He doesn’t speak to her when she speaks to him. He doesn’t lift his sweatshirt when she asks him to do so. He doesn’t kneel when she tells him to kneel.
He looks down in the direction of his feet the entire time. She’s thinking that if he looked up he might freak out at the two dozen weapons pointed at his body.
Carmody has decided to wait, at least for a while, to give the young man a chance to begin to speak on his own. Or, more likely, to speak at the direction of the unseen man inside the tomb.
Joey Blanks marches up behind her. He hands her a sheet of paper. His whisper is so resonant it sounds like he’s speaking from inside a bass drum. “We have a tentative ID on this one. His name is Michael Smith the third. He’s on the ATL list—he’s one of the kids we’ve been suspecting might be inside. But the report that he’s missing came from his roommate at Saybrooke. His parents haven’t contacted us, have not returned calls. That’s the bio we have so far. The photo is from his student ID.”
“I don’t want to take my eyes off him. Tell me what it says, Joey. Keep your voice down. You know, as much as you can.”
“It says . . . he’s a junior out of Houston. Saybrooke College. Major is HPE, whatever the hell that is. Linebacker on the football team. My partner—you know Andy Gomez?—was at the Harvard game last year. He just told me this kid was the best player on the field. Hard-hitter. Well-liked apparently. Average student. Sings a cappella. He’s a tenor. I can relate to the average student and the singing part, at least.” He pauses for a moment. “Got into a fight freshman year outside G-Heav with a bunch of other players. Disorderly. Charges were dropped.”
“Family? Is there a government connection?”
“No. Family is Lutrex Oil. Refining, offshore pipelines, terminals. Gulf of Mexico mostly. That’s what it says.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Get more. Find Fred Sewall. Get him to Google the family, every member individually. Do LexisNexis. Fred can grab a student volunteer to help search Facebook and MySpace and YouTube and Twitter and all the clones. And get our photographer to zoom in on his ears right now. I want to know if they can see an earpiece.”
Michael Smith’s hair is cropped short. With her naked eyes, Carmody can’t see any evidence of plastic or wire on either of his ears.
Joey Blanks returns to confirm the news half a minute later. “No earpiece,” he says.
The second he finishes speaking, a single sharp craaack pierces the air.
Michael Smith makes a short high-pitched sound that comes from deep in his throat. He falls to one knee.
Half the cops go down into protective postures.
Carmody doesn’t move anything but her eyelids. Discipline, she tells herself. Her pulse explodes. See, don’t look.
Although her fear is screaming gunshot, her brain decides that the noise was someone hitting the inside of the front doors with something hard. It was, she suspects, a signal to Michael Smith III.
A blatantly low-tech signal.
She wonders about the change from high-tech to low. A message? She doesn’t know. The list of what she doesn’t know is way too long.
If the noise was a signal, a signal to do what?
She doesn’t know that either. She will wait. Time is supposed to be her friend.
The young man gets back on his feet. He regains his balance. Finally, five seconds after the loud crack, he lifts his head, looks directly at Carmody, and says, “I’m coming down.”
“No,” she says. “Not yet.” Goddamn. She goes back to the beginning. “My name is Christine Carmody. I’m a negotiator with the New Haven Police. We’ll get you to safety as soon as we can. Okay? But we have to do this . . . right. So that everyone can be safe. Do you understand? First, lift your shirt, front and back. Then turn around, a full three-sixty.”
Michael, his arms still above his head, takes a step forward. It is clear that the step is reluctant. This is a kid who would rather do what he is told.
But he has two masters.
“Do . . . not . . . move . . . forward,” Carmody says. “Please. Stay exactly where you are. I need to determine that you are safe. We can’t allow you to—”
Michael takes another step toward the stairs.
Carmody senses what is happening. The kid is on autopilot. He has been instructed to carry out a specific choreography regardless of what she might do or say.
He has, she assumes, been threatened with unimaginable consequences if he disobeys.
What consequences? She guesses that if Michael disobeys, the subject will kill one of his friends inside the tomb.
She has decisions to make. She has no time to make them.
What if Michael Smith is a bomb?
What if she lets him approach and a hidden device explodes, killing her and a few other cops?
And what if Michael Smith is not a bomb?
What if she stops his approach—with lethal force, if necessary—and it turns out that he is completely unarmed?
Smith takes the first step down the stairs. He pauses.
She raises her left hand, extends her index finger. Joey Blanks steps forward. She feathers the fingers of her right hand in front of her mouth before she speaks to him. “I need volunteers to take him down when he gets to the bottom of the stairs.”
“Shoot him? Ma’am,” Joey asks, disbelieving.
Michael moves down one additional step.
“Tackle and restrain until we can assess his risk. The kid is big. Strong. He could be wired to explode. I need volunteers. Now.”
“We could Tase him, try nonlethal force.”
“Too unreliable. He’s a friendly—a victim—until proven otherwise.”
Christine and Joey both know that “until proven otherwise” might mean the death of anyone in the young man’s vicinity.
Michael’s descent is deliberate. Christine recognizes that the hostage taker is giving her time to react. She doesn’t know why. Michael takes another step down.
