Hunted

by Karen Robards

  “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.

  But for now, all she could do was look at her father’s grim face—and at the handsome, black-haired man who held a gun to his head.

  Her breathing suspended.

  She knew him. More than knew him, in fact. She’d once had a hell of a thing for him.

  Over long ago, of course.

  One of the NOPD’s own: Detective Reed Ware.

  What the hell?

  The shock she felt upon identifying him threatened to tip her world on its axis.

  She’d be damned if she was going to let it.

  “He’s one of us,” she said tightly. “What’s the story?”

  Scowling at the monitor, Dixon folded his arms over his chest. “No idea. Nobody’s had a chance to talk to him yet. Only word we’ve gotten about what’s happening in there is from people fleeing the scene.”

  “Who called it in?”

  His eyes shifted in her direction. “Initial call went out on a silent alarm when somebody hit a panic button in the library. Since then, 911’s been blowing up with cell phone calls. I’d say, everybody in the damned place.”

  First things first. “Anybody dead? Wounded?”

  “None known so far.”

  Caroline felt a glimmer of relief. The situation had not yet totally spiraled out of control. “That’s a plus.”

  “You all right to do this?” Dixon asked her. “I know it’s hitting close to home, what with your father being involved. But at midnight on Christmas Eve, getting anybody else out here is going to take some time.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and she was. Absolutely. Even if her heart had started to beat a little faster, and her stomach had twisted itself into a knot.

  That was normal, the result of adrenaline. That meant she was on her game.

  She was a pro. Lives depended on what she did next. And what she was going to do next was exactly what she had been trained to do: her job.

  Which was, first of all, to establish contact. Get Ware on the phone.

  “We got a line inside?” she asked Dixon.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ON THE MONITOR, Caroline watched Ware’s expression change as he registered the sound of the ringing phone. He stretched to punch a button on the instrument, which rested on the massive mahogany desk located at the far end of the room. To do that he used a single finger because, she noticed, both his hands were full—the right one with what looked to be his service weapon and the left one with—a dead man’s switch? She couldn’t be sure. Ware’s leanly muscled, six-foot-two-inch frame had been perched, foot swinging, on a corner of that desk until he heard the phone. As he moved to answer it, his crow-black hair gleamed in the light of a chandelier hanging above the desk. Unlike Dixon, he didn’t appear to be sweating, but his swarthy-skinned, chiseled-featured face was set in tense lines. Like the majority of the guests, he wore a tux. She guessed that was how he had managed to gain entry into the party, to which it was almost certain he had not been invited, because this storied bash was strictly for the rich and influential, and Ware was neither. Whatever, the elegant tux elevated his killer good looks to a whole new level of hot. Beneath the carelessly buttoned jacket, she saw no sign of a suicide vest. Which didn’t mean that he wasn’t in possession of a bomb, just that he didn’t appear to be wearing it.

  “Asshole,” she heard her father say clearly, and realized that with one push of a finger Ware had put the phone on his end on speaker. Her phone was not on speaker, and would not be. Specially designed for use in hostage situations, the receiver she was holding was equipped with a button that you had to depress before you spoke into it if you wanted whoever was on the other end to be able to hear you. Otherwise, the handset did not transmit sound, which was the point. In hostage situations, there was generally too much going on in the Mobile Command Unit that the perp didn’t need to hear.

  “Shut the hell up,” Ware replied almost amiably as he straightened to nuzzle the back of Martin Wallace’s leonine head with his pistol. “Or I’ll shut you up.”

  A muscle twitched in her father’s cheek, which Caroline knew from experience
meant that he was absolutely furious, but he didn’t say anything else. No surprise there: contrary to his genial, glad-handing exterior, he was at heart cold and calculating, the opposite of rash. He would bide his time, wait for his opportunity, and strike back hard. Visibly on edge, he was seated in a leather-upholstered accent chair that looked like it was one of a pair designed to face the desk. It had been moved so that it was now directly in front of Ware, facing the room. Caroline recognized the self-control her father was exercising in the set of his shoulders and the thinness of his mouth. Ware’s hand holding the pistol now rested negligently on the rolled leather back of that chair. The pistol’s mouth was just a couple of inches short of the base of her father’s skull. His wrists, she saw, were secured with zip ties to the chair’s arms. A pair of bungee cords around his waist held him fastened in place. There was a bruise on his chin, and a small cut under one eye that had started to scab over. From the reddened scrape along Ware’s left cheekbone and the cut at the corner of his mouth, she surmised that her father, a bull of a man who at fifty-seven still took pride in his physical prowess, had put up a fight.

  Only the injuries didn’t look like they had happened within, say, the last hour or so. They looked older than that. Which meant they didn’t fit within the time frame. According to what she had been told, this standoff had started approximately twenty minutes ago.

  Something to puzzle over later.

  She hadn’t exchanged one word with her father in the last six months, and she wouldn’t have talked to him six months ago if it hadn’t been in the line of duty. They were the opposite of close. When he had lived with Caroline, her mother, and her two younger sisters, he had been a verbally abusive and sometimes even physically violent bully. When she was eighteen, he had divorced her mother, left the family, and married again. On most days, she would have said that she actively despised him.

  But seeing him like this awakened all kinds of unsuspected emotions inside her, the simplest of which was a determination to get him, and the rest of the hostages, out of there alive.

  I don’t have to like him. I just have to do my job.

  Her chest felt tight. She ignored it.

  “If you’ve got something to say, say it,” Ware said with a glance at the phone, and Caroline realized that he was talking to her.

  Like the rest of Ware’s too-handsome self, the voice was pure Louisiana Cajun.

