The negotiator rubbed his eyes and leaned back and took the cup of the dreadful coffee Derek set beside him. "I don't get it," he said to no one in particular.
"What?" Budd asked.
"A hostage escaped and he's angry. That part I understand. But he doesn't seem angry because he lost a bargaining chip. He's angry for some other reason." He looked across the van. "Angie? Our resident psychologist? Have any ideas?"
She organized her thoughts, then said, "I think Handy's big issue is control. He says he's killed people because they didn't do what he wanted. I've heard that before. A convenience store clerk didn't put the money in the robber's bag as fast as he wanted so she's the one guilty of an offense, not him. That gave him, in effect, permission to kill her."
"Is that why he killed Susan?" Budd asked.
Potter rose and paced. "Ah, a very good question, Charlie."
"I agree," Angie said. "A key question."
"Why her?" Potter continued.
"Well, what I actually meant," Budd said, "was why did he kill her? Why go to that extreme?"
"Oh, when somebody breaks his rules, however slightly," Angie said, "any punishment's fair. Death, torture, rape. In Handy's world, even misdemeanors are capital offenses. But let's ask Arthur's question. Why her? Why Susan Phillips? That's the important issue. Henry, tell us about the girl."
LeBow's finger clattered. He read from the screen. "Seventeen. Born of deaf parents. IQ of one hundred and forty-six."
"This is hard to listen to," Budd muttered. Potter nodded for LeBow to go on.
"First in her class at the Laurent Clerc School. And listen to this. She's got a record."
"What?"
"She was a protestor last year at Topeka School for the Deaf, a part of Hammersmith College. They wanted a deaf dean. Fifty students got arrested and Susan slugged a cop. They dropped the charges for assault but gave her a suspended for trespass."
LeBow continued, "Volunteered at the Midwest Bicultural/Bilingual Center. There's an article here--in the material Angie brought." He skimmed it. "Apparently it's an organization that opposes something called 'mainstreaming.' "
Angie said, "The dean of the Clerc School told me about that. It's a movement to force the Deaf into regular schools. It's very controversial. Deaf activists oppose it."
"All right," Potter said. "Let's file that away for a moment. Now, who's Handy given up so far?"
"Jocylyn and Shannon," Angie said.
"Anything in common about them?"
"Doesn't seem to be," Budd said. "In fact, looks like they're opposites. Jocylyn's a timid little thing. Shannon's feisty. She's a little Susan Phillips."
"Angie?" Potter said. "What do you think."
"Control again. Susan was a direct threat to him. She had an in-your-face attitude. She probably challenged his control directly. Now, Shannon, with her kicking Bonner . . . Handy'd sense the same threat but on a smaller scale. He wouldn't feel the need to kill her--to reassert control in the most extreme way possible--but he'd want her out. Jocylyn? She was crying all the time. Sniveling. She got on his nerves. That's a way to eat at his control too."
"What about the adults?" LeBow asked. "I'd think they'd be more of a threat than the children."
"Oh, not necessarily," Angie said. "The older teacher, Donna Harstrawn, is half-comatose, it sounds like. No threat there."
"And Melanie Charrol?"
Angie said, "The dean at the school told me that she's got a reputation for being very timid."
"But look at what she just did," Potter said. "Getting Kielle out."
"A fluke, I'd guess. Probably impulse." She gazed out the window. "He's an odd one, Handy is."
"Unique in my experience," Potter said. "Say, Henry, read to us from your opus. Tell us what we know about him so far."
LeBow sat up slightly and read in a stiff voice. "Louis Jeremiah Handy is thirty-five years old. Mother raised him after his alcoholic father went to jail when the baby was six months. The mother drank too. Child protective services considered placing him and his brothers in foster homes several times but nothing ever came of it. No evidence he was abused or beaten, though when his father returned from prison--Lou was eight--the man was arrested several times for beating up his neighbors. The father finally took off when Handy was thirteen and was killed a year later in a barroom fight. His mother died a year after that."
Officer Frances Whiting shook her head with undirected sympathy.
