Avis took a defiant minute to gather her snack, along with a bottle of soda, and bring it into the sitting area, where she spread everything out on the coffee table.

"Tell us about your English teacher," I said.

"Mr. Ritter?"

"You've got more than one English teacher?"

"Mr. Ritter is okay. Not my favorite, but I get good grades in English. I have a talent for writing."

"Is Jordan Ritter the father of your child?"

"That's insane! insane! I hardly know him." I hardly know him."

I was sitting in a chair at her level, my hands clasped, my elbows resting on my knees. I leaned over the coffee table and said to the teenager, "Do you think I'm stupid?"

"What?"

"I said, Do you think I'm stupid?"

"What difference does it make who the father is anyway?"

I said, "That's it. Avis, stand up. Inspector Conklin, cuff her. Avis Richardson, you're under arrest for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and child endangerment. If we find his body, we'll change that charge to murder."

"Oh my G.o.d, what are you doing?" she said as the cuffs closed around her wrists. "My baby's not dead. He's not dead dead."

"Tell us about it at the station. Let's go," I said.

"Here. I'll talk here here," she said.

I nodded to Rich and he took off the cuffs. The girl threw herself back onto the couch, and then she started telling a version of the story that I hadn't heard before. I didn't know if she was telling the truth.

But truly, her story was taking a turn for the weird.

Chapter 60.

"IF YOU TELL ME A FIB," I said to Avis Richardson, "or a half-truth or even an exaggeration - if you tell me any kind of lie at all - I will know it. And when that happens, you're going to jail."

"I'll tell you the truth," she said. "I'll tell you whatever you want to know. I can't stand it anymore."

"Start talking," I said.

"You're right about Jordan. He is the father of my baby. He has great genes."

Genes? Jeans? This kid was criminally deluded. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, I'd lash out at her.

I put my hands through my hair and took a moment to get a grip on my anger. I couldn't remember when I'd felt so frustrated, but I didn't want to shut this kid down by letting her see the fury in my eyes. It was the time to let Conklin work his magic with women.

Conklin said, "Is the baby alive, Avis? Do you know where he is?"

"He's alive. I don't know where he is, though."

Conklin said, "Okay, Avis. Let's see if we can figure it out together."

"A lot of what I said before was true. I hid my pregnancy. I didn't even tell Jordan about it for five months. Then I told him, and he started to go a.s.shole on me. 'How do I know it's even mine?'"

"Men can be jerks," Conklin said.

Avis nodded. "I went out to Prattslist and found an ad."

"There was no ad," I said.

"It wasn't the ad I told you about," Avis said. "It was a different ad and it was only three weeks ago. I contacted these two women. A couple. They were looking for a baby and they would pay twenty-five thousand dollars."

"Names?" I said.

"Toni and Sandy."

"That's it?" I said.

"You contacted two women," Conklin said to the teenage idiot on the couch. I looked at the door. With luck, the kid would tell us everything we needed to know before her parents came home.

Right now, Jordan Ritter was facing jail time. Avis Richardson was looking at juvie. And the last thing we needed was a thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyer sticking his fingers in the pie.

"They picked me up a block from the school, but - but they didn't drug me or anything. They said they had a place where I could give birth in peace. I fell asleep in the back of the car."

"When you woke up," Conklin said, "did you know where you were?"

"Not at all. It was dark. It was remote. I was in labor. I got into bed and for about six hours, I screamed my head off. I gave birth to the baby. I held him. He was absolutely the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. And then I gave him to Toni and Sandy. They were nice and they really wanted him."

I'd reached my limit. Did this child care at all about her son? No.

I shouted, "That's the last you saw of that baby? You have nothing else to tell us? Is any of what you told us true? If you gave birth with these nice women in attendance, explain to us why you were found bleeding out near the lake."

"That part was all my fault," said Avis Richardson.

Chapter 61.

HALLELUJAH. Avis Richardson was finally about to take some responsibility. If she admitted something that led us to her baby, I thought I could possibly forgive her for driving us crazy for the past week.

How about it, Avis? Gonna give us a break?

I went to the fridge in the kitchenette, brought back a bottle of soda, and poured three gla.s.ses, no ice.

"Toni said she and Sandy would stay with me until I felt well," Avis told Conklin and me. "Then they were going to take the baby home."

"Did they say where home was?" Conklin asked.

"Nuh-uh," Avis said.

I was still comparing and contrasting Avis's new story with what she'd told us before, and the two versions hardly matched up.

