12th of Never (Womens Murder Club 12) (18 page)

He smiled, said, “Hey, sweetie.” He stood and I went into his arms.

“How is she?” I asked.

“She’s sleeping quietly.”

“Any news?”

“I don’t think we’ll hear anything today—”

The woman in the seat next to me was in her early twenties, wearing a red tracksuit and running shoes.

She said, “I made this for Scotty. Want to see?”

I said that I did and she took out a little knitted outfit, blue and white, with a pom-pom on the top of the hat. Her husband was sitting next to her. He said that he was going outside to use the phone.

Just then, pandemonium cut loose.

There was a loud beeping, like a truck’s backing-up alert, and simultaneously a voice came over the intercom: “Code blue in NICU. Code blue.”

I screamed, “Oh, God.” I bolted out of my chair and pitched myself toward the NICU’s swinging double doors. Joe ran along with me as I rounded the bend and headed to the windowed room at the end of the hall. I pulled up short, saw only the infant incubators lined up in four rows of four—when a nurse closed curtains across the window.

I hadn’t been able to pick out my baby. I hadn’t been able to see Julie.

Three doctors pushing a crash cart blew through the doorway. I tried to see around them, but the door closed in my face.

I clutched at Joe and said, “It’s Julie, I just feel it, Joe.”

He shushed me and held me and walked me back to the waiting room, where we sat with three other sets of parents who were nearly paralyzed with fear.

We were all strangers to each other, yet drawn together like people in a lifeboat, watching as the ocean liner goes down.

And then a doctor left the NICU and came toward us.

He stood in the alcove, pulled down his mask, and looked around. I didn’t know him.

But still, his eyes locked on mine.

THE ICU DOCTOR was looking straight at me when he said, “Are Scott Riley’s parents here?”

The young woman sitting next to me, the mom who had knitted the outfit for her son, stood up and said, “I’m Scotty’s mom. Is there a problem, Doctor?”

“Let’s walk a little,” he said.

I watched them go out into the hallway. I was afraid for Scott’s mother, hoping that the doctor would tell her that her baby was out of danger. But Mrs. Riley screamed, her voice echoing in the hallway.

“Nooo, no, no. It can’t be. I just saw him this morning and he was fine.”

Mr. Riley ran toward his wife, who had dropped to her knees and was rocking herself as she sobbed. Scott’s father said to the doctor, “Who are you? I’ve never seen you before. Maybe you’ve mixed up the babies. I know Scotty is going to be fine.”

Nurses swarmed into the hallway and helped Mrs. Riley to her feet, tried to walk her out of the public space.

My heart broke for the Rileys, and their fear reignited mine. It was like lighting a match in a gas-filled room. I felt that I could explode.

Maybe the babies
had
been mixed up.

Joe put his arms around me and I folded myself into his embrace. I said to Joe, “Scotty was a preemie. Julie is a big girl. She’ll be okay. Won’t she, Joe?”

The head nurse came out to the hallway and was walking toward the end of the corridor when Joe and I got out of our seats and boxed her in.

I said, “We’re Julie Molinari’s parents. Have you seen her? Do you know how she’s doing?”

The nurse put her hand on my arm and told us that our baby was sleeping, that all her vital signs were normal. I thanked the nurse. I overthanked her. I just felt so damned grateful.

“I’d like to hold her now, if that’s okay.”

Joe said, “Honey, never wake a sleeping child.”

We went back to the waiting room, held hands, and took turns pacing for another hour before Joe said, “Sweetheart, you’re making yourself crazy. I’m here for Julie. I’m not going anywhere, and besides, she’s sleeping soundly. Didn’t you tell me there’s someplace you’re supposed to be?”

I DROVE FOR two hours, some of that time wishing my eyes had windshield wipers. I pulled myself together about the time I saw the guard towers and the razor wire of the Atwater penitentiary. I parked in the law enforcement lot, combed my hair, and put on lipstick so that I looked like I had some game.

I showed my badge thirty times before being shown to Warden Haight’s corner office overlooking the yard. FBI big cheese Ron Parker joined us, and we talked about the psycho we were taking for a day trip and how dangerous he was.

