Takeover (12 page)

“Yes, sir.”

Theresa goggled. She’d never heard Frank call anyone “sir” before.

“Best of luck to you. I’m glad you’re in on this—we need to keep a cop approach going here. Cavanaugh’s good, but these specialized units can get too wrapped up in themselves.”

Theresa could see a sort of struggle pass over her cousin’s face, as if the desire to be honest—at the moment Cavanaugh seemed their only hope—warred with his desire to be the head of the Homicide unit. Jason said nothing. She intervened. “Could Pitney Bowes trace the postage meter?”

Viancourt’s expression clouded. She could swear he had forgotten what they were talking about, finding the politics of the police
department a far more fascinating topic. Then it cleared. “Yeah. They have over five hundred meters leased within city limits, did you know that? Just about any large office concern has one. Anyway, this machine is at a storage facility in Decatur, Georgia. Gray’s Store-All, on Forrest Avenue.”

Frank had his radio in hand. “I’ll get the Georgia cops to send someone out there now.”

“I thought of that. A unit’s on their way,” the assistant chief told him with a touch of reproach. Frank’s stock had just lost a few points on the Dow.

Theresa butted in again, even batting an eyelash or two at Viancourt. “Bobby probably had his car in storage while he served his time. But I don’t understand how the car got to Decatur from here—they’d hardly let him drive himself to prison, would they?”

“Not in this case. It was an interprison transfer, so he’d have gone by bus.”

“Then maybe the storage facility can tell us who brought it there or who paid the bill.” She thanked the assistant chief profusely. He wandered back to the hypnotic waves of broadcast news as she turned to Frank. “Where’s his brother? I’d like to talk to him.”

“So would I,” Jason said.

Eric Moyers’s disposition had not improved greatly since he’d left his workplace. He had gone from one inhospitable climate with a partially stocked pop machine to another. He sat at an abandoned microfilm-viewing station, drinking Sprite without enthusiasm.

Theresa planted her body in front of him and introduced herself. The guy looked exhausted and breathed with a raspy wheeze, but
he gamely fielded questions from her and Jason without argument. Theresa had the feeling he’d answer questions from Peggy Elliott, should she care to ask any. An air of hopeless resignation bracketed every word.

“Does Bobby have a white Mercedes?”

“Not white,” the baggage handler corrected her bitterly. “Pearl.”

“And he put it in storage while he served this last sentence in Atlanta?”

“I wouldn’t have any idea where he put it.”

“Could he have paid to store it for six months?”

“Sure. Bobby always had money—stolen money, of course, but he’d have it.” He snorted. “He put his car in storage? That’s probably the only time my brother thought ahead in his life.”

Jason asked, “Did he live in Brookpark before he went to jail? The car is registered to a house there.”

“We all lived there. That’s where Bobby and I grew up. But he was gone and Mom had died—no point me living there all by myself. I sold it months ago.”

Jason’s phone rang, and he answered it, walking a few steps away and pulling out his notepad before he even flipped the receiver open.

Theresa tried another tack with Eric Moyers. “Is Bobby good with mechanics? Did he work on the car, know how to modify it?”

“Bobby couldn’t change a tire if his life depended on it. If he had any work done, he got someone else to do it. What are you guys doing about this anyway? Can’t I sit somewhere so I can see what’s going on?”

“Unfortunately, we can’t all fit in the command center,” she told him, thinking,
Damn, I’m learning to deflect people as smoothly as Chris Cavanaugh.
“Does Bobby have a friend named Lucas?”

“I told this guy here I don’t know any of Bobby’s friends. He always had plenty of them, I’ll admit that. Everyone liked Bobby, especially kids and dumb animals. But I don’t know his friends—I didn’t want to know them then, I don’t want to know them now.”

“Has he called you since he got out?”

“He might have tried, but I doubt it. I changed my address and phone, left no forwarding. We only had my aunt and uncle in common, and they died in a car accident. Truth is, lady,” Eric Moyers summed up, “I didn’t even know he
was
out.”

12:05
P.M
.

Paul had stretched his legs out straight, Theresa noted, probably to release some of the pressure on his butt. He wasn’t used to sitting so much. He still wouldn’t look up at the camera, instead following Lucas’s pacing movements.

