I was accustomed to Cindy getting between rocks and hard places and equally used to the idea that she could chop her way out. But a bad feeling was coming over me.
Cindy had been missing for more than three hours.
We kept saying, “If Cindy’s phone was turned off …”
But Cindy never turned off her phone. The last contact her phone GPS chip made was within two hundred and fifty meters of this building.
So where was she?
And if she wasn’t here, and her phone wasn’t turned off, where was she?
Where the hell had she gone?
Chapter 103
DISPATCHER MARILYN BURNS opened the stairwell door onto the lowest subterranean level, and Conklin and I were right behind her.
The windowless space was dark and dank and twenty-five feet underground. The fluorescent lighting was so dim, it didn’t illuminate the corners of the room.
I thought about the crap-quality surveillance cameras high up on the walls and pillars — they would record nothing but snow. I stood at the foot of the ramp and tried to get my bearings.
Beyond the ramp was a motion-sensor and the magnetic key card-operated garage door that opened onto Turk Street. Beside that exit was the industrial-size freight elevator with its door rolled down and a hand-lettered sign duct-taped to it reading, “Out of Service.”
To my right was the fire door to the stairwell we’d just come from. To my left was a door with another hand-lettered sign, this one marked “Storage.” It was faced with metal, and I could see a shiny new dead bolt from thirty feet away.
“What’s in that room?” I asked Burns.
“It’s empty now. We used to store parts in there,” she said, “but we moved the parts room to the main floor to cut down on thefts.”
I moved my flashlight beam across the door and under the surrounding taxis — and then I saw something that just about stopped my heart.
Under a cab, about fifteen feet from the storage room, was a collapsible umbrella. It was red with a bamboo handle. Cindy had an umbrella just like that.
My hands shook as I put on gloves and picked up the umbrella and handed it to Rich. “This had to have fallen out of a cab,” I said. “Doesn’t it look familiar?”
Conklin blinked at the umbrella, then said to Marilyn Burns, “You have the key to that storeroom?”
“Al keeps the keys. All of them. He manages this place.”
I opened my phone. The words “no signal” flashed. I told Rich and he said to Burns, “Go upstairs and call nine one one. Say officers need backup. Lots of it. Do it now.”
I held my light on the storage room door, and Conklin pulled his gun, aimed, and fired three shots into the lock.
The sounds of the three shots multiplied as the echoes ricocheted throughout the underground cavern. But we didn’t wait for the cracking booms to stop.
I took a stance behind Conklin. My gun was drawn as he pulled open the storage room door.
Chapter 104
IN THE SPLIT SECOND before my flashlight beam hit the room, pictures flashed through my mind of what I was afraid to find: Cindy lying dead on the floor, a man pointing a gun at my face.
I found the switch on the wall, and the lights went on.
The windowless room was a cube about twelve feet on all sides. Coils of ropes and tools hung from hooks on the walls. A dark-stained wooden worktable was in the center of the floor. Was this the rapist’s party room?
Was that blood staining the table?
I turned toward Rich, and that’s when I heard a muffled sneeze coming from outside the storage room.