Hunted

by Karen Robards

  “Holly’s down there. Some guys came—I think he’s watching them rob some people.” Ant sounded breathless.

  Doing his best to tamp down the curses that crowded to the tip of his tongue, Reed was already moving again—faster but still deliberate—in that direction, with Ant, having let go of Reed’s jacket, trotting beside him.

  “You follow him here?” he asked Ant in a growly undertone, because to Holly’s credit, Reed knew that if he’d thought something bad was going to go down, he wouldn’t have brought his little brother anywhere near it. Ant shrugged guiltily. Reed had his answer: yes. “My car’s out there on the street. Go crawl under it and wait for me.”

  In Reed’s experience, even in the deadliest of street confrontations, even if the bullets were flying and the bad guys were mowing each other down like weeds, nobody ever looked under a vehicle for potential targets. Therefore, especially at night and for a kid Ant’s size, having him take shelter beneath a vehicle was way safer than, say, passing over the keys to the Explorer and telling him to hide in the backseat. Everybody always looked in the backseat.

  “What?” The look Ant gave him was disbelieving.

  Reed’s answer was short. “Do what I tell you.”

  “But I don’t—”

  The rest of Ant’s words were lost as a woman screamed. The terror-filled sound sliced through the darkness like a knife, making Reed’s muscles tense and the hair on the back of his neck catapult upright as his gaze snapped toward the sound. A split second later the sharp pop pop pop pop of gunfire exploded through the alley. It was close, loud, and almost certainly coming from the cemetery just a couple of dozen yards ahead.

  Shit.

  “Go get under my damn car,” he barked at Ant as he broke into a dead run and, at the same time, yanked his radio from his belt. Out of the corner of his eye he watched Ant melt back into the shadows. Damned pain-in-the-ass kid—would he do as he was told? “Officer needs assistance at—”

  He had just finished giving the address as he burst out of the alley into streaming moonlight, then pulled up to orient himself, pressing his back against the flat wall of the side of the last building. Juiced by adrenaline, blinking against what felt like a sudden onslaught of brightness, it was all he could do to stop himself before he possibly got in trouble, to give himself time to let his eyes adjust and conduct a lightning survey of the scene. An ancient wrought iron fence edged the cemetery that was just a couple of yards away. The fence surrounded an overgrown lot, which housed a church in the middle—equally ancient, no more than a chapel really, a one-story brick shoebox with a crooked steeple. Behind it—he had exited the alley at the back of the church, which faced out on a narrow residential street—monuments ranging from knee-high marble arches to six-foot-tall stone angels leaned mostly out of plumb and cast long shadows over weed-infested plots. A slamming of doors and a squealing of tires made him look sharply toward the street in front of the church, although he couldn’t see the vehicle in question because the church itself was in the way. The buildings across from the church were dark and deserted: not a soul in sight. A whooshing sound, and he knew the vehicle was gone.

  Movement nearby brought his focus instantly back closer at hand.

  Holly stepped out of the shadow of one of the stone angels. Five ten, lanky in the way of a kid who hadn’t yet filled out, wearing his uniform of jeans and a hoodie, he impatiently pushed his too-long black hair back behind his ears as he struggled with a small object that he was holding up in front of his face. A phone, Reed identified a second later. Elizabeth Townes’ stolen phone, almost certainly. Holly was focusing the phone, as well as every bit of his attention, on something that appeared to be on the ground in front of him. Something that the darkness, and the shifting shadows, and the monuments that semiblocked his view, prevented Reed from seeing.

  Holly was taking pictures with the phone. Of what? Reed couldn’t yet tell, but the quick answer was, it couldn’t be anything good.

  Reed thrust the radio back into position on his belt, tightened his grip on his gun, then took a running step and vaulted the thigh-high fence.

  “Holly.” His footsteps were soundless in the overgrown grass. His voice was quiet as he came up to the kid. Holly cut a glance at him. Visually probing the darkness all around, Reed identified no threat. But danger and violence hung in the air: like any good cop, he could feel them in his bones the way some people feel rain.

  “I saw ’em! I told you! They acted like they wanted to make a buy, and then they shot them!” It was an emotion-packed whisper. Holly’s hands shook. His eyes were wild. “I got pictures. I think. This damned phone—”

  “Yo. Everything okay?” Ant slunk up behind them.

  Holly turned on him. “I told you not to follow me!”

  “I told you to get under the damned car!” Reed growled at almost the same moment. Of course Ant hadn’t done as he was told. By either of them. That was Ant.

