by Lisa Black
“What?” Cavanaugh breathed in her ear.
She prodded the lab coat with her free left foot and felt a thin item under her toes—probably a pen. She never carried much else in her pockets. “You can make plastic explosives with Vaseline and potassium chlorate, otherwise known as salt substitute. It’s sold at health-food stores, among other places.”
“Didn’t use that,” Lucas said, tossing loose bills into the wind. “I used Solidox, for welding. There’s a twenty-four-hour hardware store in a place called Maple Heights. Turn left on Ninth, Jessie.”
Lucas must have removed it from the teller cages across from the security guards, or he would have used it to prevent the cops from pursuing. “So where’s the explosive?”
He smiled at her. “Right here, with us.”
She thought of a suicide pact but dismissed that immediately. Lucas had planned, very carefully, to get away, and he would not abandon that plan. And whatever else Jessica might be, she clearly was not the kind of mother who’d let any harm come to Ethan.
Harm to Theresa and Chris Cavanaugh, however, was a different story. If they lived to tell, the whole day’s efforts would be for naught. Jessica and Lucas would be hunted down, convicted on two counts of murder, and go to jail for the rest of their lives. Ethan would be raised by strangers.
Theresa and Cavanaugh had to die. No other option existed.
Not a pen, she suddenly thought. A scalpel. The sterile, disposable scalpel she’d used to cut the bloody carpeting from the trunk of this car. She had put the protective cap back over the blade and slipped the scalpel into her lab coat.
“The explosives aren’t in the car,” she pointed out. “We went over it.”
“Nope. They’re in the backpack.”
She and Cavanaugh slid forward suddenly as Jessica hit the brakes.
“Watch it, Jessie.”
“A car pulled in front of me. What do you mean, in the backpack? Get them out.”
“We discussed this.”
“The picture’s in the backpack!”
“Exactly. The picture that you couldn’t resist stealing, even though as soon as they realize it’s missing they’re going to know that you’re not some sweet little innocent secretary!”
Jessica continued to snake a hand into the duffel now and then to throw more money out the window. Theresa could only glimpse the top of the girl’s head, not her expression, but she sounded as if her vocal cords were made of solid titanium. “It’s a damn Picasso!”
“I had the perfect plan! All we had to do was get away, and no one ever would have figured it out, and you had to screw it up because you couldn’t keep your hands off some stupid piece of canvas!”
“It’s one of the Vollard Suite!”
“It’s not worth the rest of our lives!”
Theresa recalled how the dog had barked when Lucas forced Jessica over to the elevators, but not so much, now that she thought about it, when he returned. That was because Jessica was carrying the plastic explosives, or at least part of them. Jessica the artist, who knew where the fancy furnishings from the executive’s redecorated office had been stored and how a tiny amount of explosive would blow the door’s lock, and who returned from that trip with paint flakes on her pants. Jessica, who loved art almost as much as she loved her son, and possibly more than she loved her boyfriend, because she might have ruined their chances for a future together.
This was why Lucas had been so angry when she returned to the lobby with the backpack. Not because she brought less money than he counted on but because he found the painting when he unzipped the bag.
“You had to have the money!” Jessica countered. “Why did we have to hang around for that stupid shipment? We could have lost them in the convention-center traffic if we left earlier!”
“If you hadn’t taken that painting, we could have started over again somewhere. You would be an artist, I’d manage the gallery. But if they figure out we worked together, they’ll never stop looking for us. We’re going to have to stay underground forever now, Jessie, and that’s going to take a lot of money.”
Theresa continued to watch him but hooked her foot underneath the loose part of the lab coat. Slowly she inched the pocket up as she inched her free left hand down. If Cavanaugh felt her movements, he gave no sign.
Lucas calmed his voice but spoke with teeth gritted against each other in a way that would have been comical if they hadn’t been hurtling down a city street in a car carrying $4 million and a bomb. “If it gets destroyed, they’ll assume some other bank worker took advantage of the confusion to sneak it out.”
“If it just disappears, they’ll assume the same thing.”
