by Lisa Black
“You had better get her out safely! How could you let her go in there in the first place?”
Patrick leaned over the desk to interject, “Don, who’s Oliver?”
The young man paused, probably in surprise. “There’s a guy named Oliver in Toxicology.”
Cavanaugh explained what Theresa had said to him. “We’re assuming that’s some kind of clue. What is her relationship with Oliver? Are they friends?”
“Nobody’s friends with Oliver—he’s too big a pain in the ass. But Theresa can get more out of him than anyone else. She gave him some stuff from that dead guy this morning. That’s probably what she meant. You want me to transfer you?”
“No, stay with me a minute. Jason will get Oliver on another line. What can you tell me about Theresa? Have you ever seen her under pressure?”
“Pressure? We work for Leo.”
Apparently Don also had them on speakerphone, because they heard the boss’s voice in the background. “Hey!”
“This job is nothing but pressure. Theresa handles it. The bodies just keep coming in, attorneys get in her face, she just gets colder and quieter.”
“Is she likely to take action?”
Patrick wondered why the hell Cavanaugh wasn’t asking him. He had known Theresa since the day she was born—but then Cavanaugh didn’t know that. He spoke up. “No.”
“No,” Leo said.
Don sounded defensive. “She’s very tough.”
“But not assertive,” Patrick said.
“I don’t know,” Leo put in. “She certainly gets uppity enough with me.”
“So she’s more likely to cooperate, to try and keep things calm,” Cavanaugh said.
“Unless they’re going to hurt someone,” Don insisted. “Then she’ll rip the guy’s heart out.”
“I guess we’ve just seen evidence of that. Thank you. I’m going to hang up now. Jason’s got Oliver on the other line.”
“Espero que usted sea tan bueno como dicen,” Don warned. I hope you’re as good as they say you are.
“I’m better,” Cavanaugh told him, and hit a button on the phone. “Is this Oliver?”
“Who wants to know?”
Patrick leaned over the microphone. “Oliver, this is Patrick from Homicide. Did you talk to Theresa today?”
“Yeah.”
“What about?”
“Now what’s going on?”
“What did she say?”
Patrick didn’t care for the appraising look Cavanaugh gave him, perhaps considering if Patrick would need to be evicted from the command center as well.
“I told her the dirt from the floor mat of that car was oxidized soil. Red clay, if you will.” After another moment he added, “I assume from your silence that means about as much to you as it did to me.”
“Like from the southern states,” Patrick said. “Georgia.”
“Sure, could be.”
“Anything else?” Cavanaugh asked.
“Yeah. About forty-five minutes ago, I called her back with the smear that was on your dead guy’s shoulder this morning. She collected it from…let me see—”
“His suit coat,” Patrick supplied.
“Yeah. And I told her it was cyclotrimethylene trinitramine.” Not even the hollow sound of the speakerphone could disguise the disdain in his voice. “Now I assume from your silence that you have no idea what I just said.”
“Is that C-4?” Cavanaugh asked.
“RDX, actually, but you’ve got the general idea.”
“Plastic explosives?” Patrick sat down. “Can this get any worse?”
Oliver pointed out with unseemly haste, “Things can always get worse.”
“Where would they get RDX?” Patrick mused. “Maybe Lucas was in the military. Bobby sure wasn’t.”
Oliver spoke again. “Considering the liberal use of Vaseline as a plasticizer, they probably made it themselves. All you really need is bleach and potassium chloride.”
“What are they going to do with that?” Patrick wondered. “And where is it? It’s not in the car.”
Cavanaugh stared at the monitor. “They could have it strapped to themselves, but I can’t see it. The jackets hang open, and there doesn’t seem to be anything on or under the T-shirts.”
“It’s hard to tell,” Jason offered, “with dark colors against dark colors on a black-and-white monitor.”
“That leaves the duffel bags. Oliver, how stable is this stuff?”