With urgency frosting her voice, she says, “Volunteers, Joey. Now.”
Jack Lobatini is two steps away, liasing. He is relaying by radio all of what he can hear to his boss in the Mobile Command vehicle.
Carmody knows that Hade Moody should be outside, coordinating the troops behind her. Managing the scene is not her job. Her boss is keeping his hands clean. She wonders what he knows that he hasn’t told her.
Michael’s steps continue. They remain measured. Step. Pause.
What if he starts to run? she worries. God.
Michael is two strides from the sidewalk when Joey returns to Carmody’s side. “Three volunteers, Sarge.”
She glances at the three. She nods. She recognizes that two of them are National Guard Iraq War veterans. Both back from combat for less than a year. The word that comes to her mind for them is “valiant.” The third cop is Joey Blanks. She hopes that her nod begins to express the depth of her admiration and appreciation. She says, “Get in place on each side of the gate. On my order, the moment he steps through. Everyone else takes cover now.”
She turns her attention behind her. “I want a shitload of guns aimed at those doors no matter what happens with this kid. Do not get distracted from those doors.”
The young man is one step away from the bottom of the stairs.
“Michael, stop right there.” It’s Carmody’s most authoritative voice. But she knows that her protest is only an exercise. If Michael Smith has any intention to stop, he would have already stopped.
Michael reaches the area between the stairs and the iron fence. He is as tall as the fence. He is an even larger man than she thought.
She’s ready for him to open the gate.
He approaches it.
Okay, she urges him silently. Go ahead, open the gate. Let’s do this.
He stops.
His hands remain in the air. His eyes stay focused toward his feet.
Jack Lobatini takes up position at Carmody’s s
houlder. He says, “HRT is here.”
“What?” she says.
“FBI Hostage Rescue. They arrived . . . early.”
“I’m a little busy,” Carmody replies under her breath. “Jack, go take care of welcoming the feds.” She doesn’t have the authority to tell Jack to do anything. She intentionally spoke loudly enough that any defiance on his part would be public.
She’s still waiting for Michael Smith III to open the gate. She gets ready to give the order to take him down. To give an order that might kill brave cops.
That’s when Michael Smith III pivots and turns right.
No, she thinks. No.
He takes two steps and stops. Then he spins one hundred and eighty degrees.
At that point his hesitation is gone. He darts up the gentle slope of a dirt berm and makes a ninety-degree left turn. He sprints into the narrow side yard between the Book & Snake tomb and the sidewalk on High Street. He is separated from the sidewalk by a tall iron fence that has posts that look like snakes and pickets topped with spears.
Carmody calls out, “Shit. Joey, tell me we have contain over there.” She is jogging toward the corner so she can visually follow Michael Smith’s route.
Joey Blanks is right behind her. “The tomb’s fenced in on that side. I don’t know where he’s going.”
“What about the other side of the fence?”
“The whole perimeter is ours. High Street’s closed. There’s a library, the law school. Some stairs down to the plaza.”
“The plaza’s secure?”
“That’s where SWAT is mobilized.”
They both watch the kid vault over the tall fence with the spiked pickets as though he’s been practicing the move. He races down High Street for a few long strides before turning down the stairs toward Beinecke Plaza.
“I hope SWAT’s ready,” Carmody says. “ ’ Cause here he comes.”
APRIL 18, FRIDAY LATE MORNING
Sam
Ann stayed with me at the house until the plane that was supposed to be carrying Jane from Hartford landed in Miami. Ann had dispatched Julio to meet the flight. He reported back by phone that Jane wasn’t on board.
I watched Ann as she killed the call from Julio. She looked over at me with eyes full of poisoned wonder. “This is real, Sam. I can’t believe that this is real.”
I said, “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks for being here. Helping me.”
I could have gone macho and mounted my white horse, but I didn’t. I said, “I’m so far out of my comfort zone right now that I can’t . . .” I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. I said, “I’m afraid I’m not the right person to be helping you.”
She adopted a tone of voice that I remember hearing from my dad when he was bucking me up after I got advanced an age group in pee-wee hockey and was getting my butt kicked on a regular basis by the older kids. She said, “Last night on the yacht? When I decided to show you that note, I was telling myself that there was a one percent chance that it was really something to worry about. Now I’m telling myself that there’s only a one percent chance that it’s not really something to worry about. The truth? I’m not sure I would take the same risk with you again, Sam Purdy.”
She had my attention. I thought she was waiting for me to react to her criticism. I didn’t. Mostly I welcomed it. It reflected reality. I liked that she could spot reality from where she was standing. I waited to see where she was going next.
“But something in here”—she spread her hand over her chest—“told me to trust you then. So I’m going to trust you now. Don’t you even think about going invertebrate on me, mister.”
“I’m a small-town cop. I need you to know who you picked for your team, Ann.”
“I’m fine with my team.”
Did Ann have a choice any longer? Not really. She was, in Stephen Stills’s words, loving the one she was with.
That would be me. I said, “Okay then. Do you know any other kids who are in this club? The Thursday and Sunday night club?”