  Ant threw up his hands in a gesture meant to be placating. “I thought you all might need some help.”

  “From you?” Holly countered scornfully.

  Reed missed the rest of that brotherly exchange, because by then his eyes had adjusted enough to find what he was praying he wouldn’t see—victims, sprawled in the shadow of an above-the-ground crypt maybe thirty feet away.

  His gut tightened.

  “Fuck.” Reed felt more tired than he could remember feeling in a long time as he started toward the motionless figures. He had little doubt that they were dead, probably as Holly had said, the victims of a drug deal gone bad, just a few more casualties of the escalating, gang-related violence that was tearing the city apart. So many murders provided him with job security and all that, but truth was this shit was getting old. Even he, hardened to violent death as he was, was beginning to be sickened by all of it.

  Not for the first time, he wondered if he was in danger of getting burned out.

  “It’s the same thing that happened to Mom.” Holly’s whisper was urgent as, with Ant trailing him like a shadow, he followed Reed. Crouching to check each victim in turn for a pulse—there were four of them, two adult males, an adult female, and a boy who looked like he was about Ant’s age—Reed registered the raw meat smell of fresh blood with a grimace. What looked like oily black halos leached into the grass around each victim’s head. He placed two fingers beneath the ear of the youngest victim. Like the others, he had a bullet hole between his eyes. Nice and neat. Death would have been instantaneous. No pulse, big surprise, although the boy was still warm. His wide-open eyes were already glazed and vacant as he stared sightlessly up at the night sky.

  Another goddamned kid. Two minutes earlier, and I might have been able to save him.

  Reed could feel the pounding of his own pulse in his temples.

  “You listening to me?” Holly demanded, and Reed frowned up at him. The teen was standing over him, waving the stolen phone practically in his face. Holly continued, “This time I saw them. For real. I even took pictures. I mean, if I did it right. Anyway, it’s like I told you: it’s the five-o.”

  By five-o, Holly meant the cops.

  “Would you give it a rest?” For an instant, as he held Holly’s gaze, a graphic mental picture of Magnolia’s corpse flashed in front of Reed’s eyes. A once-pretty woman aged prematurely by the life she’d led, she’d had a bullet hole drilled through her forehead, too, just like all four of these victims did. Thing was, though, as every officer who went through the police academy learned, torso shots were the high percentage shots. A couple of rounds from a 9mm pumped into a chest would stop pretty much anything. Head shots like these were the trademark of gang members, not cops. “No way in hell were they cops.”

  “Way.” Holly darted a glance in the direction of the fast-approaching sirens that were growing louder with every second, and shifted nervously from foot to foot. “What, you think I don’t know what I saw? I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Give me that phone.” Reed st
ood up abruptly and took the phone from Holly’s hand, ignoring the kid’s indignant “Hey!” in response. The victims were beyond help: there was nothing Reed or anyone else could do for them except find out who had killed them. As an eyewitness to the murders, Holly would be invaluable to the investigation—with or without a phone full of pictures—and he would also be dead, just as soon as the perps found out about him and what he had seen. Holstering his gun, Reed slid the phone into his pocket, pulled out his keys, and wrested away his house key from the others.

  “Go to my house. You and Ant. Let yourselves in, and stay put until I get there. Don’t talk to anybody about this or anything else. Do not tell anyone that you were at the scene of these murders. Hear?”

  “What am I, stupid?” Holly asked with disgust. He caught the key Reed tossed him without argument, which told Reed that he knew just how deep he was in the shit. Casting another wary glance in the direction from which the sirens were shrieking now as the posse Reed had summoned closed in, Holly thrust the key into the front pocket of his jeans, then looked at Reed again. “I ain’t lying. I swear. It was a bunch of cops. Like, four.”

  “We’ll hash this out when I get home,” Reed told him. “Go.”

  “Yeah.” Holly grabbed Ant by the arm. “Come on,” he said to his brother.

  Lips compressed, Reed watched Holly and Ant scramble over the fence and vanish into the dark as, lights flashing, a pair of squad cars slammed to a shuddering halt in front of the church.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE THING ABOUT the steamy heat of New Orleans was, sometimes it had a tendency to seep into its residents’ brains. Where it drove them all kinds of crazy. Mix that with the holiday season, include a full moon on Christmas Eve, add in plentiful amounts of booze, and the city was ripe for trouble. What you got was the proverbial Bad Moon Rising, which it was, big and yellow as a tennis ball right over the smooth black waters of Lake Pontchartrain.

