“Joe found a hair that could be Cindy’s caught under the desk drawer. It’s at the lab. But, Rich, we knew she was wedged under a desk. Now we know where.”

  Richie’s face just fell apart. “This is so wrong.”

  The brother I’d never had, my dear friend, crossed his arms on the table, put his head down and broke into sobs. I understood that this was yet one more breaking point. The chances of finding Cindy alive were minute, but finding a strand of her hair felt like proof of death.

  I said, “We didn’t find any other sign of her, Rich. Nothing. He probably moved her. Uniforms are sitting on that house 24-7. If he comes back … Look. That scum made us an offer—Burke for Cindy—and that offer is still standing. He’s not going to walk away from that.”

  We both knew that exchange wasn’t happening, but I said it to comfort us both. Richie didn’t answer me. He cried and I sat with him, rubbing his back and heaving shoulders.

  About then, Brady burst through the door. “Sorry,” he said, seeing Conklin’s distress. “We’re not done, Boxer. Come see me.”

  Brady left.

  There wasn’t a paper towel or a napkin or a dollar pack of tissues in the room. Rich wiped his face with his sleeves and said, “The contact info for Bryan Catton’s school friends is old. We checked. The numbers are no good anymore. The bookstore where Catton worked on weekends is out of business.”

  “We have two more addresses,” I said.

  “Lindsay, I want in on the search for Cindy. Or I’m going to fucking quit.”

  CHAPTER 86

  THIS WAS PURE desperation time and we knew it. Cindy had been missing for too long and we hadn’t been prodded by Blackout. So, we were scraping the bottom of Marion Witmar’s tip list. She had given us names that we’d connected to locations where Catton may have lived years ago—or where he might be living now. Or we’d never know.

  With no sand left in the hourglass, we’d committed to checking out Witmar’s leads with Blackout’s given name—Bryan Catton.

  Cappy and Chi had drawn the name Bennet Frank, a Catton high school friend. After running Frank’s name and finding nothing criminal, they were driving to his house in the Marina District.

  Conklin had pressed Brady to the wall until he relented and put Rich back in action on the search for Cindy. Brady had too many balls in the air, and now he had to neutralize the Barbara Sullivan media bomb that was radiating out to all points.

  Richie and I pulled the name Austin Reynolds, an actor/stand-up comedian who knew Bryan Catton through their drama classes at Berkeley. Reynolds’s bio on social media listed his day job as a copy editor for a small publishing company.

  So on that hazy Saturday afternoon, two weeks after Blackout had put a couple of rounds into Ralph Hammer’s head, we were squeezing out a few unexplored leads. I knew Rich and I were both thinking of Cindy, last seen balled up under a desk and no longer there. We met Alvarez at the garage and checked out a tech-tweaked unmarked police car and headed out to Dolores Heights.

  We had a dedicated radio channel connected to Brady’s office, two FBI special agents in the form of my husband and his former partner for a half-dozen years. We also had the assistance of two undercovers driving an unmarked Chevy sedan following us to Austin Reynolds’s address. We had no search warrant, no probable cause, and I could only hope that Reynolds knew where Bryan Catton lived. And that at the end of this blindman’s bluff we’d find Cindy Thomas alive and planning her next true-crime tour de force.

  Rich parked our car on 20th Street under a tree across from a clean white apartment building with balconies and city views. Joe and Mike parked a half block away and the undercovers found a spot a couple of car lengths from the entrance to Reynolds’s building.

  The undercovers stayed at the curb. Joe and Mike left their car and took up positions at the back of the apartment building. Rich and I zipped up our Kevlar vests, clipped our badges to our windbreakers, and got out of the car. Dodging traffic, we crossed the street and entered the building’s foyer. On the wall to our right was a bank of mailboxes and intercom buttons.

  Witmar had told us that Bryan Catton and Austin Reynolds had been roommates in college and again before he enlisted. The name “Reynolds” was on the mailbox for apartment 1R. That meant ground floor, rear. I took in a long breath and exhaled as Rich pressed the bell.

