by Neal Baer
“Well, that’s what I was calling to ask you,” she said. “Because Jill’s never cut a class, and when she didn’t show up for her seventh-period history—”
“Do you know where she went?” asked Nick, the fear in his voice turning heads and bringing Claire to his side.
“No, but her friend Marnie told us Jill got a call from your younger daughter, Katie, and ran out of the building.”
“I appreciate it,” said Nick. “Please let me know if Jill comes back.”
“Jill’s gone?” asked Claire as Nick hung up.
“After Katie called her,” said Nick, dropping the receiver, pulling his cell phone, and hitting Jill on his autodial. He ended the call after just a few seconds.
“Went right to voice mail,” said Nick, hanging up and autodialing Katie’s number. Again, he ended the call quickly, fear spreading across his face.
“What?” asked the inspector.
“Something with Nicky’s kids,” Simms answered.
Nick fumbled through his phone contacts for the number for Katie’s school and speed-dialed it. “I.S. One-Thirty-Two,” came a female voice on the line.
“Hi, this is Nick Lawler, Katie Lawler’s father. Do you know which class Katie’s in right now?”
“It’s okay, Mr. Lawler,” said the voice. “Everything’s taken care of.”
“What do you mean?” asked Nick.
“Well, we dismissed Katie with that detective you sent over.”
“What?” Nick demanded. “I never sent any detective there to pick up my daughter.”
This brought Wilkes flying over and detectives stopping whatever they were doing, rising from their seats. “What’s going on?” the inspector demanded.
Claire just put up her hand, trying to eavesdrop on the voice coming from Nick’s phone. She reached over and hit the button putting the female voice on speaker.
“Oh, we checked it out when he said he was a friend of yours and Katie said she didn’t know him. But then he said you’d lent him your car to pick up Katie. We took her outside and she said it was your car, so we figured it was okay.”
It’s as far as she got before Nick dropped the receiver. “Mr. Lawler? Are you there? Mr. Lawler . . .”
Claire disconnected her. “It’s him,” she said to Wilkes.
Nick scanned the room. He knew that for his colleagues nothing else mattered now. He shot Claire a look of fear—the first time she’d ever seen him like that. She didn’t know how to comfort him.
Wilkes bellowed commands. “Alarm out on Nick Lawler’s personal vehicle,” he said. “Red 1988 Jeep Cherokee, occupants likely two teenage girls and a man believed to be armed and dangerous and should be approached with caution. Amber Alert and Roadblocks at every tunnel and bridge on and off this rock. Cops on every subway train and platform just in case.” He glanced at Nick to calm him. “We have to assume he has both of Nick’s daughters,” he said to the room. “I want every cop in this department to know it. Stark,” he shouted, “you cover the phones. I want the graveyard shift in here forthwith on OT, everyone on the street, two to a car. We’ll position you from the Battery to the Cloisters for immediate response when we find them.” He emphasized the when to make a point, and turned to Nick. “That shithead’s not leaving this island with those two girls. Now let’s move!”
The entire room sprang into action. Claire moved over to Nick, who didn’t resist when she put her hand on his shoulder. She said nothing, knowing nothing she could say would make any difference.
“You two,” Wilkes barked at them, “let’s go. I’m gonna need you.”
“Where?” asked Nick, waking himself up.
“Katie’s school,” Wilkes shot back over his shoulder, already heading for the door. “I’m sending Crime Scene to dust anything this asshole might’ve touched.”
Savarese drove Wilkes’s Dodge Charger south on the FDR Drive, around the Battery and up West Street, lights and siren, as fast as traffic would let him. The familiar feeling eased Nick’s paralysis of fear. For the first time since Wilkes took command of the situation, he spoke more than one word. To Claire.
“He was following you,” he said. “Because he wanted that car. To get Katie out of school. He used the same shield on those idiots at the school that he used on Rosa Sanchez so she’d go with him.”
“Then he used Katie to lure Jill in,” said Claire.
