“Can I ask what you want with her?” Weinberg asked.
“Now you’re just being cute.” Lassiter hung up. A dial tone sounded through the speakers until Weinberg hung up his handset.
“Well, that was productive,” Franco said sarcastically. “Get him back on the phone. Soto, you try this time.”
Trisha’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out and looked at the caller ID. Her stomach sank. “It’s him,” she said.
“Don’t answer it,” Franco said. “He has to talk to a negotiator.”
Trisha’s hand trembled. She felt as if he were controlling her phone from across the street, making it shake.
“Don’t answer it,” Franco repeated. “He’s got to play by our rules.”
But Trisha wasn’t listening. Her focus was on the phone and her mounting fear.
“Just disconnect it,” Pete said. “Give it to me. I’ll take out the battery.”
But Trisha pulled away when he reached for it. Her thumb was on the Send button. This was her problem, she told herself, her family. She had to deal with it herself. She held her breath and answered it.
“Hello,” she said in a raspy whisper.
“Can we patch into this?” Franco whispered to Soto and Weinberg.
Weinberg looked doubtful. “That would take time.”
“Trisha,” Lassiter said, and she could hear the grin in his voice.
Her fingers were icicles. “Yes—” She didn’t know what to call him. Calling him Gene didn’t seem right.
The door opened, and Barry Krieger stepped into the van. Booker put his finger to his lips, telling Barry to be quiet. Barry tried to make eye contact with Trisha, but she looked down at the floor. She needed to concentrate.
“What’s going on, Gene?” She decided to use his first name to keep him from hanging up. “Why are you doing this?”
He chuckled. “I’m doing it for you.”
“For me? What do you mean?”
“Come over and I’ll show you.”
“No, you tell me.”
“The telephone is too impersonal. I want to talk to you face-to-face.”
“Then let Cindy and my father go. You do that and I’ll come talk to you.”
Barry shook his head vehemently.
“Frankly, Trisha, I don’t trust you,” Lassiter said.
“You’ve turned your house into a bomb, Gene. How many aces do you need?”
She scanned the expectant faces around her. This back and forth was going nowhere. Lassiter knew what she wanted—her father and sister safe—but she didn’t know what he wanted. She had an urge to harangue him until he told her, but she knew better than to confront him head on.
“You know, Trisha,” he said, “you mentioned that I had some aces. Well, actually I have all the aces. Your father is one. You sister is two. The gas in the basement is three. And then there’s the McCleery Foundation.”
“What do you mean?”
“I lied when I told Cindy that the money was safe.”
“You son of a—” She wanted to call him every name in the book.
“You see, Trisha, if I kill your father and Cindy, that’s just two people. No big deal in the scheme of things. If I blow up this building, what will that achieve? Twenty more dead? Fifty? Maybe a hundred? Still pretty insignificant. But if I make the McCleery Foundation disappear, how many children around the world will die? What do you think? A couple thousand? Tens of thousands? I read an article in the paper this morning that quoted the Secretary General of the U.N. saying that your father’s work saved over fifty thousand children last year. That’s a pretty impressive figure. Imagine a future without your father’s charity. Pretty bleak, I’d say.”
Trisha shook with anger. “What… do… you… want?”
“I told you. I want you. I need you. I’ve told you that before. The text message?”
She felt light-headed. He was Drac. There was no doubt in her mind.
He started humming. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to make out the tune. “I Need You.”
“How do you know that song, Gene?”
“I heard you sing it with your father. At your parents’ house. A long time ago.”
Her legs could barely support her. He was the one. He killed her mother.
“Now, Trisha, it’s very simple. All I want is for you to come over here by yourself. You will save many, many lives if you just do that. Just a simple little visit. Okay? Think about it.”
“Hold on—”
But he had already hung up.
She lowered the phone to her side. It felt as if it weighed more than the world. Her stomach was queasy, and her whole body was trembling.
Everyone in the van spoke at once.
“What did he say?”
“What did he tell you?”
“What does he want?”
“Did he say where he is in the house?”
“Where are the hostages?”
“Is he for real about the gas?”
Trisha just shook her head. She didn’t have any answers. She knew only one thing.
“He wants me,” she said.
And that scared her to death.
Chapter 24
The Emergency Response van had been moved down the block to avoid the direct impact of a possible gas explosion. Inside Trisha sat on a low stool, staring into space, trying to collect her thoughts, oblivious to the people hovering over her, waiting for her to make up her mind.
Pete hunkered next to her. “Talk to me, Trisha. You’re zoning out. Come on. Breathe. Talk to me.”
His voice pulled her out of her trance, and she felt like a deep-sea diver surfacing the water. It was only then that she realized she’d had a death grip on Pete’s hand.
Barry’s face hung over her like the man in the moon. He seemed exasperated, as if he’d been trying to get through to her for some time. “Trisha, listen to me. I forbid you from going in there. This is an order. Do you understand?”
