Twenty

by James Grippando

Andie gripped the fire extinguisher, not sure if the best defense was to spray the shooter with foam or to throw the entire metal canister like a mortar shell.

  “Are you hurt?” a man shouted.

  Andie recognized the black uniform of Miami-Dade SWAT in the nick of time, sparing him a face full of fire retardant.

  “I’m FBI!” she shouted, as she flashed her credentials.

  “Come with me!”

  “My daughter’s in this classroom!”

  “My job is to clear this hallway!”

  “I’m not leaving my daughter!”

  He seemed to comprehend that the children would be safer with a law enforcement officer there, but it was obvious that standing guard with a fire extinguisher wasn’t a viable plan. He reached for the electronic passkey that was linked to his belt and stepped closer, to be heard over the blaring alarm.

  “Announce yourself before you enter,” he said. “Lock the door and barricade it once you’re inside. Don’t let anyone leave until I come back with the ‘all clear.’”

  He inserted the passkey. The electronic lock clicked. Andie called out to the teacher at the top of her lungs.

  “Ms. Hernandez! It’s Righley’s mother! I’m coming in!”

  “Mommy!” the reply came, and the little voice from inside nearly crushed her.

  Andie turned to thank the SWAT officer, but he was already gone. She opened the door and hurried inside a kindergarten classroom under siege.

  Chapter 3

  Jack watched from outside the campus grounds, having positioned himself as close to the entrance gates as possible without crossing the yellow police tape. The hysteria around him was palpable, the desperate pleas of parents blending into a cacophony of English and Spanish. Jack’s español wasn’t bad—his abuela gave him about a C minus—but in all his years in Miami, he’d never heard it spoken with such urgency. He was pretty sure he’d heard the group of Latina moms behind him correctly, but he needed to clarify.

  “Excuse me,” he said slowly in Spanish, overenunciating in hopes that the woman behind him would take his cue and answer in the same cadence. “Did you say they are evacuating students?”

  The woman’s emotions were running too high for her to speak slowly, and Jack’s loose handle on Cuban American Spanglish was no match for a native Colombian speaker. But he got the gist: police had begun to evacuate students through the riverside access to campus. The implicit good news was not lost on him.

  The police must have been confident that the shooting was over.

  The crowd outside the gate was growing larger by the minute, and getting from one side of campus to the other wouldn’t be easy. But Jack had still heard nothing from Andie, and he needed to find his wife and daughter. He squeezed his way around one person after another, zigzagging his way past uniformed police, scrambling journalists, and tearful parents. It took ten minutes just to get to the end of the block, where he made a left turn toward the river. With each passing square of sidewalk underfoot, he sensed that more and more frantic people were moving with him in the same direction. News of the evacuation appeared to be spreading. Jack hoped it wasn’t just another worthless rumor. He’d heard plenty of misinformation already, everything from “It was just a bunch of firecrackers” to “Dozens of children and teachers dead.”

  Jack was getting close to the campus’s rear exit. The attractive coral-rock wall that protected three sides of the ten-acre campus gave way to a purely functional chain-link fence. On the other side of the fence was an open athletic field, and through the gaps in the eight-foot privacy hedge, Jack spotted lines of students, each line led by an adult, leaving the building. They were moving quickly but in orderly fashion, each student with one hand in the air and the other resting on the shoulder of the boy or girl they followed. Jack found an opening in the crowd and sprinted the last hundred yards to the field exit. A police officer was at the gate.

  “Have they evacuated kindergarten yet?” Jack asked.

  “I really don’t know, sir.” A line of older students passed, and her attention shifted fully toward crowd control. “Don’t crowd the gate, please!”

  “Where would they be, if they came out already?”

  The officer’s focus was entirely on the students. “Keep moving! Don’t stop until you get to the high school parking lot.”

