San Francisco Night by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online Page A

and drove to the Mission Street library, a square gray building on a corner lot. He parked the SUV, went inside and found a free computer. He Googled Kent Speckman and Lucille Carr. There was plenty of online information about them both, though nothing that connected them. He got home addresses for them and pictures of their houses. He then spent the next hour looking for Christians who had been abducted over the past six months, but Googling “Missing Christians” didn’t help. He tried Googling missing nuns, priests, monks, church-going spinsters, choristers. Then he narrowed down the list by focusing on disappearances that had occurred the week before a full moon. That gave him several possibilities.
    A seventeen year old boy from Santa Clara hadn’t been seen for five days. Morton Steele, a straight-A student, though something of a loner, hadn’t come home from school that day. He was a regular church-goer, and an altar server at St Anthony’s. The photo showed a pale, chubby face, ginger hair and round metal-framed glasses with thick lenses.
    A church organist had gone missing in Oakland, Caroline Shaw, described as a “devout Christian” had failed to show up to play at a service six months before, and had apparently not been seen since.
    An unmarried woman of seventy from Nob Hill had been reported missing by neighbors. Shirley Davenport, had last been seen after she’d been to St Michael’s church to arrange flowers on a Friday night, and her car had not been found. The accompanying photo showed a thin-faced old woman with round glasses and thinning gray hair. Probably a lovely personality though, thought Nightingale, but he did have the good grace to feel guilty about it afterward.
    One more seemed to fit. A monk had gone missing from Our Lady Of Spring Bank Cistercian Monastery out near Santa Teresa. Brother Gregory West had last been seen working in the monastery vineyards nine months ago, but had not come in for evening service. The monastery grounds had been searched extensively, but no trace of him had ever been found. Police had appealed for witnesses, especially anyone who might have been driving along the main road that passed the bottom end of the vineyard, but there had been no sightings.
    Nightingale printed out the details of the four new cases along with all the information he had on Speckman and Carr, collected the sheets from the desk, paid and left.
    Back in the SUV, he tapped in Kent Speckman’s address and followed the Satnav’s directions for twenty minutes to a large modern house, the type often disparagingly called a McMansion, churned out to order like cheeseburgers. He climbed out and lit a Marlboro as he stared through the twelve-feet high wrought iron gates. The mansion was set back from the road, red brick with a brown slate roof, and a triple garage to the left. The high wall that ran around the boundary was free of spikes or barbed wire but well covered with CCTV cameras and two more cameras covered the gate. There were signs on the wall saying that the house was under the armed protection of a local security company. As he turned back to his SUV an SFPD cruiser pulled up and a female officer climbed out, short and dumpy with hair so uniformly chestnut that it could only have been dyed.
     “Good afternoon, sir.  Is this your car?”
    “It’s a rental,” said Nightingale.
    “License and registration, please?”
    Nightingale went back to the car, opened the glove compartment and gave her the rental agreement before fishing his driver’s license out of his wallet.
    She checked the documents and handed them back. “Thank you, sir. Why are you waiting here?”
    Nightingale had learned over many years that cops never responded well to sarcasm so he played it straight. “My wife’s thinking of moving up here officer, so I was looking at houses, trying to get a feel for the area. I needed a cigarette, and I don’t like smoking when I’m driving.”
    “You’re