SWAT Standoff

by LENA DIAZ,

  “Roots.”

  “Roots? Like tree roots?”

  She laughed. “Hair roots. His wife is a bottle blonde. I saw her pictures at the house, with dark roots.”

  “You’re not a bottle blonde.” His voice was husky.

  Her face flamed hot. She cleared her throat. “The salon Mrs. Grant uses is expensive, exclusive and has a long waiting list. It takes months to get an appointment. According to the owner, their clients never cancel.”

  “Never?”

  “So she said.” She rolled her eyes. “Mrs. Grant has standing appointments every three months to do her roots. She’s been going there for years and has never missed an appointment. She had one the day she supposedly left on vacation. An appointment she did not keep. And she never called the salon. They’re very unhappy with her.”

  She waved at the board again. “Plus, I may not have children of my own, but I have nieces and nephews. And I know how parents are about recitals of any kind, especially dance. Having your kid in dance classes is really expensive. The lessons alone are outrageous, but add to that the cost of outfits, and it skyrockets. It’s a tremendous investment of money and time. And it all leads up to the recitals. You don’t miss recitals. Period.”

  He stared at the board, appearing deep in thought. Donna decided to read off a few more of the bullet points herself.

  “A mysterious cruise was arranged for the wives of the SWAT team. They were the only ones who ‘won’ tickets, even though it was supposed to be a charity for law-enforcement families. The wives left the day before the SWAT team disappeared.

  “Lopez used his influence to help the one-time charity set up the cruise, to get past city permitting issues.

  “The ONLY law-enforcement families on the cruise were from Destiny, even though the cruise was arranged by a charity out of Knoxville...”

  She stopped. It was her turn to frown and puzzle over what she was seeing.

  “What is it?” Blake asked.

  “The cruise. Lopez’s involvement seems to connect it with Grant, like so much of whatever is going on. And it was obviously focused on the wives of our officers. But there’s a different slant to this than everything else.”

  He stepped beside her, as if he could see what she was thinking if he looked at the clues from the same angle. “Go on.”

  “Randy was murdered, which proves whoever took the rest of the team hostage means business. They’re dangerous, and they want us to know that, so we give in to their demands. Only, there haven’t been any.”

  “Which doesn’t make sense in a ransom case,” he added.

  “Right. We’ve already concluded that delay, diversion, misdirection seem to be the goals. But why? Our victimology, the timelines, haven’t raised any red flags. There’s no one that we can point to as having any immediate grudges against our team. At least, nothing recent that we’ve looked at. It doesn’t seem like it was personal in any way.” She turned to look at him. “I’m starting to think the kidnapping of our team is random.”

  He stared at her a long moment, then shook his head. “Can’t be. It was planned ahead of time in order for the note to be ready, and the team to have been taken so cleanly, with almost no evidence left behind.”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “It was planned, but what I’m saying is that it could just as easily have been another group of cops, in another county, who were taken. They may have chosen Destiny because of the location alone. Lots of foothills and woods and long stretches of rural roads. Much easier to sneak up on someone out here, without witnesses, than in a city. Maybe our team was chosen because they checked off the boxes of whatever the kidnapper or kidnappers needed.” She stepped to the board and wrote another bullet. Choice of victims irrelevant—goal was to create a diversion for other law-enforcement. Diversion from what?

  She set the marker back on the tray and joined Blake again. “Other than getting lots of law-enforcement people working on the case, what did the kidnapping do? What concrete effect did it have?”

  Blake slowly nodded, as if he was beginning to see her viewpoint. “The Sanchez trial. We keep coming back to that. The trial was postponed because of the kidnapping. Maybe that was the goal all along, to put the trial on hiatus. The victims, who the bad guys kidnapped, were irrelevant.” His gaze shot to hers. “Not to us. I meant to the bad guys.”

  She gave him a sad smile. “I knew what you meant. In addition to postponing the trial, the kidnapping got the main witnesses, the FBI agents who gathered the evidence against Sanchez, out of town, and temporarily out of the picture.”

  “Seems like it. The dates,” he said, going to the board and tapping on the dates they’d written next to several of the bullets. “They all line up. Mrs. Grant and her kids left town a little before our guys were taken. The wives of the kidnapped officers were sent out of town around that same time. What did that accomplish? It got the women and children out of harm’s way. That’s the only thing I can think of. But do you know of any drug lord who would care about collateral damage? I sure don’t. Which leads us back to one person who seems knee deep in this thing who might have known what was going to happen ahead of time and cared enough to protect them.”

  “Grant,” she said. “Which is double damning against him because the families were sent out of town before the FBI was ever called.”

  He nodded. “He knew our guys were going to be kidnapped, and he wanted to make sure their families, and his, were kept safe.”

  “Safe.” She fisted her hands at her sides. “Don’t expect me to thank him when this is over because he went out of his way to keep the wives safe. He knew this was going to happen and did nothing to stop it, and Randy died because of it. I’m going to tear him apart with my bare hands once we have proof.”

