“I said don’t give him that.”
“It’s to manage his pain. I’m sorry, who are you?”
She racked her brain for an excuse. “He’s . . . an addict. Rehabilitating. I’m his drug abuse officer.” She locked eyes with David. “We talked about this. It’s not worth the risk.”
David stared at the supposed morphine as if it were a lotto ticket being taken away.
The doctor glanced at the clipboard chart, then back at David. “That true? I thought you hardly knew this woman.”
Janet piped up. “On a personal level, no. But on campus—”
The doctor waved his hand at her as if shooing her away. Her blood simmered.
“No, she’s right,” David said. “Known her from Trenton U. since I was a freshman.”
The doctor checked his watch. “All right then, no meds. Fair warning, though. We’re going to have to run some tests on him down at imaging soon—no visitors allowed.”
Janet gave him the slightest acknowledgment.
The doctor walked toward the door, leaned close to her ear, and whispered, “I can always use this in the B wing.”
Lucy.
Janet’s stomach dropped as she watched the doctor exit the room and disappear behind the nurses’ station.
“David, you have to get out of here—now.” She pulled some cash out of her purse, handed it to him, and pointed at his pile of clothes. “Take off that wristband and have a stranger call a ride. Don’t use your phone.” Janet pulled out her own cell and showed David how to track Markus’s location with it. “He’s the one who will protect you, okay? He and Cody are the good guys.”
“What are you going to do without your phone? What if the conductor texts you?”
“I can’t play his games anymore. I’m going to protect my sister and am not leaving her side.” She dropped her head for a moment, then swung it back up. “If you get the chance, tell Markus and Cody that I’m sorry. Now go.”
We drove the snowy highway back toward the university area. “What are you mumbling?” I said, looking at Alec in the Corolla’s rearview mirror.
Cody glanced back at him too, looking at the kid as if he were crazy.
“They’re complete words in my head,” Alec said. “They just don’t all come out of my mouth.”
“What’s in your head then?” I noticed the notebook on his lap. “Those pages too.”
Alec tapped his pen against the side of his head. “There’s just been something in my head—the conductor. Who’s the conductor? Who’s running around with makeup and playing God with people’s lives?”
“And?” Cody said.
“Who’s in town right now?” Alec said. “It’s Ivan Mikolaev. I love his music and should be biased against thinking he could be capable of the hell he’s put us through. But he’s a conductor. Best in the world. Here. In Trenton.”
The same thought had crossed my mind back in the gymnasium, but I hadn’t had time to explore it since. Ivan did have a similar profile, height, weight—but that’s where things stopped adding up for him.
Still, I played devil’s advocate and let Alec’s brain do more work on it. “I saw him motionless on the court. He’d really fallen and really hurt himself.” I blinked back to the highway as we passed a parked car alongside the road. “Why would he do that, this rich and famous prodigy? And how could he have been watching or texting us while performing that night?”
Cody tapped my arm. “So theoretically, if Ivan is the conductor, he could be at the hospital. They took Ivan to the hospital, right?”
I turned and looked at Cody. Janet.
“Haas!” Alec yelled.
I looked back to the road just in time to see a blur of a man. He had tossed something over the road: spikes.
I jerked the wheel, but there was no dodging them.
What sounded like two gunshots fired and the Corolla spun out of control—all four tires shredded.
I tapped the brakes, released, tapped, released, trying to regain any sort of control. We careened off the road and slid along the guardrail, sparks lighting up the darkness outside the windows. Shrieking metal on metal pierced the air.
The shrieks morphed into groans.
Then we stopped.
I peeled my hands off the wheel. Quick glance at Cody, quick glance at Alec.
Cody and I both drew our weapons. I could tell we were thinking the same thing.
The front of the car was still facing forward, which meant the person who’d dropped the spikes would be coming from behind. Opening our doors wouldn’t provide cover. But . . .
“Alec, the back doors—open them!”
He was nearly hyperventilating in the back seat. Wasn’t moving.
“Come on!” Cody threw his upper half into the back seat and pushed open the door behind mine, then proceeded to nearly crush Alec doing the same for his side.
Cody maneuvered back into his seat, then we both swung open our front doors and took cover behind them.
A single person was walking toward us—and he had a badge. In one hand he held a phone, pointing it at us as if taking a video, and in the other he held a Trenton University police–issued Glock.
“Hopkins?” I waved a hand at Cody to cover me as I lowered my weapon and stood straight.
Hopkins stopped about twenty yards away. “Naughty, naughty knots,” he said, his voice breaking painfully.
I squinted. Shared a glimpse with Cody. Checked on Alec.
It was Hopkins speaking these words. But it was the conductor saying them.
“A part of me thought you’d never make it this far . . . that you’d break like all the others,” Hopkins said in that same distressed tone.
“Hopkins,” I said. “Where is he? Are there other hostiles? What’s his play?”
Hopkins was holding back tears. “You think he’s going to help you? He hated you long before I came along . . . along with the rest of the Trenton Police Department . . . and now you think he’ll help? Do you have any idea the torment you’re causing this man right now?”
“What’s your stupid game?” I yelled.
