“Yeah.” Holly grabbed Ant by the arm. “Come on,” he said to his brother.
Lips compressed, Reed watched Holly and Ant scramble over the fence and vanish into the dark as, lights flashing, a pair of squad cars slammed to a shuddering halt in front of the church.
CHAPTER
TWO
T
HE THING ABOUT
the steamy heat of New Orleans was, sometimes it had a tendency to seep into its residents’ brains. Where it drove them all kinds of crazy. Mix that with the holiday season, include a full moon on Christmas Eve, add in plentiful amounts of booze, and the city was ripe for trouble. What you got was the proverbial Bad Moon Rising, which it was, big and yellow as a tennis ball right over the smooth black waters of Lake Pontchartrain.
At about fifteen minutes before midnight, all hell broke loose.
“Where is he? Is he going to shoot?”
“He has a bomb!”
“Liza! Has anyone seen Liza?”
“Run! Keep going!”
That last bellowed order came from a cop. It sent adrenaline surging through the veins of Jefferson Parish Police Sergeant Caroline Wallace, who was shooting that malevolent moon a grim look even as she ran toward the mansions fronting the lake. It punctuated the panicked voices that somehow managed to reach her ears above the bedlam created by the intermingling of wailing sirens and shouts amplified by bullhorns and hovering helicopters. Sprinting for the Mobile Command Unit—a white van parked at the curb directly in front of the crime scene—she threw a quick, harried glance in the direction of the voices to check things out. An explosion of women in glittering ball gowns and men in tuxedos rushed down a long driveway and across the wide street just a few dozen yards away. The harsh glow of police floodlights illuminated the fear in their faces. The uniformed police officers running with them, protecting them, hurrying them along, looked agitated.
Survivors were being evacuated from the beleaguered mansion situated on two waterfront acres directly in front of her. Sixty or more, according to her lightning count.
Which left one burning question: how many remained inside?
When she had arrived on the scene just a few minutes before, the block already had been cordoned off and the perimeter team was sealing off any possible escape route. The perp was trapped, which was both good and bad news: good because he wouldn’t be going anywhere, and bad because, like trapped animals, surrounded humans were always the most dangerous. Her instant conclusion when her pager had gone off with Code 923, which meant hostage situation in progress, was that she, the hostage negotiator on call, was racing to a domestic, because that was most common this close to Christmas. But by the time she’d slammed her cruiser into park on a manicured lawn just down the street that was already thick with official vehicles, she had known that tonight was going to be anything but typical.
Tonight she was going to have to rock and roll.
Jefferson Parish’s top brass, including the sheriff and the council chairman, as well as New Orleans’ superintendent of police and mayor, were among the hostages being held inside the mansion, as she had learned via radio on the way over. That made it personal. That upped the stakes by about a thousand. That made it just that much harder to maintain the necessary distance, that much harder to do her job.
See, the sheriff was her boss. And the NOPD superintendent of police? That would be her dad.
As she ran, she was tightening up her body armor, which she’d learned the hard way not to show up at a crime scene without and which she kept in the trunk of her car, along with various other job-related necessities, for just this kind of occasion. The flak vest was state-of-the-art, designed to be thin and lightweight, yet it was still uncomfortable, still felt big and bulky on her slender, five-six frame. Along with her duty belt that held, among other items, her Glock 22 in its holster, she wore the vest beneath a black windbreaker with JPPD emblazoned across the back. The skirt she’d been wearing on the date the pager call had interrupted was a couple of inches short of her knees, slim fitting and black, while the sleeveless blouse beneath the windbreaker was thin silver silk, with a collarless V-neck that revealed a hint of cleavage. Since she’d had no time to change, she was actually glad for the coverage provided by the collarbone-high rise of the body vest. All she’d had time to do was trade her blazer for the windbreaker, kick off her high heels, slam her feet into the black sneakers that she also kept in the trunk, and grab her gear.
Be prepared
. It might be the Girl Scout motto, but it worked for Caroline as well.
