"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.
She'd been picked by senior ADA Leonard Parisi to be his second chair in a trial that mattered very much to Yuki. Alfred Brinkley had murdered four people. It was sheer luck that he hadn't also killed Claire Washburn, one of her dearest friends.
She glanced down the row of seats, past the junkies and child abusers, their mothers and girlfriends, the public defenders in ad hoc conferences with their clients.
Finally she homed in on Public Defender Barbara Blanco, who was whispering to the ferry shooter. Blanco was a smart woman who, like herself, had drawn a hell of a card in Alfred Brinkley.
Blanco had pleaded Brinkley "not guilty" at his arraignment and was certainly going to try to get his confession tossed out before the trial. She would contend that Brinkley was bug-nuts during the crime and had been medicated ever since. And she'd work to get him kicked out of the penal system and into the mental-health system.
Let her try.
The clerk called the case number, and Yuki's pulse quickened as she closed her laptop and walked to the bench.
Alfred Brinkley followed meekly behind his attorney, looking clean-cut and less agitated than he had at his arraignment – which was all to the good.
Yuki opened the wooden gate between the gallery and the court proper, and stood at the bench with Blanco and Brinkley, looking up into the slate-blue eyes of Judge Norman Moore.
Moore looked back at them fleetingly, then dropped his eyes to the docket.
"All right. What do you say we set this matter soon, say Monday, November seventeenth?"
Yuki said, "That's good for the People, Your Honor."
But Blanco had a different idea. "Your Honor, Mr. Brinkley has a long history of mental illness. He should be evaluated pursuant to 1368 to determine his competence to stand trial."
Moore dropped his hands to his desktop, sighed, and said, "Okay, Ms. Blanco. Dr. Charlene Everedt is back from vacation. She told me this morning that she's got some free time. She'll do the psych on Mr. Brinkley."
His eyes went to Yuki. "Ms. Castellano, is it?"
"Yes, Your Honor. This is a delaying tactic," she said, her words coming out clipped and fast, her usual rat-a-tat style. "Defense counsel wants to get her client out of the public eye so that the media flap will die down. Ms. Blanco knows perfectly well that Mr. Brinkley is quite competent to stand trial. He shot and killed four people. He turned himself in. He confessed of his own volition.
"The People want and deserve a speedy trial -"
"I understand what the People want, Ms. Castellano," said the judge, countering her verbal machine gun with a patient drawl. "But we'll get a quick turnaround from Dr. Everedt. Shouldn't take more than a few days. I think the People can wait that long, don't you?"
Yuki said, "Yes, sir," and as the judge said, "Next case," to his clerk, Yuki left the courtroom through the vestibule and out the double courtroom doors.
She turned right, down the dingy marble hall toward her office, hoping that the court-appointed shrink would see what she and Lindsay knew to be true.
Alfred Brinkley might be crazy, but he wasn't legally insane.
He was a premeditated killer four times over. Soon enough, if all went well, the prosecution would get their chance to prove it.
Chapter 33
I TOSSED THE KEYS TO CONKLIN and got into the passenger-side door of the squad car.
Conklin whistled nervously through his teeth as we pulled onto Bryant, headed north on Sixth Street for a few blocks, then went across Market Street and north toward Pacific Heights.
"If there was ever a thing that would make you not want to have kids, this is it," he said.
"Otherwise?"
"I'd want a whole tribe."
We theorized about the kidnapping – whether or not there really had been a murder and if the nanny could have played a part in the abduction.
"She was inside," I said. "She would've known everything that went on in the household. How much money they had, their patterns and movements. If Madison trusted her, the abduction would have been a piece of cake."
"So why pop the nanny?" said Conklin.
"Well, maybe she outlived her usefulness."
"One less person to cut in on the ransom. Still, to shoot her in front of the little girl."
"Was it the nanny?" I asked. "Or did they shoot the child?"