the piece with a flourish, stretching her arms as far as they could go down the keyboard, releasing the last notes to loud bravos and rousing applause.

Madison turned and said to the audience, “I’ll be able to do much better when my arms grow.”

Fond laughter bubbled over the speakers, and a boy of about nine came out from the wings and gave her a bouquet.

“Have the parents gotten a call?” I asked, tearing my eyes from the video of Madison Tyler.

“It’s still early, but no, they haven’t heard anything from anyone,” said Jacobi. “Not a single word. Nothing about a ransom so far.”

CINDY THOMAS WAS WORKING from the home office she’d set up in the small second bedroom of her new apartment. CNN was providing ambient sound as she typed, immersed in the story she was writing about Alfred Brinkley’s upcoming trial. She thought of not answering the phone when it rang next to her elbow.

Then she glanced at the caller ID — and grabbed the phone off the hook.

“Mr. Tyler?”
she said.

Henry Tyler’s voice was eerily hollow, nearly unrecognizable. She almost thought he was playing a joke, but that wasn’t his style.

Listening hard, gasping and saying, “
No . . . oh, no
,” she tried hard to understand the man who was crying, losing his thoughts, and having to ask Cindy what he’d been saying.

“She was wearing a blue coat,” Cindy prompted.

“That’s right. A dark-blue coat, red sweater, blue pants, red shoes.”

“You’ll have copy in an hour,” Cindy said, “and by then you’ll have heard from those bastards saying how much you have to pay to get Maddy back. You
will
get her back.”

Cindy said good-bye to the
Chronicle
’s associate publisher, put down the receiver, and sat still for a moment, gripping the armrests, reeling from a sickening feeling of fear. She’d covered enough kidnappings to know that if the child wasn’t found today, the chances of finding her alive dropped by about half. It would drop by half again if she wasn’t found tomorrow.