"Handy killed his first victim at age fifteen. He used a knife though he apparently had a gun on him and could have used the more merciful weapon. It took the victim, a boy his age, a long time to die. Six years in juvenile for that then out long enough to earn a string of GTA arrests, carjackings, assault, D&D. Suspected in ATM stickups and bank robberies. Was almost convicted twice for major jobs but the witnesses were killed before trial. No link to him could be proved.
"His two brothers were in and out of trouble with the law over the years. The eldest was killed five years ago, as I mentioned before. It was thought Handy might have done it. No known whereabouts for the younger brother.
"As Handy's career's progressed," LeBow said to his audience, "he's gotten more violent." It was the severity and randomness of his crimes that seemed to escalate, the intelligence officer explained. Recently he'd taken to killing for no apparent reason and--in the robbery in which he'd most recently been convicted--started committing arson.
Potter interrupted to say, "Tell us specifically what happened at the Wichita robbery. The Farmers & Merchants S&L."
Henry LeBow scrolled through the screen, then continued, "Handy, Wilcox, a two-time felon named Fred Laskey, and Priscilla Gunder--Handy's girlfriend--robbed the Farmers & Merchants S&L in Wichita. Handy ordered a teller to take him into the vault but she moved too slow for him. Handy lost his temper, beat her, and locked her and another woman teller inside the vault, then went outside and got a can of gas. Doused the inside of the bank and lit it. The fire was the reason he was caught. If they'd just run with the twenty thousand they'd have made it but it took him another five minutes or so to torch the place. That gave the cops and Pete Henderson's men time to roll up, silent."
He summarized the rest of the drama: There was a shootout in front of the bank. The girlfriend got away and Handy, Wilcox, and Laskey stole another car but got stopped by a roadblock a mile away. They'd climbed out and walked toward the cops. Handy fired a hidden gun through Laskey's back, killing him and wounding two of the arresting officers before being wounded himself.
"Pointless." Budd shook his head. "That fire. Burning up those women."
"Oh, no, the fire was one way to regain control of the situation," Angie said.
Potter quoted, " 'They didn't do what I wanted. When I wanted it.' "
"Maybe people like Handy'll become your specialty, Arthur," Tobe said.
Two years until retirement; as if I need a specialty, thought Potter. And one that includes the Lou Handys of the world.
Budd sighed.
"You all right, Captain?" Potter asked.
"I don't know if I'm exactly made for this kind of work."
"Ah, you're doing fine."
But of course the young trooper was right. He wasn't made for this line of work; nobody was.
"Listen, Charlie, the troopers're probably getting antsy by now. I want you to make the rounds, you and Dean. Calm 'em down. See about coffee. And for God's sake make sure their heads're down. Keep yours that way too."
"I'll come with you, Charlie," Angie said. "If it's okay with Arthur."
"Catch up with him, Angie. I want to talk to you for a moment."
"I'll meet you outside," she called, and pulled her chair closer to Potter.
"Angie, I need an ally," Potter said. "Someone inside." She glanced at him. "Melanie?"
"Was that really just a fluke, what she did? Or can I count on some help?"
Angie thought for a minute. "When Melanie was a high-school student there, Laurent Clerc wa
s an oralist school. Signing was forbidden."
"It was?"
"It was a mainstream school. But Melanie realized that was stifling her--which is what all educators are now coming to realize. What she did was to develop her own sign language, one that was very subtle--basically just using the fingers--so the teachers didn't notice it the way you'd see people signing in ASL. Her language spread through the school like wildfire."
"She created a language?"
"Yep. She found that the ten fingers alone weren't enough for a working vocabulary and syntax. So the variable element she introduced was brilliant. It had never been done in sign language before. She used rhythm. She overlaid a temporal structure on the finger shapes. Her inspiration was apparently orchestral conductors."
Arthur Potter, who, after all, made his living with language, was fascinated.