  No answer.

  We counted to ten and pressed it again.

  Still no answer.

  We returned to our car and I texted Joe. “He’s not home. Let’s wait thirty mins.”

  “Copy that,” he replied.

  But Rich couldn’t wait half an hour. Ten minutes was his limit. We got out of the car, re-entered the lobby, and out of pure frustration, Conklin pushed the buzzer again, leaned on it.

  This time a male voice spoke.

  “Who is it?”

  “Mr. Reynolds? This is the SFPD.”

  I texted Joe. “Stand by.”

  CHAPTER 87

  THE VOICE AT the apartment end of the intercom said, “What can I do for you?”

  “This is Sergeant Lindsay Boxer, SFPD. We need you to look at some pictures,” I said. “Take two, three minutes.”

  “Can you come back later? I’m in the middle of something,” Reynolds said.

  I tried to listen to the rhythm and tone of his voice. There was classical music playing in the background. The voice itself was distorted through the intercom.

  “Mr. Reynolds,” Rich said. “We’re going building to building, knocking on doors. Let’s do this quick and we’ll get out of your life.”

  The buzzer sounded. Rich pushed on the lobby door. I notified Joe that we were in, then Rich and I headed down the corridor until we stood in front of Reynolds’s door.

  I pressed the doorbell. I heard footfalls coming closer, then the peephole cover sliding open, the chain moving along a track and the hard click of a lock opening. At last, the door opened and I was staring at the face of a white male in his twenties, under six feet, dark haired, wearing black-rimmed glasses.

  This was Blackout.

  I clamped down on my startle reflex. He looked at me seemingly without recognition, then shifted his eyes to Richie and stepped aside.

  “Come in, I guess,” said the man with the glasses.

  We stepped inside and Reynolds closed the door behind us. Bryan Catton was a strangler. I lifted my shoulders an inch or two, retracting my neck out of pure instinct as Rich and I entered his long, narrow living room.

  It was a straight shot from the door, past an eat-in kitchen and a number of closed doors along the left-hand wall. The right-hand wall was all bookshelves and movie posters from Casablanca to Avengers. The room ended at a pair of sliding doors fronting a terrace.

  I walked down to the sliders, opened them, and Joe and Mike vaulted over the terrace railing and walked in. They were big men, armed, wearing FBI windbreakers.

  “Who are you?” Reynolds asked. “What is this?”

  I made introductions and took a seat at the round dining table. We all did, including a reluctant Austin Reynolds. I looked into our subject’s face and thought, It’s happened.

  We’ve got him. We’ve got Blackout.

  But at the same time, I thought, Down, girl. Play this right. I didn’t dare look at Richie.

  Reynolds said, “Why do I think there’s more to this than looking at pictures?”

  “We’re investigating a series of crimes,” I said. “You may be able to help us.”

  Reynolds’s voice sounded the same as when I spoke to him on the phone, but I couldn’t be sure. I was expecting him to bolt, and at the same time, thinking he was going to say, “Nice to meet you, Sergeant Boxer,” in the sassy, nasty way he’d been dealing with me since Hammer’s murder tape arrived in my inbox. But Blackout was reputed to be a brainiac. If so, he would want to know what we knew. He’d play us, just like Burke.

  “Reynolds” said, “What kind of crime? And why do you think I can help?”

  Joe said, “Mr. Reynolds. Is anyone else here?”

  “No. No one at all.”

  “Okay,” Joe said. “We’re permitted by law to do a walk-through of your rooms and the building’s basement to make sure no one’s in hiding.”

  This was true. We were not allowed to open any space too small to enclose a body, so furniture was out, but closets and rooms were fair game.

  Mike said, “I’ll take the basement.”

  He left by the apartment’s front door, while Joe opened interior doors with gun drawn and checked the rooms.

  He came back to the table and said, “All clear.”

  When Mike also rejoined us, I said to Reynolds, “Are you familiar with the name Bryan Catton?”

  “Catton. Hell, yeah. What’s he done?”

  “How do you know him?”

