Was she capable of telling the truth? Toni and Sandy. I wondered if she’d made up those names on the spot.
“When I was in that house, right after I had the baby, Toni gave me her phone so I could call Jordan and tell him to come and get me,” Avis said. “But when I handed the phone to Toni so she could give him directions, Jordan hung up.”
Incoming phone calls would show up in Jordan Ritter’s phone records. So maybe we would yield something.
“I just wanted to get out of there. I didn’t want to be around the baby, so I waited for an opportunity and sneaked out the back door. I hitched a ride as far as Brotherhood Way, but the people who gave me the ride were going east, so I got out.
“What kind of car, Avis? Did you get the name of a person or a plate number? We’re trying to connect the dots. Get me?” I said.
?
?I wasn’t thinking of anything like that. I’d just run away, and I was still in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t have my handbag, my phone, nothing, and I was starting to bleed again. And then I was bleeding really hard. I didn’t expect that.”
Finally the girl was starting to show signs of distress. She was sweating, wringing her hands. Thinking of her own pain.
Conklin said, “Can you go on, Avis? Or do you need to take a break?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “There’s not much more to tell. I found a rain poncho in the weeds near the lake, so I took off my clothes and put it on. I was feeling faint as I walked and I fell down a few times. A car stopped for me and took me to the hospital. I met you,” she said, trying to give me an evil eye.
“Is Jordan in trouble because I’m underage?”
“Jordan will be fine,” I lied. “The most important thing, Avis. More important even than Jordan Ritter, is to find out where your baby is and if he’s okay.”
That was the truth.
Where was that baby?
If these women were real and not more characters from Avis Richardson’s creative-writing workshop, had they kept him?
Was he in a warm room somewhere covered with a little blue blanket? Did he have a full tummy? A teddy bear? Was he safe?
Or had he been smuggled out of the country with heroin in his colon, gutted as soon as he reached shore?
“How did they pay you?” I asked.
Please, God, let them have given this naive little girl a check.
“They didn’t pay me. I didn’t want the money. That would’ve been illegal, right? To sell my baby? I didn’t sell him. So, what are you going to do now?” Avis asked Conklin.
“Everything is going to be all right,” Conklin told her.
Really? For whom?
Chapter 62
WHEN WE LEFT the Mark Hopkins, Avis was being comforted by her parents. They barely looked up when Conklin said we’d call later, and we left their suite.
My partner and I had a little confab outside my car — or rather, he listened to me rant about the stupidest, most morally challenged girl on the planet — and then we headed out to our respective homes for the night.
I called Quentin Tazio from my cell phone on the drive home.
Quentin is a police resource, a tech consultant who has been described as a “brain in a bottle.” He lives in a dungeon of his own devising, a dark and drab two-floor flat tricked out with a million dollars in computer equipment.
It’s how he spent his inheritance from his father, and it had made Quentin absolutely the happiest man I knew.
I told QT, as he liked to be called, about the ad on Prattslist, the call to Jordan Ritter’s phone, and the two names, Sandy and Toni, which may have been real names, nicknames, or pseudonyms the women made up to use on Avis.
Maybe, for once, Avis had told us the truth to the extent that she knew it.