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“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 trafficlight 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 Saturnbehind 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?”
