heavy had hit the floor.
She saw Phil the intern run past her muttering, “Sweet
Jesus, sweet Jesus,” over and over again. Amanda still
couldn’t see what was happening, but if praying to Jesus or
any other deity meant she’d make it out of the building alive
she’d happily renew her faith in the Lord.
Crawling on all fours, Amanda moved past her desk until
she was next to the door to the conference room. She peered
up, looked through the small window pane. She gasped when
she saw what was happening inside.
Violet Lawrence was lying on the floor, facedown.
Amanda recognized the purple sports jacket she’d complimented her on just that morning. She couldn’t see anything
else, couldn’t see Violet’s face. But she heard a small moan,
and that meant at least she was alive.
Nobody else was running. The office had grown deathly
silent. The watercooler gurgled. Then she saw the man walk
into the room, and Amanda froze.
He was tall, maybe six one or two, lean with short blond
hair. He was wearing a suit, the sleeves rolled up, sweat
beading through the fabric. His face was tan, eyes wild yet
focused.
He was holding a gun. No, not a gun, a cannon. And immediately she remembered their meeting with Agnes Trimble,
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the image her professor showed them. The one Henry was
captivated by.
The Winchester rifle.
That’s what he was holding. The man in their office had
killed four people. Killed his family, all in cold blood. What
the hell was he doing here?
Another woman ran past, screaming. The boy—William,
the papers had called him—grabbed her by the ponytail. She
let out a shriek. He spun her toward him. Amanda could see
the veins and muscles in his forearms. The woman was crying,
blubbering, tears streaking her mascara. Then he suddenly let
her go, pushed her toward the doorway. She disappeared and
Amanda heard the familiar chime of the elevator call button.
He let her go.
The man was standing in the middle of the room. He was
holding the rifle by his side. She could see no other
movement. William scanned the room, quickly crouched
down to see if anyone was hiding under a desk, then stood
back up.
“Amanda,” he said. Her blood ran cold. “Amanda Davies.”
It wasn’t phrased as a question. He said her name the same
way Henry did when he got home from work. Said it like he
knew she was there and couldn’t wait to see her.
“Amanda,” he said, holding his arms out wide, the rifle
barrel pointing at the ceiling. “I’ve been wanting to meet you
for a long time. Don’t keep a friend waiting.”
She knelt, silent, hoped he would search the other offices,
turn his back so she could make a run for it. Her heart felt like
it was ready to burst through her blouse, she could feel sweat
dripping down her sides.
“Henry and me, we bonded the other day.” She heard footsteps, looked up, saw he was moving through the office. “Like
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brothers from different mothers, we might have been. Every
yin needs a yang, every bad penny needs a good one to even
things out. He’s my bad penny.”
The footsteps grew closer and Amanda dropped back to the
ground. She scuttled behind her desk, crawled underneath and
curled her knees to her chest. She bit her lip to keep it from
trembling. She was too scared to cry.
Roberts moved closer. She heard a squeak as the doorknob
turned. Suddenly she heard a bump come from the other
office, and the knob stopped turning. The footsteps grew
fainter.
Amanda crawled back to the door, looked up just in time
to see Roberts disappear into the conference room.
“Where’s Amanda?” she heard him say. There came a
wheezy response from a male voice—she recognized Phil, the
intern. Poor Phil had only been here a week. She hoped he
was making a killer stipend.
Amanda brought her hand up to the doorknob, slowly it
turned until it stopped. Looking up, she saw that the adjacent
office was empty. Slowly she eased the door open just enough
to fit her slim body through. She eased the door shut. The stairwell was less than twenty feet away. She could make it. There
were still noises coming from the other room. Now or never.
She crawled along the wall, keeping her eyes on the other
office where Roberts had entered. Saw William’s black shoes
pointing away from the door. She took it a step at a time,
taking deep, slow breaths to slow her heart rate. Twenty feet.
Eighteen. Fifteen. She was past the door, closer to the exit
than Roberts. She slowly stood up. Took one more step.
Peeked around, braced herself, planted her feet to sprint away.
Just as she took her first step, she felt a sharp pain as a hand
gripped her hair and spun her around.
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Her breath caught in her throat as Amanda looked into the
grinning face and wild eyes of William Roberts.
She couldn’t fight back. His hand was on her neck. The
Winchester was slung over his neck. And in his other hand
was a knife nearly half a foot long, a streak of glistening red
blood on the blade.
“Miss Davies,” he said, his voice metallic and calm. “If
you’ll please join me.”
“Wh…what do you mean? Where?”