Her heart pounded, either from the dash from her car or the thought of what she faced. Deepening her breathing—the air smelled of fresh-cut grass and, faintly, of the wide lake stretching out like an expanse of flat black glass behind the houses in front of her—she tried to concentrate on mentally chilling out and easing into professional mode. What she was going for was cool, calm control.
Ice, ice, baby.
That was her reputation. That was how she rolled.
As usual, lives depended on it. Tonight the lives of some of New Orleans’ most powerful people might depend on it. Her father’s life might depend on it.
Caroline wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
“Yo, Wallace! Chop-chop! Need you to get busy pouring some oil on the water in there.” The voice yelling at her out of the dark belonged to her good friend Lt. Jorge Esteban. He ran one of the TELS units, which told her that snipers were on the scene. She spotted him through the shadows, standing at the base of a cherry picker hoisting a basket with its cargo of one black-clad police sharpshooter high in the air. With the houses as far apart as they were, and given the nature of the exclusive neighborhood, which was as well manicured and flat as a golf course, she was guessing the logistics of getting off a kill shot were going to be difficult.
It was her job to make sure a kill shot didn’t become necessary. As in, to pour oil on troubled waters until she got them smoothed out.
“On it,” she yelled back as she passed, and finished snapping the rubber band in place around the ponytail she had just scooped her thick, shoulder-length coffee brown hair into, then tucked the tail up under her black JPPD baseball cap. Her eyes, artfully made up tonight to bring out the green tinge in her hazel irises, were busy darting every which way as she tried to gather as much information as she could before the ball bounced into her court.
Sometimes the smallest detail could be used to establish a connection with the perp.
In this case, rich envy was a no-brainer. She could definitely use that, see if he would bite, see if she couldn’t get him feeling like he and she were on the same, poverty-stricken side of the fence. That was key: to make him—hostage takers were almost universally male—feel like she was his ally, like he could trust her. She didn’t know who he was or what his motivation was yet, but that was an easy place to start trying to build some rapport. The palatial houses in this section of Old Metairie were so far out of touch with most people’s lifestyles that it was hard to remember that these enormous structures—with their elaborate fountains, wide porticos, and multiple wings—were indeed people’s homes. With many of them ablaze with Christmas lights, the neighborhood looked like something conjured up by Disney. Directly in front of her, the huge white southern-style mansion where the hostages were being held had been decked out to impress. Festoons of evergreen boughs intertwined with sparkling white lights adorned the three long verandas, one fronting each level of the three-story house. More sparkling white lights illuminated the wide staircase leading up to the front entrance. The small round bushes lining the sidewalk were aglow with lights. Farther out on the lawn (it would be almost sacrilegious to call an expanse of grass so well kept a yard), the small flowering trees had been wrapped in white Christmas lights, too. The revolving red flashes of light from multiple police cruisers that danced across the pillared facade could almost have been part of the holiday decor—if the holiday decor in this exclusive enclave had been real cheesy this year.
’Twas the night before Christmas . . .
And the owner of the house, billionaire Allen Winfield, had been holding his annual black-tie ball. Only the rich, famous, and powerful were inside.
Where some of them—she had no idea of the exact numbers yet—were currently at the mercy of a crazed gunman. Who may or may not have planted bombs throughout the house, and may or may not be wearing a suicide vest with a dead man’s switch that would blow the whole place sky-high.
As a hostage negotiator, it was her job to talk him into giving himself up without harming anyone. Or at least to keep him talking until SWAT could overpower him or a sniper could take him out.