The French-speaking man was on the cutting-room floor. The kidnapping was history. The father of her baby was her English teacher. Avis had answered an ad from two women women, and now Avis said she had given up her baby voluntarily.

Was she capable of telling the truth? Toni and Sandy. I wondered if she'd made up those names on the spot.

"When I was in that house, right after I had the baby, Toni gave me her phone so I could call Jordan and tell him to come and get me," Avis said. "But when I handed the phone to Toni so she could give him directions, Jordan hung up."

Incoming phone calls would show up in Jordan Ritter's phone records. So maybe we would yield something something.

"I just wanted to get out of there. I didn't want to be around the baby, so I waited for an opportunity and sneaked out the back door. I hitched a ride as far as Brotherhood Way, but the people who gave me the ride were going east, so I got out.

"What kind of car, Avis? Did you get the name of a person or a plate number? We're trying to connect the dots. Get me?" I said.

"I wasn't thinking of anything like that. I'd just run away, and I was still in the middle of nowhere. I didn't have my handbag, my phone, nothing, and I was starting to bleed again. And then I was bleeding really hard. I didn't expect that."

Finally the girl was starting to show signs of distress. She was sweating, wringing her hands. Thinking of her own pain.

Conklin said, "Can you go on, Avis? Or do you need to take a break?"

"I'm okay," she said. "There's not much more to tell. I found a rain poncho in the weeds near the lake, so I took off my clothes and put it on. I was feeling faint as I walked and I fell down a few times. A car stopped for me and took me to the hospital. I met you you," she said, trying to give me an evil eye.

"Is Jordan in trouble because I'm underage?"

"Jordan will be fine," I lied. "The most important thing, Avis. More important even than Jordan Ritter, is to find out where your baby is and if he's okay."

That was the truth.

Where was that baby?

If these women were real and not more characters from Avis Richardson's creative-writing workshop, had they kept him?

Was he in a warm room somewhere covered with a little blue blanket? Did he have a full tummy? A teddy bear? Was he safe?

Or had he been smuggled out of the country with heroin in his colon, gutted as soon as he reached sh.o.r.e?

"How did they pay you?" I asked.

Please, G.o.d, let them have given this naive little girl a check.

"They didn't pay me. I didn't want the money. That would've been illegal, right? To sell my baby? I didn't sell him. So, what are you going to do now?" Avis asked Conklin.

"Everything is going to be all right," Conklin told her.

Really? For whom?

Chapter 62.

WHEN WE LEFT the Mark Hopkins, Avis was being comforted by her parents. They barely looked up when Conklin said we'd call later, and we left their suite.

My partner and I had a little confab outside my car - or rather, he listened to me rant about the stupidest, most morally challenged girl on the planet - and then we headed out to our respective homes for the night.

I called Quentin Tazio from my cell phone on the drive home.

Quentin is a police resource, a tech consultant who has been described as a "brain in a bottle." He lives in a dungeon of his own devising, a dark and drab two-floor flat tricked out with a million dollars in computer equipment.

It's how he spent his inheritance from his father, and it had made Quentin absolutely the happiest man I knew.

I told QT, as he liked to be called, about the ad on Prattslist, the call to Jordan Ritter's phone, and the two names, Sandy and Toni, which may have been real names, nicknames, or pseudonyms the women made up to use on Avis.

Maybe, for once, Avis had told us the truth to the extent that she knew it.

I cooked dinner for Joe and had a jumbo gla.s.s of merlot with my pasta. We went for a long walk with Martha and I told my husband the latest episode in the Avis Richardson story.

Joe said, "I have a hunch QT is going to find something for you, Linds."

Joe has first-cla.s.s, FBI-trained hunches.

I had a great night's sleep wedged between Joe and Martha, and when I got to the Hall at 8:30 a.m., I discovered that QT had called.

I called him back, and while I waited for him to get my message and return my call, Brady asked me to come to his office and update him on Richardson. I gave him a detailed but concise report, and he asked good questions. I only wished I had something worthwhile to tell him.

"Get traction on this thing, or we'll send it down the line to Crimes Against Persons and move on," he said.

My phone was ringing when I got back to my desk. I was hoping it was QT, but I saw from my caller ID that it was Dean Hanover of the Brighton Academy.

"Boxer," I said, picturing the man with the polka-dot bow tie in his b.u.t.toned-up office.

"Sergeant, I'm glad I reached you."

"Is something wrong?"