“Somewhere a little, oh, scenic. The last girl, Mya, sad to
say she’s probably going to make it.” He smiled at her. Then
he said, “Problem is, I didn’t drop her from nearly high
enough. That’s a mistake that won’t happen again.”
56
I shared a cab with Jack. My legs were jittery as I kept redialing Amanda’s number on my cell phone. It went right to
voice mail every time. I called 911. Tried to figure out what
the hell was going on. I got the feeling from the exasperated
woman on the other end that I wasn’t nearly the first to call
it in. I hung up without learning anything.
I called Curt Sheffield, praying there was some sort of
mistake. His voice instantly told me the situation was worse
than I imagined.
“Dude, 911 got about a hundred calls in a three-minute
span,” he said, his voice breathless and uneven. “All from
newspapers and television stations. The NYPD has a freaking
battalion on our way down there, but man, they’re going to
be a few minutes, the choppers say there’s already a few
dozen reporters at the scene. Somehow you guys at the news
desks got wind of this before the cops did. Listen, Carruthers is on the rampage. I’ll call you soon as I know anything.”
Curt hung up.
“What’d he say?” Jack asked. His voice was scared, his
breath slightly sour.
“Nothing we don’t know,” I said. “But it seems like the
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news crews got tipped off somehow before the NYPD. There
might be a few repor
ters down there already.”
The cab rounded the corner, arrived at 199 Water Street.
Or at least got as close as it could. Because when we saw the
crowd in front of the building, both of our jaws dropped.
Jack said, “I have a small quibble with your definition of
the word ‘few.’”
Surrounding the building’s entrance were at least a
hundred reporters and a dozen news vans. They lined the
street like a cattle drive stuck in Neutral.
“What the…” Jack said.
“Hell…” I finished.
Dozens of sports-jacketed journos were in the middle of
writing copy while news correspondents were already being
primped for their on-camera reporting. Cameramen were
pushing and shoving, jockeying for the best lighting to both
hide their stars’ blemishes and capture the best angle of the
building behind them. It was an unmitigated madhouse.
And there wasn’t a cop in sight.
“This has to be a mistake,” Jack said. “I’ve never seen
anything like this.”
“No way,” I said. “This is no mistake.”
Looking at the building, I could see several confused
people staring out their office windows down at the gathering outside, oblivious to what was going on just a few floors
above or below them. And in the time I took to assess the
situation, three more news vans pulled up, five more nattily
dressed reporters piled out, followed by several burly not-asnattily-dressed cameramen. They all joined the horde and
began applying makeup.
There were no cops anywhere to be seen.
Roberts.
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He couldn’t have taken the office more than twenty minutes ago. That’s when I spoke to Amanda. That’s the last I
heard from her.
“Crazy son of a bitch,” I said. “Roberts tipped off the press
before hitting Water Street. Only a sick fuck would call the
press prior to a crime he intended to commit. He called the
press so they’d show up before the cops. He wanted it like this.”
“This isn’t just one newspaper,” Jack said. “I think everyone who’s ever held a press badge is here. Informing a
thousand reporters about a hostage situation in New York is
like throwing a slab of rancid meat into an ant farm.”
Roberts wanted the press to have the kind of unimpeded
access cops would normally prevent. Right now, the news
crews were free to roam. There was no yellow tape, nobody
holding the crowd back, no gruff detectives or crisis management teams giving inconvenient “no comments.”
This was the very definition of a free press.
A reporter wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit and fiberglass hair walked up to the main entrance, cupped his hands
and peered inside. He cocked his head, turned back and
shouted, “Jesus, I think I see someone lying down behind the
security desk. I think I see blood, I think the security guard is
dead.” He turned to the cameraman. “You think we should go
inside?”
His cameraman, six-four with a body that looked like it
was fueled at the local Krispy Kreme, carried the camera
over to him. He glared inside.
“Why not? Let me get a light reading, make sure this thing
will transmit.”
Suddenly I was sprinting over to the entrance. I shoved fiberglass hair against the side of the building and pressed my
forearm into his chest.
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He struggled, tried to pry my arm away, yelped, “Get the
hell off me!”
“Goddamn it, you don’t know who’s watching. If you so
much as touch those door handles I’m going to break them
off and strangle you with them.”
He could see in my eyes I wasn’t kidding. He relaxed. So
did I. He smoothed out his jacket, told the cameraman, “We’re
good out here.” Then he turned to me. “I had a great spot out
front. If someone steals it I’ll have your ass.”
“You’ll have to try it with broken arms. Look, there’s a nice
spot, go set up. Get away from here.”