“About damned time.” JPPD Major Tom Dixon, command officer, greeted Caroline with a scowl as she pulled up, breathless, outside the van, before he turned back to continue the discussion that he had been in the midst of. He was in a huddle with senior officers from both police departments—Caroline knew most of them, at least by sight—because, while Jefferson Parish PD had jurisdiction over Old Metairie, the NOPD had a vested interest in what was happening considering that their superintendent of police and the mayor were inside. She knew Dixon well, having been in his chain of command until, after three years on the force, she had been accepted onto the Hostage Negotiation Team and whisked away for the initial FBI-sponsored training course. Given the high-profile nature of this event, she had been informed en route that the two departments were collaborating, with Dixon in charge, at least unless or until another, higher-ranking officer appeared on the scene. Despite the night’s low-seventies temperature, she could see the sheen of sweat on Dixon’s thick-featured face. Well, no surprise there. The burly, gray-haired fifty-five-year-old veteran officer was under a lot of pressure, Caroline knew. If this went down wrong, high-profile casualties were a virtual certainty. Old Metairie could be the next Colorado theater shooting. International headlines. The darling of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. And Dixon could kiss his fanny—and his career and his pension—good-bye.
“I think we should go ahead and send in a man with a dog. At least if the bastard’s really gone and set bombs inside the mansion, the dog can sniff them out and we’ll know where we are,” Paul Villard said. A small, wiry man in his midforties, he was head of the JPPD bomb squad. Although Caroline had never worked directly with him, she had heard via the grapevine that he suffered from so-called little-man syndrome, with its compensatory tendency to be overly aggressive.
It wasn’t her place to object to anything the big boys chose to do. She was the negotiator, not the playmaker. Still, Caroline automatically shook her head. Hostage negotiation Rule Number One: don’t spook the perp.
“The last thing we want to do is get Mr. Winfield’s house blown up,” John Lagasse said uneasily. Average height and looks, muscular and balding, about the same age as Villard, he was in charge of the NOPD’s Special Operations Unit.
“We get in there and find the bombs and disarm them”—Villard’s voice was growly—“and we won’t have to worry about the house blowing up.”
“Yeah, but what if we don’t get them disarmed in time? Or what if we miss one?” Lagasse scowled at Villard. “Forget the damned house: we get a lot of people blown up.”
Dixon made an impatient gesture. “How about we let Wallace give it a try before we do anything else?”
The men turned and looked at her almost as one. Police work was a high-testosterone business, with no room for incompetence. She was the only woman on the hostage negotiator team, and, at twenty-seven, with two years as a full-fledged negotiator under her belt, she was the youngest and least experienced. Add to that the fact that she was the daughter of New Orleans’ superintendent of police, and attractive enough so that she was more or less constantly fending off come-ons from her fellow cops, and skepticism as to her performance abilities had initially abounded. Caroline took pride in the fact that she had laid those concerns to rest. No, she had used them, harnessing them to fuel herself to be the best at her job that she could be.
Which was pretty damned good, if she did say so herself.
She had earned the respect of her fellow officers because she deserved it.
She said, “I’d like to try to establish a connection with the perp before anyone else goes in there. In case he
does
have the house set to blow.”
The men looked at one another. Villard shrugged. Lagasse looked dubious. Dixon nodded.
“Okay,” Dixon said. “Go ahead.” To the others he added, “She’s good.” Then his eyes slashed back to Caroline and gleamed with sudden humor. “Don’t make me regret saying that.”
Caroline shot him a withering look.
“We got eyes in the house,” a man’s voice called excitedly from inside the van.
“Way to go, Isaacs,” Dixon boomed back. He made a gesture for Caroline to precede him into the van. She did, ascending the fold-down steps into dim overhead lighting and walls lined with desks and computer equipment in a space about the size of a tin can.
“Hey.” Walking forward, she nodded at the two technicians, Rob Isaacs and Kevin Holder, who were seated in front of the control panels. As Dixon stepped inside, behind her she found her attention riveted on the eye-level monitors. There was a row of them, fed by the telescoping antennas that stretched up from the van’s roof like a bug’s feelers.
They were showing scenes from inside the house.
“I was able to hack into the mansion’s security system,” Isaacs said to Dixon.
Caroline barely heard him.
On the monitor to her far left was her father, Col. Martin Wallace, in full dress uniform, not a strand of his snow-white hair out of place, his craggy face set in angry lines. He was seated in a chair in what looked to be a large, wood-paneled library or conference room. Men in tuxedos and women in ball gowns sprawled facedown on the floor in front of him. In a moment she would do a head count, check for visible injuries.