Greg Iles - Third Degree

The aggressive stranger’s hair was cropped short, and it had receded on both sides of his scalp, leaving a sharp V of aggression in the middle of his forehead. He looked about forty-five, but the flesh of his face was tight, with no sagging around the jaws. The kind of guy who woke up at 5 a.m. every day to run four miles. As soon as Danny was close enough to hear, he realized that the man in the suit was the agent Ray Breen had been complaining about: Paul Biegler.

“States’ rights versus federal authority,” the sheriff was saying. “Somehow, it always seems to come down to that with you people. I guess you want to refight the Civil War right here, Agent Biegler.”

“Yankee sumbitch,” someone muttered.

“I was born in Arkansas,” Biegler snapped, cutting his eyes at Trace Breen.

“Well, I don’t have time to debate constitutional issues with you,” Ellis said. “I’ve got a crisis to resolve.”

“How?” asked Biegler. “You don’t have any intelligence.”

Ellis drew himself to his full height. “You people may think we’re all dumb down here, but we-”

“Information!” Biegler snapped. “You don’t have any information about your subject. Intel, Sheriff. Ring a bell?”

For a moment Ellis was speechless, so Biegler charged on. “I’ve spoken to Kyle Auster’s office manager at the hospital. She’s in critical condition. Third-degree burns over forty percent of her body. She told me that she and Auster were behind the fraud. They’ve been having an affair for years. Shields went along with some of it for the past few months, but that’s all.”

“If Shields is the good guy in all this,” said the sheriff, “then why did he shoot Auster?”

“Maybe Auster provoked him.”

“Or maybe this office manager’s really been screwing Dr. Shields,” suggested Ellis, “and she’s trying to do whatever she can to protect him.”

Biegler shook his head. “Vida Roberts has worked in medicine for twenty years, Sheriff. She knew she wasn’t going to make it when she talked to me. That’s a deathbed confession. Admissible in court.”

Ellis’s face was getting redder by the second. “So, what are you saying? We should just pack up and go home? Let these two fine fellows work things out on their own?”

“Of course not! I’m saying that if Auster’s still alive, you’ve got two different subjects in there. Two different psychologies. And you don’t know who’s really controlling things.”

“I think Auster’s dead,” Sheriff Ellis said with conviction. “I just talked to Dr. Shields. I heard his voice when he said Auster couldn’t come to the phone.”

“You’d better be sure.”

Ellis gave the agent a patronizing smile. “Well, I sure thank you for your brilliant insights.”

“Sheriff, listen-”

“Now, I’d appreciate it if you’d carry your ass about four hundred yards that way.” Ellis gestured back toward the highway with a sweep of his big forearm. “Down past my perimeter. I don’t want to see you back up here unless you’ve got something that will give me a tactical advantage in this standoff. Are we clear?”

Biegler’s eyes went flat as a shark’s, and he spoke in a low voice. “I can federalize this scene, Sheriff. I will bring the FBI down here from Jackson.”

“This thing’s gonna be over with before you get anybody down here.”

Biegler sighed. “If you think that, you don’t know much about hostage situations.”

“I reckon we’ll see, won’t we?”

“Ellis, if you fuck this up, you’ll answer to the attorney general. And I’m not talking about the one in Mississippi.”

“Go suck an egg.”

Sheriff Ellis walked away from the trailer and signaled Danny to join him.

Biegler stared after them for a few moments, then turned and marched off toward the roadblock.

Trace Breen barked a laugh. “That sumbitch is shakin’ like a dog shittin’ a peach pit.”

“You sure told his ass,” Ray agreed.

Ellis rounded on his deputies, his dark eyes blazing. “You TRU boys have been spending a boatload of my budget on training and equipment. Well, you got till exactly dark to prove you’re worth it. Understood?”

The smiles vanished. “Yessir,” Ray snapped out. “Let’s get to it, boys.”

Danny had to stretch out his legs to stay up with Ellis as the sheriff strode down the border of the Shieldses’ front yard.

“Where are we headed?” Danny asked.

“Neighbors’ house. Frank Elfman’s. They got Dr. Shields’s boy over there. I think we ought to hear him out ourselves before we shoot anybody, don’t you?”

Danny felt the coiled spring in his chest loosen just a little. “Absolutely.”

Laurel lay on her side on the great room sofa, her arms and legs once again bound tightly with duct tape. Warren had taped her ankles first, so she had risked slipping the Razr from her pocket and sliding it beneath her before he taped her wrists. The forty seconds it had taken him to do that were the tensest she’d experienced since the ordeal began.

Beth lay sound asleep on the red leather sofa in the study, thanks to a sedative dose of Benadryl calculated by her father. Warren himself was sitting at his study desk. His large, flat-panel computer monitor hid his face from Laurel, and she was thankful, because it allowed her ready access to her cell phone. The Roche-Bobois sofa was a modern piece, with spare lines and minimal padding on the arms. There wasn’t much of a crease in which to hide the Razr, but she had stuffed the phone as deeply as she could into the crack between the arm and the seat, leaving only a thin line of exposed metal.

Danny had sent two messages since she’d checked the phone in the laundry room, the first telling her he was on the way with the sheriff, the second asking several questions about the situation inside the house. She’d sent back a message that read: KA dead by W. Self-defense. Me amp; B all right 4 now. Tied up tho. More 2 come. Be patient.

Danny’s question as to whether Warren intended harm was harder to answer. Warren had hit her twice after Beth shorted out the laptop, and hard. But he hadn’t shot her. What he had done was download another copy of Merlin’s Magic into his study computer, so that he could try to break into her Hotmail account online. She wasn’t too worried about that, since she didn’t save e-mail messages online. There might be one or two of Danny’s last e-mails in her online mailbox, but she didn’t think so. Even if there were, the password-cracking program had to start again from scratch.

She was more worried about the safe room.

After taping Laurel up, Warren had carried his father’s old deer rifle and some plastic trash bags into the safe room. His shotgun was presently leaning against his desk in the study. He’d been quite open about what he was doing, announcing that the trash bags could serve as temporary toilets. There was already enough food and water in the safe room to last for days, if not weeks, and the gun was self-explanatory. But he had not tried to move Laurel or Beth in there. She had a feeling that Warren saw the safe room as his last resort, a final redoubt in the event of a police assault, rather than a place to commit some terrible crime. His primary goal still seemed to be the discovery of her lover’s identity, through cracking the Hotmail account.

She wanted to tell Danny about the guns and the safe room. But if she did, what would happen? Would she trigger an immediate rescue attempt? Were there people outside capable of bringing off a rescue without loss of life? She thought about the hostage rescues she’d read about or seen on the news. In most cases, it seemed, at least some hostages died before the hostage taker was killed.