“No,” she said, swallowing some exasperation at my ignorance. “It’s . . . secret. A secret society. She’s a new member. Brand-new. A . . . tap. I don’t have the list. She knows very little. I know less than that.”
“How many members?”
“Once, when she was wondering if she’d get tapped, she mentioned fifteen or sixteen. That the societies mostly have fifteen or sixteen members. I don’t recall if that was new members—taps—or total members, including the seniors. They’re small clubs. It’s exclusive. It was an honor for her to be chosen.”
I wondered how many of the kids were missing. How I might be able to find out. If all fifteen or sixteen—or thirty or thirty-two—sets of parents had received the same note Ann had received.
“Earlier, you were going to tell me about the tomb,” I said.
Ann sighed before she began. “These secret societies go way back. The oldest societies constructed their own buildings, meetinghouses, well over a hundred years ago. Some of the buildings are prominent structures on campus. Others are off campus.”
“Why are they called tombs?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because that’s what they look like,” she said. “Some of them don’t have any windows.” She started touching the screen on her phone. Touching, flicking, touching again. She handed me the phone. “Jane sent me pictures of a few of the society buildings before she was tapped. This isn’t a great picture; she took it with her cell. After pre-tap, she kind of described her society’s building. I think this is her tomb.”
Her choice of words—the last sentence—made Ann gasp. Her hand flew to her mouth. “I can’t believe I said that.”
I have a good friend named Alan who is a psychologist in Boulder. He would have gotten distracted right there, would’ve invested a whole mess of energy and way too much time into trying to un-ring the bell that Ann had just rung. That was Alan.
That wasn’t me. I focused on the photograph. I thought the building looked like a simplified version of the U.S. Supreme Court Building. As advertised, it appeared to have no windows. Fancy thing. Marble. Columns. This secret society wasn’t meeting in some clubhouse built out of scrap lumber in an oak tree in the woods.
“Does the place have a name?” I asked.
“Jane didn’t tell me. But I looked up the photo online. This building is the tomb for the society called Book & Snake,” she said.
“Book & Snake,” I repeated. I was about to ask why it was called Book & Snake, but knew it made no difference. “The text you got from her on Thursday afternoon? There was a copy on your computer. I saw it. Was she going here? This building?”
She took the phone, found the text on her phone, showed it to me. “This one?”
It read At Beinecke, so wish I could tell you more, maybe soon, lusm.
“That one,” I said.
“Yes. It was more like Thursday evening. Jane had been told to dress up in some costume—no, I don’t know what kind of costume—and wait in a specific location on campus. She thought someone would find her and escort her to Book & Snake.”
“What’s that word? ‘Beinecke’?”
“It’s the rare book library on campus. It’s right behind Book & Snake. Both buildings are on Beinecke Plaza.”
“St. Cloud State didn’t have any of that. No rare book libraries. No secret society tombs. No fancy plazas.”
She exhaled audibly. She stepped close enough to put a hand on each of my clavicles. “My father was a butcher who ended up running his own neighborhood grocery store, Sam. My mother never finished high school. I went to Florida State on a private scholarship that is specifically reserved for left-handed girls—originally left-handed white girls—from the Confederate South,” she said. “Now? Things are different. Ronaldo and I are wealthy. We own a yacht. Jane goes to Yale. Get over it.”
She was telling me not to get distracted by the Ivy League glitz or the Calderón money. It was excellent advice.
“It was,” she said. “There will be a next time, Sam. But for now, that’s the . . . most recent time.”
I’d been with crime victims before. The longer they could find reason to hope, the better. Ann still had a firm grip on hope.
I feared, of course, that the rope she was gripping was made of smoke.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s something. We know where she was then. Now we have to figure out where she is right now.”
“The tomb,” Ann said. “She has to be in there.”
I didn’t share her confidence, but I nodded. “Good place to start,” I said. I narrowed my eyes and told her I had one more question.
“Yes?”
“You’re not left-handed, are you?”
“No, Sam. I am not.”
In retrospect, what happened in the next few minutes shouldn’t have done as much damage to my equilibrium as it did.
Ann started the ball rolling with a simple question, one that I probably should have seen coming. She said, “Will you go to New Haven, Sam? Today? Now? Be my eyes and ears? I know it’s a lot to ask. Please. I can’t leave. Everyone would wonder. I wouldn’t be able to keep the secret. And . . .”
She didn’t have to finish that sentence, not for me.
Ann went on. “If Jane is inside that . . . tomb, that building, I have to be close to her. You can do that for me.”
I didn’t respond right away. I was trying to come up with a rational reason to refuse. Why it shouldn’t be me, why it was wrong that it be me. I couldn’t.
It would have been better, I was thinking, if Ann’s son had fallen in love with a girl whose pregnant cop mother had a boyfriend who was more like James Bond or at least like some character that Denzel Washington would play in the movies. But Ann’s son didn’t fall in love with that girl.
Second best would have to do. And second best was that Ann’s son had fallen in love with a girl whose pregnant cop mother had a suspended cop boyfriend with time on his hands and a stubborn sense of obligation to do what was right.
That was me. Other than the suspended part, it was a rare day that I wasn’t okay in those shoes.
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