Chapter 25
RICH CONKLIN AND I were looking for a contact who had wanted to meet us at the Yerba Buena Gardens, not far from the Tenderloin. The contact had said the Duke of the Tenderloin told her to call.
We parked on Mission Street and had to walk almost a full block to get to the entrance of the park.
Conklin said to me, “Did you know Cindy was going with Joe on some kind of missing child tip?”
“Yeah. I helped set it up. It was supposed to give Cindy a little context for her story.”
“She’s positively obsessed with this case of the girl missing from San Julio. She’s spun it up into a huge conspiracy theory about human trafficking.”
“She’s not the only one. That’s my working theory as well.”
“But the cops in San Julio said the father of the missing girl is their main suspect. How is that a trafficking ring? Sounds more like a nut.”
“Eric Snaff? I haven’t gotten a handle on him yet.” I took a few steps on the uneven sidewalk and had to stop when a thought hit me.
Conklin stopped and turned around to look at me. “What’s wrong?”
My mind was still ahead of my mouth. I held up a hand as I tried to bring my thoughts into alignment. My patient and reliable partner stood there silently and didn’t speak as he waited for me to tell him what my momentous thought was.
Finally, I looked at him and said, “In addition to our unidentified body from Marshall’s Beach, we have the murder of the woman in Golden Gate Park, Tina Barnes. Who we know was murdered the same night as Claire’s party.”
“So?”
“So if the San Julio cops think Eric Snaff is a suspect in his daughter’s disappearance, and we think the missing girls might be connected to the two dead women, then Snaff could also be a suspect in Tina Barnes’s murder.
We know for a fact he was in San Francisco that night because he talked to me and Cindy at the party. ”
Conklin nodded his head slowly, then said, “That’s a pretty interesting theory.”
“Most theories are interesting. That’s why people come up with them.”
“Do you think we can move on from theory to investigation and find the woman who phoned in this tip?”
With that we continued our march toward the public park.