He walked away. Then I turned back to the building. That’s
when I heard the first siren. I could see the reflection in the
doorway as half a dozen squad cars pulled up and a phalanx of
uniformed officers filed out. Radios came out as the first cops
to arrive called in reports. They circled the building’s entrance.
One cop came closer. I heard him say, “We don’t know
what floor they’re on.”
“Ninth floor,” I said.
“And who are you?”
“Henry Parker, I’m with the Gazette. My girlfriend is up
there, she works here. Amanda Davies.”
The guy waved his arms and another cop came over. This
cop was tall, thin, with a handlebar mustache.
“Captain James O’Hurley.”
“Henry Parker.”
“You have knowledge of this situation?”
“I just know I was on the phone with my girlfriend, she’s
an employee who works on the ninth floor, when I heard a
gunshot. Then the line went dead.”
“Who’s your girlfriend?”
“Her name is Amanda. Davies.”
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“Can you think of any reason why Miss Davies or her coworkers would be in danger?”
I took a breath. “William Henry Roberts. He’s up there.”
O’Hurley’s face darkened. I saw a flash of anger in his
eyes. The other cop looked at him.
“That’s the guy killed Joe.” O’Hurley nodded. “Roberts is
supposed to be the grandson of Billy the Kid or something,
right? Hey, kid,” he said, clearly meaning me, “you work at
the Gazette, didn’t you write some stuff about this guy?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I did.”
“How much do you know about him?” O’Hurley asked.
I held up my hand, the stitches still embedded in my skin.
The cop whistled.
“Manners aren’t his strong suit. Let’s say I know Roberts
a lot better than I’d like.”
“He did that to you,” O’Hurley said, “and that’s your girlfriend up there, then…” He paused, realized what was going
on. “Maybe you shouldn’t be here.”
“You try and drag me away,” I said. “And it won’t be
pretty.”
“Fine,” O’Hurley said. “But stay out of the way. If we need
your help we’ll ask for it.”
“No problem, but Roberts is in there and I know he’s going
to hurt Amanda. I know it. That’s why he came here. That’s
why he called the press first. He wants people to see every
second of this.You don’t do that kind of thing if you’re looking
to steal a few grand and disappear to the Caribbean.” I noticed
the rest of the cops were hanging back. “Are you going in?”
“Not yet,” O’Hurley said. “We need to assess the situation,
take his demands if there are any, and then figure out a
strategy. Rushing in there might cause panic, stress and force
Roberts’s hand.”
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“This sick bastard killed one of our own,” the other cop
added.
“He’s either spending the rest of his life getting reamed
up the ass in the shower or he’s getting a one-way ticket to
the juice chair.”
“But what about Amanda?” I asked.
O’Hurley said, “We have no reason to believe she’s in immediate danger. If she is the intended target, we have the
hostage negotiation team en route.”
“You might be negotiating for a body, Captain.”
“Listen, Parker, I can imagine what you’re going through.
Trust me, this freak will get what’s coming to him. But we
need to minimize collateral damage.”
“By collateral damage you mean my girlfriend.”
“That’s right.”
“You think he called the press just so he could try out his
new stand-up routine? He’s going to do something terrible,
and if you guys don’t do something soon it’ll be too late.”
“That’s enough, Parker.” O’Hurley pointed to where
several cops were putting up blue sawhorses, stringing up
yellow tape. “Wait behind the line with the rest of the press.”
I watched as the cops herded several reporters behind the
barricade. They put up a fight. They always did. But in the
end they always moved back, docile.
Docile wasn’t going to cut it today. Roberts was pure evil.
He wasn’t going to wait for the cops to “strategize.”
I waited until O’Hurley’s back was turned, then I pushed
the other cop aside and bolted toward the building.
I heard someone yell, “Stop that guy!” but it was too late.
I shoved the glass doors open, saw that the elevator was
stuck on nine and not moving. Without hesitating I sprinted
toward the end of the hallway, banged through the stairwell
door and began my climb to the ninth floor.
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When I got to five, my breath beginning to leave me, I
looked down. Nobody was following me.
Four flights above was a man who was preparing to do
something unspeakable to Amanda. Clenching my right fist,
feeling the stitches threaten to pop, I continued climbing.
57
When I reached the ninth floor I stopped to catch my breath.
If we lived through this, I promised to use the StairMaster on
a more frequent basis.
Guys like Roberts always looked like they would be a
pushover in a fight. Not too big, not too heavy, but their
muscles were trained. They were sleeping attack dogs waiting
to be prodded. First fight I ever won was against Bruce Baumgarten in the sixth grade. Bruce was a hundred and ninety
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