“Car thirty-one, call your command,” came a voice from the police radio.
Wilkes picked up the secure radio-phone in the car, which was linked to the chief of detectives’ office. “Inspector Wilkes,” he said.
For a few seconds he listened. “Ten-four,” he finally said. “I want everyone moved to that location.” He hung up the receiver and turned to Savarese. “Inwood. Payson and Dyckman Avenues,” the inspector commanded.
Savarese obeyed, speeding the car up the West Side.
“What is it, Inspector?” asked Claire.
When Wilkes turned around to face them, he spoke with his jaw clenched. “Patrol found your car, Nicky. The girls are inside, alive, and the bastard didn’t touch ’em.” He paused, finding himself at a rare loss for words. “But it’s not good.”
CHAPTER 21
The car’s siren and radios were off by the time Nick and Claire reached the police perimeter in the otherwise quiet Inwood neighborhood near the northernmost tip of Manhattan. Though the day was clear, the darkly tinted windows on Wilkes’s Dodge made it difficult for Nick to see anything but the outline of his Jeep parked in the middle of an intersection a block away.
The picture became only slightly clearer when he got out of the car. He could make out two people in padded protective suits that made them look like supersized deep-sea divers. They were Bomb Squad detectives, he realized, and they were examining his Jeep.
His Jeep. In which he couldn’t even see his two precious daughters he knew were trapped inside.
Wilkes had told them the story on the way uptown. The kidnapper, presumably the Anagramist, had stopped the car in the center of the intersection, just off Inwood Hill Park. He got out, displayed a remote control, and warned the girls that if they tried to escape through any door or window, the car would blow up. Then, according to what the girls told the first cops who arrived, he’d disappeared into the wooded park.
Nick headed for the yellow police tape.
“Where are you going?” Claire asked, alarmed.
Nick was just about to duck under the tape when Wilkes grabbed his arm. “Are you nuts?” he exclaimed. “You can’t go down there.”
Nick yanked his arm from his boss’s grasp, but Wilkes grabbed him again. “Nicky, please. Let the bomb guys do their jobs,” he pleaded.
“I’m their father,” Nick said. “If they go up they’re not going alone.”
“That’s just what this dickhead wants,” Wilkes replied.
“You wanna stop me, you’re gonna have to collar me,” Nick said. His patron saint didn’t want to let him go. But Wilkes knew he had no choice. He released Nick’s arm. Nick nodded in thanks, then turned toward the Jeep, his walk turning into a trot, then a run.
Claire felt a wave of guilt for involving Nick in Rosa Sanchez’s murder. Though of course she never imagined doing so would put him and his family in harm’s way.
She couldn’t change that now. But maybe she could mitigate the damage. She headed toward the yellow police tape and tried to duck under before anyone noticed. But Wilkes took her by the shoulder and pulled her back.
“Not a chance, Doctor.”
“But I can calm them down,” she begged him. “Please.”
“I can’t even justify Nick being down there. You’re a civilian. I let you through and that thing goes off, forget what the department will do to me—I’ll spend the rest of my life in a bottle of Johnnie Walker.”
He handed her a pair of binoculars. She stood behind the yellow tape and put them to her eyes, watching as Nick reached the car. She imagined he felt even more powe
rless than she did as he saw his terrified daughters huddled together on the backseat, their arms clenched around each other, whimpering.
“Daddy!” screamed Katie.
“Don’t move!” yelled one of the Bomb Squad detectives, turning slowly, like an astronaut walking on the moon, to see Nick wearing nothing more protective than his one-hundred-percent worsted wool, charcoal pin-striped suit. “Get outta here!” he yelled.
“They’re my kids,” Nick said, as if that explained everything.
He stopped a foot from the back passenger door of the Jeep, his straining eyes recording every detail. The first thing he noticed was that all four door windows were cracked open.
Thank God for small favors, he thought. At least the sonuvabitch left them able to breathe.
Nick leaned as close as he could to the door without touching it.