I’m failing miserably at this investigating gig, honey. I haven’t discovered one useful fact, and we still have no idea how to get you out of there.

Kessler had disappeared. The scribe, Irene, wrote steadily now that Cavanaugh had Lucas back on the phone. He asked the bank robber, “Where are you from, by the way?”

“I could say the depths of hell, but I hate to be overdramatic.”

“Bobby is a Cleveland boy, born and raised, we know that—”

“Really. What else do you know?”

“—but where are you from, Lucas? Where did you two get to be friends?”

“I fail to see how that’s relevant, Chris.”

“Did you meet when Bobby served time in Atlanta?”

A pause. Theresa could see him on the monitor, talking on the phone from the information desk. It had a cord and limited his movement to pacing in front of the hostages, the curly wire stretched over their heads. Any minute now he would tug the body of the phone down onto one of them. “I don’t see that car pulling up outside. And don’t give me any more lines about a tow-truck driver.”

“That’s just it, Lucas. The last time you mentioned the tow-truck driver, you also mentioned Winn-Dixie, which is a chain of grocery stores, right?”

“So?”

“So there aren’t any in Cleveland. There aren’t any in Ohio. They’re a southern chain.”

“That’s just fascinating, Chris. I guess your cops will have to get their coffee somewhere else, then, which is a pity, because they make pretty good stuff. I still don’t see that car. Who do you want me to shoot next?”

“I just want to know where you’re from, Lucas.”

“Is there a reason you’re wasting my time with this? Please tell me there’s a reason.”

Cavanaugh sighed. Didn’t he ever get tired of these games? Theresa wondered. She could see herself yelling at people:
Just spit it out already!

Cavanaugh didn’t yell. “Bear with me here, Lucas.”

Lucas’s sigh could be heard clearly over the speaker. “Okay. Since you ask all polite like, and since I’m obviously supposed to be impressed with your keen grocery-store reasoning here, I’ll just tell you if it will make you feel better: Bobby and I served time together in Atlanta. That’s where we met.”

“Again, telling us stuff,” Frank muttered. “Does this guy even want to get away? Or is he just that stupid?”

“He’s not stupid,” Theresa said, back at the telescope.

Cavanaugh opened his mouth, then stopped. Then he said, “Thank you, Lucas. Give me a second, okay?”

He tapped a button on the phone console and turned to the rest of the sweltering group. “It sounds like he has us on speakerphone. If Bobby can hear what we’re saying, so can the hostages.”

Maybe we could get a message to Paul,
Theresa thought. But what would they say? Run for it? Don’t run for it?

“I can’t ask him about Ludlow. Ludlow’s wife is sitting there with a gun to her baby’s head and then hears that her husband has been murdered? She’ll freak out.”

“She’ll be uncooperative.” Theresa shuddered. Lucas hadn’t stopped at an unarmed woman; there was no reason to think he would stop at killing a child.

“Just as well,” Jason said. “I still think he’ll become more desperate if he knows we know about Ludlow’s murder.”

Cavanaugh rubbed his eyes.

“I spoke with Atlanta again,” Jason went on. “Bobby did not have any visitors during his incarceration. He gave exactly one name for his visitors’ list, his mother’s, and they erased that after she died.”

Theresa said, “His brother didn’t even know Bobby had been released.”

Cavanaugh stared at her, and too late she realized they hadn’t told him about Eric Moyers’s being in the building. But he didn’t ask how she knew that, and Jason went on, “They had nine Lu
cases incarcerated at the same time as Bobby—four in his cell block—who’ve been released in the past six months.”

He paused, his eyes going to the blinking red light indicating that their Lucas was on hold. But Cavanaugh said, “Details.”

Jason rattled off four names, then added, “One white, thirty-two, Arkansas resident, second conviction for selling marijuana within five hundred yards of a school. The other three are black. The first is twenty-one, did four years for assault after nearly killing a guy in a bar fight. No other record. The second is forty, two and a half years for credit-card fraud, first offense. Third is thirty-one, did five years for putting his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend in intensive care. No other record.”

“Military backgrounds?”