  She depressed the talk button on the phone.

  “This is Caroline Wallace, Detective Ware,” she said. “You want to tell me what this is all about?” Her father’s eyes widened. It was the only acknowledgment of her he made. Even if their relationship had been different she wouldn’t have expected anything more, given the situation. Revealing their vulnerabilities could only work in the hostage-taker’s favor, and Martin would know that. The knowledge that her father would be listening to everything she said, evaluating her skills, judging her as he had always judged her, caused her stomach to flutter unexpectedly, and realizing that she was having that reaction annoyed the hell out of her. For the sake of the other hostages, the ones lying facedown on the obviously expensive Oriental rug with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, the ones whose fear she could practically feel through the monitor, she needed to keep her emotions out of it. To do what she had been trained to do to the best of her ability, and forget about everything else. With that in mind, she almost went personal. Almost called the perp Reed, as she had years ago. But she didn’t: too many ears were around to hear, too many minds to speculate, too many memories to jog. Once upon a time, for a three-month period when the police superintendent’s family had been under threat and Ware had been one of the officers assigned to watch over them and keep them safe, she’d had the most enormous crush on him. Done her best to seduce him, which, to his credit, he hadn’t allowed her to do.

  She’d been seventeen. He’d been twenty-five.

  Jailbait, he’d called her at the time.

  Since then, she’d seen him around. She’d grown up and gotten over him, of course, but she had always been aware of him. In a casual, heard-it-through-the grapevine kind of way, she’d known when he got married, had a child, got divorced. She’d known when his ex-wife and child had died in a traffic accident.

  She’d gone to the funeral, one of a large contingent of cops.

  That was three years ago.

  Now Reed Ware’s eyes looked straight into the monitor, as if he could see her. His irises were so dark brown as to be almost indistinguishable from the pupils. Framed by sooty black lashes and straight black brows, they were as steamy-hot as the Louisiana swamps from which he had sprung. Once, just having them look at her in a certain way had been enough to make her go all marshmallowy inside.

  Once.

  Not now.

  She was all grown up now. And he—he was the perp she was getting ready to help take down.

  How did this happen? she thought incredulously. How did Reed Ware—a solid cop with something like twelve years of exemplary service under his belt—wind up taking all these very important people hostage?

  “Caroline.” Ware spaced her name out: Car-o-line. Just like he had always done. She refused to acknowledge the shiver that sexy drawl sent down her spine. God, between his presence and her father’s, this was going to be the job from hell, and she found herself wishing that anyone else had been on call tonight. But as the junior negotiator, she got the crappiest shifts, so here she was. Recalculating quickly, she had to throw the approach she had been planning to use with the perp out the window. Ware knew too much about her, too much about the way cops worked, too much about how hostage negotiation generally went down. She was going to have to go with her gut and what she knew about him, improvising on the fly. He continued, “Been a long time, cher.”

  Cher, which he pronounced shah as they did back in the bayous, meant dear or sweetheart. He’d called her that sometimes when she’d come down in the middle of the night to watch TV with him while he was on guard duty in the rented house where her family had been holed up; he’d called her that when he’d found her, trembling and upset, huddled on the staircase landing one night after her parents had had yet another terrible fight, and she’d ended up confiding to him the truth about how her father treated his family; he’d called her that on the night when she’d plopped her shorty-nightgown–clad self on his lap, twined her arms around his neck, and kissed him. He’d kissed her back for a hot, memorable moment, after which he’d stood up with her, carried her through the sliding glass doors to the patio, and dumped her unceremoniously into the swimming pool.

  At the time, she’d been outraged, furious—and humiliated. Much as she hated to admit it, the memory still stung.

  Luckily—unless he was the kind of guy who bragged about his conquests, and she didn’t think he was, or she would have heard—no one knew about that mortifying episode except the two of them.

  No one knew that there had ever been any kind of personal relationship between them.

  But it made what she was trying to accomplish here just that much more complicated. Firmly she pushed that tiny little bit of near-forgotten history out of her mind.

  Here, tonight, she was a police negotiator and he was a perp, and that was it. Lives were on the line.

  “Why are you doing this, Detective?” Her tone was brisk and businesslike as she rephrased her previous question slightly, made it blunter in hopes that she would get an equally blunt response. He’d located the camera, which was somewhere above him and to his left: she knew because he was looking directly into it. His dark eyes seemed to burn into hers.

  He said, “First of all, I want this house cleared. Nobody in it outside this room. If I even think there’s somebody else inside, we’re going to have a problem.”

  “That’s not an answer,” Caroline replied. “Help me to understand so that I can help you.”

  Ware looked impatient. “You don’t need to understand. And if you want to help me, just do what I tell you.”
>
  Knowing that pushing him could prove counterproductive and rebound on the hostages, Caroline didn’t persist. Instead she released the talk button on the receiver and glanced at Dixon, who shrugged and said, “I got people checking him out. We know he’s got a clean record. All I can tell you at this point is, something must have happened recently to send him over the edge.”

  “You know I mean it about getting the house cleared out, right, Caroline?” Ware’s tone made it an implicit threat.

  She pressed the talk button. “Yes, I know,” she replied in her best conciliatory tone. “The house is being cleared. What else can we do for you?”

  Ware’s voice was hard. “A kid I know was arrested earlier tonight. I want him out of jail. Hollis Bayard.”

  Caroline shot a quick glance at Dixon, who shook his head: don’t know anything about who that is. He glanced at her receiver, she assumed to make sure that she wasn’t still pressing the talk button—she wasn’t, she released it whenever she finished speaking—and said into his radio, “I need information on a Hollis Bayard. Check the jails.”