The 6th Target (Women's Murder Club 6)

Joe wouldn’t be sitting on my front steps when I got home.

Even Martha was still on vacation.

Thunder rumbled as I ran up the steps to my apartment. It was still raining when I went to bed alone.

Chapter 108

RICH AND I FRETTED AT OUR DESKS the next morning, waiting for Mary Jordan to come through the gate. She arrived ten minutes late, looking rattled.

I invited the Westwood Registry’s office manager to join us in the windowless cell we call the lunchroom. Rich pulled out a chair, and I made coffee — black, two sugars, the way she’d taken it when we’d seen her last.

“I’ve been praying for Madison,” Jordan said, twisting her hands in her lap. There were prune-colored smudges under her eyes. “I feel in my heart that I’ve done what God would want me to do.”

Her words stirred up a little eddy of apprehension in the pit of my stomach. “What did you do, Mary?”

“When Mr. Renfrew went out this morning, I opened the door to his office again. I did some more digging in there.”

She hefted a large leatherlike handbag onto the table and removed a slate-blue, clothbound, old-fashioned accountant’s ledger. It was labeled QUEENSBURY REGISTER.

“This is in Mr. Renfrew’s handwriting,” Jordan said, pointing out the neat block letters and numerals. “It’s a record of a business the Renfrews had in Montreal two years ago.”

She opened the ledger to where a stiff rectangle of paper was wedged between two pages. Jordan took it out and flipped it over.

It was a photograph of a blond-haired boy of about four, with incredible blue-green eyes.

“Got a few minutes?” I asked Jordan.

She nodded her head.

I’d ridden up in the elevator with ADA Kathy Valoy, so I knew she was at her desk. I called her and explained about the Queensbury Register and the photo of the boy.

I said, “The Renfrews are hopscotching around the continent, opening and closing these registries. Kathy, I’m guessing we’re looking at a picture of another victim.”

Kathy must have taken the stairs two at a time, because she appeared in the lunchroom doorway almost before I’d hung up the phone.

She asked Mary Jordan again if she’d dug up this information on her own, and again Jordan swore that she was not acting as our agent.

“I’ll put in a call to Judge Murphy,” Valoy said, staring at the photo, running both hands through her short black hair. “Let’s see what I can do.”

Minutes after we’d escorted Jordan out to the elevator, Kathy Valoy was back on the line. “I’m faxing you the search warrant right now.”

Chapter 109

PAUL RENFREW ANSWERED OUR KNOCK and swung open the door to the Westwood Registry. He was looking smart in a gray herringbone suit, crisp shirt, bow tie, and well-cut wheat-colored hair. His flyaway eyebrows lifted over his frameless lenses, and his smile broadened.

He seemed completely delighted to see us.

“Is it good news? Have you found Madison?” he asked.

Then the four uniformed officers climbing out of the property van caught his eye.

“We have a search warrant, Mr. Renfrew,” I said.

Conklin signaled to the uniforms, and they clomped up the stairs with empty cartons in hand. They followed us down the long hallway to the Renfrews’ office.

The workplace was orderly — a mug of tea was on the desk, a plate of half-eaten muffins resting beside a sheaf of open files.

“Why don’t you tell us all about the Queensbury Register?” I asked Renfrew.