SWAT Standoff

by LENA DIAZ,

  “You’re supposed to be pointing at the roof, not shaking your head.” Donna scribbled fake notes on a clipboard as they stood by one of the pink-flowering dogwood trees about twenty feet from Grant’s front door. The latex gloves they were both wearing weren’t exactly work gloves to match the blue dungarees they’d worn as their disguise. But at least the gloves would ensure that they didn’t leave any fingerprints. Hopefully no one would notice their hands and realize something was off.

  Blake pointed. “Look. Shingles.”

  “It would help if you actually looked at the house when you point at it,” she muttered.

  His sigh could have knocked over a horse.

  “We need to work on your choreography,” she said. “Come on. Let’s head around back and get this over with.”

  The hammers and screwdrivers hanging from their tool belts jangled as they walked through the deep green, well-tended grass to the garage side of the house. There was no fence, which was both good and bad. Good, because they didn’t have to worry about any locks. Bad, because it meant they weren’t completely hidden from view. The neighbors behind the house and to one side had high privacy fences and large back yards, which helped. But if the neighbors were home in the house on the other side, they would see everything. For that reason, she insisted they keep up the same pretense in the backyard, pointing to the roof, the gutters, various parts of the house, as if they were performing some kind of inspection. On the back porch, she peeked through the glass. A security alarm keypad was just to the left of the door inside—its red light blinking in warning.

  That’s when she knew they were sunk.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She stepped back and pretended to study the window to the left of the door. “What makes you think something’s wrong?”

  “Donna.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “Remember I told you the company I worked for made ninety-nine percent of the alarms in this part of the country?”

  “Yes.”

  “Grant bought the other one percent.”

  He blinked. “You can’t disable the alarm.”

  “No. I can’t.”

  His jaw tightened as he looked up at one of the many cameras they’d passed when they’d walked around the house.

  “You might want to keep your head down,” she said. “Since I won’t be able to erase our existence from the recordings.”

  He swore. “What kind of alarm system is it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He stared at her, his patience obviously wearing thin.

  “Okay, okay.” She gave him the information.

  He pulled out his phone.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “You’re not the only one with a history.” He scrolled through his contacts. “I’ve disarmed an alarm or two during my military days. And I have a friend who’s probably dealt with that other one percent.” He pressed the dial button and placed the phone to his ear.

  She put her hands on her hips. “You couldn’t have mentioned this at the hotel?”

  “I didn’t want to encourage your life of crime.” He turned away from her. “Yeah, Jack. Hey. I know, I know. It’s been forever. I should have called long before now.”

  She crossed her arms, shaking her head as he threw out alarm terminology even she had never heard before. As he spoke, he peered in windows and doors, studied the cameras, even followed what appeared to be a phone line to a utility box at the end of the house. He hung up the phone and then pried the panel open.

  Donna followed him. “Just how long were you in the military?”

  He ran his fingers down some cords in the box and shrugged. “Ten years. Why?”

  “You said you were only in for a few years, that you didn’t want to reenlist.”

  “No. I said I decided not to make a career out of it. You assumed I was only in for a few years.” He pulled a screwdriver and wire cutters from his tool belt. His movements were sure and quick as he snipped here, rerouted there, cut the coating off some wires and twisted them together with another set.

  “What exactly did you do in the military?” she asked, in awe of his calm demeanor as he meticulously destroyed an extremely expensive alarm system, all without it going off.

  He snipped one more wire, then shut the panel, before looking at her. “I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”

  “Ha ha.”

  He shoved his tools back into his belt. “I bought us time, and not a whole lot of it. We need to be quick, in and out.”

  She followed him to the back door and reached for the screwdriver on her tool belt.

  “You coming in?”

  She jerked her head up. Blake was standing just inside the family room. The French door was standing wide open.

  “How did you—”

  He turned and headed down the hallway on the right side of the house. She shut the door and jogged to catch up to him. All the doors in the hall were open, which made finding the office easy. He disappeared into the last room on the right, and she was left to catch up yet again.

  He plopped into the desk chair and scooted up to the computer sitting on the massive cherry wood desk. After turning on the monitor and tapping the keys, he shoved his chair back. “Unless you’re a computer genius, we’re not getting anything useful off his hard drive. It’s password protected.”

  She pressed her hand to her heart. “You mean they didn’t teach you how to break encryption algorithms in spy school?”

  He pulled open a desk drawer and rummaged inside.

  She stared at him, waiting for a snarky comeback. It never came. “Blake?”

  “Uh-huh?” He opened another drawer.

  “Were you...were you a spy?”

  He pulled out his phone, checked the time. “If my calculations are right, we have approximately fifteen more minutes before we have to be out of here. Shouldn’t you be searching for this amazing evidence you expected to find?”

  “You and I need to talk.”

  “Yeah. I know. Maybe later. Like, after we rescue our friends.”