  “We studied drama together at Berkeley. We were also roommates for a while in this apartment, but I’ve lived here alone since he enlisted. I haven’t seen him in over six months. Are you saying you’re looking for him?”

  The way “Reynolds” spoke about Bryan Catton in the third person was raising some doubt in my mind. However, they were both actors. This evasive technique could be easy for him. Blackout had lured people to their deaths.

  Rich said, “These are the photos. Can you show me if you see Catton?”

  The photo array was the same deck of six photos we’d shown to Tom Watkins, five mug shots and a photo of Blackout lifted from one of his videos, reduced to the size and shape of the other five.

  Rich fanned all six out on the table. Witmar had described the results of Catton’s plastic surgery: his nose was smaller; his eyes were positioned differently in his face.

  Reynolds hovered his right forefinger over the second photo and then the fifth, then shook his head.

  “I don’t recognize any of these people,” he said. “I can’t make a positive ID.”

  CHAPTER 88

  AT MY REQUEST, Austin Reynolds produced his ID. He had the usual wallet-full: driver’s license, insurance, and credit cards.

  While I studied the picture on his license, I asked him to take off his glasses. I placed the picture of Blackout beside the one of Reynolds. Reynolds had crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes and no surgeon’s scars at the temples. Reynolds’s eyebrows were closer together than Catton’s. His hairline was deeper, and his mouth was wider.

  It had taken me fifteen minutes with Austin Reynolds to conclude that while he and Bryan Catton looked similar, they were not the same dude. Still, I hated to give up my conviction that we’d nabbed Blackout, and I needed more than a photo comparison to be absolutely sure that Reynolds was not Blackout before letting a killer walk free.

  I said, “Mike, can we see that SEEK?”

  Wallenger pulled the SEEK, a handheld forensic fingerprint device about the size of a small phone, from his windbreaker pocket.

  “Here’s what you do,” said Wallenger. “You put your thumb right here and this little critter will send your print to Quantico. There it will be compared with Bryan Catton’s prints in the military database.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see,” Reynolds thumbed the reader, laughing, “Oh, this is good. You think I’m Bryan? Really? No, listen don’t feel bad when you guys turn out to be wrong. We used to get mistaken for one another a lot back in school.”

  While we waited for the print to enter the government store of fingerprints, Reynolds answered Richie’s questions about Bryan Catton. No, he’d never seen any signs of violence when they were in school. Catton was extremely smart and the two of them competed for the best roles in plays put on by the drama department. Later, they competed for roles in commercials. People liked Bryan, Reynolds said, but he never made real friends.

  “Except you,” I offered.

  “Not even me,” said Reynolds. “But he was a good roommate. He had a sense of humor. He picked up his clothes and ran the dishwasher and that was all I cared about.”

  “Got it,” said Wallenger, looking at the LED on the print reader.

  “You,” he said, looking directly at Austin Reynolds, “are not Bryan Catton.”

  “You were the last to know,” Reynolds said with a grin.

  We wrapped it up quickly after that. I gave Reynolds my card, asked him to call me if Catton contacted him, but to keep walls between them.

  “He’s a killer,” I said to Reynolds. “Don’t let him in the door.”

  CHAPTER 89

  I CHECKED IN with Brady as we set off for the Hall. Conklin was deep in his head when I broke in to say, “Listen, Rich. We know more than we knew twenty-four hours ago.”

  “It still adds up to zero.”

  I sighed. He was right.

  Rich said, “But, we left a box unchecked.”

  “Brooks’s Books?”

  “We should do a ten-minute detour and take a look.”

  I pictured Cindy as we’d seen her last in Blackout’s video, curled into a ball under a desk. The bookstore was a good bet. Better than no bet at all.

  “You’re on,” I said.

  Rich made a U-turn on Oak Street and headed us east toward Hayes Valley, an eclectic shopping and restaurant area with businesses on the ground floors of Victorians and other older buildings, apartments above. It was Saturday, nearing 6:00 p.m., and the street was quiet.