“The guns,” Hopkins said, though I think he was speaking for himself this time.
Cody shook his head at me.
“We can’t do that,” I said. “He’s going to hurt a lot of people.”
“That’s the fascinating part,” Hopkins said, the conductor clearly back. “You somehow separate the people you’re hurting now—Janet, Serge, and Hopkins here—from the people who may or may not be hurt later. What’s the difference, Haasy?” Hopkins choked back anguish and lifted his weapon.
I took cover behind my door once more. “Can you take his Glock?”
Cody, head as still and eyes as focused as I’d ever seen, simply said, “Yes.”
“Either Hop here gets the guns . . . or the next knot will,” Hopkins said. “You know that.”
“Hopkins,” I said, “just drop it. Come with us.”
He shook his head.
Cody shouted some choice words, demanding the same thing.
“I can’t,” Hopkins yelled, extending his shaking gun toward us. “I won’t!”
But then he did drop his gun.
Cody and I rushed toward him. He was convulsing on the ground.
Cody knelt, looked into the officer’s eyes, tried to see into his mouth. “I don’t know what’s happening. He can’t breathe.”
The conductor was laughing through Hopkins’s phone. At least, that’s what I thought I heard. White noise was blasting through the speaker. I picked up the phone. It was a video call, and the conductor’s face filled the screen as he patted his face with makeup.
“What’s happening to him?”
“Slow, slow, so utterly slow, painful death,” the conductor shouted. “It’s a shame. He played his part well. But when knots break the string, knots get broken.” The conductor scoffed. “You think it’s just guns I want? No. It’s this I want, the sweet, sweet sound of a tightly wound will crack
ing.”
The connection clicked off.
Covered by darkness, we grabbed the duffle bags and huffed back to the car we’d seen parked alongside the highway—which indeed belonged to Hopkins—none of us saying a word. His keys hadn’t been in his pockets, and they weren’t above his visor. What had he done with them? “Come on!” I said, hitting the dashboard.
Somewhere above, a helicopter whirred through the night.
I was sick of the game. Of the killing. I knew deep down that I wasn’t the killer, wasn’t a killer at all, but the conductor had created an ecosystem in which my choices meant life or death for others. And in that sense, I was killing people.
The conductor had been right, and I hated it. I was crack-ing.
How many more would he kill if I kept trying to stop him? Less than he planned on killing with the guns? Did he even plan on using the guns? My brain hurt.
The monster hadn’t even played his trump card yet. I needed to find Steph and the girls . . . then kill the conductor.
Silence weighed heavily on us as we used Hopkins’s phone to request an Uber—three grown men, two duffle bags, and a quiet, snowy highway.
Upon arriving in a CR-V, the driver popped the trunk and I loaded the bags. He appeared to have stopped to get himself coffee and breakfast en route to picking us up.
“Could you have come any slower?” I bit out.
“Sorry. Ice and all.”
He dropped us off a few blocks away from the armory, and we stashed the guns behind a large recycling container across the road from the armory’s front entrance.
That’s when Alec told Cody and me what we needed to know.
There was a clear way in through the front and the back. But the multilevel complexity of the building meant it could take five or ten minutes to get from one end to the other—maybe more if the mazelike interior had changed in the last three years, which was when Alec had written the feature for the Telegraph. The conductor would have the option to not only slip out the back with Steph and the girls if he saw us coming from the front, but also take a quick nap before doing so. This meant we had to cover both the front and rear entrances.
Which meant splitting up.
Which meant being unable to cover one another’s backs.
“Whoever goes through the front will be spotted. There’s no cover—he’ll see you coming if he’s set up cameras or motion sensors,” Alec said. “But there’s enough wooded area near the back that you could hide and watch until he’s flushed out. He won’t see us there.”
I studied the seventy-thousand-square-foot, three-story building, which looked as though it belonged in England next to other countryside castles. Mortar-laced clay tile, bricks, and sandstone covered the exterior walls, which extended to turret corners. The arched front entrance was made of solid oak and was notched with two barred window openings.
If the conductor were to see anyone coming, I wanted it to be me. He had an eccentric fascination with me, and for that reason alone, he may be slower to retaliate.
“You two take back. You don’t see me come out, assume the worst and create a new plan. Got it? No one stops until the conductor is in cuffs or dead.”
“We’re getting them back, Haasy. Especially if he runs into me.” Cody tapped the barrel of his shotgun.
“If you shoot, know it’s him first. He’s all tricks and the girls might be in there.”
We split up, Cody and Alec circling around the back while I stayed positioned behind the recycling container.
Doubt weaseled into my thoughts. What if Janet was wrong? What if the conductor had been here but had changed locations? If he wasn’t here, neither were Steph and the girls. And if they weren’t here, they could be anywhere. I’d have no other place to look—completely powerless to save them or stop the conductor.
I looked for some kind of surveillance at the front entrance but didn’t spot any. Cameras had gotten so small and easy to set up. I’d need hours to convince myself that I wasn’t being watched this very moment. The only advantage I had was my key ring. The armory belonged to Trenton, and that meant my key would open the door—unless the conductor had taken further precautions.
