by Meg Gardiner
Ducking, Caitlin grabbed Emmerich’s wrists and desperately pulled, trying to get him out of Hayden’s sight. As she crabbed backward, peripherally she saw the shadow on the bar straighten to his full height. Arm extended.
Hayden’s first gunshot sailed over her head and hit the wall.
She hauled, her veins hissing with adrenaline. Emmerich lay like a 170-pound sack of quicklime, his belt buckle scraping the floor and catching on slats in the hardwood.
Hayden’s second shot ripped splinters from the floor six feet away. God.
Fear buzzed through her, an electric force. Caitlin dragged Emmerich behind a sheet-draped sofa. Footsteps thudded as Hayden jumped from the bar onto a nearby table.
“Twinkle, twinkle, Darkstar. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
He sounded like a Cub Scout.
“Bitch.”
He fired again. His ejected brass landed with a ting near Caitlin’s shoulder.
He was practically on top of her. Dropping flat, Caitlin belly crawled, sweeping her hands along the floor, searching for her gun. Hayden made a kissy sound, as if calling a cat.
Then he began to sing.
“All around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel …”
His voice was lilting and jokey. She couldn’t find her Glock.
“The monkey thought, ‘I’ve got a gun …’”
She had no place else to go. She turned. She was going to have to charge him.
Forcing away the image of his gun barrel, the all-devouring eye of death, she drew her knife and braced herself.
Directly above her, a table creaked. Hayden whispered. “Pop! goes the—”
“FBI. Drop your weapon.”
Emmerich racked the slide on his Glock.
Hayden’s shoes squeaked as he spun toward the sound. He fired, the noise blaring in Caitlin’s ears, and dived off the table.
She heard him hit the floor, but amid shadows and jumbled furniture, couldn’t spot him. She cast a look over her shoulder. Through moonlight she caught Emmerich’s eye. He’d barely moved behind the sofa. He had no angle and no strength to take a shot. He was bluffing.
Hayden’s footsteps drummed, running.
Emmerich slid his gun across the floor at her. She lunged and grabbed it. Climbed to a crouch.
The racing footsteps accelerated. She swung the Glock toward the sound. It faded—Hayden was breaking for the ballroom door. Caitlin leaned around the stacked tables.
Hayden fired again. Blindly, over his shoulder. She ducked. The heavy door banged open and he sped from the ballroom.
Sheathing her knife, Caitlin scrambled back to Emmerich’s side. He had pulled himself up and slumped against the sofa. His face was cornflour white and glazed with sweat. She put a hand on his arm. His skin was clammy.
Sitting up had left him panting. “Keep the Glock. Go.”
She shed her coat and draped it over him. The ballroom door swung slowly shut. Hayden’s footsteps thumped in the stairwell.
“He’s—”
She’d been about to say, He’s fleeing the building. But the rhythm of his footsteps was wrong. He was climbing.
In her earpiece a voice rose, distant and staticky. “There are lights on the top floor.”
Caitlin leaped to her feet. “Rainey. Thank God.” Hand to her ear, she rushed to the door. “Emmerich’s down. Ballroom, fifth floor.”
“On it.” Rainey’s timbre rose and became urgent. “I see Hannah.”
Caitlin’s blood felt radium-hot. “Where?”
“The top-floor apartment. Locked in a—bathroom, looks like. She’s yanking on the door, but it won’t open,” Rainey said. “Glass is gone from all the windows.”
Caitlin saw it clearly now. Hayden had taken Hannah to the top of the building, locked the girl in an apartment, then come back down in the elevator to lure the FBI team into his trap. She turned and peered across the ballroom at Emmerich.
“Get to her before he does,” he said, his voice fading.
“You’re—”
“This is his endgame.”
Caitlin raised her head to look up. Top floor.
To Emmerich, she called, “Backup’s on its way.”
She went.
52
Stepping into the thirtieth-floor hallway, Caitlin listened to the night.
She’d smashed the light bulb in the elevator so that when the doors opened, she wouldn’t present a brightly lit target. But she couldn’t stop the bell from ringing. She slid around the control panel into the high air above the city.
