He checks the ladies’ room first, kicking in stalls.
By the time he’s back in the hallway, his voice is almost hoarse from screaming. When the door to the men’s room opens and Keith Morehead walks out, adjusting his belt, Jay flies at him, grabbing the man by his suit lapels and slamming him against the nearby wall. “Jay!” Lonnie is right behind him, running to what is fast becoming a scene. The bailiff from Keppler’s courtroom is in the hall too, her right hand hovering over the grip of the pistol on her belt. Others start spilling out from the courtroom, Gregg Bartolomo, Sam, and Vivian. “What did you do with her?” Jay says, slamming him against the wall again.
“Hey!” the bailiff says, moving closer.
Lonnie puts a hand on Jay’s back. “Calm down, Jay, just calm down.”
“What did you do to them?” Hearing that word, that them, Lonnie steps back, staring at Morehead, her mind lighting on some meaning. “Where the hell is my daughter!” Jay screams. Morehead is so spooked by Jay, by the brewing commotion in the hall, that he can’t quite speak. Stuttering his way toward a response, the beginning of a word that keeps tripping on his tongue, he keeps darting his eyes over Jay’s shoulder and down the polished floor of the hallway.
Lonnie turns first, and then Jay, in time to see T. J. Cobb slipping through the door to the stairwell at the end of the hall, a flash of something red moving just ahead of him and then gone from sight. Red, Jay thinks, lights turning off one by one in each chamber of his brain as he races through it trying to remember what Ellie was wearing when they left the house this morning. Why, oh why can’t he remember what was just in front of his eyes only a few minutes ago?
“Call the police,” he tells Lonnie. “Get Axel, and call the police.”
He takes off running for the stairs.
In the grayish light of the stairwell, he hears the footsteps below him, two sets, he’s sure of that. He calls his daughter’s name, over and over, and hears nothing but the tin echo of his own panic. They are just beyond his reach, it seems, just past the landing of every floor before he gets there, never in full sight.
When he gets to the bottom, he barrels through the door, nearly tripping over his own feet as he stumbles into the crowd in the first-floor lobby. Jurors, cops, lawyers, translators, social workers, teary relatives, and nervous defendants out on bail, all moving in a reluctant swirl through the metal detectors. Jay grabs the arm of the nearest deputy on duty, causing the man to cuff Jay’s wrist with his own oversize hand, its force nearly crushing the bones. “A girl,” Jay says quickly. “Did you see a teenage girl, fifteen, black? She might have been wearing red.” It was red, he remembers now, a cardigan with a rosette above her heart. She’d dressed up for court. “There was a man with her, a black guy, really tall.” He doesn’t see either of them anywhere in the main lobby.
“Okay, calm down, buddy, calm down.”
But as he says it, the deputy sees the bailiff from Keppler’s courtroom coming out of the same stairwell from which Jay recently emerged. She’s still got her hand in position, over the pistol, and she points directly at Jay.
“Wait a second, guy,” the deputy says, tightening his grip.
Jay shakes him off and pushes his way through the incoming crowd and out onto the front steps of the criminal court building. He’s screaming her name, scanning the faces on the street for any sign of his daughter or Cobb.
“Jay?”
It’s Cynthia Maddox, in that white, white suit.
She must have come down for a cigarette at some point and is standing by the sand-filled cement ashtray at the top of the steps. She has a cellular telephone in her right hand. The look on his face absolutely terrifies her.
“My daughter,” he says, breathless. “I can’t find my daughter.”
Behind him, Keppler’s bailiff and the sheriff’s deputy are coming through the glass doors. Jay is probably a few moments from being arrested. “Come on,” Cynthia says, tossing her cigarette and pointing to her waiting car, her driver behind the wheel reading a newspaper folded into a square. Even with the officers on his tail, Jay hesitates, still afraid, after all these years, to trust her.
“Don’t be stupid, Jay,” she says. “Let me help.”
She climbs into the backseat of the car first, leaving the door open for him. Jay, desperate, slides in behind her. “Where to, ma’am?” the driver says. Jay barks out an address, reaching into his pocket for his cell phone. He calls Lonnie, who hands the phone to Axel, to whom Jay gives a detailed description of his daughter and T. J. Cobb. “I started a file on him with HPD,” he says. Axel tells him, “I’m on it, man.” Jay slams the phone closed. He squeezes his eyes shut against the terror, the image of that empty seat in the courtroom, his daughter gone. But it’s worse in the dark, and so he opens his eyes and stares out the window instead, hearing nothing but his breath, his heartbeat, and the rush of pavement beneath the car. After Parker’s turn on the witness stand today, the things Jay must know by now, Cynthia wants her chance to explain.
“Listen, Jay–”
“Don’t say a fucking word.”
Ricardo Aguilar has apparently been conducting all of his business between the hours of nine and four thirty, when he expected Jay to be in court, and then, just to be safe, had actually moved his personal office into a small storage room just off the reception area, so certain was he that Jay, or Rolly, the long-haired dude in the El Camino, was coming after him. Should anyone ask, it gave his secretary a perfect cover to answer honestly, “No, Mr. Aguilar is not in his office.” Jay storms in, barreling past her and her threats to call law enforcement. “They’re already on their way,” he informs her.