The warden took a call, then said that Fish was ready for transport to his “playground.” All I had to do was say hello to Fish so he knew that I was on board.

Parker and I walked through the loud, labyrinthine prison corridors out to the lot inside the north gate. The transport vehicle was a black armored van with a steel grille between the front seat and the rear cargo area, where Pretty Boy Fish was flanked by armed guards and shackled to an iron loop in the floor.

Fish smiled when he saw me. It was a great smile, seemingly genuine. The killer was a charmer. With a different mind-set, he could have been a talk show host or a real estate broker dealing in upmarket homes.

“It’s a wonderful day for a treasure hunt,” said Randolph Fish. “I think I know where we might find Sandra Brody.”

We pulled out of the prison yard caravan-style. A pair of motorcycle cops took the lead, then came Fish’s transport van. More cops on bikes followed, then the red van with the hounds. Parker’s government-issue SUV was next, and I brought up the rear in my geriatric blue Explorer.

As I drove blindly through the cloud of dust, I thought about Fish saying, “I think I know where we might find Sandra Brody,” a vague but intriguing statement that was a mile short of a confession.

So far, all that connected Fish to Sandra Brody was that she fit the pattern of young women Fish had been convicted of killing. She had dark hair, was attending college, and she had vanished at three in the afternoon without a trace.

A friend of Sandra’s had taken a cell phone picture of her an hour before she disappeared. Sandy had been crossing the campus on her way to her volunteer job at the Raphael House, a shelter for homeless people. Her jeans looked new, her shirt was powder blue, she was carrying a brown saddle-leather backpack, and she was wearing loafers. Her long, dark hair was shining. To me, she looked like an angel.

Sandra Brody never arrived at her destination.

Jacobi and I had interviewed Sandra’s friends, her boyfriend, and her devastated parents. We had seen videos and photographs of Sandy from the time she was born to the time she was last known to walk the earth.

That cell phone picture had been flashed over the Web and was posted on her Facebook page.

HAVE YOU SEEN SANDY?

The reward for information increased from ten thousand dollars to ten times that amount as money flowed in from friends Sandra hadn’t known she had. Three years after she disappeared, her page was still up. People still wrote on her wall. Her parents hadn’t given up hope that the phone would ring and Sandy would be on the other end of the line.

If Randolph Fish helped us to find Sandra’s body, at the very least, her family would know what had happened to her. I prayed that we were on the road to solving the mystery.

We traveled up Highway 99 north to I-580 west and from there to Redwood Regional Park. I’d been there before and knew it to be 1,829 acres of sequoia, evergreens, chaparral, and grasslands just outside the dense urban areas of Oakland and the East Bay. Wildlife abounded, and that was one of the elements that made this wilderness a good dumping ground.

If coyotes had found a dead body, they would have carried it away, along with any evidence that might lead to Sandra’s killer.

That’s what I was thinking when suddenly the caravan veered onto the verge. Parker nosed his car onto the weedy edge of the road and after avoiding the motorcycles spinning their wheels in loose stone, I came to a stop.

The transport van doors opened and a guard jumped down. He helped his prisoner to the ground and the second guard joined them. He unlocked Randy Fish’s leg irons as the driver and another armed guard dismounted from the front of the vehicle. The cadaver dogs put their noses to the ground and their handler got a good grip on their leads.

Despite the reason we had all driven to this spot, I noticed that it was a beautiful day. The new leaves were a fresh green. The sun was blazing in a clear blue sky, and the air was a mild, pine-scented sixty-two degrees.

Randolph Fish hadn’t stepped on natural earth in more than three years. He took in a deep breath, closed his eyes, and tipped his face up to the sun.

Parker advanced on him and said, “Okay, Mr. Fish. Let’s get to work.”

I HEARD THE psycho killer say to the head of the FBI’s San Francisco field office, “I’d like to have my hands free.”

“I don’t think so,” Ron Parker said. He took a panoramic look around the steep, heavily wooded terrain.

Fish said, “I know you think I’m going to run, but really, I want to read. My paperback is in the van. It’s a great story and I’m dying to find out what happens.”