“If he turns around,” Cavanaugh breathed into her neck, “we’ll strangle him. You may have to grab the gun. Keep the barrel pointed up.”
She moved her head in a nod, tiny enough to be taken as swaying with the vehicle. Her fingers dipped into the pocket. She had always appreciated the deep pouches, but now they made it difficult to reach the scalpel. Her thigh protested as she used her foot to pull the pocket a fraction of an inch higher.
It took only the slightest glance down for Lucas to notice her raised knee. “What are you doing? Stop wriggling.”
She squirmed more, and the plastic weapon slid into her hand. “There’s not a lot of room back here.”
But while Lucas watched her, his mind stayed on his girlfriend. “It’s your fail-safe, Jessie. If they catch us, you can always say you were coerced. But if they catch us with that painting, they’ll know you were in on it with me, and you’ll never see Ethan again. Everything I’ve done has been for you, can’t you see that?”
He did it all for love, Theresa thought. He’s been trying to tell me that all day.
Jessica tapped the brakes, then sped up. “Where are we going?”
“Drive into the bleachers. Just like we talked about.”
Bleachers? Suddenly Theresa realized why they were heading north on East Ninth, when there was nothing at the end of it but Lake Erie. The Hall of Fame induction concert. Those tall scaffolds covered in rock-and-roll-black cloth on the East Ninth pier, where she and Paul had scouted out the reception facilities on the Goodtime II.
“What if I get the wrong spot and hit a pole?”
“Just drive where I point. Brian told me exactly where to go.”
“What about them?”
“Keep throwing the money, especially the closer we get.” Lucas peered over the headrest. “I’ll take care of them.”
Theresa’s heart sank. Cavanaugh’s arm tightened around her waist.
Jessica remained silent, apparently mulling this over. Theresa heard sirens behind them, but not nearly close enough. In Lucas’s sideview mirror, she could glimpse pedestrians milling in the street, stopping cars to pick up the scattered bills.
Could she stab him? She’d have to get him in the neck. Disposable scalpels were handy, but also cheap and thin, and they would snap in half at even medium pressure. It would be a one-shot deal. The jugular or nothing. A shallow slash would only make him mad.
She could press it into Cavanaugh’s hand. He was stronger, trained in hand-to-hand. Let him do it. He’d have to reach around her, but he could use his right hand, and she would have to use her left. She would be free to grab the gun barrel, to keep Lucas from shooting them in the time it took him to bleed to death.
Because maybe she didn’t have what it took to kill a man, and this would be a bad time to find out.
They approached the end of East Ninth, where it dead-ended into the pier. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame sat to their left, and the World War II submarine, the Cod, to their right. The huge stage and seating for the induction ceremony concert rose directly in front of them. The fishy smell of the lake air blew through the car from the open windows.
“How are we going to get to Brian?” Jessica asked.
“We’ll stay under the bleachers. Everyone will be looking at the explosion.”
The pain
ted guitars outside the rock hall sped by. Jessica couldn’t have been driving more than twenty miles an hour, but falling out onto the pavement and possibly a curb at that speed could easily kill them both. Theresa would rather stay in the car, except that the car was going to blow up. Lucas intended to drive the car into the hidden caverns under the seating and set off the explosives. If the bleachers collapsed, it would take even more time before the cops could tally the bodies.
The explosives were in the backpack, and the backpack was in one of the duffels, with the money. The duffels were too heavy to be carried by one person.
“What about the money, Lucas? If you detonate the explosives, won’t you lose part of your take?”
“Just one. I can get the other one out.”
One of the bags would blow along with the car, for the same reason Jessie now threw bills out the window. Money distracted people, and no one would ever believe that he would have left it behind after all he’d done to get it. If the money wound up in the wreck of twisted metal, then Lucas must be in there as well. It would be months before the DNA got sorted out. He’d salvage enough for Jessie and him to start a wonderful new life together. She’d sell her paintings, and they’d travel the world.
If they got away.
“You’ll never make it,” Theresa told him. “It’s impossible to get out of this car and away from it fast enough. The concert area is a little concrete peninsula, with only one bottlenecked way in or out. Every cop in the city will surround you in thirty seconds, and there’s nothing to the north but water.”
