Lisa Black - Takeover

The blood drained from the woman’s face to see her coworkers crouched on the marble floor, guns pointed at their bodies. “Oh, my Lord.”

“No one is hurt, and I’m sure we can get them out safely. But does that look like Jessica Ludlow?”

She squinted. “Yes, I’m sure. She has the baby with her?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“We’re wondering that ourselves. Thank you for your help, Mrs. Hessman-”

Theresa interrupted. “What time does she start work?”

“Seven-thirty,” the woman answered without hesitation.

Cavanaugh took a swig from his water bottle, allowing Theresa to continue her questioning.

“What time does Mark Ludlow start work?” she asked.

“Eight, usually. But a senior examiner… well…”

“Doesn’t punch a time clock.”

“Exactly,” Mrs. Hessman told her. “Some are more flexible, come in at eight-thirty or nine and stay later, but only a few. They’re all accountants, so they tend to be a bit regimented.”

“Do you know what day-care arrangements she had for their son?”

“No, I sure don’t.”

Theresa mulled this over while Cavanaugh thanked the woman again. “This officer will see you out.”

The room fell silent, except for the hum of distant cars and the terse, quiet exchanges from the staff offices. Then Theresa said, “Maybe they drive separately to work because she starts earlier. It still seems funny, considering the price of gas these days.”

“Come here,” Cavanaugh said to her. He pushed an empty chair out from the desk, next to him. “Sit down. Need a bottle of water?”

“No-yeah, actually. That would be good.”

Irene pulled an Aquafina from a small cooler and passed it down.

Cavanaugh handed it to her. “Or she drives separately because she drops the baby at day care. Are there still officers at the scene?

We’ll have them ask the neighbors while they canvass.”

Theresa soaked her hand with the bottle’s frigid condensation and rubbed it on the back of her neck, hot again from the six-flight jog. “They’re probably done.”

“Jason, get Homicide. Have someone come over here with everything they found out about Ludlow. If they didn’t find the day care, send someone back to the neighborhood.”

Theresa sipped, watching the TV screen. “This woman’s got a gun pointed at her little boy, and she doesn’t even know that her husband is dead.”

“I haven’t lost a child on one of my jobs yet, and I don’t intend to start today.”

“You haven’t lost anybody yet.” Jason stood as he dialed, adding to Theresa, “Chris has a perfect record. Two hundred and sixteen hostage situations ended without bloodshed.”

“Not totally-there’s been some blood lost. But not fatally.”

That should make me feel better, Theresa thought, but it doesn’t. He talks about loss of life as if it’s a running bet on a basketball team. As Jason walked off with his cell phone, she asked Cavanaugh, “How did you get into this line of work? How do you talk them into giving up when they have to know they’re going to go to jail?”

“Mostly it’s about listening. You have to be a good listener. I’ll bet you would be good at it.”

“Not me.” She shuddered. “I don’t want live people depending on me.”

Cavanaugh laughed. “Dead ones are okay?”

“Precisely. I could fail to solve their case, to get justice for them, but I can’t make them any more dead.” She finished the water. “That probably sounds wimpy, but I don’t care.”

“It sounds sensible.”

“You, on the other hand-do you ever have to decide who lives and who dies?”

“Not in this case,” he said, neatly sideswiping the question. “The hostages are all together, and that simplifies matters. In domestics, particularly, you can have them scattered around in different rooms, so that at any given moment some are safe, some are not. We adjust our thinking accordingly.”

If it came down to Paul, who had chosen to be in the line of fire by virtue of his profession, and a civilian, he would adjust his thinking accordingly. She needed to stay with Cavanaugh, to be sure that did not happen.

She let out what had been weighing on her mind for the past hour. “Can’t we give them their damn car and let them move on?”

“Not in light of his parting statements. They take any person with them out of that bank, that person’s dead. Otherwise I’d be happy to let them have the car and all the money they want, and I don’t even care if they get away. That’s someone else’s problem. But I can’t give them a hostage.” He glanced at her face. “Don’t look like that. It’s not hopeless. I’m going to try to trade the car for leaving all the hostages behind.”

“They’ll never go for that. They have to know that once they poke their heads out that door without a hostage in front of their face, they’re dead.”

“That’s why it makes more sense to give themselves up. You have to let them reason through the scenarios themselves. Eventually they’ll get a grip on what is and is not a realistic option.” He glanced at her face again. “I just said it isn’t hopeless. I didn’t say it’ll be easy. ”

Kessler stood to throw out his coffee cup. “But why kill Mark Ludlow? And if they’ve already killed once, doesn’t that make them more likely to… um…”

“We’re not completely sure they had anything to do with Ludlow,” Cavanaugh said. “We’re not even reasonably sure. But if they did, they don’t know that his body has been found or that we suspect he’s connected to this robbery. They want to have the option to walk away from this without anyone getting hurt, because they’re certain to get a lighter sentence that way. If we let them know that we’re waiting to hang a murder charge on them-”

“They have nothing to lose,” Theresa finished.

“Exactly. We need to keep them believing that it’s in their best interest to avoid hurting anyone.” Cavanaugh moved one hand to pick up the phone, then hesitated, long fingers stroking the receiver. “Tell me about your fiancé, Theresa.”

Would this man ever stop startling her? “Paul?”

Well, duh. How many other fiancés did she have? She took another deep breath. “He’s been a cop for seventeen years. He’s currently a detective in Homicide. He’s a good cop.”

Cavanaugh waited as she tossed her empty bottle into the wastebasket. “I’m sure he’s a great cop, Theresa, but I’m not writing a brochure for the department. Tell me what he’s like. ”

Not a word came to mind, and she stared at him in confusion. Glass slides and databases were her bailiwick, not psychology. “I don’t know what you want.”

“It’s an open-ended question, I know. This is why I ask: He’s a cop in their midst, but he’s in plainclothes and he’s not tied up with the security guards, so our two guys in there clearly do not know that he’s a police officer. That means they haven’t searched him, haven’t found his gun, so now he’s ten feet away from these guys and he’s armed. What is he going to do?”

She glanced at the TV screen again; she had trouble looking away from it for more than a few seconds. Not much had changed in her absence. Paul still sat second from the end of the row of hostages, fidgeting now and then but obviously unhurt. “All he’ll care about is protecting those people. Frank says he’s a Boy Scout.”

“What do you think?”

It took her a while to answer. “I think he cares about doing the right thing. That’s why I want to marry him. My ex-husband never cared about the right thing. Paul is more like-”

“Your father?”