  “I’ll be right there with you,” he agreed. “But we need to keep our eye on our goal—bringing back our team alive. So what else do we see?” He pointed to some bullets about the evidence at the lab. “If Grant is part of this, he’s doing everything he can to buy time. That means doing things to hamper the investigation. Like sending evidence to the FBI lab when the state lab could have tested it by now and had the results back. He’s interfering with the investigation.”

  “He totally is.” She put her hands on her hips. “I have to believe the FBI, in a typical kidnapping investigation where the clock is ticking and time is of the essence, would put a rush on the test results.”

  “Who says they didn’t?” He arched a brow. “For all we know, the results could be back, and Grant isn’t sharing them.”

  She shook her head, incensed at the very thought. A man with the coveted position of supervisory special agent had turned on his fellow law-enforcement officers. He didn’t care that one had died, and four more lives were in jeopardy. She was so upset she started shaking.

  Blake’s arm settled around her shoulders, drawing her close against him. “We’re going to find them. Then we’ll focus on making sure the FBI and others know what Grant has done. But we need to focus. With Grant driving the investigation, it’s going in the wrong direction. We have to figure this out. Now.”

  She blew out a deep breath and put her arm around his waist, drawing on his warmth and strength to try to calm down and think. They both stood there for several minutes, quietly studying the board, silently reading through the dozens of clues and theories they’d written down.

  “Mineral deposits.” Donna frowned at the description that Blake had written about his phone call with Doc Brookes. “What did Brookes say about the mineral deposits on Randy’s pants?”

  “That the lab would have to test them to identify them. There were little pieces of grit mixed in with the mud. He said if he had to guess, he’d say it was either quartz or granite. The mud sparkled when he passed a light over it. That’s the only reason he even noticed it.”

  She blinked and drew back. “The mud spark
led? Are you sure?”

  “That’s what he said. Why? Is there somewhere in Destiny with mud that sparkles?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is. The old quarry. It’s about a mile from Hawkins Ridge. It’s been closed down for years, but they used to cut slabs of granite out of those hills. Between the bad economy and local environmentalists putting every roadblock up they could to stop the company from working there, they decided it wasn’t worth the trouble and left. But I don’t see how anyone could hide four people there. It’s an open mine, kind of like with coal strip mining. They don’t cut tunnels through the mountain like the other mines around here used to do when they were open. If they were at the quarry, someone should have seen them.”

  “If they searched that area, yes,” Blake said. “But if Grant saw that in the report, and has any kind of geological map of the area to help with the search, he could have put two and two together way before we did and directed the search parties away from the quarry. Yet another stall tactic to drag this out.”

  “There’s only one way to know for sure,” she said. “We need to see whether the quarry was searched.”

  “I’ll call Officer Lynch and see if he knows.”

  While Blake made the call, Donna waited, silently praying that this was it, the clue they needed in order to find the team. If Grant had steered the team away from searching that quarry, then that could be the red flag they were looking for. Because there was no other way she could think of for those sparkling mineral deposits to be on Randy’s clothes. The kidnapper, the killer, must have trekked through the forest from that direction to sneak up on the SWAT team and transferred the granite chips from his own clothes to Randy. Then he took the team back with him, somehow. She didn’t have a theory yet for how he’d done that without leaving any evidence.

  The team could still be at the quarry—maybe tied up, or kept in some kind of shed or small building left over from the mining operation. If no one had searched the area, it wouldn’t matter that it was an open mine. Kind of like the old philosophical question—if a tree fell in a forest, and no one was there to hear it, did it make a sound? Well, if a SWAT team was kept tied up in an open quarry, but no one was there to see them, did it really matter that the quarry was open? No. It didn’t.

  With the phone still to his ear, Blake moved to the table to one of the maps they had of the area. They’d marked off earlier spots as searched, based on previous calls to Lynch while on the plane. Now he marked off more spots, his mouth tightening into a hard line when he circled where the quarry should be.

  Then checked it off.

  Donna’s shoulders slumped.

  “Thanks, Officer Lynch,” Blake said. “We both appreciate your help. Watch your back, okay? Neither of us trusts Grant, or any of the people he brought with him.” A pause, then, “Soon, hopefully. We’re working on some leads. Okay, we’ll keep you posted, too. Thanks.”

  He hung up and slid the phone into his pocket. “They searched the quarry yesterday afternoon. Not because of any evidence, and not at Grant’s direction. Some volunteers, along with the state police, decided to expand the search in that direction—even though Grant never asked them to.”

  He stared at the board another minute, then pulled his phone out again.

  “Do you have another idea to follow up?” she asked.

  He shook his head and punched in a number. “Other than going into the woods and searching on our own, no. I’m drawing a blank. But if this all revolves around Sanchez, I’m going to warn my friend at the detention center to beef up security. Maybe the delay was to give Sanchez a chance to try to escape when the focus wasn’t on him and things weren’t so hot. It’s the only thing that I can think of at this point, even though there isn’t any real evidence to back it up.”