Colleen Franco stood next to him, the woman in the moon. “It’s totally up to you, McCleery. You don’t have to do this. But you do have to give us an answer so we can proceed accordingly.” She seemed to have softened a bit and reminded Trisha of a guidance counselor she’d had in high school—stern but concerned.
Detective Soto stood near the console, arms crossed. “I don’t like it. If she’s going in, Lassiter should give us something first. Give us a hostage. Unfreeze the money. Something. Otherwise we have no leverage.”
Weinberg sat at the console, keeping an eye on the phones. “I wish to hell Lassiter hadn’t talked to her. Now he won’t talk to us. He’s focused on her.”
“And how does that affect things?” Franco asked.
“It means if she goes into the house, she becomes the negotiator and the bargaining chip. That’s not good.”
Booker, the SWAT team commander, stood to the side like a towering tree. Trisha liked having him close by. His voice was deep and even-tempered. He ignored the others and spoke directly to her. “Con Ed shut off the gas main from the street. No more gas is going into the house, but we have to assume a lot has accumulated inside. In the basement if Lassiter was telling the truth. This will present a problem for you if you decide to go in. You cannot take a firearm. Firing a round could cause an explosion.”
“I’ll bring it, but I won’t use it,” she said.
He shook his head. “If you bring it, he might take it away from you. Or one of the hostages might get it and fire it. Too risky. You have to go in unarmed.”
The precinct captain stood at the back of the group. “We’ll also have to check your shoes for exposed metal. And no jewelry. You can’t bring in anything that could make a spark.”
“Remember to
open and close doors slowly and carefully,” Booker said. “And don’t turn on any lights. Especially fluorescent ones.”
“How will I be able to breathe in there?” she asked.
“The leak must be confined to a certain area of the house otherwise they would have all expired by now.”
She started to panic, realizing she’d lost track of time. “How long since I talked to him?”
“Ten minutes,” Weinberg said.
Her heart slammed. What if her father and Cindy were already dead from the gas?
Barry knelt down in front of her. “Trisha, I’m ordering you. Do not go in there. Listen to me.”
“This is entirely your decision, McCleery,” Franco said. “We’re not forcing you.”
“We’ll have you wired,” Booker said. “My people will be positioned on the roof ready to rappel down to whatever floor you’re on. We’ll use a code word. When Lassiter is distracted, you say the word and my guys will break in through the windows in a matter of seconds.”
“What’s the word?” she asked.
“Your choice.”
She stared straight ahead, terrified. She did not want to go in there. Lassiter was the boogeyman who’d haunted her for twenty years. He was the shadowy face she saw every night before she fell asleep and every morning when she started a new day. But she couldn’t run from her fear. She had to go in. For her father and her sister. For the kids. For herself.
Pete squeezed her hand. “You don’t have to do this, Trisha.”
She exhaled slowly. “Yes. I do have to do this.” She looked up at Booker. “Okay. I’m going in.”
The interior of the van suddenly thrummed with activity. The precinct captain rushed out the door. Booker got on his police radio, barking commands, and Franco pulled out her cell phone. Soto and Weinberg put their heads together and got into an animated discussion.
Barry was grim. “I’m going to have to write you up for insubordination if you do this. There will be repercussions. You can still back out.”
She shook her head.
Pete gave her a reassuring smile. “I’ll buy you a burger and a bourbon when it’s all over.”
She tried to laugh, but she was just putting it on. She was scared to death.
“Agent McCleery?” Booker held the radio away from his face. “What’s your code word?”
She thought for a moment, and the obvious choice popped into her head. “Natalie,” she said, her eyes tearing. She cleared her throat and said it again. “The code word is Natalie.”
Twenty minutes later Trisha watched the police helicopter fly off toward the river. The diminishing roar of the rotors brought an unnatural silence to the neighborhood. Manhattan was never this quiet. The street had been cordoned off as well as the adjoining streets and avenues within a five-block radius. Residents had been evacuated, vehicles and pedestrians prohibited from entering the danger zone.
She stood on the front steps of Lassiter’s townhouse, staring at the door, summoning the courage to knock. There were cops all around her—on the rooftops and crouched behind police cars thirty yards away—but the silence made her feel all alone. She kept telling herself that she could do this, that the SWAT guys would swoop down to rescue her, that they would hear her through the transmitters a police techs had planted on her (one in her hair and a backup in the waistband of her slacks), that they would get there in two seconds as soon as she gave them the word. But there was no getting around it—she was afraid, and no amount of self pep talk would change that. She’d sat with serial killers dozens of times, interviewed them by herself for hours at a stretch in locked rooms in prisons and precincts all across the country. But this was different. This was an experienced killer in the middle of a rampage. And this was the man who had murdered her mother. It was very different.
She had left her jacket in the van and now wore only black slacks and a long-sleeved white blouse, the cuffs rolled up to her elbows to show Lassiter that she wasn’t hiding anything. She’d taken off her rings and watch, and strips of duct tape covered the nail heads on the heels of her leather-soled flats.