“Tell you what: when you get back to your cell, I’ll be sure to get that book to you. That’s if you show us where you buried Sandra Brody.”

We were caravanning again, this time on foot. I stayed behind Fish, my hand on my gun. I could imagine that freak in the orange jumpsuit breaking free, zigzagging through the scrub, and bullets missing him, flying into the trees. It wasn’t so hard to believe that Fish might want to get shot out here rather than wait twenty years for his walk to the death chamber.

But if Fish was anticipating “suicide by cop,” you couldn’t tell from watching him. He chatted with Ron Parker, told Ron that he was a happy person. That he had been a happy baby, and hardly ever experienced doubt or frustration.

Parker asked, “So what made you kill those girls? What made you cut off their fingers? I really want to know.”

“If I told you, you’d judge me.”

“Try me,” said Parker.

“I might be willing to tell Lindsay.”

“No. You won’t,” said Parker. “She’s not that interested in your twisted facsimile of a mind.”

“See? I knew you’d judge me,” Fish said brightly.

I thought of the way Fish had tortured his victims for hours or days before finally strangling them or stabbing them to death. All those young women had been loved by their friends and their families. I thought about their mothers, and tears came into my eyes.

I clamped my lips together, using the back of my hand to dry my eyes. I was thinking of Julie. I couldn’t bear to think of losing Julie.

I heard Fish say, “Hey, Ron. I recognize that rocky outcrop. I climbed past it and turned left at the top of the ravine. There’s a trail up there that goes off to the east.”

We crossed a brook and dug our hands into crumbling earth in order to climb up the side of the ravine. We turned left at the rocky outcropping and continued east on a deer path.

Fish, looking as pale as the underbelly of a trout, said to Parker, “It’s been a while since I’ve been here, but see that tree limb that looks like an elbow? You’ll find what you’re looking for under that.”

The dogs snuffled but didn’t alert. The guards shoveled dirt, but only uncovered roots and stones. Fish suggested that they try just a few more yards up the trail, and they did. After some digging, a shovel hit something that caused interest.

Parker hiked up his pants cuffs and squatted near the hole. He reached in and removed a bone from the freshly turned earth. Then he pulled out a skull—with antlers.

Fish laughed.

“I don’t think I had anything to do with killing that. But I can’t say for sure.”

He called out to me, “Lindsay, I haven’t been here in a long time, you know?”

Fish had manipulated all of us to get his outing in the woods. I was mad at myself for letting Ron Parker waste my time. As we hiked back to the road, I called Joe to get an update on our baby girl, but he didn’t answer the phone. I left him a message to call me, and a few minutes later I called him again. Still, Joe didn’t answer.

Fish was walking backwards, talking to me, telling me he was as surprised as we were that we hadn’t found Sandra. “I’m not so sure what I remember. You know, being in a coma for two years is a big deal. In fact, I’m not sure if I ever knew Sandra Brody or if I just got her name from you.”

He was screwing with my head.

I thought maybe God was messing with me, too.

PROFESSOR PERRY JUDD tried to make sense of the enormous black hole that had opened in front of him. It was like a portal ringed with light, a tunnel of some sort, and he was being pulled through it as if he were being drawn into an eclipse of the sun.

The image was stunning, and the feeling of effortless movement was heady. At the same time, the professor knew that what he was experiencing could not be real.

Either he was dead—or he was having a dream.

A dream.

That had to be it.

He had prepared himself for the possibility of a waking dream by marking an X on the back of his left hand before going to sleep. Now he held out his hands, palms facing away from him, and spread his fingers wide. The bluish light limned each of his fingers, and he could clearly see that there were no Xs, no marks of any kind on the backs of his hands.

He was almost certainly dreaming, but to be sure, he ran another reality check. This time he pushed two fingers of his left hand into the palm of his right.

The fingers went straight through his palm.

He had
really
done it. He was lucid, aware that he was inside a dream, and that meant that he had control of the story and the ending.

But first—where was he?

He was sure he had never been in this place before, but then the location came to him. This had to be the Aquarium of the Bay. He had seen a video of it on the Web. He had planned to take his nephew there one day.