  He made the call while Donna sat down and studied the map, checking all the places the teams had searched. They’d been thorough. Every building in a ten-mile radius of Hawkins Ridge had been checked. Did that mean the team had been taken somewhere else? In spite of the lack of tire tracks, had they been driven out of the county and were somewhere else entirely? If so, how were they going to find them?

  “Donna.”

  The odd hitch in Blake’s voice had her stomach dropping before she even looked at him. He’d put his phone away. And his brow was lined with worry.

  “What happened?” she asked, dreading the answer.

  “Sanchez attempted to escape a couple of hours ago.”

  She pressed a hand to her throat. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Two guards were killed.”

  She let out a ragged breath. “What about Sanchez?”

  “They caught him. I don’t have many specifics, but it seems like this must have been planned for months. It was an inside job. A group of new hires, hired when the trial first started, put everything in place to smuggle him out as one of the grounds crew members. It all hinged on him being transferred from the Knox County Jail downtown. He was at KCJ during the trial, but once it was postponed, he was transferred to the Maloneyville facility. Without that constant media attention anymore, or the extra vigilance at KCJ because of shuffling him back and forth to court, the heat died down, and guards began treating him like any other prisoner.”

  “Then what happened to Randy, and the others, was about Sanchez. The diversion was so everyone was looking the other way, so he could escape.”

  Her heart seemed to stutter in her chest as another thought occurred to her. “His plan failed. What does that mean for our team? If he doesn’t need the diversion anymore, does that mean time has run out for our guys? Assuming he’s kept them alive, now he has no need to worry about it anymore. He’ll pull the plug on the operation. Or, if he can’t get word out, one of his thugs will hear about the failed escape attempt on the news, and they’ll know it’s over. They’ll cut their losses and run. We have to find our team now. It might already be too late.”

  He grabbed his keys from a hook on the wall and pitched them to her. “You drive while I call everyone I know and tell them our suspicions about Grant and the link to Sanchez’s escape attempt. We may not have enough proof to have him arrested, but with Sanchez having tried to escape, it gives a lot more weight to our belief that he’s behind this, that he and Lopez colluded to make this happen. If nothing else, they’ll want to interview Grant and Lopez to see if they know anything about Sanchez—and our men. That alone means we get someone else in to run the investigation.”

  She hurried to catch up to him as his long strides carried him to the door much faster than her shorter ones. “Where are we going? To the FBI field office in Knoxville to plead our case?”

  He paused at the door. “We’re going to Hawkins Ridge to search for them ourselves. Unless you have a better idea?”

  She yanked open the door. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  In spite of Officer Lynch’s assurance that the quarry had already been searched, that was the first place that Donna and Blake decided to check—based on the mineral deposit evidence. Unfortunately, they didn’t find their missing team. What they did find were lots of footprints from the searchers. If there had been any evidence of Sanchez’s men out here, it had been obliterated. That was one of the problems with getting civilian volunteers involved—they lacked the training to preserve evidence.

  Blake led the way through the forest, toward Hawkins Ridge. He held up a low-hanging branch for Donna to pass under, then took the lead again. When the woods near the top of the hill they were on thinned out, she joined him, and they walked side by side, studying the ground, scanning the woods, always on the alert in case anyone else was out here who shouldn’t be.

  When they reached the dilapidated barn, they both stopped at the closed double doors. A notice declaring it a sealed crime scene was taped across the middle.

  Blake motioned to the notice. “What do you think?”


  “I think I care more about searching for clues that might help me find my friends than preserving a crime scene.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking.”

  They both grabbed a handle and pulled the doors open, ripping the notice in half. The smell hit them immediately. Even with the body gone, the blood had soaked into the ground, and the place had been shut up without ventilation. It reeked of death.

  Donna’s face went pale. She blinked several times as if fighting back tears. But Blake knew it wasn’t because of the odor, specifically. It was because of the memory of her friend, and what had happened to him.

  “You can stay out here if you want,” he said. “I’ll look inside, see if there are any clues that didn’t make it into the reports. You and I certainly didn’t have time to properly search it ourselves when we were here last.”

  “No. We didn’t. But I’m okay. I can handle this. The search will go faster with both of us.” She stepped in past him, scanning the floor and walls off to the right with her flashlight.

  Blake did the same on the left side, but he couldn’t help frequently glancing back at her to see how she was doing. He couldn’t imagine how hard it must be for her to be here knowing that this was the place her friend had died. Knowing that her other friends could very well be dead, as well.

  No, that wasn’t entirely true. He was feeling some of those same emotions himself, to a lesser degree. He’d been thinking about his former team a lot ever since he was fired and they disappeared. And he’d begun to realize that they meant far more to him than he’d ever thought they could. But more than that, his emotions were all wrapped up in Donna, and his worry and concern for how this was affecting her. He wanted to protect her from every kind of hurt, every kind of pain, physical or mental. And he hated that he seemed helpless to do that right now.

  They met in the center of the barn.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  He swept his light toward the row of stalls that ran across the back. “There are what look like fresh scrapes across the floor over there, most of them concentrated in one stall. But there aren’t any hiding places. It’s all open. Maybe the crime scene techs found some blood back there, or other evidence, and the scrapes are from their boots.”