I still didn’t know what we had. Was Avis Richardson a victim of multiple savage crimes? Or had she killed her own child? I kept my foot on the gas as if that would actually bring the Richardson baby home.

“This teenager had recently given birth,” I went on, taking the car through the heart of the Hispanic area of town. We passed check-cashing holes-in-the-wall and cheap souvenir vendors selling T-shirts out of the old 1920s theaters under their cracked and faded marquees.

I turned right onto 26th, still talking. “But the thing is, Cindy, no baby was found. The girl didn’t remember the delivery, and now that the shock is wearing off and she might be able to talk to us, she won’t do it.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I swear I don’t know.”

Cindy made me promise to tell her whatever I could, whenever I could, on the record. I nodded yes as I turned left on Valencia and parked my old heap in front of the hospital.

Chapter 17

CINDY AND I entered the crowded lobby of Metropolitan Hospital and found Cindy’s friend, Joyce Miller, waiting for us at the main desk. She was a dark-haired woman, maybe thirty-five, wearing a nurse’s uniform.

She pumped my hand with both of hers.

“Thanks for coming, Lindsay. Thanks so much.”

We followed Joyce down a number of branching linoleum-tiled corridors, around corners, and then through the ER, an obstacle course of gurneys and wheelchairs, before we came to a partitioned stall where we met Anne Bennett, a possible rape victim.

Ms. Bennett was a travel agent in her early forties. She looked as fatigued as if she’d been running on a treadmill for the past eight hours.

Her voice quavered as she said that she remembered taking a cab to her office this morning but she woke up behind a Dumpster in an alley a block from her house.