Angie continued, "Right around that time there were protests to shift to a curriculum where ASL was taught and one of the reasons cited by the deaf teachers in favor of doing so was that so many students were using Melanie's language. But Melanie wouldn't have anything to do with the protests. She denied that she'd invented the language--as if she was afraid the administration would punish her for it. All she wanted to do was study and go home. Very talented, very smart. Very scared. She had a chance to go to Gallaudet College in Washington this summer on a fellowship. She turned it down."
"Why?"
"Nobody knew. Her brother's accident maybe."
Potter recalled that the young man was having surgery tomorrow. He wondered if Henderson had gotten in touch with the family. "Maybe," he mused, "there's just a certain timidity that goes along with being deaf."
"Excuse me, Agent Potter." Frances Whiting leaned forward. "Is that like a certain amount of fascism goes along with being a federal agent?"
Potter blinked. "I'm sorry?"
Frances shrugged. "Stereotyping. The Deaf have had to deal with it forever. That they're kings of the beggars. That they're stupid. Deaf and dumb. That they're timid . . . . Helen Keller said that blindness cuts you off from things, deafness cuts you off from people. So the Deaf compensate. There's no other defining physical condition that's given rise to a culture and community the way deafness has. There's a huge diversity among--pick a group: gays, paraplegics, athletes, tall people, short people, the elderly, alcoholics. But the Deaf community is militantly cohesive. And it's anything but timid."
Potter nodded. "I stand chastised." The officer smiled in response.
He looked out over the scruffy field beside them. He said to Angie, "My feeling is that I can get only so far with Handy through negotiations. It could save three or four lives if somebody inside was helping us."
"I'm not sure she's the one who can do it," Angie said.
"Noted," he said. "You better go find Charlie now. He's probably wondering what's become of you."
Angie left the van, Frances too, on her way to the hotel to check on the hostages' families. Potter sat back in the desk chair, picturing the photo of Melanie's face, her wavy blond hair.
How beautiful she is, he mused to himself.
Then he sat up, laughing to himself.
A beautiful face? What was he thinking of?
A negotiator must never Stockholm with hostages. That's the first rule of barricades. He has to be ready to sacrifice them if need be. Still, he couldn't stop thinking about her. This was ironic, for nowadays he rarely thought of women in terms of physical appearance. Since Marian died he'd had only one romantic involvement. A pleasant woman in her late thirties. It was a liaison doomed from the start. Potter now believed you could return successfully to romantic love at age sixty and above. But in your forties and fifties, he suspected, the process was doomed. It's the inflexibility. And the pride. Oh, and always the doubts.
Gazing at the slaughterhouse, he thought: In the past fifteen years, since Marian, the most meaningful conversations I've had have been not with my surrogate cousin Linden or her clansmen or the women who've hung chastely on my arm at functions in the District. No, they've been with men holding oiled guns at the heads of hostages. Women with short black hair and Middle Eastern faces, though very Western code names. Criminals and psychopaths and potential suicides. I've spilled my guts to them and they to me. Oh, they'd lie about tactics and motives (as I did) but everyone told the exquisite truth about themselves: their hopes, their dreams dead and dreams living still, their families, their children, their scorching failures.
They told their stories for the same reasons Arthur Potter told his. To wear the other side down, to establish bonds, to "transfer the emotive response" (as his own highly circulated hostage negotiation guidebook, eighth printing, explained).
And simply because someone seemed to want to listen.
Melanie . . . will we ever have a conversation, the two of us?
He saw Dean Stillwell wave to him and stepped into the fragrant gully to meet the sheriff. He glanced at the shreds of fog wafting around the van. So Handy's weather report wasn't up to date after all. It gave him a fragment of hope--unreasonable perhaps, but hope nonetheless. He looked up at the late-afternoon sky, in which strips of yellow and bruise-colored clouds sped past. In a break between two of the vaporous shapes he saw the moon, a pale crescent sitting over the slaughterhouse, directly above the blood-red brick.
6:03 P.M.
They appeared suddenly, the dozen men.