The wind whistled through missing apartment doors. Her hair swirled around her face. The Swallowtail felt like a desiccated shell. Through gaping doorways, she glimpsed city lights and heard a helicopter inbound.
From the hallway only ambient light was visible. Caitlin inched along the corridor. She had no idea whether Hayden was still running up the stairs or if he had grabbed an elevator and beaten her here.
She crept another step. The hall, the entire floor, felt empty. But it couldn’t be. Rainey had seen Hannah here.
A voice broke through the radio static—Keyes. “Patrol officers have entered the building. Ascending the fire stairs. SWAT is staging. They’re four minutes out.”
She murmured, “I don’t have four minutes.”
Endgame. Hayden would kill Hannah if he reached her first.
She counted six apartments on the floor, three on each side of the hall. She reached the first doorway. Taking a long breath, she entered. The apartment was wrecked—stripped and gutted. Drywall was torn off the walls, leaving the exposed two-by-four framing. No visible electric lights on. Still, she needed to conduct a room-by-room search. And she had to watch for fresh booby traps. Trip wires. Rugs placed over holes in the floor. Nail guns positioned to fire when she crossed an infrared beam, for all she knew. Every second ached.
Outside, a helicopter swept by, the letters fbi on its side. Its engine blatted, echoing between buildings.
Rainey’s voice came through Caitlin’s earpiece. She was aboard. “Have you on visual.”
Caitlin crept deeper into the apartment. Boots scratching on dust and paint chips. Wind hissing through the empty window frames. No Hannah, no Hayden.
From the helicopter, Rainey’s voice turned urgent. “He’s above you.”
Caitlin raised her flashlight and Emmerich’s Glock. Saw only a water-stained ceiling. She thought, crawl space.
“Where? I’m on the top floor.”
“No—there’s another floor above you. A penthouse.” Rainey’s voice was calm but intense. “The apartment directly across the hall has an internal staircase that goes up.”
Caitlin ran back to the hall. Outside the empty doorway of the apartment across the corridor, she pressed her back to the wall. The helicopter rounded a corner of the building, completing a sweep, its spotlight aimed above her. It slowed, dipped, and swung back around.
Rainey’s voice turned glacial. “Hannah broke out of the bathroom he’d locked her in. She ran deeper into the building. He’s hunting for her and closing. Hurry.”
53
Her back pressed to the wall outside the doorway, Caitlin listened for noise from within the apartment. The thump of the helicopter’s rotors filled her ears.
“Can’t hear, won’t be able to see around corners or up the stairs,” she said.
“I’m your eyes,” Rainey replied.
She swallowed, bolstered. “Copy.”
She spun through the empty doorway into the apartment. It too was gutted, windows gaping, but the drywall hadn’t been pulled down yet. Blank, impenetrable walls greeted her.
“Stairs to your left,” Rainey said.
Caitlin turned the corner. The staircase ascended to a darkened hallway on the penthouse level.
&nbs
p; Rainey radioed, “Hannah’s at the opposite end of the building from you. A great room. Hands duct-taped. She’s near a plate glass window that’s been broken out.”
Cross talk interrupted her. A SWAT commander. “Entering the building in one.”
Caitlin crept up the stairs, trying to stay silent. Halfway up, she thought, No. Simultaneously Rainey spoke the thought out loud.
“We’re past the time for stealth.”
Caitlin charged to the top of the stairs and backed against a wall. Shouted, “FBI.”
No response.
The helicopter continued its slow crawl across the air outside the building. It turned its spotlight on the penthouse.
Rainey said, “He ducked out of sight.”
The spotlight swept. Caitlin’s skin skittered. Her outside eyes had just gone blind.
The penthouse took up the top floor, corner to corner, but was a warren of rooms. She couldn’t wait for Rainey to find Hayden. Pulse drumming, she rounded a corner, clearing it in vertical slices, then combat-walked, gun aimed, flashlight sweeping.