“And,” he reminded her, “boats.”
One shot, she thought. As much as she wanted to be the one who took him down, the man who put Paul at death’s door, she had to be practical. She had always been practical. Her grandfather had taught her that.
She pressed the scalpel into Cavanaugh’s right hand and slipped off the protective cap. He was right-handed, wasn’t he? She tried to remember how he dialed the phone…. Yes.
She moved her left hand to the back of the front seat, pretending to steady herself as Jessica barreled over a speed bump. “You don’t have a boat. You don’t even have a car.”
“Ah, but, Theresa, what’s better than having a boat?”
Cavanaugh squeezed her fingers, but she didn’t know if that meant good luck or grab the gun. “Having a friend with a boat,” Theresa said.
“Exactly.”
“But you don’t have any friends either.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
Jessica spoke suddenly. “I don’t think I can do this.”
“Yes you can.” While maintaining a firm hold on the gun, Lucas twisted out of his jacket, then produced yet another plastic tie-wrap. “You two, put your hands up here. Just the tied ones.”
“What if Ethan gets whiplash?” Jessica fussed.
“He won’t. It’s just canvas, it won’t hurt us. Right there—see the section with the white stripe at the top? Aim for that.”
Jessica sped past the end of East Ninth Street, down a narrowed pavement and beyond a sign reading NO UNAUTHORIZED VEHICLES PAST THIS POINT. Spindly trees grew from circles in the pavement, but no other turf presented itself as a soft place to land.
“Give me your hands!” Lucas demanded again, lowering the barrel of the gun to point it at them.
Theresa grasped the headrest with her bound hand and leaned forward, as if she wished to discuss this in private. “Why don’t you just shoot us now? You didn’t show much enthusiasm for killing Cherise—is that because you don’t enjoy it?”
She never heard his answer. Instinctively mirroring, as most humans will, he leaned toward her ever so slightly. She grabbed the gun barrel.
Using the back of the seat as an anchor, Chris Cavanaugh pulled himself forward and struck downward with as much force as he could accumulate in the tight space. The scalpel entered Lucas’s neck, and the handle snapped off. Theresa closed her eyes against the spray of blood and felt the burning metal within her palm as Lucas pulled the trigger of his handgun. She let go. The bullets entered the roof.
Jessica screamed.
Lucas put both hands to his neck. For an instant he caught Theresa’s eye, his face reflecting pain and disappointment. Blood flowed between his fingers. He brought the gun around again. She moved her hand up to knock it away but couldn’t make herself grab the hot metal with her singed palm.
Jessica hit the brakes, instinctively reluctant to hit the black canvas wall.
Then the door came open, and Cavanaugh launched them both into the air. Theresa managed to get with the program just in time to push outward with her legs, trying to clear the doorsill so they wouldn’t be dragged alongside the moving vehicle. The car door, trying to blow shut, smacked her in the chest.
Lucas swiveled the gun, following them, but without his earlier lightning-quick ability.
Jessica continued to scream.
Theresa’s torso met the concrete, slightly on her right side and with Chris Cavanaugh completely on top of her. The air left her lungs, and she rolled, gasping. Amid the squealing of brakes, the car disappeared behind a black canvas curtain. The shot never came.
Then nothing.
CHAPTER 33
4:01 P.M.
“Theresa?”
She opened her eyes, shut them again. The sunshine hurt too much. Damn, it was hot.
Cavanaugh persisted, patting her cheek. “Theresa. Are you okay?”
She squinted, tried to shake off the liquid dripping into her eyes. It hurt to breathe. “I’d be better if you hadn’t landed on top of me.”
He made a sound like a laugh and helped her to sit up. One side of his face bled where it had scraped the ground. He held up their bound hands; now both their wrists were bloody. “You don’t have another one of those scalpels, do you?”
Her body seemed intact, nothing broken or even bleeding profusely. But it hurt to sit, hurt to breathe, hurt to exist, especially for the right half of her torso—she must have cracked a few ribs. Her lungs worked in short gasps, expanding no more than absolutely necessary.
