10th Anniversary (Women's Murder Club 10)

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.”