Jeffery Deaver - A Maiden's Grave

The phone clicked into dull static.

The door to the van suddenly swung open. Dean Stillwell's head poked in. The sheriff said, "They're releasing one of them."

"We know."

Stillwell disappeared outside again.

Potter spun about in the swivel chair. He couldn't see clearly. The clouds were very dense now and the fields dim, as if an eclipse had suddenly dipped the earth into shadow.

"Let's try the video, Tobe."

A video screen burst to life, showing in crisp black-and-white the front of the slaughterhouse. The door was open. They had all five lamps burning, it seemed.

Tobe adjusted the sensitivity and the picture settled.

"Who, Henry?"

"It's the older girl, Susan Phillips. Seventeen."

Budd laughed. "Hey, looks like it may be easier than we thought. If he's just gonna give 'em away."

On the screen Susan looked back into the doorway. A hand pushed her forward. Then the door closed.

"This is great," LeBow said enthusiastically, looking out the window, his head close to Potter's. "Seventeen. And she's a top student. She'll tell us a truckload of stuff about the inside."

The girl walked in a straight line away from the building. Through the glasses Potter could see how grim her face was. Her hands were tied behind her but she didn't seem to have suffered from the brief captivity.

"Dean," Potter said into the radio microphone, "send one of your men to meet her."

"Yessir." The sheriff was now speaking in a normal tone into his throat mike; he'd finally gotten the hang of the gear.

A state trooper in body armor and helmet slipped from behind a squad car and cautiously started in a crouch toward the girl, who'd made her way fifty feet from the slaughterhouse.

The gasp came from deep in Arthur Potter's throat.

As if his whole body'd been submerged in ice water he shuddered, understanding perfectly what was happening.

It was intuition probably, a feeling gleaned from the hundreds of barricades he'd negotiated. The fact that no taker had ever spontaneously released a hostage this early. The fact that Handy was a killer without remorse.

He couldn't say for sure what tipped him but the absolute horror of what was about to occur gripped his heart. "No!" The negotiator leapt to his feet, knocking the chair over with a huge crash.

LeBow glanced at him. "Oh, no! Oh, Christ, no."

Charlie Budd's head swiveled back and forth. He whispered, "What's wrong? What's going on?"

"He's going to kill her," LeBow whispered.

Potter tore the door open and ran outside, his heart slugging away in his chest. Snatching a flak jacket from the ground, he slipped between two cars and, gasping, ran straight toward the girl, passing the man Dean Stillwell had sent to meet her. His urgency made the troopers in the field uneasy but some of them smiled at the sight of the pudgy man running, holding the heavy flak jacket in one hand and waving a white Kleenex in the other.

Susan was forty feet from him, walking steadily over the grass. She adjusted her course slightly so they would meet.

"Get down, drop down!" Potter cried. He released the tissue, which floated ahead of him on the fast breeze, and he gestured madly at the ground. "Down! Get down!"

But she couldn't hear, of course, and merely frowned. Several of the troopers had heard Potter and stepped away from the cars they were using as cover. Reaching tentatively for their guns.

Potter's shouts were joined by others. One woman trooper waved madly. "No, no, honey! Get down, for the love of God!"

Susan never heard a word of it. She'd stopped and was looking carefully at the ground, perhaps thinking that he was warning her about a hidden well or wire she might trip over.

Gasping, his middle-aged heart in agony, Potter narrowed the gap to fifteen feet.

The agent was so close that when the single bullet struck her squarely in the back, and a flower of dark red blossomed over her right breast, he heard the nauseating sound of the impact, followed by an unworldly groan from deep within a throat unaccustomed to speaking.

She stopped abruptly then spiraled to the ground.

No, no, no…

Potter ran to the girl and propped the flak jacket around her head. The trooper ran up, crouching, muttering, "My God, my God," over and over. He aimed his pistol toward the window.

"Don't shoot," Potter commanded.

"But -"

"No!" Potter lifted his gaze from Susan's dull eyes to the slaughterhouse. He saw in the window just to the left of the door the lean face of Lou Handy. And through the right, perhaps thirty feet inside the dim interior, the negotiator could make out the stunned face of the young teacher, the blond one, who'd sent him the cryptic message earlier and whose name he could not now recall.

You feel sounds.

Sound is merely a disturbance of air, a vibration, and it laps upon our bodies like waves, it touches our brows like a lover's hand, it stings and it can make us cry.

Within her chest she still felt the sound of the gunshot.

No, Melanie thought. No. This isn't possible.

It can't be…

But she knew what she'd seen. She didn't trust voices but her eyes were rarely wrong.

Susan, Deaf of Deaf.

Susan, braver than I could ever be.

Susan, who had the world of the Deaf and the world of the Others at her feet.

The girl had stepped into the horrible Outside and it had killed her. She was gone forever. A tiny hole opening in her back, kicking aside her dark hair. The abrupt halt as she walked the route that Melanie had shamefully prayed that she herself would be walking.

Melanie's breath grew shallow and the edges of her vision crumbled to blackness. The room tilted and sweat appeared in sheets on her face and neck. She turned slowly and looked at Brutus, who was slipping the still-smoking pistol into his waistband. What she saw filled her with hopelessness. For she could see no satisfaction, no lust, no malice. She saw only that he'd done what he planned to – and had already forgotten about the girl's death.

He clicked on the TV again and glanced toward the killing room, in whose doorway the seven girls stood or sat in a ragged line, some staring at Melanie, some staring at Mrs. Harstrawn, who had collapsed on the floor, sobbing, gripping her hair, her face contorted like a hideous red mask. The teacher had apparently seen the gunshot and understood what it meant. The other girls had not. Jocylyn wiped from her face a sheet of her dark hair, unfortunately self-cut. She lifted her hands, signing repeatedly, "What happened? What happened? What happened?"

I have to tell them, Melanie thought.

But I can't.

Beverly, the next oldest after Susan, understood something terrible had occurred but didn't quite know – or admit – what. She took Jocylyn's pudgy hand and gazed at Melanie. She sucked air deep into her damaged lungs and put her other arm around the inseparable twins.

Melanie did not spell the name Susan. She couldn't, for some reason. She used the impersonal "she," accompanied by a gesture toward the field.

"She…"

How do I say it? Oh, God, I have absolutely no idea. It took her a moment to remember the word for "killed." The word was constructed by moving the extended index finger of the right hand up under the left hand, held cupped, palm down.

Exactly like a bullet entering the body, she thought.

She couldn't say it. Saw Susan's hair pop up under the impact. Saw her ease to the ground.

"She's dead," Melanie finally signed. "Dead" was a different gesture, turning over the flattened, palm-up right hand so that it was palm down; simultaneously doing the opposite with the left. It was at her right hand that Melanie stared, thinking how the gesture of this hand mimicked scooping earth onto a grave.

The girls' reactions were different but really all the same: the tears, the silent gasps, the eyes filling with horror.