“I’m here, and I’m not leaving without you two,” he said to the girls. “These guys are the best. Just stay calm and we’ll get you out of there. I promise.”
The girls were too scared to say anything. Nick turned to the Bomb Squad guys. “Where’s the device?” he asked.
“Guy, I’ve gotta tell ya,” said the Bomb Squad detective. “We’ve been over the car three times and we can’t find anything—outside, that is.”
Nick turned back to the rear door and spoke into the window. “Jill,” he said, “do you see a device with wires anywhere in the Jeep?”
Jill looked around, never letting go of Katie, whose head rested in her lap.
“I don’t see anything, Dad,” Jill said.
“Okay, sweetheart,” Nick said, his voice as calm as he could manage. “Tell me everything that happened, from when he picked you up until he got out of the car.”
Jill summoned every detail she could remember. “I got in the car outside school. He said he was taking us to you. But then we started heading up the West Side Highway.”
“Then what?” her father asked.
“He had one of those earpieces—you know, like the Secret Service guys wear. I asked him where he was taking us. He said you were waiting for us over in New Jersey. That’s when I told him I was calling you. He pulled out a gun and made Katie and me give him our phones. I can’t believe I was so stupid.”
“You weren’t stupid, you were smart,” Nick reassured her. “Someone has a gun you do what they say. Tell me the rest.”
“He was about to get on the George Washington Bridge. And then he suddenly kept going straight. We drove around for a while, like he was looking for something. And then he stopped right here and told us if we tried to get out of the car it would blow up.”
“Did you see the remote? The one he said he used to set the explosive?”
“Yes,” said Jill, trying hard not to shake too much.
“Can you describe it for me?” asked Nick.
“It looked like one of those electronic key things that opens a car door,” Jill said.
Nick came to a decision. He hoped it was the right one, because the lives of his children—and therefore his own life—would depend on it.
“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” he said to Jill and Katie as he waved the Bomb Squad detectives closer. Nick pulled out his memo book, wrote something down, and then showed it to everyone. “Nobody say a word, just nod an answer. Are we clear?” he asked.
The girls obeyed. Nick turned to the Bomb Squad detectives, who nodded as well.
Claire saw all this through the binoculars from behind the yellow tape. “I think they’re gonna try something,” she said to Wilkes.
“Start praying, Doc,” came the inspector’s response.
“I never stopped,” Claire said.
A hundred yards away, Nick took a deep breath.
“Okay,” he said. “On my count: One. Two. Three!”
He yanked open the rear door, grabbed Katie and ran as Jill scrambled out the other side and into the protective embrace of a Bomb Squad guy. They were fifty yards from the Jeep before anyone turned around.
Nothing. The Jeep was still there, intact.
Nick grabbed his daughters, pulling them close. Both were crying and shaking. The Bomb Squad detectives moved back toward the car, looking inside, under the seats, in the spare tire compartment, under the hood, at the undercarriage using mirrors.
“It’s all clear,” one of them yelled after a minute or two.
Claire and Wilkes bolted toward Nick and the girls, who stood huddled about halfway down the block between the yellow tape and the Jeep.
“What the hell was that?” Wilkes asked Nick, reaching the scene.
“This guy’s a piece of work,” Nick said, just starting to breathe again.
“You wrote something down and showed it to everyone,” Claire said as she ran up.
Nick pulled out his memo book and showed them his written message:
IT’S BULLSHIT
ON 3 WE RUN FOR IT
“How’d you know?” Wilkes asked, amazed and relieved.
Nick recounted what Jill had told him. “Mr. Anagramist was making it up as he went along,” he explained. “He must’ve had one of our police radio frequencies going into his earpiece. He heard Central order roadblocks on the bridge—that’s why he swerved off the ramp. He took the first exit he could find and came up with plan B—the fake bomb—so he’d have time to get away.”
Claire and the girls hugged each other.
“Are they okay?” Wilkes asked her.