“The white guy got kicked out of the National Guard. The last black guy got kicked out of the regular army for medical reasons.”

“What kinds of reasons?”

“They didn’t know. His record just said honorable discharge, medical deferment.”

“None classified as mixed-race,” Cavanaugh mused.

Frank said, “We can’t eliminate by that. He’d be entered as whatever the arresting officer considered him, which depends a lot on the arresting officer.”

The light on the phone went out. Lucas had hung up. Cavanaugh glanced at it but did not seem concerned.

Please don’t make that man angry,
Theresa thought. “What’s that last one’s name again?”

Jason checked his notes, but the scribe read first, from hers: “Lucas Winston Parrish.”

“Why him?” Cavanaugh asked.

“We figured this guy’s age at twenty-five or thirty, right? He and the white guy would fit, but the drug dealer doesn’t have a record of violence, and he does. Besides, the bottle of Advil in the car might have been his. Maybe his medical condition involves headaches or some other kind of chronic pain.”

“It’s slim.”

“Everything we have is slim.” She could not keep the bitterness from her voice.

“Good point. Okay, Jason, call whoever you have to call to get Parrish’s military history. I’ll try to keep him occupied talking about Cherise.”

Theresa’s Nextel rang. The caller ID read
OLIVER TOX
. She moved to the window seat facing Superior and cupped the tiny phone with her hand, to keep from disturbing the negotiations.

“Here’s the thing,” he said without preamble. “The dirt from your victim’s shoulder?”

“Yeah?”

“Vaseline. With cyclotrimethylene trinitramine.”

The vast library felt airless all of a sudden. “Shit.”

“Yep. Whatever the hell you’ve gotten yourself into down there, don’t bring it back here.”

She snapped her phone shut. Apollo and Hyacinthus rested stiffly in their painting overhead, aware that Hyacinthus would die from a misdirected discus. His lifeblood would drain out at the feet of someone who loved him.

Who the hell decided to put
that
on the library wall?

She went back to the reading table, where the conversation between hostage taker and hostage negotiator continued. “I’ll pick
one from the middle of the row this time,” Lucas was saying, “if I don’t see that car outside the door in five minutes.”

“What’s your hurry? I thought you wanted more money,” Cavanaugh pointed out.

“I did. But I’ve decided I can live with what I’ve got. I’m tired of this place, and I need a drink. I want my car, and I want to get out of here.”

The scribe, Irene, made a note, which Theresa read over the girl’s shoulder.
“Drinks?”

“This guy goes back and forth,” Frank groused.

Cavanaugh said into the phone, “I thought it was Bobby’s car.”

“You’re nitpicking, Chris. Does that mean you’re out of ideas?”

“I’ll be happy to give you the car, Lucas. But you can’t take any of those innocent people away in it.”

“There you go with the ‘innocent’ bit again.” The robber paused, perhaps to think. “Tell you what. The hostages will walk to the car with us but won’t get in. That will protect us from the snipers, at least until we drive away. Then they’ll riddle us with bullets, like Bonnie and Clyde or something, but it will just be us criminals.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good plan for you two.”

“Hardly your problem, is it?”

“It is. I don’t want you to die any more than I want one of the bank employees to die. If we can come to some agreement, some conditions under which you’d turn yourselves in, then we could be sure to avoid the whole ‘riddled with bullets’ thing.”

Bobby said something in the background.

“The bullets sound better than trusting you cops, that’s what Bobby thinks.”

“What do you think?”

“Trying to create a difference of opinion over here? It’s not going to work. We’re a team, me and Bobby.”

“Then decide as a team. Under what conditions would you consider letting those people go and turning yourselves in?”

Lucas did not hesitate. “The team answers: None. We are driving away from here under our own power, no matter what. So let’s get back to the central point, because I think we’ve digressed. I want the car outside, keys in, engine running, in ten minutes.”

“Can’t do it. Not like this.”

“The middle of the line this time. I’m thinking Brad. I don’t really like Brad. He looks like the kind of pencil-necked little geek who cashes postdated checks a day early just to watch them bounce.”

“I don’t cash checks!” they heard the young man’s distant protest. “I’m just a tour guide!”

