The Final Twist by Jeffery Deaver (free ebooks romance novels txt) 📕

of quarters and I’m not coming home until I win back all the gas we spent on the drive here.”

The couple owned a Winnebago that was the size of Shaw’s—a thirty-footer. It would take a string of jackpots to make that miracle happen.

“She’s convinced that the odds’re better with the slots in Reno than Vegas. You know, to attract tourists. Second-city kinda thing.”

Shaw wouldn’t know. He didn’t gamble.

His eyes on his father’s documents, he said, “Replay?”

Teddy: “Single mom this time, not dad. But another missing daughter. Mother’s a widow. And the girl’s older than the one a couple weeks ago. Twenty-two or -three.”

Not only did the Bruins themselves scan social media and law enforcement posts for announcements of rewards, but they supervised a software program that sniffed out offers too. Velma had named it Algo after algorithm. “Where?”

“Why we’re a-calling. San Francisco.”

“Got a lot on the platter here.”

“I know, Colt,” Teddy said. “But a couple things. I’ll just throw ’em out there. The reward? It’s for seventeen fifty.”

“You mean seventeen thousand, five hundred.”

“No, I mean seventeen hundred and fifty buckaroos.”

Very low for a missing child. And the low sum meant the mother had scraped together every penny she could.

“The other thing?”

“The offer,” Velma told him. “Listen to what she posted online. I’m quoting: ‘Please, please, please help!!!’ A bunch of exclamations here. ‘Tessy, love of my life, has gone missing in San Francisco. I’m sick with worry over her. I’m offering a Reward. I’ve started a GoFundMe page to raise more. Please.’ More exclamation points. Then a picture of her. Sweet kid.”

Shaw’s experience was that parents rarely posted a shot of demonic-looking children. “That kind of money, nobody’ll go to the trouble to look for her.”

“Exactly.”

Shaw looked at his father’s map with the eighteen red Xs on it.

“When was it posted?”

“Couple days ago.”

Before BlackBridge knew he was in town, so it wouldn’t be a trap.

He looked at the notes in such delicate and perfect script:

Haywood Brothers Warehouse, the Embarcadero

3884 Camino, Burlingame

After a moment he said, “Send me the offer.”

They said goodbyes and a few seconds later his phone dinged with Maria Vasquez’s reward notice. He read through it once. Shaw started to read it once more and put the mobile down. He thought: Why bother? Either you’re going to do it or you’re not.

Please, please, please help

Followed by a bunch of exclamation points.

20

One question was answered.

Maria Vasquez, mother of the missing woman, lived in the heart of the TL.

This explained the low sum she was offering for information about her daughter. Very few residents of San Francisco’s Tenderloin would be able to come up with a big enough reward to snag anyone’s attention.

The neighborhood, in the central part of the city, was infamous. Seedy, dilapidated, graffitied, marred by trash-filled streets and sidewalks, the TL was home to street people, those working in the sex trade—traffickers among them—gangs and those involved in all phases of drug enterprises: manufacturers, transporters, sellers and, of course, consumers. The SFPD has defined more than six hundred “plots,” small geographic areas of the city, for the purpose of analyzing crime stats. Seven of the ten most dangerous plots in San Francisco were in the TL.

Shaw hadn’t been here for years. Back then the place was filled with single-room occupancy hotels and small shabby apartments, adult bookshops, massage parlors, bodegas, Asian and Filipino grocery stores, tobacco/vaping places, cell phone card and wig shops and nail salons.

Much of that atmosphere persisted to this day but Shaw now saw a few nods toward improvement. Outreach programs operated out of storefronts, helping runaways, trafficking victims, addicts. There was even some gentrification, albeit modest. Across the street from Maria Vasquez’s walk-up was a ten-story apartment building that offered studio and one-bedroom units, which the poster described, with an inexplicable hyphen, as de-luxe. There was a Starbucks wannabe on the ground floor, along with an art gallery and a wine bar. Changing . . . but not changed: the windows on the first two floors of most buildings along this block were covered with thick iron security bars.

He chained his bike and helmet to a lamppost then walked to the door of the apartment building. He pressed the intercom and, when a woman answered, he said, “I called earlier. About the reward you posted.”

“You’re—”

“Colter.”

The door buzzer sounded and he stepped inside and climbed to the third floor, smelling fresh paint, garlic and pot. He knocked on the door of 3C. He heard the creak of footsteps and she answered.

Maria Vasquez looked him over cautiously, eyeing the leather jacket and jeans and boots.

In most assignments, when meeting with offerors he wanted them to see him as a professional—part lawyer, part detective, part psychologist. His garb would be sport coat, laundered jeans, polished shoes, dress shirt in dark shades. Not an option now, not with the Yamaha.

She’d have to deal with the reward-seeker as biker.

Something about his face, perhaps, put her at ease, though. “Come in. Please, come in.”

Vasquez, in her forties, was about five eight or nine, a pretty face and trim figure. Her dark features suggested blood from Mexico.

The one-bedroom apartment was nicer than he’d expected. The furniture was cheap but the walls had been painted recently—and were hung with bold floral posters and a half-dozen fine-arts photographs, reminiscent of the work of the famous West Coast photographers of the mid-twentieth century: Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham.

She asked if he wanted anything to drink and he declined. They sat and the woman held her hands to her face. “Oh, it has been a terrible year. Such a terrible year. My husband, he died without insurance, and I lost my job. I was a receptionist at a tech company.” A cynical grimace. “Big start-up! Oh, we were going to all be millionaires. They promised everything. Stock bonuses. All that. It went under. I’ve been doing that since then.” She waved toward a pink waitress’s uniform. “We lost our house. And the bank owns