AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 86
I DROPPED THE KNOCKER ON THE DOOR of the Westwood Registry that sunless morning after our return from LA. Conklin stood beside me as a round-faced man cracked the door open. He was in his fifties, with blond-going-gray hair and clear gray eyes that peered at me through frameless lenses perched over a sharp beak of a nose.
Did he have something to do with Madison Tyler’s abduction?
Did he know where she was?
I showed him my badge, introduced my partner and myself.
“Yes, I’m Paul Renfrew,” said the man at the door. “You’re the detectives who were here a few days ago?”
I told him that we were, that we had some questions about Paola Ricci.
Renfrew invited us inside, and we followed the natty man down the narrow hallway, through the green door that had been padlocked when we’d last seen it.
“Please. Please sit,” Renfrew said, so Conklin and I each sat on one of the small sofas at right angles in a corner of the cozy office as Renfrew pulled up a chair.
“I suppose you want to know where I was when Paola was abducted,” Renfrew said to us.
“That’d be a start,” Conklin said. He looked tired. I suppose we both did.
Renfrew took a narrow notebook from his breast pocket, a thin daybook of the type that preceded handheld computers. Without prompting, he gave us a short verbal report of his meetings north of San Francisco in the days before, during, and after Paola’s death, along with the names of the potential clients he’d met with.
“I can make you a photocopy of this,” he offered. On a one-to-ten scale, ten being a three-alarm fire, the gauge in my gut was calling out a seven. Renfrew seemed too prepared and well rehearsed.
I accepted Renfrew’s photocopy of his schedule and asked him about his wife’s whereabouts during the same period.
“She’s taking a slow tour through Germany and France,” Renfrew told me. “I don’t have a precise itinerary because she makes it up as she goes along, but I do expect her home next week.”
I asked, “Do you have any thoughts about anyone who would have wanted to hurt Paola or Madison?”
“None at all,” Renfrew told us. “Every time I turn on the television, I see another news story about a kidnapping. It’s a virtual epidemic,” he said. “Paola was a lovely girl, and I’m deeply distressed that she’s dead. Everyone loved her.
“I met Madison only once,” Renfrew continued. “Why would anyone do anything to such a precious child? I just don’t know. Her death is a terrible, terrible tragedy.”
“What makes you think Madison is dead?” I snapped at Renfrew.
“She’s not? I just assumed . . . I’m sorry, I misspoke. I certainly hope you find her alive.”
We were leaving the Westwood Registry when Renfrew’s administrator, Mary Jordan, left her desk and followed us to the door.
Once outside in the dank morning air that was saturated with the smell of fish coming from the nearby market, Jordan put her hand on my arm.
“Please,” she said urgently, “take me somewhere we can talk. I have something to tell you.”
Chapter 87
WE WERE BACK AT THE HALL fifteen minutes later. Conklin and I sat with Mary Jordan in our cramped and grungy lunchroom. She clutched her container of coffee without sipping from it.
“After you left a few days ago, before Mr. Renfrew got back from his trip, I decided to poke around. And I found this,” she told us, taking a photocopy of a lined ledger sheet out of her handbag. “It’s from the Register. That’s what they call it.”
“Where did you find this, Mary?” Conklin asked.
“I found the key to the Renfrews’ private office. They keep the Register in there.”
I phoned the DA’s office, got ADA Kathy Valoy on the phone. I filled her in, and she said she’d be down in a minute.
Valoy was one of those people who actually meant it when she said “a minute.” She came into the lunchroom, and I introduced her to Mary Jordan.