  His reminder of what was at stake jarred her into action. Since they didn’t have enough time to study and read everything, she grabbed a book bag from one of the daughters’ bedrooms, choosing a grimy, stained one that she hoped wasn’t sentimental in any way. They shoved an appointment book into the bag, a calendar with handwritten notes on it, and a couple of files that seemed related to the Sanchez case.

  Blake checked his phone again. “Five minutes. Anywhere else you want to check?”

  “This office appears to be just for the husband. What if his wife has an office, too? There might be something useful in there.”

  He nodded, and they hurried down the hallway, through the living room and kitchen, to the other side of the house. Sure enough, there was a matching office on this side with decidedly more feminine decorating. Just as in the other one, they found an appointment book. She added it to her collection and headed to a set of file cabinets near the window.

  “No,” Blake said, motioning for her to leave. “No time.”

  “But I just want to—”

  “Donna. If we’re not out in about one minute, the motion sensors will come back on and set the alarm off. We’re out of time.”

  She reluctantly hurried out of the room, her fingers itching to search the files. Blake put his hand on the small of her back, urging her to run. They raced out the French doors and he shoved them closed behind them. The light on the alarm keypad, which had been green when they were inside, now switched to red. The alarm had just rearmed.

  “Wow. We literally got out just in time.” She drew a shuddering breath.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Hurry.” He grabbed her arm and yanked her with him in a dead run across the backyard to the garage side of the house, where
they’d parked their car. He clicked the key fob, unlocking the doors. “Get in.”

  Her heart was slamming in her chest as she jumped into the passenger seat, dropping the book bag to the floor. A bead of sweat slid down the side of Blake’s face as he backed the car down the driveway at a sedate pace. But he was constantly searching the mirrors, looking up and down the street. As soon as they were on the road, he accelerated to the end of the block and around the corner.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” she said, snapping her seat belt into place.

  “No. I’m going a different way. Just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  As if on cue, sirens sounded behind them—from the direction of the street they’d just been on, zooming toward Grant’s house. If they’d left the same way they’d come in, they’d have gone right past the police car, or cars, from the sound of it. There was no way of knowing if the police might have pulled them over.

  Neither of them said anything as he skillfully wound his way out of the neighborhood while avoiding the police. And she didn’t bother saying out loud what they both knew—they’d dodged a bullet, had almost gotten caught. If Blake hadn’t forced her to leave when he had, they’d probably be in handcuffs right now. And how would that have helped their fellow SWAT team members?

  “I wanted to go see Sanchez after this,” he said as he headed up a ramp onto the interstate.

  “Too risky. I think we should head straight to Destiny.”

  “My feelings exactly. My house is on the way into town, so I figure we can stop there, grab some lunch while we look over our ill-gotten gains. If we still feel the need to explore the Sanchez angle after that, I can call a friend at the Maloneyville Road detention facility and see if he has any useful information.”

  “Maloneyville?”

  “Part of Knox County’s prison system. That’s most likely where Sanchez is being held for now, and it’s where any visitors would go see him—assuming he’s allowed visitors. As high profile as he is, they may have restricted him to visits only from his lawyer.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Two hours later, they were sitting at the expansive mahogany table in the kitchen section of Blake’s loft-style house on the outskirts of Destiny. Their bellies were full from some sandwiches they’d grabbed at a deli along the way. And the case files and stolen appointment books and papers from Grant’s house nearly covered the entire top of the table. They’d been reviewing them for the past hour.

  Donna straightened in her chair, stretching, her joints popping.

  Blake glanced up at the sound, then tossed his pen onto a file folder and sat back. “You okay? Can I get you anything?”

  “A chiropractor would be nice. I feel like a human pretzel.” She stood and stretched some more before moving to the group of couches that marked the living room area. “I’ve probably passed this barn a hundred times and never knew it looks like an übercool loft inside. How come I never knew you lived here?”

  “You never asked.”

  Guilt flooded through her. “You’re right. I didn’t. None of us did. We should have, though. We should have worked harder to include you. All this time, I thought you were being standoffish, stubborn, refusing to be part of the team. I never tried to look at it from your side, that maybe you never felt welcomed, so you didn’t try to join us. I’m sorry, Blake. I really am.”

  He stood and headed toward her. His long legs ate up the distance between them, and he was suddenly in front of her, tilting up her chin to look at him.

  “There’s plenty of blame to go around,” he said. “On both sides. My background, as you’ve seen today, is a bit...unusual. I had a hard time fitting in at the Knoxville office because I couldn’t talk about my past. That same...difficulty...pretty much transferred here to Destiny.”

  “Your super-secret-spy past?” She wiggled her eyebrows.

  “My top-secret past. Can we leave it at that?”

  She slid her hands up the front of his chest to entwine them behind his neck. Or she would have, if she could reach that far. She had to settle for letting the tips of her fingers barely touch. He was deliciously tall.

