Fond laughter bubbled over the speakers, and a boy of about nine came out from the wings and gave her a bouquet.
“Have the parents gotten a call?” I asked, tearing my eyes from the video of Madison Tyler.
“It’s still early, but no, they haven’t heard anything from anyone,” said Jacobi. “Not a single word. Nothing about a ransom so far.”
Chapter 31
CINDY THOMAS WAS WORKING from the home office she’d set up in the small second bedroom of her new apartment. CNN was providing ambient sound as she typed, immersed in the story she was writing about Alfred Brinkley’s upcoming trial. She thought of not answering the phone when it rang next to her elbow.
Then she glanced at the caller ID — and grabbed the phone off the hook.
“Mr. Tyler?” she said.
Henry Tyler’s voice was eerily hollow, nearly unrecognizable. She almost thought he was playing a joke, but that wasn’t his style.
Listening hard, gasping and saying, “No . . . oh, no,” she tried hard to understand the man who was crying, losing his thoughts, and having to ask Cindy what he’d been saying.
“She was wearing a blue coat,” Cindy prompted.
“That’s right. A dark-blue coat, red sweater, blue pants, red shoes.”
“You’ll have copy in an hour,” Cindy said, “and by then you’ll have heard from those bastards saying how much you have to pay to get Maddy back. You will get her back.”
Cindy said good-bye to the Chronicle’s associate publisher, put down the receiver, and sat still for a moment, gripping the armrests, reeling from a sickening feeling of fear. She’d covered enough kidnappings to know that if the child wasn’t found today, the chances of finding her alive dropped by about half. It would drop by half again if she wasn’t found tomorrow.
She thought back to the last time she’d seen Madison, at the beginning of the summer when the little girl had come to the office with her father.
For about twenty minutes Madison had twirled around in the chair across from Cindy’s desk, scribbling on a steno pad, pretending that she was a reporter who was interviewing Cindy about her job.
“Why is it called a ‘deadline’? Do you ever get afraid when you’re writing about bad guys? What’s the dumbest story you ever wrote?”
Maddy was a delightful kid, funny and unspoiled, and Cindy had felt aggrieved when Tyler’s secretary had returned, saying, “Come on, Madison. Miss Thomas has work to do.”
Cindy had impetuously kissed the child on the cheek, saying, “You’re as cute as ten buttons, you know that?”
And Madison had flung her arms around her neck and returned the kiss.
“See you in the funny papers,” Cindy had called after her, and Madison Tyler had spun around, grinning. “That’s where I’ll be!”
Now Cindy turned her eyes to her blank computer screen, paralyzed with thoughts of Madison being held captive by people who didn’t love her, wondering if the girl was tied up inside a car trunk, if she’d been sexually molested, if she was already dead.
Cindy opened a new file on her computer and, after a few false starts, felt the story unspool under her fingers. “The five-year-old daughter of Chronicle associate publisher Henry Tyler was abducted this morning only blocks from her house. . . .”
She heard Henry Tyler in her head, his voice choked with misery: “Write the story, Cindy. And pray to God we’ll have Madison back before we run it.”
Chapter 32
YUKI CASTELLANO SAT three rows back in the gallery of Superior Court 22, waiting for the clerk to call the case number.
She’d been with the DA’s office only about a month, and although she’d worked as a defense attorney in a top law firm for several years, switching to the prosecution side was turning out to be dirtier, more urgent, and more real than defending white-collar clients in civil lawsuits.
It was exactly what she wanted.
Her former colleagues would never believe how much she was enjoying her new life “on the dark side.”
The purpose of today’s hearing was to set a trial date for Alfred Brinkley. There was an ADA in the office whose job it was to attend no-brainer proceedings like this one and keep the master calendar.
But Yuki didn’t want to delegate a moment of this case.