“So which address do we raid first, the one for Rob Johns or Alma Walker?”
Clay considered a moment. If the identity the man used for snatching Max was the old lady’s, then it was more plausible that he would have taken Max to Rob Johns’ residence, thinking it would take the authorities a while to make any sort of connection between the two. Which it would have, if Clay hadn’t seen the man get into that vehicle. Of course it was also entirely possible that the man had another identity, another residence, and another vehicle which they knew nothing about.
“Start with –”
“Walker!” Maureen burst out, surprising Clay out of what he’d been about to say. “The man on the phone just said the name Walker!”
CHAOS reigned.
Between the Charleston PD, what Bentonville sheriff’s department deputies they’d managed to locate, and the contingent of federal agents, three different law enforcement agencies were now rushing to the Walker farm. Clay was on the phone with Kathleen, telling her to make sure the officers on her end didn’t come in with sirens blaring, because this was obviously not the kind of man who was going to give up peaceably when cornered. In fact, Clay believed that type of situation would only make him more dangerous.
Kim, who was driving at something approximating the speed of light, talked to the Special Agent in Charge of the local RA, updating him on the situation, and on the phone he held to his other ear, Clay listened for sounds of life from Josh Harding. He’d roused himself enough to tell them he’d been shot and was lying in front of a barn on the Walker property, but for the past ten minutes Clay’d heard nothing. No talking, no moaning, no hint of breath.
If the man was still alive, it was just barely.
After concluding her conversation, Kim waited for Clay to finish his, and then risked taking her eyes from the road to glance his way. “You think this guy – the one who abducted Max – is the other perp we’ve been looking for.”
“Has to be. It’s the only thing that makes sense, even though – holy God – I never would have predicted he’d do something like this.”
“So you think this is part of his revenge and retribution thing? He took out his accomplice, who was stupid enough to allow himself to be made, took out the deputy who did the composite, and went after the son of the woman who ID’d the partner?”
Clay laid the open phone – their link to Harding – on his lap so that he could rake both hands through his hair. At this rate, he’d be bald before morning. But he needed to think, needed to figure this whole thing out. He had to get inside this asshole’s head so that he knew best how to help Max.
“Yes,” he admitted to Kim as he watched the outside scenery fly by, “that’s essentially what I think. Although to be quite honest, it’s more extreme than I would have imagined. Josh Harding – well, I think he just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, so the guy shot him. But with Max…” Clay shook his head, looked at Kim. “It’s like he didn’t just want to strike back at Tate, but he wanted to do it in the most painful way possible. And he went to a lot of trouble to do so, at the risk of getting caught. We’re talking about the sort of man who up to this point has avoided risky behavior, so that begs the question why is he willing to do so now? That sort of thing reeks of some sort of personal connection, of prior knowledge of his victim. It’s too extreme an act of retribution against a perfect stranger who’s pissed you off.”
Kim seemed to swallow that piece of information like something akin to spoiled milk. “So you think this man is someone who knows Tate? Someone she has some kind of history with?”
“I don’t know.” Clay rubbed his eyes, went with his gut. “Yes, that’s what I think. Kathleen’s running everything they can on the old lady who owns the farm, to see if they can turn anything up from that quarter. But I’m afraid if we can’t approach the situation at that farm stealthily – if it becomes a hostage situation – someone’s going to have to wake Tate and show her the second composite, to see if she recognizes the blond man from the diner.” He remembered something she’d said to him once, about him being the latest in a string of gorgeous blonds that she’d fallen for. He prayed to God that this man wasn’t one of them. “We’ll need to know everything we can about this guy and what makes him tick if we have any hope of getting Max back unharmed.”
Clay’s phone rang, and he flipped it open to continue his dialogue with Kathleen.
“We’re here,” she informed him, just slightly out of breath. “We have our snipers moving into position. No sign of life so far, but two members of the SWAT team just cleared the barn and made a positive ID on the blue pickup. There’s also a late model minivan parked beside it.”
A minivan? Interesting choice. It was excellent cover for a man traveling with a young child.
“Kathleen, find out if there’s a car seat in the back of the second vehicle.”
Clay could hear her muffled voice as she turned away to make the inquiry. “Affirmative,” she told him after a moment. “I guess that means he was planning to take Max out of here alive?”
“Not only that, but it means they’re both probably still there. He’d want to move quickly, after shooting Harding, so our best bet might be to wait him out, have one of the snipers take him down when he heads out toward the car.” But it was going to take nerves of steel for him to wait, knowing that Max was probably in that house. Kathleen must have felt the same way.
“I want to bust that door down right now.”
“I do, too. But that might endanger Max. We need to be sure that the guy isn’t in there, holding a gun to Max’s head before we go alerting him to our presence.” Clay listened to the silence coming from the phone on his lap and asked her another tough question. “Any word on Deputy Harding?”
Kathleen sighed, and Clay could hear her tension. “His position is such that he’s in full view of the house, and if we get near him we’ll give ourselves away. I had to take a hard line with a couple of his fellow deputies, who wanted to run to his aid. We can’t risk it, as you said, until we know what we’re dealing with inside. But in all honesty, I’m not sure the guy’s alive. There’s an awful lot of blood under him.”