“It all depends on the skill of your amateur terrorist, how thoroughly he filtered the crystals out, et cetera. If it hasn’t gone off yet, that’s your best indication.” The toxicologist paused for a split second, then added, “It’s…um, not near Theresa, is it?”
“It’s about ten feet away,” Patrick told him. “I assume from your silence that this situation is less than ideal.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself, Detective.”
Patrick eyed the monitor. “I’m going over there.”
The air hung still, without even a fishy breeze from the lake to lift the sand-colored strands of hair from Patrick’s forehead. He took the long way around, down East Third and up Rockwell to the rear of the Federal Reserve building. Beyond the sawhorses blocking the roads, Clevelanders were going about their daily business, working, eating lunch, ducking out of the heat and back into the air-conditioning before their ties wrinkled and their makeup ran. He passed the corner where Pat Joyce’s Tavern used to sit and found himself wishing for his younger years, when whether or not to write out a parking ticket would be the toughest decision he had to make the whole day.
Unless he wanted to walk all the way around the Hampton Inn to the Superior entrance, Patrick needed to enter the building via a plunging vehicle ramp overseen by a guard turret encased in glass, which Patrick assumed to be bulletproof—and air-conditioned, or the poor guy in it would have passed out by now.
His badge got him inside without getting shot. One of the many Fed security SRT responders, sweating in his assault gear, escorted Patrick up to Mulvaney’s office on the sixth floor. The chief of the Fed security force wasn’t happy.
“What the hell did she do that for? Driving that car up to the door! One of my guys got shot at in order to take their wheels away, and she gives it back to them?”
“Trying to save a cop’s life.”
“And did she?” Mulvaney’s head bobbed from side to side as he studied his mosaic of surveillance videos. “Did he live?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“There she is, that other girl.” Jessica Ludlow appeared on one of the monitors. She had just stepped out of the elevator onto the third floor. “Let’s go.”
He didn’t seem to care, or even notice, if Patrick tagged along.
They caught up with her in the hallway—the young mother no doubt further terrorized to have a group of large, heavily armed men descend upon her, but that could not be helped. Mulvaney identified himself.
“You have to let me go back,” she said. Her entire body shook, the jumbled blond hairs quivering like plucked harp strings. “If I don’t go back, he’ll kill my son.”
Without thinking, Patrick reached out to pat her shoulder, and she jumped away like a startled rabbit. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Ludlow. We’re doing everything we can.”
“You know who I am? Is my husband here? Where’s my husband?”
Patrick kept his expression neutral. The woman seemed close enough to collapse; learning of her husband’s murder would finish her off. “We’ve evacuated the building.”
“All the employees are next door or sent home,” Mulvaney added.
“I have to go back,” she repeated. “You can’t stop me from going back to the lobby. He’ll kill Ethan—”
Mulvaney stepped forward, which only made her retreat farther until she bumped into the glass door labeled BANK LOANS. “We understand, Mrs. Ludlow. We’re not going to stop you from delivering the money if your child’s life is at stake. I hate to let you go
back there, but we don’t appear to have any choice.”
She breathed in a huge sigh of relief; it seemed to fill her entire body with air. After she let it out, she spoke a good deal more calmly. “He wants me to pack this bag with money, like a million dollars or something.”
Mulvaney extended a hand for the backpack, but she held it to her chest. “No, he wants this exact bag back. He’s going to make me or one of the other hostages unpack it and repack all the stuff, so we can’t put any dye packs or locators in with the money. If there is, he’ll kill my son.” Her moment of relief, of trust that the cavalry could ride in and save her, had passed. The pitch of her voice rose with each word, and she seemed more afraid of them than of the robbers in the lobby.
“Okay,” Mulvaney soothed.
“You have to help me get the money.”
“It’s okay,” the security chief told her. “That, we can do. Come this way.”
“I’ve never even been on this floor.” She followed him, flanked by Patrick and four security guards. “When I got in the elevator, I went to the eighth floor because I pushed the wrong button. But then I used the restroom. I had to. I thought I was going to pee my pants.” She sniffed. “I had to. But if I’m not back in twenty minutes—”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Ludlow. You have eleven minutes left, and this won’t take that long.”