She stopped.
She found herself in a bedroom. The window was covered with a dark sheet that shuddered in the wind. A second door on the far side of the room led toward the interior of the apartment. A table lamp, covered with a towel, hummed on the floor beside a sagging bed. The sheets were yellowed with sweat and grime. The wall above the headboard was pitted with bullet holes. Ghostly light seeped through them. They formed a giant eye.
Target practice. Or boredom. It was the room where Hayden had been nesting.
The smell, with the room semiprotected from the winter wind, thickened in Caitlin’s nose. Urine in an unflushed toilet. Grease. A frenzy of ants crawled over a moldy blue sandwich on the nightstand. Crumpled food wrappers whisked across the hardwood floor, scuttling like crabs.
On the grungy bed lay Hayden’s mother.
Officer Gretchen Maddox wore the coral pink twinset Caitlin had seen at the task force briefing. It was now torn and bloodstained. Her no-nonsense, cardboard-brown hair was tangled and matted with blood, as if she’d fought for her every breath against the person to whom she’d given life. She had been gagged with duct tape and bound to the bed frame with zip ties. Her face was puffy. Her eyes were open.
They were baby-blue, pupils fixed, as if targeting the doorway Caitlin had just come through. As if they’d been staring, unblinking, at that doorway for hours, fearing, hoping, knowing her end was inevitable and drawing close. Waiting for her only son to walk in and finish her.
To Caitlin’s utter shock, she was alive.
Gretchen squinted under the beam of the flashlight. Her chest rose convulsively.
Caitlin gave a hand signal. I’ll be back. She crossed the room toward the second door. But Gretchen bucked, frantic.
In two steps Caitlin reached the bed and ripped off the duct tape. “Which way did he go?”
Gretchen said nothing. With horror, Caitlin understood why her lower face was so puffy. Her mouth was crammed with spent bullets—and wedding rings.
She seemed close to choking, but Caitlin couldn’t spare the time to help her empty her mouth. She said, “Which way?”
Still Gretchen was mute. She could have lifted her head, nodded, indicated somehow. She didn’t.
But emotion flashed in her eyes. Fear, torment—and calculation.
Caitlin understood what she meant to do. Before Gretchen could gag out more than a few bullets, preparing to scream a warning to her son, Caitlin slapped the duct tape back over her mouth.
She turned and hurried to the far doorway. Shut off her flashlight and jammed it in her back pocket.
Rainey’s strained voice crackled in her earpiece. “I don’t have him.”
On the bed behind her, Gretchen thrashed and kicked. She tried to moan, to make a sound that would break through the thump of the helicopter. The sheet over the window beat back and forth like a moth’s wings.
Low, harsh, Caitlin spoke into the radio. “Hannah?”
“We’re circling. Will have her in view if—yes. She’s still in the great room. Searching for a way out. She freed her hands—she’s waving at me.” Rainey’s voice tightened. “I signaled back but can’t get to her. No visual on Hayden.”
Caitlin stole to the next room, gun aimed at the floor. She presumed Hayden was waiting to ambush her. Where?
He knew she was there. Knew she was coming. But he wasn’t running, wasn’t blundering around. He was either sneaking or lying in wait. In the penthouse maze, how could she find him? She needed a formula, a schematic, a Magic 8-Ball. X-ray vision. She needed Keyes.
Then it came to her. She didn’t need to radio him. Didn’t need Keyes in the room. She already had him. She had his research on the predictability of criminal behavior.
She edged to the doorway. In the hallway hung a mirror. Antique gold frame, beveled glass, four feet high, a means for those who’d once lived here to admire themselves as they swept past in splendor. It provided a glimpse into the next room.
It was a dining room. Ornate table, high-backed chairs. A second door, maybe to the kitchen. Two tall windows.
Outside them, the helicopter’s spotlight slowly panned the exterior wall of the building. It was the white of a streaking meteor. The windows turned briefly into two blind eyes.
Hayden stood between them, back against the outside wall, hiding in the helicopter’s blind spot.
