Lisa Black - Takeover

“Could he have paid to store it for six months?”

“Sure. Bobby always had money-stolen money, of course, but he’d have it.” He snorted. “He put his car in storage? That’s probably the only time my brother thought ahead in his life.”

Jason asked, “Did he live in Brookpark before he went to jail? The car is registered to a house there.”

“We all lived there. That’s where Bobby and I grew up. But he was gone and Mom had died-no point me living there all by myself. I sold it months ago.”

Jason’s phone rang, and he answered it, walking a few steps away and pulling out his notepad before he even flipped the receiver open.

Theresa tried another tack with Eric Moyers. “Is Bobby good with mechanics? Did he work on the car, know how to modify it?”

“Bobby couldn’t change a tire if his life depended on it. If he had any work done, he got someone else to do it. What are you guys doing about this anyway? Can’t I sit somewhere so I can see what’s going on?”

“Unfortunately, we can’t all fit in the command center,” she told him, thinking, Damn, I’m learning to deflect people as smoothly as Chris Cavanaugh. “Does Bobby have a friend named Lucas?”

“I told this guy here I don’t know any of Bobby’s friends. He always had plenty of them, I’ll admit that. Everyone liked Bobby, especially kids and dumb animals. But I don’t know his friends-I didn’t want to know them then, I don’t want to know them now.”

“Has he called you since he got out?”

“He might have tried, but I doubt it. I changed my address and phone, left no forwarding. We only had my aunt and uncle in common, and they died in a car accident. Truth is, lady,” Eric Moyers summed up, “I didn’t even know he was out.”

12:05 P.M.

Paul had stretched his legs out straight, Theresa noted, probably to release some of the pressure on his butt. He wasn’t used to sitting so much. He still wouldn’t look up at the camera, instead following Lucas’s pacing movements.

I’m failing miserably at this investigating gig, honey. I haven’t discovered one useful fact, and we still have no idea how to get you out of there.

Kessler had disappeared. The scribe, Irene, wrote steadily now that Cavanaugh had Lucas back on the phone. He asked the bank robber, “Where are you from, by the way?”

“I could say the depths of hell, but I hate to be overdramatic.”

“Bobby is a Cleveland boy, born and raised, we know that-”

“Really. What else do you know?”

“-but where are you from, Lucas? Where did you two get to be friends?”

“I fail to see how that’s relevant, Chris.”

“Did you meet when Bobby served time in Atlanta?”

A pause. Theresa could see him on the monitor, talking on the phone from the information desk. It had a cord and limited his movement to pacing in front of the hostages, the curly wire stretched over their heads. Any minute now he would tug the body of the phone down onto one of them. “I don’t see that car pulling up outside. And don’t give me any more lines about a tow-truck driver.”

“That’s just it, Lucas. The last time you mentioned the tow-truck driver, you also mentioned Winn-Dixie, which is a chain of grocery stores, right?”

“So?”

“So there aren’t any in Cleveland. There aren’t any in Ohio. They’re a southern chain.”

“That’s just fascinating, Chris. I guess your cops will have to get their coffee somewhere else, then, which is a pity, because they make pretty good stuff. I still don’t see that car. Who do you want me to shoot next?”

“I just want to know where you’re from, Lucas.”

“Is there a reason you’re wasting my time with this? Please tell me there’s a reason.”

Cavanaugh sighed. Didn’t he ever get tired of these games? Theresa wondered. She could see herself yelling at people: Just spit it out already!

Cavanaugh didn’t yell. “Bear with me here, Lucas.”

Lucas’s sigh could be heard clearly over the speaker. “Okay. Since you ask all polite like, and since I’m obviously supposed to be impressed with your keen grocery-store reasoning here, I’ll just tell you if it will make you feel better: Bobby and I served time together in Atlanta. That’s where we met.”

“Again, telling us stuff,” Frank muttered. “Does this guy even want to get away? Or is he just that stupid?”

“He’s not stupid,” Theresa said, back at the telescope.

Cavanaugh opened his mouth, then stopped. Then he said, “Thank you, Lucas. Give me a second, okay?”

He tapped a button on the phone console and turned to the rest of the sweltering group. “It sounds like he has us on speakerphone. If Bobby can hear what we’re saying, so can the hostages.”

Maybe we could get a message to Paul, Theresa thought. But what would they say? Run for it? Don’t run for it?

“I can’t ask him about Ludlow. Ludlow’s wife is sitting there with a gun to her baby’s head and then hears that her husband has been murdered? She’ll freak out.”

“She’ll be uncooperative.” Theresa shuddered. Lucas hadn’t stopped at an unarmed woman; there was no reason to think he would stop at killing a child.

“Just as well,” Jason said. “I still think he’ll become more desperate if he knows we know about Ludlow’s murder.”

Cavanaugh rubbed his eyes.

“I spoke with Atlanta again,” Jason went on. “Bobby did not have any visitors during his incarceration. He gave exactly one name for his visitors’ list, his mother’s, and they erased that after she died.”

Theresa said, “His brother didn’t even know Bobby had been released.”

Cavanaugh stared at her, and too late she realized they hadn’t told him about Eric Moyers’s being in the building. But he didn’t ask how she knew that, and Jason went on, “They had nine Lucases incarcerated at the same time as Bobby-four in his cell block-who’ve been released in the past six months.”

He paused, his eyes going to the blinking red light indicating that their Lucas was on hold. But Cavanaugh said, “Details.”

Jason rattled off four names, then added, “One white, thirty-two, Arkansas resident, second conviction for selling marijuana within five hundred yards of a school. The other three are black. The first is twenty-one, did four years for assault after nearly killing a guy in a bar fight. No other record. The second is forty, two and a half years for credit-card fraud, first offense. Third is thirty-one, did five years for putting his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend in intensive care. No other record.”

“Military backgrounds?”

“The white guy got kicked out of the National Guard. The last black guy got kicked out of the regular army for medical reasons.”

“What kinds of reasons?”

“They didn’t know. His record just said honorable discharge, medical deferment.”

“None classified as mixed-race,” Cavanaugh mused.

Frank said, “We can’t eliminate by that. He’d be entered as whatever the arresting officer considered him, which depends a lot on the arresting officer.”

The light on the phone went out. Lucas had hung up. Cavanaugh glanced at it but did not seem concerned.

Please don’t make that man angry, Theresa thought. “What’s that last one’s name again?”

Jason checked his notes, but the scribe read first, from hers: “Lucas Winston Parrish.”

“Why him?” Cavanaugh asked.

“We figured this guy’s age at twenty-five or thirty, right? He and the white guy would fit, but the drug dealer doesn’t have a record of violence, and he does. Besides, the bottle of Advil in the car might have been his. Maybe his medical condition involves headaches or some other kind of chronic pain.”