Patrick longed to ask her…what? How Theresa was doing? He could watch that himself on the monitors, and Jessica Ludlow had barely met Theresa; the young woman wouldn’t have any insight as to her mental state. Ditto the robbers, but he had to try. “We’ve been watching on the lobby cameras, Mrs. Ludlow, but is there anything you can tell us about those two men? Anything they might have said to each other?”
“No.” She answered Patrick without taking her eyes off the security chief as she followed him through the glass door, nearly tripping in her haste. “They don’t talk much. He says more to us than the other guy.”
“Anything stand out about them? A tattoo? A smell?”
“No. I can’t think of anything, I’m sorry. All I can think about is Ethan and that big gun.”
Mulvaney led her and her escorts past a grouping of desks to a set of double doors too narrow to lead to a room. The metal latch system in the middle of the two doors had a thin gap for a magnetic card, and a numbered keypad. Mulvaney punched in six numbers in quick succession.
Despite his agitation Patrick found himself curious about the Fed’s building security. It seemed pretty thorough. Lucas must know something about it, at least enough to know better than to try to get around it. “You have the code?”
“The director of this department whispered it over his cell phone about five minutes ago,” Mulvaney said as he gave the latch a twist. The heavy metal doors opened to reveal a set of drawers, each with its own lock. “As soon as this crisis ends, he’ll come in and program a new code, known only to himself and the board. You know how it goes. They don’t let us cops near the money, only the guns.”
Jessica Ludlow stared in dismay. Set into the wall were twelve drawers, three across, four down. Each seemed as wide as paper money was long. Each had a smaller version of the card swipe/numeric keypad latch on its face. “Is that where the money is? How are we going to get in there?”
“Ten minutes.” One of the security guards, who held a stopwatch, announced to Mulvaney.
“That was the second thing the director whispered in my ear,” Mulvaney said in answer to Jessica Ludlow. “I think he found it personally painful.” He opened three drawers with what seemed to be the same numeric code, sliding each one out and setting it on the carpeted floor. Each had been filled to the top with one-hundred-dollar bills, held in bundles with paper bands.
Jessica Ludlow sank to her knees and opened her backpack. One of the security guards tried to pull it away gently. “I’ll fill it for you.”
She wouldn’t let the nylon bag out of her hand. “No! It has to be me…. It’s my son’s life. Please.”
“Of course,” the young man placated. “But it will go faster if I help you.”
She held the bag open as the young man dropped in the bundles. “There can’t be any dye packs, you know, or whatever other security things you might have.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Ludlow,” Mulvaney assured her. “We don’t put anything like that in these drawers. We’ve always assumed a robber would never get this far.”
His tone did not convince Patrick, who caught his eye. Mulvaney seemed to nod, and the Homicide detective said nothing. He was in another agency’s house now and would have to trust their judgment in an area of crime that he, Patrick, seldom dealt with. But any surprise Lucas received might prompt him to kill another hostage. He’d shot Paul; choosing Theresa, who had traded herself for Paul, might have an appealing symmetry to the sick son of a bitch. “We wouldn’t do anything to startle the robbers,” Patrick said, speaking to Jessica Ludlow’s bent head but looking at Mulvaney.
“We won’t,” the security chief confirmed.
“That’s all I can fit.” The blond woman struggled with the bag’s zipper. “How much is it? I lost count.”
The guard who had helped her said, “Eight hundred forty thousand.”
“Seven minutes,” the other one reported.
The young woman hefted the backpack with a grimace. Patrick thought for a moment that he could smell her fear, a sharp, sweaty odor. “That might not be enough,” she worried. “I’m sure he said a million.”
“It’s all you can fit in that bag,” Mulvaney pointed out.
Jessica slung one strap over her shoulder and weaved through the cubicles, making for the elevator like a student late for class. The men had to trot to keep up with her.