Clay swallowed and looked at the phone on his lap, feeling a real pang of loss for the other man. In the short time Clay had known him, Josh had managed to earn his respect.
But then suddenly, noise erupted from that phone, and Kathleen began oh, shitting in the other.
“Kathleen? What the hell’s going on?”
There was a barrage of voices, most raised in angry shouts, and then a very definite gunshot.
Two. Three shots.
Between the two phones it was like hearing the situation in some kind of weird stereo. “Please tell me that was one of the snipers.”
“Another of the Bentonville deputies is down.” Panic pitched Kathleen’s words. “He ignored orders and went after Harding. The first two shots came from an upstairs window, the third from one of our snipers, to get the gunman to back off.” She made a noise that sounded an awful lot like a sob. “I’d say our perp definitely knows we’re here.”
THE situation had gone to hell in a hand-basket by the time Clay and Kim made the scene. Federal agents descended in a flurry of dark-tinted vehicles while a mixture of sheriff’s deputies and Charleston PD tried to maintain some kind of perimeter. Gossip in small towns traveled faster than wildfire, and the curious were already flocking. A hostage negotiator with the Charleston PD was trying to find out if there was a land line so that he could establish communication, as the name of the game was to keep the offender as calm as possible, and bullhorns were not the way to go.
Nor, of course, was busting down the door, which was what the remaining sheriff’s deputies were advocating. They had two men down – one badly wounded, one maybe dead – and were on an adrenaline rush of anger and retribution. Tempers were heated, emotions close to the surface, the whole situation a ticking bomb. The man inside the house had created an incredi
bly dangerous situation for himself, because now he was not only a child abductor but a cop killer.
Every law enforcement official present wanted him dead.
None of them more than Clay.
But first they had to get Max out safely.
He and Kim parked alongside the road, arriving in time to see several members of the SWAT team gearing up to pull the downed deputies out. Aside from body armor and riot shields, they had the backup support of their snipers. So far Rob Johns, or whoever the hell he was, had made no further attempts to fire his weapon. There was speculation that he had a limited amount of ammo, but everyone knew it was foolish to make assumptions.
Well, almost everyone. Apparently the deputy who’d gone after Harding hadn’t thought the whole thing through.
Locating Kathleen in the throng, Clay pushed past some Charleston PD officers who asked him for ID, leaving Kim to flash her badge and smooth things over. He simply didn’t have the wherewithal to tolerate needless distractions.
A short man – early forties, with ruthlessly tamed dark hair and an FBI raid jacket over a very expensively tailored suit – looked up at Kathleen, exuding irritation.
“Your opinion is of no consequence. You should not be on this case, let alone part of the decision making process,” Clay heard the man say. “There’s no way for you to maintain your objectivity, Detective.”
“Look,” Kathleen was going toe to toe, refusing to back down at all. She obviously had her Irish up, a condition that Clay recognized from working with Kim. “My cousin’s little boy is in that house –”
“Exactly my point.” The agent talked right over her protests. “You assume you have a family member in imminent peril, which makes your judgment questionable at best. I’d like to remind you that we have no viable proof the child is in there, and yet you’ve created an atmosphere of extreme urgency which has caused a local uniform to get himself shot.”
Kathleen’s fair skin turned red at the unjustified accusation. Clay knew this man’s type, knew exactly what he was up to, and given the asshole factor concluded he was the man Kim had spoken of earlier. The fact that an officer had been shot – two officers, in fact – meant that the ugliness quotient had ratcheted up to damaging levels. Anytime a law enforcement official or innocent bystander was wounded or killed in the course of a tactical situation, everyone’s first and immediate question was who screwed up?
Clearly, this man – Special Agent in Charge Beall – was already pointing fingers to pass the blame.
“Detective Murphy hasn’t done anything in her handling of the situation that wasn’t carried out with the utmost professionalism, and she has proceeded as both her lieutenant and I have instructed.”
The older man frowned at Clay as he spoke. “And who the hell are you?”
“Agent Clay Copeland. I’m with the Investigative Support Unit.” He reached into his pocket, produced ID. “I’ve been working with the Bentonville sheriff’s department on their investigation, which has spilled over into Detective Murphy’s kidnapping.”
No way was he going to give this guy any indication that he had a personal interest in the case. He was just the kind of man to use that against Clay, to ignore every piece of advice he had to offer. And technically, the man was the highest ranking official on the scene, so like it or not that put him in charge.
“So you believe Detective Murphy’s assertion that the boy’s in there and still alive? That we need to approach this as if it were a hostage situation?”
“Yes, I do.”
Beall motioned to the van behind him, which held a boatload of taxpayer dollars in the form of expensive equipment. “We have a parabolic microphone that suggests otherwise. Other than the sound of our gunman moving around, we’ve been unable to detect any signs of a hostage. How do we know this isn’t simply some old farmer who thinks he’s defending his property? It would have been prudent to follow protocol and make your presence known from the outset. This situation might have turned out peacefully.”