  Rich was staring straight ahead and he stopped for a traffic light at the intersection of Gough and Hayes. I saw Brooks’s Books up ahead, an old vacant bookstore wrapping around the corner of Hayes to Gough on our right. According to our tip-line witness Marion Witmar, Bryan Catton had once worked off-hours in the stockroom. Now there was an epitaph painted on the inside of the plate glass window: “Out of business.”

  Richie looked past me to the store that was already showing signs of neglect. The sidewalk was littered. Windows unwashed. It was as if the store had given up and gone into retirement.

  Rich said to me, “Maybe it’s a wild-ass idea, but it’s the only one I’ve got.”

  “You had me at unchecked box.”

  I got a smile from him, then it faded again into a frown of apprehension. I radioed Brady and told him our change of plans.

  The traffic light changed. Rich took a right at the corner and we drove slowly along Gough, which would take us to the bookstore’s rear entrance, a small lot for employee parking, and a loading dock. Beyond the entrance to this lot was a row of attached houses with small shops on the ground floor.

  We were coming up on the entrance to the bookstore’s parking lot when Rich slowed way down. There was only one car in the lot, and it took a second for my brain to register what my bucking heart already knew. That the car parked to the far side of the lot was a gray Ford four-door sedan with municipal tags. It could be, had to be, the car Tom Watkins had seen across the street from Barbara Sullivan’s house this morning. And maybe also the same car I’d glimpsed in Blackout’s video of Catherine and Josie Fleet’s murders.

  “Stop here,” I said to my partner. He braked hard enough to make our car shudder. An angry driver in a red Saturn behind us honked, pulled around our squad, and flipped us off. I hardly noticed. I was too busy running the gray Ford’s plates through our car’s mobile data computer.

  The MDC came back with an answer: “Not in the system.”

  It was a retired cop car. A “ghost car.” A junkyard retread with fraudulent municipal plates.

  Rich said, “That’s Blackout’s car. No doubt.”

  He put our car in reverse, wrenched the wheel, gave it some gas, and backed us into a spot at the curb with a prime view of the lot, the gray car, and the elevated loading dock at the rear of the bookstore. Rich cut the engine.

  I locked my eyes on the loading dock, noted the typical aluminum roll-down door.

  I said, “Rich, look at the door at right angles to that roll-down.”

  The much smaller second door was the kind used for workers on foot or with hand trucks. Even from where we were parked thirty yards away I could see that it was open, maybe six inches. And above that door was a glass transom window about three feet wide by one foot high.

  “See the transom window?” I said.

  “I do now.”

  It added up. The old gray former cop car, parked at the place where Catton used to work—and a transom window over a metal door that looked identical to the one I’d seen in the Blackout video. The one where he’d dragged Cindy across a warehouse floor.

  Conklin said, “I can hear you thinking.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Blackout is here and so is Cindy.”

  I grabbed the mic off the hook and radioed Brady to tell him that this was no longer a drive-by. It was a full stop and we needed backup, SWAT, drones, complete cover, and Blackout’s reason why.

  Brady asked, “Have you seen any movement?”

  “No.”

  “Lights?”

  “No.”

  Brady said, “Don’t approach that building until I say so. Keep your eyes on that car and the open door. SWAT is still assembled. They can be there in ten. I’ll get a perimeter in place and get back to you.”

  “Copy that, Lieutenant.”

  “Don’t get twitchy,” Brady said. “Once we’ve got that store locked down, we’ll have all the time we need to reel him in.”

  Unless Catton puts a gun to Cindy’s head and bargains his way out. I canceled the thought. Rich dialed down the radio volume and we sat there waiting for the troops to arrive.

  I wanted to jump out of the car and run for that open doorway. I worried that if she was inside the bookstore, she was dead. I also knew that the correct and only thing to do was sit, watch, obey orders.

  “I’m sure of this,” Rich said.

  He wasn’t but he wanted to be. I felt the same way. I kept my eyes on the door and the car under the dusky sky and felt time drag slowly by. I kept my hand on the door handle and waited for Brady’s order to go in.

 

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