Standing this close to the house, she could smell gas—not overpowering but definitely present. She glanced at the black iron bars over the basement windows. A field supervisor from the gas company had guessed that the leak was probably in the basement, though the first floor kitchen was also a possibility. The utility had no record of gas lines ever being installed above the first floor for an upstairs clothes drier or water heater. Commander Booker had instructed her to stay in rooms with windows, the more the better, and to stay out of closets and bathrooms with small windows so that his people could locate her fast when she called for them.
She took her phone out of her pocket. Weinberg and Soto had advised her not to call Lassiter too far in advance. Why give him time to prepare? She’d just call his cell and tell him she was at the door. Pete had entered Lassiter’s number as a preset. Number 9. She ran her thumb over the keypad, trying to get psyched for this. A gentle breeze sent a stronger gas odor toward her. Her father and sister were inside breathing that. She pressed the 9 key and held the phone to her ear.
It rang once… twice… three times.
Why wasn’t he picking up? Was he on the phone with Paul Weinberg?
After the fourth ring, she heard his voice-mail recording. “This is Gene Lassiter. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”
She heard the prompt but wasn’t sure if she should leave a message. She opened her mouth, about to say she was there, but then changed her mind and hung up. She decided to wait a bit and call back.
She looked back toward the van at the end of the block. She could verbally transmit information to them, but they couldn’t communicate with her. They had all decided it would be too risky for her to wear an ear bud. Lassiter would notice it, and there was no telling how he would react. If he went berserk, the SWAT team might not be able to get there in time.
Too many variables, she thought. That’s what Barry had kept telling her in the van. Too many variables. Never go into a situation unless you know you’re going to win. Do not act unless you know you are in a position of strength. It was the FBI playbook, chapter and verse.
But this situation wasn’t going to get any better if they waited. And it wasn’t Barry’s father and sister in there.
She turned away from the van. She wasn’t going to get any advice from them. She was on her own. She grabbed the door handle and laid her thumb on the latch.
“I’m trying the door,” she said out loud so the transmitter would pick it up.
She expected it to be locked, but when she pressed the latch, it descended all the way. She stopped breathing.
Should I open it? Should I just go in?
She pushed the door lightly. It resisted. She pushed harder, and it opened. Her heart beat faster. She held it open only a sliver.
“It’s unlocked,” she said, keeping her voice down. “I’m going in.”
Instinctively she reached to her hip for the service weapon that wasn’t there. Whenever she was on duty, she kept her gun in a clip holster in her waistband.
She pushed the door open and peered into the foyer. The fading afternoon light reflected off golden oak floorboards. The walls were ivory white. A large modern painting hung on one wall—a ghostly woman in gray, yellow and blue sitting in a chair with her head tilted at a sad angle. Her features were smudged and unrecognizable. A formal representational portrait of a fleshy-faced man in his sixties hung on the opposite wall. The paint at the bottom edge was checked, and the man’s wide-lapelled double-breasted suit, rimless glasses, and the way he wore his hair parted down the middle suggested the 1930s.
She stepped inside, leaving the front door open. She listed the reasons for not closing it—easier access for the police, quicker escape, airing out the
gas. Concentrating on procedure and the details of entering the domicile of a suspect kept her fear from spiraling. She didn’t smell gas. Lassiter had probably been truthful when he said the leak was confined to one space.
She moved farther into the house, her eyes darting left and right, up and down, expecting him to pounce. But all she saw were empty rooms. A living room with a maroon sofa and tuxedo chairs connected to a dining room with a large light oak table and matching captain’s chairs. An open swinging door led to a sparkling kitchen—speckled gray-and-black marble counter tops, whiskey-colored cabinets, brushed chrome appliances. It looked brand new, and she wondered if anyone had ever cooked there. She checked the knobs on the stove and saw that they were all in the off position.
She stood over a small kitchen table next to a window and looked out at the backyard through white vertical blinds. Low shrubs and ivy surrounded a marble birdbath. Tall bamboo stalks along the perimeter encased the space, making it feel like an animal enclosure. She bent her head to see the rooftops directly behind, hoping to spot cops and sharpshooters, but the bamboo blocked the view.
She walked back into the hallway and peered up the staircase. Supposedly there was no gas line up there. That left the basement. She found the door under the staircase and figured that must be the way down.
She turned the knob slowly and opened the door. What she saw made her heart thump. A very narrow staircase. The only light came from somewhere down below, and there wasn’t much of it. She suddenly felt claustrophobic. The space was tighter than it should have been, and there were no windows. The SWAT guys wouldn’t be able to get to her. But Lassiter would. It was the perfect place to trap someone. Maybe she shouldn’t go down. She closed the door, keeping her hand on the knob as she thought it through.
She considered her options. If she ran down the staircase, he might hear her, get jumpy and attack. But if she announced herself before she went down, he might still attack. Although he might not. If she’s the object of his obsession, he won’t want a quick kill.
She spoke softly for the transmitter. “I’m going down into the basement.” She wanted the police to know where she was.
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