18th Abduction (Women's Murder Club) by James Patterson Read Free Book Online

recently and connected. While he struggled into his leather jacket, Conklin snaked a hand around him, picked up the beer glass by the rim. While I further distracted Barry by putting the photo of him back in his face, asking, “This is the parking lot at the Bridge, right?” Conklin got a plastic bag from the bartender.
    “I guess so,” Barry muttered.
    With his prints on a bagged glass under Conklin’s Wind-breaker, we escorted him out onto the street and into the back of our car. As Conklin drove, I checked out Thomas Barry on the MDC built into the console.
    Barry had a minor-league record: an arrest for drunk and disorderly one night at Casey’s a couple of years back, a fender bender last year, and a DUI. His juvenile record was sealed.
    I had an image in mind of Carly Myers and Barry, and he didn’t look, smell, or feel like a match for her. What did she see in him?
    My interest was piqued. So much so that I was cautiously optimistic that Tom Barry held a key to the whereabouts of the missing schoolteachers.

CHAPTER 17
    The Hall of Justice was a large, rectangular granite building on Bryant Street, home to the criminal court, the DA’s office, a jail, and the Southern Station of the SFPD, which included the homicide squad, where Conklin and I worked in the bullpen on the fourth floor.
    Despite its storied past and understated charm, the HOJ was rat-infested, prone to flurries of asbestos and sewage leaks, and seismically unstable.
    We’d been working here for so long that Conklin and I hardly noticed that the Hall was hazardous to our health. Whenever we talked about it, we agreed that we would miss the old wreck when it was eventually demolished.
    But at that moment, with a possible suspect in tow, we were only thinking about the missing schoolteachers.
    Conklin, Tom Barry, and I were seated at a metal table inside a small interrogation room down the hall from our squad room. Lieutenant Warren Jacobi, our old friend and commanding officer, was behind the glass.
    I took the lead in the interview and began by asking Barry to help us out. He responded by pushing my buttons, first denying knowing anything about Carly yet again, then becoming argumentative and belligerent. He had quite an act. And the truth was, we had nothing on him.
    He could walk out anytime.
    Conklin took a turn.
    “Mr. Barry, cut it out. This is very damned serious. We’re trying to save lives here, and you’re acting like you’ve got something to hide. If you’re innocent, act like it, okay?
    “You went out with Carly, spent time with her, so give us something to go on. Where would she be if she went somewhere on her own after work and after dark?”
    “I. Do. Not. Know. Look, I wasn’t attached to her. At all. We talked baseball, football, and especially soccer. We screwed. Once in my place. Once in hers. I didn’t buy her a Valentine. I didn’t introduce her to my mother. The relationship was casual. What don’t you get?”
    After an hour of this combative back-and-forth, I thought I’d wrung everything out of Thomas Barry that he had to give; not only his work schedule but also the name of a woman who could vouch for him the night Carly, Susan, and Adele went missing. He gave us names of two other women he’d rolled with on the two nights after that. Thomas Barry was a player. We would send his prints to the lab, my thought being that maybe his prints would be found on Carly Myers’s car.
    It was quarter to two in the afternoon.
    Barry said, “Can I go now? I don’t want to get fired.”
    I said, “I’ll have an officer give you a lift.”
    “Okay. Finally.”
    He stood to put on his jacket and gave me a peculiar look, which I read as a sign he was about to do us a favor.
    “Sergeant, I had nothing to do with Carly being missing. Or any of them. If I were you, I’d be looking into Carly. My take is that she’s no angel. She has a dark side. That much I can tell you.”
    There was a knock on the door and Jacobi came