  It wasn’t a direct response to Jack, but it answered his question. He ran ahead of the last line of students, passing a second and third line on his way to the parking lot. The children he saw were too old for elementary school but not yet teenagers. Probably middle schoolers—not a one of them too cool to be caught crying under these circumstances. Jack approached a teacher at the head of the line.

  “Has kindergarten come out yet?” he asked, alarmed by the level of desperation he detected in his own voice.

  “That’s Building G,” she said. “We’re F. They’d be somewhere behind us.”

  Jack did a quick pivot and ran back in the direction of the school. The lines were coming nonstop. The school was in full-throttle evacuation mode. Kindergarten had to be part of it. Unless the worst thing imaginable had happened.

  The thought propelled him to an all-out sprint back to the rear gate.

  The officer stopped him. “Nobody goes in, sir.”

  “I need to find my family.”

  “Jack!”

  He turned at the sound of Andie’s voice. He’d run right past her in the crowd. Righley was in her arms. He ran to them and wrapped his arms around them so tightly that he could barely breathe.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yes. We’re okay. Her whole class is okay.”

  Jack couldn’t let go.

  “Let’s walk to your office,” said Andie. “I want Righley out of here.”

  Righley’s teacher was fending off questions from every angle. Jack was able to get her attention long enough to let her know that they were leaving with their daughter. Andie was already on her way and carrying Righley with her. Jack caught up and offered to give Andie’s arms a rest, but Andie refused to give up her daughter.

  “Have you heard anything?” asked Jack.

  Andie threw him a look that said, Not in front of Righley.

  Jack placed his set of earbuds in Righley’s ears, opened the Spotify app on his smartphone, and tuned to the playlist labeled Righley’s Stuff.

  “How about some music, Pumpkin?”

  Righley nodded, and the playful sound of her favorite music took some of the fear out of her eyes. Jack and Andie kept walking toward his office. Andie seemed satisfied that they were free to talk.

  “You probably know more than I do,” said Andie. “I’ve been locked in a classroom with zero information. My cell didn’t even work.”

  “I’ve picked up a few things from reporters here and there.”

  “Have they identified the shooter?”

  “If they have, they’re not saying. But all the networks are saying that they recovered a semiautomatic pistol. It’s registered to a forty-one-year-old man who has kids in the school.”

  “Are you kidding me? A school parent?”

  “Amir something is his name. Begins with a ‘K.’”

  Andie brought them to a dead halt. “Amir Khoury?”

  “Yes, that’s it. Do you know him?”

  Andie’s expression ran cold. “My friend Molly—that’s her husband.”

  Not another word was said until they reached Jack’s office.

  The Law Office of Jack Swyteck P.A. was on the first floor of a ninety-year-old house near the Miami River, and, more important, blocks away from the Criminal Justice Center. The first time Jack had set foot on the old Dade County pine floors, this old house was home to the Freedom Institute, a ragtag group of talented lawyers who specialized in death penalty work. It was Jack’s first job fresh out of law school. Four years of defending the guilty proved to be enough for Jack, so he struck out as a sole practitioner. A decade later, when his mentor passed away and the Insti
tute was on the brink of financial collapse, Jack bought the building. He set up shop downstairs. His old friends from the Institute leased space upstairs. Jack couldn’t remember the last time they had actually made a rent payment.

  Jack’s assistant met them at the door. Bonnie had been with Jack for years. Andie called her “the Roadrunner,” so named because she knew only one speed—full throttle—when zipping around the office.

  “Is she—” Bonnie started to ask, but Jack gave her a quick shush signal. Righley was sound asleep in her mother’s arms.

  “Poor angel,” said Bonnie.

  Andie took her into what had once been the dining room of the old house—now Jack’s private office. Jack cleared away the trial notebooks, and Andie laid Righley on the couch.

  “She’s wiped out,” said Jack.

  “Better off in her dreams,” said Andie.

  They stepped out of Jack’s office and into the reception area. Bonnie had the television tuned to the local news coverage. Amir Khoury’s name and photograph were on every broadcast in America, confirming Jack’s info. But Jack was confused on many levels.