“They’re in shock,” Claire replied, and indeed both girls were shivering despite the unusually hot and muggy spring day. “They should be checked at a hospital.”
Wilkes agreed. “Why don’t you take them over to the medics. Columbia-Pres is the closest ER,” he said, referring to New York-Presbyterian /Columbia Medical Center. Wilkes then spoke to the girls. “We need your help here, ladies. You’re the only people who’ve seen this guy’s face. I’m gonna have an artist meet you at the hospital to get a description from you. That’s okay, right?”
The girls, still unable to find their voices, simply nodded. Wilkes gestured to Claire, who put an arm around each of them and escorted them toward two approaching fire department ambulances.
“Boss . . .” exhaled Savarese, breathless from running down the block.
Wilkes wasn’t interested. “When we get that sketch I want it out to every law enforcement agency within three hundred miles. This asshole finally screwed up and I don’t care if it’s in cuffs or a pine box, he’s going down.” His steely eyes focused on the Jeep. “Have Crime Scene flatbed this thing to the garage and tear it apart. Maybe he was dumb enough to leave prints and/or DNA too.”
“Let me take a look first,” said Nick. “I thought I noticed some damage that I don’t remember being there.”
He walked around the Jeep and sure enough, saw what appeared to be a fresh dent that left a swath of white paint on the red car. “Claire!” he shouted, waving her over.
Claire looked in his direction as two paramedics checked the girls’ vital signs. “The paramedics will take you to the hospital and we’ll meet you there,” she told Jill and Katie. Then she hurried over to where Nick stood, looking down at the dent. “What is it?” she asked.
Nick knelt beside the car and gestured to the damage. “Do you remember this being here the other night when you parked the car?”
He stopped, hearing something in the distance from the direction of the park. A sound that, if not for his sensitive hearing, he might not have heard. Like the pop of a balloon bursting ...
Claire felt his hand grab her arm, pulling just as the sharp pain, the burning in her right lower back, hit her like someone had branded her with a hot iron. Everything began to slow down and spin.
“Gun!” she heard Nick yell as she grabbed on to one of the Jeep’s door handles, but it only broke her fall. She was too weak and in too much pain to hold on.
“Claire!” screamed Nick, rising to his feet to grab her but not fast enough.
Claire droppe
d to the ground, on her back, looking up at the blue sky, thinking it was a beautiful day. Wondering what tomorrow would be like. All the noise around her faded away. She was in her own bubble, and she wanted to sleep.
Like a vision in a dream, Inspector Wilkes appeared above her, his face massive.
“Get that bus over here, now!” she heard him say, referring to the ambulance parked nearby. It was strange, because his voice was only a whisper. Then she heard him say, “She’s been shot . . . shot . . . shot. . . .” echoing over and over. She was aware of Nick’s voice beside her but she just kept staring at the sky above. With those big fluffy clouds ...
“Don’t go out on us,” Nick said. “We’re gonna get you to the hospital.”
She knew she had to fight as hard as she could to keep her eyes open.
But she couldn’t.
CHAPTER 22
Claire heard the beeping first. She was in a fog. It took all her strength to force her eyelids open. Just a crack, but enough for the light to nearly blind her. She put it together—the collection of noises, the antiseptic smell, the rhythmic lines rolling across the screen of a monitor. She was in the hospital.
“She’s awake,” came a female voice she recognized but couldn’t quite place. “Find out how far away her parents are.”
Her pupils adjusted to the light, allowing her eyes to focus. She was in the post-op recovery room of MSU Hospital’s surgical suite. She’d been there before, each time to observe a neurosurgical procedure. She couldn’t remember why she now lay in a hospital bed.
“Claire.”
The same female voice. She tilted her head to the left. Fairborn stood there, smiling, her face the picture of concern, her eyes red—from what? Crying?
Crying for me?
“Hi,” Claire said, with a hoarse squeak.
“She’s back,” Fairborn said. She lowered her face close to Claire’s. “Don’t talk. They just took out your ET tube ten minutes ago. Just rest.”