The elevator doors stood open; this apparently confused her, because she stopped and did not go in.
“We shut it off,” Mulvaney explained, reaching in and flicking a red switch before holding the doors for her. “So you wouldn’t have to wait for it.”
Then she moved inside quickly and stood at the front, as if trying to bar them from entering. “You can’t come with me. He said I had better come back alone.”
“I know,” the security chief said. “And I’m sorry. We’d rather do anything in the world than have to send you back there, Mrs. Ludlow. You’re a brave woman.”
She pushed the “L” button. “He has my baby.”
The doors began to slide shut. Patrick’s stomach seemed to shrink; it went against a cop’s grain to let an unarmed civilian walk into a criminal’s power, it battled with every instinct he had. But he could not see a solution.
With five inches to go, her palm slammed against the moving door. She spoke to Patrick, as if answering one of his earlier questions. “One thing. It was after they shot that guy in the blazer, the one that new lady asked them to let go. Lucas said to the other guy, ‘If the cops come in after us, we have to kill them all.’ But he nodded his head at us as he said it. He didn’t mean you cops, he meant he’d have to kill us. The hostages.”
The doors slid shut.
Before he left, Patrick asked the Fed security chief about the money packs. “There’s really nothing in there?”
“Nothing this scumbag is going to figure out.”
“If he does, who do you think he’s going to pick for his next example? He’s already shot one cop—why not one of yours? Or our scientist?”
Mulvaney held the door to the stairwell for him, possibly implying that Patrick shouldn’t let it hit him in the butt on the way out. “It’s not in the money. You have to keep this to yourself, and I mean it—the employees here don’t even know about it, for obvious reasons. There’s a metallic tracer in the bands, but all it will do is show up at the metal detector by the doors. I wasn’t lying—a robber, under normal circumstances, would never make it to that vault, so there aren’t any standard security devices there. The bands are meant to catch thieves who work here and decide to cut out early one day and head to Aruba. Last time that happe
ned was 1963.”
“So Lucas won’t notice—”
“He might hear a beep when they go out the doors, but since the guy’s carrying a damn M4 carbine, I don’t think it’s going to worry him much. Unfortunately, it’s not going to help us at all either.”
“Mmm.” Patrick checked Theresa’s status on the security unit’s monitors but grew frustrated with the lousy audio quality. At least in the library he could hear the phone conversations. He hurried back up Rockwell, hoping nothing had happened to Theresa in his absence. Not that he could do a bloody thing about it anyway.
CHAPTER 19
12:46 P.M.
Six stories down, Theresa remained occupied with the squirming child on her lap.
Two-year-old Ethan pushed at her, trying to get away from this stranger, and hit her with the stuffed Cleveland Browns dog. She gave him a bit of space but wouldn’t let go. His screams pierced her eardrums.
“Told you so,” she said to Lucas.
“Don’t hassle me, ma’am. You should be able to handle kids—you’ve got your own.”
He must have overheard her conversation with Rachael. “Just one, and it’s been a long time since she was two.”
Lucas glanced at his watch. “Hang in there. His mama’s only got seven minutes left. And how’d you know he was two?”
Her lungs seemed to seize up, and she covered herself by getting a firmer grip on the writhing boy and turning him to face outward. “He’s pretty solid for his size. And he’s definitely got all his teeth, since he just bit me with them.”
Lucas watched her with a cool, shark-eyed stare, but said only, “Don’t bite, Ethan. It’s a nasty habit.”
The boy quieted, distracted by the sweeping room and the mysterious man in front of him. He straddled Theresa’s thigh, with one of her arms firmly around his waist. “Bo,” he said, suddenly and clearly, shaking the stuffed animal. “Bo.”
“That don’t concern me,” Lucas answered, his eyes on Theresa still. “What concerns me is your mama has five minutes and twenty seconds left.”
“I still don’t see how you expect a young girl to find and then break into a small vault, or whatever the heck is up there,” Theresa said.