Jeffery Deaver - A Maiden's Grave

Her hands trembling, Melanie turned back to the window. De l'Epée had picked up Susan's body and was walking back to the police line with it. Melanie watched her friend's dangling arms, the cascade of black hair, the feet – one shoe on, one shoe off.

Beautiful Susan.

Susan, the person I would be if I could be anybody.

As she watched De l'Epée disappear behind a police car, part of Melanie's silent world grew slightly more silent. And that was something she could scarcely afford.

"I'm resigning, sir," Charlie Budd said softly.

Potter stepped into the John of the van to put on the fresh shirt that had somehow appeared in the hands of one of Dean Stillwell's officers. He dropped his own bloodstained shirt into a wastebasket and pulled on the new one; the bullet that had killed Susan had spattered him copiously.

"What's that, Charlie?" Potter asked absently, stepping back to the desk. Tobe and Derek sat silently at their consoles. Even Henry LeBow had stopped typing and stared out the window, which from the angle at which he sat revealed nothing but distant wheat fields, distorted and tinted ocher by the thick grass.

Through the window on the other side of the van the ambulance lights flashed as they took the girl's body away.

"I'm quitting," Budd continued. "This assignment and the force too." His voice was steady. "That was my fault. It was because of that shot a half-hour ago. When I didn't tell the snipers to unchamber. I'll call Topeka and get a replacement in here."

Potter turned back, tucking the crisp shirt in. "Stick around, Charlie. I need you."

"Nosir. I made a mistake and I'll shoulder the consequences."

"You may have plenty of opportunity to take responsibility for your screwups before this night is through," Potter told him evenly. "But that sniper shot wasn't one of them. What Handy just did had nothing to do with you."

"Then why? Why in God's name would he do that?"

"Because he's putting his cards on the table. He's telling us he's serious. We can't buy him out of there cheap."

"By shooting a hostage in cold blood?"

LeBow said, "This's the hardest kind of negotiation there is, Charlie. After a killing up front, usually the only way to save any hostage is a flat-out assault."

"High stakes," Derek Elb muttered.

Extreme stakes, Arthur Potter thought. Then: Jesus, what a day this's going to be.

"Downlink," Tobe said, and a moment later the phone buzzed. The tape recorder began turning automatically.

Potter picked up the receiver. "Lou?" he said evenly.

"There's something you gotta understand 'bout me, Art. I don't care about these girls. They're just little birds to me that I used to shoot off my back porch at home. I aim to get outta here and if it means I gotta shoot nine more of 'em dead as posts then that's the way it's gonna be. You hear me?"

Potter said, "I do hear you, Lou. But we've got to get one other thing straight. I'm the only man in this universe can get you out of there alive. There's nobody else. So I'm the one to reckon with. Now do you hear me ?"

"I'll call you back with our demands."

This was tricky, this was dangerous, this was not about re-election. This was about decency and life. So Daniel Tremain told himself as he walked into the governor's mansion.

Standing upright as a birch rod, he headed through the surprisingly modest home into a large den.

Decency and life.

"Officer."

"Governor."

The Right Honorable Governor of the state of Kansas, A. R. Stepps, was looking at the faint horizon – fields of grain identical to those that had funded his father's insurance company, which had in turn allowed Stepps to be a public servant. Tremain believed Stepps was the perfect governor: connected, distrustful of Washington, infuriated about crime in Topeka and the felons that Missouri sloughed off into his Kansas City but able to live with it all, his eye no further than the low star of a retirement spent teaching in Lawrence and cruising Scandia Lines routes with the wife.

But now there was Crow Ridge.

The governor's eyes lifted from a fax he'd been reading and scanned Tremain.

Look me over if you want. Go right ahead. His blue-and-black operations gear certainly looked incongruous here among the framed prints of shot ducks, the Lemon-Pledged mahogany antiques. Most frequently Stepps's eyes dipped to the large automatic pistol, which the trooper adjusted as he sat in the irritatingly scrolly chair. "He's killed one?"

Tremain nodded his head, which was covered with a thinning crew cut. He noted that the governor had a tiny hole in the elbow of his baby-blue cardigan and that he was absolutely terrified. "What happened?"

"Premeditated, looks like. I'm getting a full report but it looks like there was no reason for it. Sent her out like he was giving her up and shot her in the back."

"Oh, dear God. How young was she?"

"The oldest. A teenager. But still…"

The governor nodded toward a silver service. "Coffee? Tea?… No? You've never been here before, have you?"

"The governor's mansion? No." Though it wasn't a mansion; it was just a nice house, a house that rang with the sounds of family. "I need some help here, Officer. Some of your expertise."

"I'll do whatever I can, sir."

"An odd situation. These prisoners escaped from a federal penitentiary – What is it, Captain?"

"With all respect, sir, that prison at Callana's like it's got a revolving door in it." Tremain recalled four breakouts in the last five years. His own men had captured a number of the escapees, a record better than that of the U.S. marshals, who in Tremain's opinion were overpaid baby-sitters.

The governor began cautiously, like a man stepping onto November ice. "So they're technically federal escapees but they also're lined up for state sentences. Won't be till the year three thousand maybe but the fact is they're state felons too."

"But the FBI's in charge of the barricade." Tremain had been told specifically by the assistant attorney general that his services would not be required in this matter. The trooper was no expert on the hierarchy of state government but even schoolchildren knew that the AG and his underlings worked for the governor. Executive branch. "We have to defer to them, of course. And maybe it's for the best."

The governor said, "This Potter's a fine man…" His voice seemed not to stop but to deflate until it became a dwelling question mark.

Dan Tremain was a career law enforcer and had learned never to say anything that could be quoted back against him even before he'd learned how to cover two opposing doors when diving through a barricade window. "Pride of the FBI, I'm told," the trooper said, assuming that a tape recorder was running somewhere nearby, though it probably wasn't.

"But?" The governor raised an eyebrow.

"I understand he's taking a hard line."

"Which means what?"

Outside the window, threshers moved back and forth.

"It means that he's going to try to wear Handy down and get him to surrender."

"Will Potter attack eventually? If he has to?"

"He's just a negotiator. A federal hostage rescue team's being assembled. They should be here by early evening."

"And if Handy doesn't surrender they'll go in and…"

"Neutralize him."

The round face smiled. The governor looked nostalgically at an ashtray and then back to Tremain. "How soon after they get there will they attack?"

"The rule is that you don't assault except as a last resort. Rand Corporation did a study a few years ago and found that ninety percent of the hostages killed in a barricade are killed when the situation goes hot – when there's an assault. I was going to say something else, sir."