  “Your friend Molly strikes me as WASPy enough to be a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution,” said Jack.

  “She is. She fell in love and married a Muslim.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “What do you mean ‘where’s he from’? Camp al-Qaeda—is that what you’re implying?”

  “I’m not implying anything,” said Jack. “His gun was found on the scene of a school shooting. I’m just asking the question.”

  “He’s from Fort Lauderdale. Whenever anyone raised an eyebrow, as if lily-white Molly and her Muslim husband were the odd couple, she’d say it was destiny: they were born in the same hospital, Broward General. I cannot believe this is happening.”

  Andie’s cell rang, and she checked the incoming number. “It’s Schwartz.”

  Guy Schwartz was the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Miami field office. Jack knew him better as that guy who always called right before Andie had to leave in the middle of dinner, cancel her daughter’s birthday party, or disappear on assignment for days or even weeks at a time.

  Andie stepped to the other side of the reception area to take the call. It lasted only a minute, and she didn’t look happy when it ended. Jack had seen Andie’s work face before, and he knew that there would no explanation coming. Just an announcement. It was all part of being married to an FBI agent.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  Andie’s partner picked her up at Jack’s office. He brought a replacement sidearm, since Andie’s was still locked in the glove compartment of Jack’s SUV, and the SUV was parked on a street so crowded that it was impassable.

  Andie knew Molly’s address. Their friendship was precisely the reason for the call from the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Miami field office.

  “Miami-Dade Police have a no-knock warrant for the Khoury residence,” ASAC Schwartz had told her. “No knock” meant that law enforcement would literally break down the door.

  “Have they executed?”

  “About to. And they want you there when they do.”

  “Why?”

  “No one knows how this might go down. You know the Khoury family. You might be useful in de-escalating the situation, if need be.”

  Andie could have resisted and said she wanted to be with her daughter the moment Righley woke, but Schwartz’s directions had left her no option: “Andie, the bureau could have jurisdiction here, if this turns out to be terrorist related.”

  Andie’s partner turned at Santa Maria Street, one of the most prestigious addresses in Coral Gables that was not on the waterfront. Lined with majestic live oaks and some of the best preserved colonial-style and other historic mansions in South Florida, the quiet old side street bisected the golf course of the famous Riviera Country Club, offering residents drop-dead views of beautiful fairways, not to mention a lifetime supply of golf balls, compliments of innumerable club members with a nasty slice. Molly had joked about not being able to cut a donation check to Riverside on top of three tuitions, but it was indeed a joke.

  They parked on the street. Andie and her partner simultaneously climbed out of the vehicle. The front door to Molly’s house was wide open. Two police officers were standing guard on the porch. A line of yellow police tape demarked the entire front yard as a crime scene.

  “Looks like they executed without us,” said Andie’s partner.

  “Wasn’t the whole point that they wanted me here?”

  A Miami-Dade police officer approached and explained. “We couldn’t wait any longer. The suspect’s name has gone viral. The media is hyper-focused on the school, but any minute now this entire street is going to be a mob scene. More packed than Halloween night.”

  Andie took his point. For Andie, Jack, Righley, and about fifty thousand other annual visitors, Santa Maria was the South Florida trick-or-treating destination of choice. Many a law enforcement officer had done Halloween crowd-control duty on Santa Maria.

  As if on cue, the first media van pulled up and stopped across the street from the Khoury residence. Seconds later, Molly’s midnight-blue Mercedes arrived and stopped in the driveway. Molly and her three children were inside. The front doors swung open, and as Molly stepped out from behind the wheel, Miami-Dade police officers surrounded the vehicle, weapons drawn.

  “Freeze!” an officer shouted.

  “Don’t shoot!” Molly screamed.

  Molly’s younger children were in the back seat, the older of the two stunned into silence and Molly’s eight-year-old daughter crying hysterically. Molly’s oldest son was standing beside the open passenger’s-side door with his hands in the air. Xavier was a high school senior at Riverside. Last Andie had heard, he was heading to MIT after graduation.

