10th Anniversary (Women's Murder Club 10)

“She didn’t show up to dinner, Rich. I called her a couple of times, left messages. Maybe her phone died. Did you try her at the office?”

“Yeah. I’ll try her there again.”

“Call me back.”

I was hunting for my softy spa socks when Conklin called again.

“I got her voice mail, Linds. This isn’t like Cindy. I called QT. I’m going over there.”

“What are you thinking?” I asked him.

“I’m thinking this is probably unfounded panic on my part and she’s going to be blistering mad. But what can I say? I love the girl.”

“I’ll see you at QT’s,” I said.

I took off my pj’s and hung them on a hook on the back of the bathroom door.

Chapter 101

I’D BEEN TO Quentin Tazio’s combination home and computer forensics lab many times, always when we were in a jam that required him to apply his skills in a strictly outside-the-box kind of a way.

His place is on Capp Street in the Mission, a former machine shop — squat, gray, two-story, and cement-faced with roll-up garage doors on the street level.

At nine-thirty at night, the streets were rockin’ with people going in and out of taquerias, galleries, restaurants, and bars. Traffic was clogged and impatient. A drunk peed against one of the young trees dotting the sidewalk.

As I parked my car parallel to Conklin’s, I told myself that Cindy was fine, that she’d just gotten involved in a story and lost track of the time. That said, Cindy pushed herself into ugly situations and always worked against her fear, a trait we shared. But there was a difference between us.

I was a trained cop with a gun and a badge and a department behind me. Cindy had a press pass and a BlackBerry.

I put an SFPD card on the dash, then went to the doorway and pressed the button next to Tazio’s name.

QT’s digitized voice came through the speaker, and a second later I was buzzed in.

I hooked a left at the end of a narrow hallway and stepped into a vast, cold space lit by the glow of plasma screens. Monitors hung edge-to-edge on the walls, a built-in desktop went around three sides of the space, and there was a staircase in the middle of the concrete floor that went up to QT’s living quarters.

Conklin called out to me and I crossed to the far side of the room, where he was standing behind QT.

“We’re getting somewhere,” Conklin said.

QT grinned up at me with his large, bright choppers. His bald head gleamed. His long white fingers spanned the curving keyboard. He was good-looking in a naked-mole-rat kind of way.

“Cindy has a GPS in her phone,” QT told me, “but it’s not sending a signal. It’s either turned off or underwater. I had to dump her phone logs to find her last ping.”

Dump her phone logs without a warrant, I thought. Whatever it took to find Cindy, to know that she was okay.

Peering over QT’s shoulder, I took in his computer screen, a map of San Francisco dotted with flags standing for cellular tower locations.

The best geek in the state of California clicked on an icon that stood for a tower in the Tenderloin. A circle appeared on the screen. He clicked on another tower, and then a third, and overlapping circles came up as he triangulated Cindy’s last cell phone signal. I saw one small irregular patch that was common to all three towers.

QT said, “I can get accuracy up to two hundred and fifty meters. The location of that last ping isn’t far from here. This is Turk,” QT said, pointing with the cursor.

“Turk and what?” Conklin asked, completely focused on the screen. “Turk and Jones?”

“Yeppers. You nailed it, Rich.”

“That’s where that cab company is.”

“What cab company?” I asked. “What’s this about?”