  “I can live with that,” she said. “And you need to stop beating yourself up. The rest of us have lived here all our lives, pretty much. There are age differences between us. We didn’t all have the same classes or graduate together. But we share the experience of growing up in Destiny. And you’re the first person we’ve ever had to welcome onto our detective squad and SWAT team who wasn’t from around here, an outsider. Even though we pride ourselves on being friendly and welcoming to strangers, we pretty much sucked in the welcoming department when we brought one onto our team. I just hope we get the chance to do better—with you on our team again.”

  He leaned down and kissed her, a soft kiss that was over almost as soon as it began. But it was so darn sweet, it made her want to weep.

  She really had it bad for this man.

  She smiled up at him. “What was that for?”

  He shook his head, but even though he didn’t answer her with words, she saw the truth in his eyes. The mutual understanding of what had gone wrong. The desire to make it right. The relief that he’d found someone who finally “got” him. She felt the same way and hoped he read the same emotions in her eyes as she stared up at him.

  He made a sound deep in his throat that reminded her of a lion. Then he was kissing her again. Really kissing her this time. Kissing her until all the clichés she’d ever heard about came true—jelly knees, the room spinning, her heart crashing against her rib cage. When he pulled back, his breathing was ragged, and there was regret in his eyes.

  “Blake?”

  “I want you,” he whispered. “But we need to get back to work.”

  Once again, she’d let her fascination with him push her off course. Shame and guilt flashed inside her, making her push out of his arms.

  “You’re right. I need to make some phone calls to double-check some of the entries in Mrs. Grant’s appointment book. Then we can compare notes.”

  “Sounds good. I’m a visual person. I’ve got a whiteboard in my closet that I haven’t used in a while. I’ll bring it out here so we can write out what we have and try to make sense of it. I figured I’d call Doc Brookes too, talk to him about the autopsy and any samples he took. My last call to Officer Lynch yielded nothing new. The lab still hasn’t returned any results from the samples that were collected. And the private lab Lynch sent your gloves to hasn’t gotten the DNA results yet. It’s supposed to take a few more days. They have a backlog, like most labs. So we’re back with Brookes to try to get useful information about the scene. Maybe he can talk me through what he saw, smelled, any impressions, things that might not be reflected in that sanitized version of the autopsy we got to read.”

  “That sounds like a great idea. Did Lynch have any reports about the team’s vehicles? Were any fingerprints found that didn’t trace back to the them?”

  “I’ll call him back and find out. I’m going to call that prison contact of mine, too, see if Sanchez has had any visitors besides his lawyer. Doubtful, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.”

  She nodded her agreement and grabbed the appointment book. Then she headed into the other room to make her calls while Blake got the whiteboard set up on top of the table, with it leaning against the wall behind it. After they both finished their calls, they gathered their notes and took turns adding bullets to the whiteboard. Blake’s notes went to the left of a vertical line he’d drawn down the center. Donna’s notes went to the right.

  “I think we should read them out loud, then discuss them,” she said. “Want to start with yours?”

  “Sure.” He read each bullet on the left side of the line.

  “Randy Carter, deceased, C.O.D. massive organ failure, caused by multiple gunshot wounds, all from the same gun, nine-millimeter
slugs. Traces of mud with mineral deposits on clothing. No fiber evidence.

  “Chief Thornton, Dillon Gray, Chris Downing, Max Remington, missing.

  “All fingerprints found on the teams’ vehicles had been sorted through and identified. No leads resulted from that.

  “No footprint evidence, other than at the barn, one partial. Assume washed away by the rain.

  “Sanchez drug trial postponed same day SWAT team went missing, per SSA Grant’s request.

  “Colin Lopez, one of Grant’s senior agents, has driven to Knoxville every day since a week before the trial was postponed, to visit Sanchez. Visits are always approximately five minutes in duration—”

  “Wait,” Donna stopped him. “Your prison contact told you that, about Lopez?”

  He nodded.

  “Does he know why Lopez goes there? And does Sanchez’s lawyer know about it?”

  “From what I was able to discern, the lawyer knows about the visits and is against them. But it’s Sanchez who insists he wants to see Lopez. As to what is discussed, my source assumes it’s Sanchez pulling the FBI’s strings, being a jerk basically, making promises he’s not keeping.”

  “Like promising to tell them information in return for a deal, to avoid the trial continuing?”

  “Maybe. We’re completely guessing here. It could be any number of things. We may need to try to talk to Sanchez after all, or Lopez.”

  She waved toward the board. “Okay, keep going. You can read my side, too.”

  “Grant’s family allegedly went on vacation several days before the SWAT team disappeared.

  “There were zero entries in either Mrs. Grant’s planner or Mr. Grant’s planner about a vacation.

  “Mrs. Grant missed a hair appointment.

  “Both daughters missed a dance recital that had been planned for months.

  “Grant’s family is NOT on vacation.”

  He arched a brow. “Missed appointments led you to conclude that the family isn’t really on vacation? That seems like a stretch. What makes you believe that?”