P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

They nodded.

“Well, she wasn’t kidding. She already had your phone number in here as one of the recurring contact numbers in the pay-phone network. She just didn’t call it out in the conclusions paragraph.”

“Son of a bitch,” Cam said. “There it is. How the hell did she do that?”

“I asked the tech control people at the phone company that question,” Pierce said. “And they said that the call logs are tied to the billing system. They don’t keep records on their customers on the off chance the cops might call, but they do keep records for bill generation. You know when you call into customer service and bitch about a bill?”

They nodded again.

“Well, you know how sometimes they make nice and remove a specific charge? The way they do that is by expunging the record of the call. The billing system then does the math. My point is, it’s not a secure system. Even a customer service rep in Bombay can do that.”

“And she’s coming at them with a couple of mainframes,” Cam said. “Shit!”

“How much time do we have?” Pierce asked.

The sheriff looked at the watch. “Twenty-seven minutes,” he said, and then explained Cam’s concern with the speed-dial business. Pierce shook his head in frustration. “What choice do we have?” he asked. “They fry her, you’re still on the hook, especially with this shit.”

“But she faked all that,” Cam protested.

“And we have whose word for that?” Pierce asked gently.

Cam wanted to hit someone.

“There’s more,” Pierce said. “We called that woman’s number in Charlotte, got an answering service. The woman who returned the call said she was Ms. Bawa’s executive assistant. She doesn’t know where Ms. Bawa is, but that’s apparently not unusual. Just for the hell of it, I asked if you had been to that office. The officer with the dogs? she asked.”

“I can explain that,” Cam said wearily. “I did-”

Pierce had his hand up, indicating that Cam should stop talking. “I’ve been going to law school at night,” he said. “I think that right now you should follow the lady’s advice and say absolutely nothing. The sheriff here vouches for you, and that’s good enough for me. But the best option for the feds to solve their vigilante problem is to hang you out to dry, declare a public, if partial, victory, and then take their own manhunt underground. Image is everything to those guys.”

“You do understand that this whole damned thing is a setup, right?” Cam said. He realized he was almost shouting.

“You should have taken along some backup,” Pierce replied, unperturbed.

“Who?” Cam said angrily. “Sergeant Cox?”

“Enough,” Bobby Lee ordered. “Let’s focus on getting the ranger back alive, shall we?”

The designated lieutenant for the SWAT team called, asking for an update, and the sheriff told him they’d be making the calls in about twenty minutes. “Hopefully, someone will call into the ops center with the location of the hostage after we do our phone drill.”

They all looked at the cell phone and waited as the minutes ticked by. The more Cam thought about it, though, the less he believed there would be any calls, at least not immediately. He wanted to run out of the building and scream at the moon. All of this because some asshole had failed to read two scumbags their Miranda rights? He thought about Mary Ellen, strapped up in that horrific chair, waiting for someone to do something. How long had she been there? Was she still alive? Had that video been done the night she was taken hostage? Or were all those images fakes, the product of some other mad digital wizard. He visualized the oil-soaked corpse of the one robber lying out on the ground next to that diesel tank. Was that where Mary Ellen was now? “We’d never harm another cop,” Kenny had said, but now Kenny was a pile of picked-over frozen bones somewhere up in the western Carolina mountains.

“Okay, we’re two minutes away,” the sheriff said. “This thing has a signal. You going to do it, or shall I?”

“I’ll do it,” Cam said, getting up and going over to the sheriff’s big desk.

They waited as the watch clicked down, and then jumped when the tiny little beep went off. Cam picked up the phone and hit zero three. He flinched when someone slammed the front door to the executive offices. Zero two killed the chair. Right?

His hands were sweating as the phone rang and rang. C’mon, he thought. C’mon.

Then it was answered by voice mail. To his astonishment, Cam heard his own voice mail greeting playing. He snatched the phone away from his ear and looked at the number he’d speed-dialed. It was his own home phone.

“Well?” the sheriff said. “Aren’t you supposed to say something?”

To my own fucking phone? Cam thought, but then he said the magic word and hung up.

He reset the watch timer for five minutes and they waited some more. Then he took a deep breath and hit zero two. The phone rang once, twice, and then what sounded like a fax machine picked up and stopped. Silence followed and Cam hung up again.

“You’re not going to believe this shit,” he announced. “The first number I called was mine.”

“Figures,” said Mike Pierce. “She’s got that, too.”

They waited for another hour, but there were no calls. Cam finally called his own voice mail at home. One message, and not the one he had left. He listened carefully, played it again, and then saved it. “Sounded like a tape,” he reported. “A trucking terminal on the south side of I-Forty, off the airport road. We’re apparently looking for a trailer. They said for me to go alone, or they’d fire the chair.”

“No,” Bobby Lee said. “No way.”

“I got her into this mess, Sheriff,” Cam protested. “Least I can do is get her out.”

“What you’d do is get yourself killed. No, I’m sorry, but there’s a hostage. I’m always sorry there’s a hostage. But we go in force.”

“How about that Owl thing?” Pierce asked. “Send it overhead with some thermal-imaging gear, see if they can find a trailer that’s different from all the others?”

“How long will that take?” the sheriff asked. Pierce didn’t know, but he went to find out.

Thirty minutes later, they had a plan. The Owl would make its sweep and report any targets of interest. The SWAT team would deploy in the rail yards behind the trucking terminal. Cam would drive through the terminal in a lone cruiser, wearing full combat gear, and pretend to scan the trailers with a handheld thermal-imaging device. He’d drive around long enough to allow the SWAT team to get in position behind the trailer, and then they’d pounce. If the Owl didn’t find anything, they’d regroup and try something else.

It took another hour to get the aircraft in position above the terminal. Cam rode out with his MCAT guys in a Suburban to a location three blocks away from the terminal. Then he shifted over to a cruiser while the guys went to join the SWAT team at the command post. The sheriff and Mike Pierce went directly to the command post in the sheriff’s personal cruiser.

Cam reached the terminal in five minutes and drove in past the security gates. The place was a medium-size terminal by Triboro standards-ten warehouses equipped with mechanized truck-loading docks. Some of the warehouses were inactive, but half had trucks and trailers backed up and forklifts operating in lighted doorways. The sergeant at the command and control vehicle announced over the secure tactical frequency that the aircraft was overhead, scanning the empty trailers parked at the back of the terminal. He said there were sixty or seventy trailers out there.

Cam drove around with his window open. The dock workers didn’t seem to pay any attention to the lone cruiser prowling the area. Cam could communicate with the war wagon but not with the SWAT team. The aircraft reported that the roofs of the warehouses appeared to be clean, no lurking shooters. Ten minutes later, it reported one trailer had a different thermal signature from the trailers around it. They pinpointed its location along the back fence of the terminal, and the SWAT team went into motion.