12th of Never

tell me where he’d hidden the unrecovered bodies. It wasn’t easy to find the right words.
    “A miracle could happen, Randy. No one is giving up. But to be honest, you probably only have a few minutes left.”
    He closed his eyes, then opened them.
    “You want to get right with people who love you, Randy. You want your son to know that you helped the parents of those dead girls—”
    “Sonoma,” he said thickly.
    “What about Sonoma?”
    “Dow off …”
    Dow off? What was this? Had his mind veered to the stock market?
    Fish’s head dropped forward even farther. He was blacking out, but I squeezed his arm and I think the pain brought him back. He tried hard to give me answers. He spoke in broken sentences punctuated by moans, and somehow, using the GPS on my phone, asking questions that required one-word answers, I was able to get Fish to string together enough words to give me a picture and a map.
    There was an abandoned typewriter factory, Dow Office Machines, in Sonoma. Fish had dumped the girls in the woods behind the machine shop.
    I named the murdered girls whose bodies had not been found and he nodded at each one, but when I said “Sandra Brody,” he shook his head no and then said, “Not mine.”
    A week ago, about eight of us had bushwhacked through the woods with cadaver dogs, dug up old deer antlers, and had our hopes raised, then shattered, so that Fish could smell fresh air.
    He’d been messing with us then.
    Was he screwing with me now?
    “Don’t lie to me. That girl is still missing. She’s just your type. You told us that you had killed her. I need to find her body, Randy. Give her back to us. I’m asking you, please.”
    Deputy Chief Robbie Wilson appeared in the frame of the windshield. He said, “We’re getting you out, Mr. Fish. This could hurt, so brace yourself.”
    Wilson gave me a look that seemed to say, “Sergeant, you brace
yourself
.”
    The hydraulic cutters chomped through the passenger-door hinges. Heavily gloved hands wrenched the door away. A hook came in from above and Wilson positioned it under the engine block.
    I heard Ron Parker calling, “Wait.
Wait
.”
    He ran as if he were in a steeplechase, clearing hurdles of twisted metal as he galloped toward the car. The hydraulic winch whined. Metal clanked as the hook got purchase and five hundred pounds of steel began to rise.
    Fish’s face stretched in pain. He looked at me, said, “Love you. Mackie.”
    And then he died.
    Parker was right outside the wreckage when it happened. He was panting, leaning forward, his hands on his knees.
    “I had more questions for him.”
    “Sorry,” I told him. “He took the express train to hell.”
    “Shit. I didn’t get to wish him a good trip,” he said.
    I put my fingers on Fish’s eyelids and closed them. The last person he’d seen in this life was me. I didn’t want him to look at me anymore.
    I was done with Randolph Fish. Done.

Chapter 104
    RICH CONKLIN BRACED himself inside the rear of the ambulance as it sped over the slick streets toward Metropolitan Hospital. He kept his eyes on Mackie Morales, who looked like she’d been catapulted into a brick wall.
    Air bags deploy at about a hundred miles an hour, and Mackie had gotten the full blunt force of the bag. She had also been whipsawed during and after the collision as the car was dragged along 3rd Street.
    She hadn’t regained consciousness, even though they were traveling in a stream of screaming sirens, the ambulance jerking and swerving around traffic.
    Right now, she was immobilized by a C-Spine collar and strapped to a long board to protect her head, neck, and spine. She could have brain damage, internal bleeding, broken bones—all of it was possible.
    Conklin reached over and squeezed her hand, got no response. He wanted to hold her, tell her she was going to be okay, and somehow make that be true.
    But even as he worried about Mackie, he was completely mystified as to why she had been driving the killer’s getaway car. Had she fired the flashbang into the storage unit? Was she the cop who had bundled Fish into the passenger seat? Why would she do that?
    What didn’t he know about Morales?
    The ambulance took a hard right on Valencia, a sharp left on 26th Street, then blew into Metro’s ambulance bay. The EMTs had the back doors open the instant the vehicle braked to a stop. Rich jumped down, then ran with the EMTs as they transported Mackie’s gurney into the emergency room.
    The ER was noisy