  “Mom, it’s okay,” said Xavier. “I did it.”

  Chapter 4

  Not until late afternoon was the neighborhood around the school clear enough for Jack to walk over and retrieve the SUV. On a normal workday he would never leave his office between four and six p.m., but Righley desperately wanted her mother, so he pushed through rush-hour traffic out of downtown Miami.

  Their house was on Key Biscayne, a tropical island community that connected by causeway to the entirely different world of high-rise condominiums along Miami’s Brickell-area waterfront. Many thought of “the Key” as paradise. Jack felt lucky to live there. Real estate was priced way beyond his means, but years earlier, before he’d even met Andie, he’d cut a steal of a deal on one of the last remaining Mackle homes, basically a 1,200-square-foot shoe box built right after World War II as affordable housing for returning GIs. Those had to be some of the happiest veterans in the history of warfare. On a day like this one, the fact was not lost on Jack that the Key still had one of the lowest crime rates in America.

  Jack pulled into their driveway, a crunchy swatch of crushed seashells that was big enough for just one car. Righley unbuckled herself from her car seat and ran to the front door. Andie met her there.

  “Mommy!”

  It wasn’t the usual “Mommy” of pure joy and excitement. Righley’s voice had a more distressed quality. Back at the office, Jack had been under the impression that he and Bonnie were doing a pretty good job with Righley in the wake of trauma. The way she was clinging to her mother, however, made Jack realize that this was going to be a long road.

  Andie led Righley back to her bedroom to change out of her school uniform. Jack went to the kitchen, opened a beer, and turned on the five o’clock news. All day long, the “breaking news” alerts had been about the shooting at Riverside. The young reporter on the screen was standing about a block away from the school, not far from where Jack had parked the SUV that morning. This time, the breaking news was actually something he didn’t already know.

  “Nationwide, this is the two-hundred-and-ninety-fifth mass shooting so far this year,” said the reporte
r, “and it is one of the most deadly. Thirteen are confirmed dead. The identity of the victims has been withheld pending notification of next of kin. Now our sources are also telling us that the terrorist organization al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility for the shooting. Law enforcement has yet to confirm that information.”

  Andie entered the kitchen. Righley was showered and in her room. The nightly routine of trying on every nightgown she owned, deciding which princess to be, had begun.

  “A link to terrorism would change the complexion of this investigation,” said Jack. “Is the FBI going to take jurisdiction?”

  “I can’t talk about that, Jack.”

  The separation of work and family was standard operating procedure for any FBI agent, and that was especially true when the agent was married to a criminal defense lawyer. Still, Jack thought she might make an exception for a criminal matter that directly affected their family.

  “What can you tell me?” asked Jack.

  “The standard-issue magazine on the semiautomatic pistol used in the shooting is thirteen rounds. The shooter went through four extended magazines, thirty-three rounds each. Over a hundred and thirty rounds fired in less than five minutes.”

  “That sounds like a lot. Is it, as far as school shootings go?”

  “Not as many as Sandy Hook; a few more than Parkland. But keep in mind this shooter was using a handgun, not an assault rifle.”

  Jack found it interesting that she didn’t refer to the shooter by name. “What’s happening with Xavier?”

  “He’s in custody.”

  “Are they questioning anyone else in the family?”

  “Molly’s husband isn’t even in the country, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s in London on a business trip.”

  It wasn’t like Andie to sling passive-aggressive reminders of “innocent until proven guilty” in Jack’s direction. But nothing was normal about this day. Andie seemed in denial, clinging to the irrational hope that by some miracle things had not forever changed between Molly and her. Jack left her alone for a while and went back to Righley’s room. Her wet towel was on the floor, as were Mulan, Ariel, and Jasmine. She’d selected her Rapunzel nightgown and was standing in front of the full-length mirror, trying to run a comb through her tangled, wet hair.