“Quick Express Taxi,” Quentin said, zooming in on the intersection, rolling his cursor over it.
“Her phone isn’t underwater,” Conklin said. “It’s underground.”
I didn’t understand any of this, but I read the urgency in my partner’s face.
“Let’s go,” he said to me.
Chapter 102
I’D GOTTEN INTO the passenger seat of Conklin’s unmarked car and barely closed the door when he jammed on the gas. The car leapt forward, slid sideways, then sent up a wake as we sped over the slick pavement.
Weaving around double-parked cars and inebriated pedestrians, Rich negotiated the six-minute drive through the traffic-choked streets toward an intersection in one of the roughest blocks in the Mission.
Conklin talked as he drove, telling me that Cindy had been poking around in taxi garages for a minivan cab with a movie ad on the side. So far, one vague sighting by one of the three rape victims was the slim and only clue to the identity of the rapist.
“She went to this hole-in-the-ground by herself on Monday,” Conklin said. “She talked to the day dispatcher. A guy name of Wysocki. If she came back today, it had to be to see him. What do you think, Lindsay? Has Cindy taken this investigative reporter crap too far? Am I wrong?”
I saw the blinking neon signs up ahead on Jones, QUICK EXPRESS TAXI and CORPORATE ACCOUNTS WELCOME. Conklin parked at the curb in front of the grimy storefront before I could answer him.
The dispatcher was in a glass booth, her cage separated from the street by a grill in the plate glass.
I showed her my badge and told her my name, and she said her name was Marilyn Burns. She was forty, white, and petite and dressed in a blue-checked shirt hanging out over her jeans. She wore a wedding band and had a smoker’s gravelly voice.
“I relieved Al right around six,” Burns told us through the grill. “He was in a hurry. Want me to call him? It’s not a problem.”
“Have you seen this woman today?” Conklin asked, pulling out a photo of Cindy from his wallet.
“No, I’ve never seen her.”
“Then, yes, call Al,” I told Burns.
Conklin and I heard her say, “Call me when you get this, Al. Police are looking for someone who might’ve come in on your shift. Girl with curly blond hair.”
The dispatcher put down the phone and said, “If you give me your number —”
“Okay if we take a look around?” Conklin said.
He didn’t phrase it as a question, and Burns didn’t take it as a request. She buzzed us into the grungy ground floor of Quick Express and said, “I’ll take you on the tour.”
Burns whistled up a cabbie to take over for her, and then the three of us walked between rows of parked cabs and past the ramp until we reached the stairs along the northern side of the building.
I asked Burns questions and answered a few of hers as Conklin flashed his light into cab interiors. She explained to me how the cab traffic worked inside the garage.
> “Incoming cabs use their magnetic key card, enter the ramp on Turk,” she said. “Drivers leave their vehicles on one of the three floors, then walk up the stairs, hand me their logs and keys, and cash out.
“When they start a shift,” Burns went on, “it’s the other way around. They pick up their log sheets on main, go down the stairs, take a cab down the ramp to Turk, and use their card to get out. We have a freight elevator goes down to Turk, but it’s not working.”
“Can cabs come in and leave without you seeing them?”
“We’ve got security cameras,” she said. “They’re not NASA-grade, but they work.”
Taxis were parked on the perimeter and between the pillars on all three floors wrapping around the ramp in the center. We checked out minivan cabs and showed Cindy’s picture to a half dozen cabbies we met as we walked.
No one admitted to having seen Cindy.
I turned over various possibilities in my mind.
Had Cindy met someone here who had a story for her? Was she interviewing that someone in a coffee shop with her phone turned off? Or was she drugged in the backseat of a taxi, one of the thousands cruising the streets of San Francisco?