The gun in his right hand was raised, aimed at the door through which Caitlin had the reflected view. He hadn’t spotted her in the mirror. He was waiting for her to walk down the hall past the doorway, like a target in a shooting gallery.
She needed to neutralize his advantage. To distract him, so she could get the drop on him.
And she needed to keep him from escaping to his right, through the second door, which led inexorably to Hannah. SWAT was infiltrating the hotel from the ground floor, headed up, but she couldn’t wait. She had to stop him, here.
Rainey’s voice came through her earpiece. “Still don’t have him. Or you. Hendrix, report.”
Caitlin couldn’t reply without giving away her position. Outside, the helicopter tilted and flew along the side of the building, searching.
Please let me bet correctly.
The spotlight retreated, light fading. She crouched in the doorway. In her hand she held a warm, wet, jagged blossom—one of the spent bullets Gretchen had spit from her mouth. Checking her balance, she leaned from the doorway into the hall. Like skipping a pebble, she tossed the bullet around the corner, into the room where Hayden was lurking. It bounced, spun, and clattered to rest at his feet.
Hayden grabbed it. For a second, he seemed mystified. Then his head jerked up.
He peered through the doorway, into the hall. And saw Caitlin in the mirror.
54
Caitlin stared through the doorway at Hayden’s reflection in the hallway mirror. From the dining room, Hayden stared back. He had a clear view of her, the indirect light providing a ghostly look at her face.
She held entirely still. Come on, she thought. Do it. Do what Keyes says you should, without even thinking. Throw the bullet away to the right, and break left.
His face, backlit by the retreating helicopter spotlight, was a shadow—the opposite of the high-gain images on all the surveillance videos Caitlin had seen. It was absence, darkness, nothingness. His hand, holding the bullet, was a fist.
He flung the bullet to his right.
Then he angled left and charged straight toward the doorway and at the mirror.
Hayden raised his gun and fired. Caitlin saw the muzzle flash an instant before the bullet hit the mirror. The glass cracked. The report boomed. The frame jumped against the wall.
Hayden, standing in the dining room, stared at the fissured glass and realized his mistake—that he hadn’t f
ired at Caitlin, but at her reflection.
She braced, muzzle up, waiting for him to come at her. She was ready to put her gun to his head when he came through the dining room doorway into the hall.
He didn’t. Standing inside the dining room, he spun to face the wall between them.
Jesus.
The wall was rotting Sheetrock. And he’d played with that plenty, shooting the giant eye into the wall of the bedroom where his mother was held prisoner.
She dropped and rolled just before his shot blew through the wall, chest high.
Chunks of drywall flew. Caitlin flipped onto her back, knees bent, Glock aimed straight back at the wall. Part of her shrieking, Fire. Another part hissing, Shoot a sixteen-year-old? Unseen? Coward. Training telling her, Know your safe zone of fire. Know your target and what’s behind it.
Her finger hovered on the trigger. Drywall dust rained on the floor. Rounds from Emmerich’s powerful Glock would penetrate the crumbling plaster as easily as they would paper plates. With Hannah downrange. She held fire.
On the far side of the wall, footsteps raced. Her adrenaline spiked and she swung the Glock at the doorway, waiting for Hayden to swivel around.
The footsteps retreated. He was running deeper into the apartment.
She scrambled to her feet. “Rainey. He’s running. I think toward the great room.”
Rainey’s voice was staticky. “Hannah’s still in there.”
Caitlin charged from the bedroom into the hall. “Can you signal her to take cover?”
“Too complicated. And you’re closer.”
Caitlin bounced off the cracked hallway mirror and rebounded into the dining room. “Hannah,” she yelled. “Hide.”
She sprinted past the dining room table, out the second door, into a spacious kitchen. At the far side of the room, past a hulking refrigerator, a swinging door swiveled back and forth. Caitlin rushed across, brought herself up short, and kicked the swinging door. She jumped back, yanked open the fridge door, and ducked behind it.
A shot came through the swinging door and hit the fridge, ringing against the aluminum.