Clay took a breath and tried to hold onto his patience. “You haven’t heard any sounds of anyone else in the house, because in all likelihood he has the child drugged. And I believe Agent O’Connell already filled you in on the situation, and the fact that Deputy Harding was shot during a routine canvass as part of his department’s investigation. This residence is supposed to be empty. Both the farm and the truck that we positively identified as the getaway vehicle for the abduction – and which is currently parked in the barn, I might add – are the property of an elderly woman who supposedly now resides in Atlanta.”
“With a grandson,” Kathleen interjected. “Who we’re currently checking out.”
Beall sent the detective a glare, and Clay continued as if he hadn’t noticed. “We have reason to believe that the man inside the house assumed the elderly woman – Alma Walker’s – identity as part of his plan to kidnap the child. We have reason to believe that this is a dangerous, unstable individual who is part of a long-standing human trafficking operation. We have reason to believe that just yesterday he killed his partner in cold blood. So no, sir, this isn’t some farmer defending his property.”
“Okay.” A little of the bite had gone out of the older man’s attitude at the calm authority in Clay’s voice. “So I guess we need to try to establish some kind of dialogue. Any idea what kind of demands we’ll be looking at to make this end the way we want it to?”
Clay shook his head and stuffed his hands into his pockets, afraid Agent Beall would notice them shaking. “Aside from retribution and a free ticket out of here, I’m afraid I don’t have enough information about our abductor to make any viable comments at this time.” Once Clay heard some of the negotiator’s dialogue with the man – if he was willing to talk – he might have a better idea. “I do know, however, that this is a man who’s on the edge. And the fact that we showed up when we did, essentially trapping him, is going to make that edge he’s on even slipperier. Most hostage-takers go into their situation expecting the police to show up. It gives them a forum to air their grievances. We took this guy by surprise, and he’s not going to like it. I think that we should approach the situation with as little show of force as possible, because he’s likely to strike back, hard and fast.”
Agent Beall nodded. “Okay, Agent Copeland. You just earned a spot next to the negotiator. He’s going to need backup if this thing drags out.”
Clay hesitated. Because he knew that wasn’t a good idea. Not only was he completely biased and in fact wanted nothing more than for that son of a bitch to die and die hard – and that sort of emotion was completely contrary to setting up a productive dialogue with a hostage-taker – but also because the bastard clearly knew who he was and what Max meant to him.
But how to broach that subject without Beall ordering him off the scene?
Clay cleared his throat, sweat trickling down his back. It ran cold, despite the relentless heat.
“With all due respect, sir, that’s a position I’d rather not take. The last time I tried to negotiate a little boy died. I’ll be happy to advise, but I can’t talk to the offender.”
Beall’s raised eyebrows suggested his opinion of Clay had just tanked. But he was prevented from commenting on that fact by the appearance of a member of the Charleston PD’s SWAT team.
“Our men are ready to move in,” he said, staring at Beall as if he dared him to stop them. “Webster, the negotiator, hasn’t been able to pull up a land line, and so far the HT seems either unwilling or unable to call the cell number we posted to get him to communicate. He’s going to use the bullhorn to tell him we’re only moving in to get the deputies some medical attention.”
Clay tensed. It was a horrible situation. They needed to get those deputies out of there, but he felt that anything they did to upset this man’s perceived balance of power was going to put Max in further danger. “Offer him a trade,” he said suddenly, surprising the others into looking his direction. Surprising himself. “Right now
, those injured deputies are his leverage. You go in there and take them out, however peaceably, and he might perceive that as loss of control. We need to offer him something in return.”
“How do we know what to offer,” Kathleen asked, “when he won’t even talk to us?”
“Offer me.”
A chorus of shocked protests erupted, as Clay had known it would. But dammit he had to try something. Him walking into that house as a voluntary hostage would not only give him a chance to assess the situation from the inside, but also create a heightened sense of power for Rob Johns. He’d have a federal agent in the doubly vulnerable position of hostage and man who wanted to protect his child. Johns’ need for control would be safely un-assailed, and Clay would have a better chance of influencing him.
Beall held up a hand to silence everyone’s comments. “You’re not seriously suggesting that I allow an unarmed federal agent to walk into a crisis situation with an unstable offender, who has already shown no compunction about shooting cops.”
Clay held the other man’s gaze. “Yes sir. I am.”
Beall expelled a short burst of disbelieving air. “You just said you didn’t want to negotiate with the man, but you’re willing to let him hold a gun on you?”
Clay tried to get Beall to see the logic of his suggestion. Or maybe it wasn’t logical. Hell, he didn’t know. And he was too desperate right now to figure it out. “As a negotiator and a hostage-taker, Johns and I are on relatively equal footing. However, put me in the position of hostage and Johns suddenly becomes the one in control. He’s the type personality who’ll be less dangerous if he feels less threatened. He’ll feel less threatened if he has both me and the child as leverage.”
And Clay could get close enough to him to snap the other man’s neck.
“Do you have any idea what kind of precedent that would set, Agent Copeland? Word gets out that I let something like that go down, and every hostage-taking psychotic in the country would be demanding a federal agent for every civilian they release.”
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