Appropriating Jason’s binoculars, Theresa could see the left half of Brad and his crisp white shirt. He held his hands up to his shoulders, palms out, and even without high resolution she could see the look of horror on his face as the barrel of Lucas’s gun came to rest a few inches from his nose.

Paul sat no more than five feet away. He would not let Lucas shoot another hostage. Theresa knew that. He would die, and they would not be married. This did not surprise her. She could be a good mother, a good daughter, a good employee, and be happy in those roles. But romance would never be hers; like Apollo and Hyacinthus, they had been doomed from the start.

“I think Brad,” Lucas said again. “Or maybe Missy.”

Next to her, Frank whispered, “If they head for the door, Theresa, get away from this window. Immediately.”

“I know.”

“Besides, I’ll need room to aim.”

Cavanaugh kept talking. “And then what, Lucas? You’re already on the hook for whatever you did to Cherise. You want to make this situation even worse? Or do you want to quit while you’re ahead?”

“Shooting Cherise put me ahead? You must not have liked her any more than I did.”

Theresa opened her mouth to tell Frank about Oliver’s call but broke off with a frown when Cavanaugh said, “You told me she struggled with you. Did she grab the gun, make it go off?”

“He’s giving him an out,” Frank said, “not blaming the victim. He’s trying to guide Lucas into thinking he can weasel out of the murder charge with self-defense. He needs Lucas to think he can get out of jail again someday, which of course he can’t.”

“I understand that. My back aches, that’s all.”

“Want to sit down?”

“No. I want to curl up in a ball and die.”

He put his arm around her, but only for a moment. It was too bloody hot in the sunny window for that. “Your mom won’t see this on TV, will she?”

“She’s at the restaurant. What about your mom?” The sisters had perfected the science of instant communication.

“She doesn’t watch anything but the Weather Channel.”

“You’ve just wasted five minutes, Chris,” Lucas said.

“You’re afraid to come out because you’re afraid of the police snipers. But don’t you think they’ll be even more trigger-happy if you shoot that young man?”

“Or Missy.”

“Or Missy.”

They could hear the girl wail, “But my baby—”

“That’s good reasoning, Chris. You have four minutes remaining.”

“What’s the hurry, Lucas? You’ve been in there for over four hours now. What’s another twenty minutes or so to work this out?”

“I think we’re done here, Chris. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. Have the car outside in four minutes.”

Click.

“I don’t get this.” Frank lit a cigarette in his agitation. “He said he wanted more money. Now he’s leaving without it. What’s up with that?”

Cavanaugh rubbed his face, an agitated tic Theresa hadn’t seen before. “I don’t know. And don’t smoke in here.”

“Give him the car,” Theresa said.

“We can’t.”

“It will keep him from shooting that kid.”

“He’ll take the kid with him to shoot later. And maybe Mrs. Ludlow and her little boy. They’ll get in that car with him and Bobby and they’ll drive away and we won’t be able to stop them without harming the innocents, so they’ll
get
away, and then those people’s lives won’t be worth a pack of gum.”

“We’ll follow them. They can’t drive forever. And at least most of the hostages will be safe.”

His chair turned on a swivel, and he spun around to look at her. His face held neither encouragement nor condemnation. “And what if Paul is one of the hostages he wants to take with him, Theresa? How would that affect your decision?”

He was right, and she hated him for it. But her growing desperation made her willing to be inconsistent. “We have to do something.”

“We delay. That’s how this works. We keep him busy with details and small decisions. We send in food, cold cuts, and bread so that the hostages will have to put a sandwich together for them, which creates more bonding than a ready-made sub would. And we keep talking.”

“Until what?”

“Until his sense of self-preservation overrules his ambition.” Cavanaugh’s hand went to the phone.

Lucas picked up on the tenth ring. “I don’t see our car, Chris.”

“It’s on its way. But I can’t turn it over to you until I can be sure no one else is going to get hurt.”

“Oh, someone’s going to get hurt,” Lucas said. “And it’s going to be Brad. Sixty seconds.”

Theresa gave up on the telescope’s narrow view and watched the monitor. Lucas pointed his gun at the young bank employee, who covered his eyes with one trembling hand. His mouth moved, but his voice did not reach the speakerphone.