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“Hey there, Sergeant. I hope you can see and hear me because I may have an offer for you. See this?”
He held up his cell phone, Apple variety.
“I’ll be able to tell when you open my email, so expect me to call you soon after,” he said.
The video went black. I looked over at Bobby and he waited for the call, with the radio room on standby. But it was my cell phone that rang. Blackout had my goddamn cell number. Must have gotten it from Cindy’s phone.
My phone rang again. I noticed that the caller ID read, “spam?$”
I put the phone on speaker and said, “This is Boxer.”
“I’m enjoying Cindy’s company,” Blackout said, continuing to use his normal speaking voice, “but I’m thinking of making a trade, but we might have to negotiate more. I don’t like the deal.”
“What have you done with her?”
“How much would you like to see her, Sergeant? I’m working on a plan in honor of my mentor, Burke.”
I said, “Why don’t you give me a hint?”
“Here’s the hint,” he said. “Keep your phone on. I’ll call you. I don’t know when.”
As he’d done before, he hung up. The line went dead.
CHAPTER 73
IF THERE WAS ever the time for a Women’s Murder Club meeting, this was it. But not at Susie’s. Not without Cindy. There’s a coffee shop near City Hall called Grumpy Lynn’s. Claire, Yuki, Alvarez, and I piled into my Explorer and headed east on Bryant to McAllister. It was just five on Thursday when we arrived at Lynn’s. The bell over the door dinged as we pushed our way inside the little diner, which was decorated with red linoleum-topped tables, customer artwork on the walls, and redolent with the aromas of French fries and bacon cheeseburgers.
The lunch crowd was long gone. A couple of men were seated separately at the counter having meat loaf and mash, watching a ball game. We took a table by the front window and Lynn pointed to the sign above the cash register:WE CLOSE AT SIX.
She swiped at the table with a rag and handed out menus. One after another, we ordered coffee.
Claire sat beside me. She was wearing pink, a good color onher, but she looked beat. She had autopsied several of Blackout’s victims, including Baby Josie Fleet, in addition to a few hundred other dead people this year. But Claire never got numb to the fact of death.
She opened the photo app on her phone and showed Alvarez a group picture of the Women’s Murder Club standing around me, with newborn Julie Anne Molinari in my arms.
“See Cindy, hogging the camera?” Claire laughed. “Look at her.”
Having seen the last known images of Cindy being dragged across a cement floor by a murdering psychopath, I felt tears welling up, spilling over. Claire closed the app and took my hand. Then she pulled a half-inch of paper napkins from the holder and pressed them to her own eyes.
Across from me, Yuki looked like she’d fallen down a well. She was sleepless from championing a woman who’d been unimaginably tortured and had barely survived. I knew Yuki was second-guessing herself as she waited for sentencing. She’s physically small, but as she always did, she’d put her whole self into this case. She was in the headlines again and had to win, whatever the psychological cost to herself. And now there was fresh worry over Cindy in captivity—or worse.
Yuki told Sonia about Cindy’s fearless investigative crime reporting at theChronicle,how she’d once shot a killer, herself.
She said, “I don’t know how Cindy lived through writing that book with Burke, that monster, but I don’t have to tellyouabout Burke.”
Alvarez and I had been moments from being Burke’s victims ourselves, an event that involved gunfire in the dark, an all-sensory memory that would haunt the two of us forever.
Grumpy Lynn offered cherry pie and Claire and Yuki were takers. I sipped coffee and looked at my friends, thinking how hard we all pushed ourselves. We were trained, tested again and again, and that made us feel invincible. But we surely weren’t. I thought we were all measuring the infinitesimal space between life and death, and there were no good vibes to be had. We weren’t at Susie’s, and Cindy wasn’t with us.
It was Sonia who shifted the mood, saying, “Blackout’s thirst for the kill is so much like Burke’s, I’m actually feeling like I know him.”
Claire said, “Can you talk about that?”
CHAPTER 74
I WAS RELIEVED when Alvarez took the talking stick. She’d never known Cindy the way Claire, Yuki, and I did and yet she was as involved as we were in getting her back and in locking up the psycho who called himself Blackout.
“He’s wicked smart,” Alvarez said of Blackout. “I’m talking high genius. He killed six people in fourteen days. But did he have help? In the most recent video, he called Burke his ‘mentor.’”