Sirens wailed around them in a symphony of noise. Most continued past them, skimming the bleachers, but one pulled up in front of them. Mulvaney, Jason, and Frank piled out.
The veteran detective reached her side before the other two got out of the car. “Theresa.”
“I’m all right. At least I’m still alive, I mean. Lucas—”
“They’re under the bleachers,” Cavanaugh cut in.
“We saw it. They won’t get far.”
“Certainly not Lucas,” Theresa said, with only a twinge of hysteria. She let Cavanaugh explain the plan. Mulvaney got on the radio; he instructed the assembling marine units to check all boats in the area for Lucas’s accomplice. “Where’s the money? I mean, what they didn’t distribute to the masses.”
“In the car, with the RDX,” Theresa said, grimacing as Frank cut apart the tie-wraps with a Swiss Army knife. “How’s Paul?”
Frank looked up, into her eyes, and she knew. She knew.
“Mom!”
Rachael bounded from another arriving patrol car before it even stopped moving. Mindless of her ribs, Theresa opened her arms. The impact hurt like hell, and she sobbed for a moment, from relief, and pain, and guilt. “I’m so sorry, honey. This will never happen again, I promise. I promise. I promise.”
Abruptly Rachael separated from her, but still grasping her arms with a grip so tight it took her attention off the ribs. “Mom.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Mom.”
Theresa watched the struggle as her daughter tried to find the right words, to deliver news that no one should ever have to deliver, much less a child to her own mother.
“He’s dead.”
Confirmation, of something she’d known for hours. She knew it from the pallor of his face when he stumbled past her on the burning street. She knew it from the location of the wound and the amount of blood on the floor of th
e lobby. She knew it from the refusal of the sergeant and Chris to tell her the truth.
Yet she tried, even as Frank put his arm around her and Rachael laid her raven-colored locks on her neck. “No, honey, the hospital probably—”
“Paul’s dead, Mom. I was with him. He died a half hour ago.”
Theresa slid her bleeding arms around her daughter and held on.
CHAPTER 34
THURSDAY, JULY 2
IN A TYPICAL CLEVELAND CHANGE OF MOOD, THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED THIRTY-FOUR DEGREES IN THREE DAYS, AND PAUL’S FUNERAL TOOK PLACE ON A COLD, WET MORNING. THERESA FOUND THIS COM FORTING EVEN AS SHE SHIVERED, MORE APPROPRIATE THAN A SUNNY DAY WOULD HAVE BEEN. POLICE-DEPARTMENT PERSONNEL TURNED OUT IN FULL FORCE, UNIFORM ED AND SOLEM N-LOOKING, EVEN THE CHIEF AND ASSISTANT CHIEF AND ALL THE DEPARTMENT HEADS. THEY HAD PLENTY OF NICE THINGS TO SAY ABOUT THE DECEASED AND THERESA DIDN’T HEAR A SINGLE WORD THROUGH HER OWN PERSONAL FOG. RACHAEL, FRANK, AND DON KEPT HER CORDONED OFF FROM MOST OF THE MOURNERS, EXCEPT PAUL’S FAMILY, AND ALL OF THE MEDIA.
They allowed Chris Cavanaugh through, to join her on a bench next to the grave site as she waited for the cemetery traffic to thin and for the strength to walk away.
He gave her a foot or two of space and studied the damp grave. “Glad to see you’re not fired.”
“Yeah. Leo made some phone calls.”
“Jessica is sticking to her kidnapping story. She must think it’s her only chance to get Ethan back, which of course it is.”
The break wall had made it easy for the marine patrol to cordon off the boats present, and it hadn’t taken long to find Lucas’s buddy, the same one who had driven Bobby’s car to Atlanta. The former desk clerk at the self-storage place clearly remembered the guy with the missing hand.
Jessica Ludlow had been found with the car, trying to drag a dying Lucas from the passenger seat. He bled out in much less time than Paul had.
“The car never did blow up,” Chris went on when she didn’t respond. “Lucas never hit the detonator. They even recovered Jessie’s damn Picasso, only a little worse for wear.”