The slippery wind covered the noise of their approach and by the time the agent was aware of them they'd surrounded him and Dean Stillwell, who was telling Potter about the dock behind the slaughterhouse. Stillwell had looked over the river and the dock and concluded that, even though the current was fast, as Budd had reported, it was too tempting an escape route. He'd put some armored troops in a skiff and anchored them twenty yards offshore.
Potter noticed Dean Stillwell look up and stare at something behind the agent. He turned.
The team was dressed in black and navy-blue combat gear. Potter recognized the outfits--the American Body Armor plated vests, the rubberized ducking uniforms and hoods, the H&K submachine guns with laser sights and flashlights. It was a Hostage Rescue Team, though not his, and Arthur Potter didn't want these men within a hundred miles of the Webber & Stoltz Processing Company.
"Agent Potter?"
A nod. Be gracious. Don't jerk leashes until leashes need to be jerked.
He shook the hand of the crew-cut man in his forties.
"I'm Dan Tremain. Commander of the state police Hostage Rescue Unit." His still eyes were confident. And challenging. "I understand you're expecting a Delta team."
"The Bureau's HRT actually. Jurisdiction, you know."
"Course."
Potter introduced him to Stillwell, whom Tremain ignored.
"What's the status?" Tremain asked.
"They're contained. One fatality."
"I heard," Tremain said, rubbing a gold pinky ring on which was a deep etching of a cross.
"We've gotten three girls out unhurt," Potter continued. "There are four other girls inside and two teachers. The HTs've asked for a chopper, which we aren't going to give them. They've threatened to execute another hostage at seven unless we have it here by then."
"You're not going to give him one?"
"No."
"But what'll happen?"
"I'm going to try to talk him through it."
"Well, why don't we deploy just the same? I mean, if it comes down to him killing her, I know you'll want to move in."
"No," Potter said, looking over at the press table, where Joe Silbert and his assistant were diligently typing away on a computer. The reporter looked up glumly. Potter nodded and glanced back at Tremain.
The state police commander said, "You're not saying that you'd let him kill the girl, are you?"
"Let's hope it doesn't come to that."
Acceptable casualties . . .
Tremain held his eye for a moment. "I'm thinking we really ought to move into position. Just in case."
Potter glanced at the men and gestured Tremain aside. They walked into the shadow of the command van. "If it comes down to an assault, and I certainly hope it doesn't, then my team'll be the one doing it--and only my team. Sorry, Captain, that's just the way it is."
Was this going to explode? Shoot straight to the governor and the Admiral in Washington?
Tremain bristled but he shrugged. "You're in charge, sir. But those men are state felons too and our regulations require us to be on the scene. And that's just the way it is too."
"I have no objection at all to your presence, Captain. And if they come out, guns ablazing, I'd sure welcome your firepower. But as long as it's understood that you're taking orders from me."
Tremain relented. "Fair enough. Fact is, I told my men that we'll probably be spending three hours drinking coffee and then pack up and go home."
"Let's hope so for all our sakes. If you want to go into position as part of the containment crew, Sheriff Stillwell here's in charge of that."
The two men nodded at each other coolly and every soul within earshot knew there was no way an HRT commander would put his men under the orders of a small-town sheriff. Potter hoped this would guarantee that Tremain would hightail it out of here.
"I think we'll just hang back. Stay out of sight. If you need us we'll be around."
"Whatever you want, Captain," Potter said.
Budd and Angie appeared, striding up the hill, and stopped suddenly. "Hey, Dan," Budd said, recognizing Tremain.
"Charlie." They shook hands. Tremain's eyes took in Angie's hair and face but it was a chaste examination, one of curiosity, and when his eyes dipped downward to her chest it was simply to confirm from her necklace ID that she was in fact an FBI agent.
"You boys heard about our little situation, did you?" Budd said.
Tremain laughed. "How 'bout, anybody watches TV knows about it. Who's working the CP?"
"Derek Elb."
"Derek the Red?" Tremain laughed. "I gotta say hi to him." Now jovial, Tremain said to Potter, "That boy wanted to join HRU but we took one look at that hair on him and thought he'd be just a little too prominent in a sniper's scope."
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