If the conductor was operating off the assumption that university staff only entered the building to collect extra chairs for graduation, then maybe he had overlooked changing the lock or adding additional deterrents.
I slipped across the road to the armory. Inserted my key into the lock. The bolt popped free—thank you—and I stepped inside, letting the darkness of the room swallow me.
Normally skylights would provide enough natural light to maneuver the building, Alec had said. But it was too early for morning light to sink through the windows. Blackness was so thick that I couldn’t see my own boots or the gun with which I was sweeping the room.
I grabbed my flashlight and tucked it under my pistol, checking left, right. Heaps upon heaps of chairs, mazes of folding tables, and antique furniture pieces lay scattered about the floor. To my left were a makeshift bench and pegboard filled with tools. It looked as though Doug had put the space to use for the university maintenance crew.
Alec had told me that this room was the only normal part of the building. The armory was an anomaly of levels, cramped passageways, and wonky spaciousness. The main part where I stood now was ordinary enough, save for the wooden walkway that ran along the perimeter, overlooking me the way a catwalk might overlook a prison yard. But the moment I ventured out of this room, it was all a smorgasbord due to all the hand changing and half-baked uses the building had been subjected to over the years, according to Alec. Passages leading nowhere. Levels created by unnecessary steps. Hallways shrinking smaller and smaller as you walked through them.
“None of it makes sense,” Alec had said. “The only people who appreciate it are the graffiti artists who break in to do their thing.”
Steph and the girls were somewhere in this labyrinth, and so was the conductor—I could feel it. I was going to rescue three and kill one.
Outside, tires skidded to a halt.
I took cover behind a stack of chairs and turned off my flashlight. I eyed the door and pursed my lips. Who could’ve known we were here?
For several minutes, nothing happened. But I could hear the faint sound of footsteps in the distance, so I skirted the outer wall, feeling my way through the nooks and crannies. My fingers touched what felt like a tablecloth and I scooted underneath it.
The footsteps grew louder as they approached the building’s entrance. Had to be three or four people. Then voices. They were arguing about how to proceed and who should follow whose lead.
I recognized the voices and shook my head. How had he found us?
“Haas, we know you’re here,” Mike Mitchell said. “He’s got us hostage, just like you. We didn’t want to chase you—but you understand, don’t you? He’s got our families, our money, our futures, all wrapped around his finger.”
One of the others tried to say something, but Mitchell must’ve waved him off. The voice had come from a different part of the armory floor. They were spreading out.
“You’re not going along with him,” Mitchell said. “You’re breaking the string like the good man you are.” He paused. “Is it Steph? I get it. He’s got my wife, Haas. My wife. And the only way she survives is if you give up. We’re all ruined if you keep going rogue, you get that? So please, just . . . come out. There’s more at stake here. We have to ride it until it’s over. The moment he’s finished, we get our lives back. He’s crazy but he’s not after our families, we both know that. He wants something else. So come out. We’ll be in your debt and we can work together for a change, come up with a plan to catch him, stop him for good.”
Mitchell’s words hung in the air.
So much of what he’d said penetrated my core, but Mitchell was all tactics right now, trying to wrangle me in through my softest spot. I couldn’t let that happen. I had never trusted him and wouldn’t start now. Steph and the girls were h
ere, and abandoning them now would be signing their death warrants—and many others’, thanks to those guns.
Mitchell sighed. “This is what I was afraid of, Haas. You need to understand that this isn’t a difference in opinions, or even right and wrong. He’ll hurt our families if we don’t get you to stop. Hear that? I’m not here for anything other than to protect my family. I will kill to protect my family. We will kill to protect our families. We already found your stash behind the recycling—we’ve got the weapons, you get me?”
I lowered my head and closed my eyes. Mitchell had signed a mass execution order by taking those weapons.
“It’s just you left. And in case you hadn’t noticed, you’re being surrounded by multiple SWAT-trained officers.”
Whether it was true or not, I wanted to tell Mitchell that the only way to protect his family was to join me now in stopping the conductor, even with the risk. People were going to die at the conductor’s hands, and only those caught in the string had any chance of stopping that from happening.
“Fine, Haas.” Mitchell cocked his weapon.
All went quiet in the armory.
The cocking of Mitchell’s gun seemed to ring in the air, making me wonder if the conductor’s texting hiatus was part of a new narrative—a narrative that no longer cared if I lived or died.
I visualized the space from an aerial vantage point. The tablecloth near my face brightened slightly—they were using flashlights. Footsteps to the right, footsteps to the left, and then Mitchell somewhere in the middle. There were three of them. Three officers sworn to protect the people, now coerced into facilitating their slaughter. I quietly repositioned myself as the glow of their flashlights loomed brighter.
One of the beams scanned the cloth draped over the table I was crouched under. I could practically see Mitchell’s visual cues to the other officers in the room.
One of them bent down to flip up the fabric. But I was no longer there. I’d passed under the cloth on the backside of the table.
If I had it right in my mind, I could draw a line from my crouched position to the officer who’d lifted the cloth and, behind him, the second officer covering him. It was a long shot, but no other options remained.
The String Page 14