  At about fifteen minutes before midnight, all hell broke loose.

  “Where is he? Is he going to shoot?”

  “He has a bomb!”

  “Liza! Has anyone seen Liza?”

  “Run! Keep going!”

  That last bellowed order came from a cop. It sent adrenaline surging through the veins of Jefferson Parish Police Sergeant Caroline Wallace, who was shooting that malevolent moon a grim look even as she ran toward the mansions fronting the lake. It punctuated the panicked voices that somehow managed to reach her ears above the bedlam created by the intermingling of wailing sirens and shouts amplified by bullhorns and hovering helicopters. Sprinting for the Mobile Command Unit—a white van parked at the curb directly in front of the crime scene—she threw a quick, harried glance in the direction of the voices to check things out. An explosion of women in glittering ball gowns and men in tuxedos rushed down a long driveway and across the wide street just a few dozen yards away. The harsh glow of police floodlights illuminated the fear in their faces. The uniformed police officers running with them, protecting them, hurrying them along, looked agitated.

  Survivors were being evacuated from the beleaguered mansion situated on two waterfront acres directly in front of her. Sixty or more, according to her lightning count.

  Which left one burning question: how many remained inside?

  When she had arrived on the scene just a few minutes before, the block already had been cordoned off and the perimeter team was sealing off any possible escape route. The perp was trapped, which was both good and bad news: good because he wouldn’t be going anywhere, and bad because, like trapped animals, surrounded humans were always the most dangerous. Her instant conclusion when her pager had gone off with Code 923, which meant hostage situation in progress, was that she, the hostage negotiator on call, was racing to a domestic, because that was most common this close to Christmas. But by the time she’d slammed her cruiser into park on a manicured lawn just down the street that was already thick with official vehicles, she had known that tonight was going to be anything but typical.

  Tonight she was going to have to rock and roll.

  Jefferson Parish’s top brass, including the sheriff and the council chairman, as well as New Orleans’ superintendent of police and mayor, were among the hostages being held inside the mansion, as she had learned via radio on the way over. That made it personal. That upped the stakes by about a thousand. That made it just that much harder to maintain the necessary distance, that much harder to do her job.

  See, the sheriff was her boss. And the NOPD superintendent of police? That would be her dad.

  As she ran, she was tightening up her body armor, which she’d learned the hard way not to show up at a crime scene without and which she kept in the trunk of her car, along with various other job-related necessities, for just this kind of occasion. The flak vest was state-of-the-art, designed to be thin and lightweight, yet it was still uncomfortable, still felt big and bulky on her slender, five-six frame. Along with her duty belt that held, among other items, her Glock 22 in its holster, she wore the vest beneath a black windbreaker with JPPD emblazoned across the back. The skirt she’d been wearing on the date the pager call had interrupted was a couple of inches short of her knees, slim fitting and black, while the sleeveless blouse beneath the windbreaker was thin silver silk, with a collarless V-neck that revealed a hint of cleavage. Since she’d had no time to change, she was actually glad for the coverage provided by the collarbone-high rise of the body vest. All she’d had time to do was trade her blazer for the windbreaker, kick off her high heels, slam her feet into the black sneakers that she also kept in the trunk, and grab her gear.

  Be prepared. It might be the Girl Scout motto, but it worked for Caroline as well.

  Her heart pounded, either from the dash from her car or the thought of what she faced. Deepening her breathing—the air smelled of fresh-cut grass and, faintly, of the wide lake stretching out like an expanse of flat black glass behind the houses in front of her—she tried to concentrate on mentally chilling out and easing into professional mode. What she was going for was cool, calm control.

  Ice, ice, baby. That was her reputation. That was how she rolled.

  As usual, lives depended on it. Tonight the lives of some of New Orleans’ most powerful people might depend on it. Her father’s life might depend on it.

  Caroline wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  “Yo, Wallace! Chop-chop! Need you to get busy pouring some oil on the water in there.” The voice yelling at her out of the dark belonged to her good friend Lt. Jorge Esteban. He ran one of the TELS units, which told her that snipers were on the scene. She spotted him through the shadows, standing at the base of a cherry picker hoisting a basket with its cargo of one black-clad police sharpshooter high in the air. With the houses as far apart as they were, and given the nature of the exclusive neighborhood, which was as well manicured and flat as a golf course, she was guessing the logistics of getting off a kill shot were going to be difficult.

  It was her job to make sure a kill shot didn’t become necessary. As in, to pour oil on troubled waters until she got them smoothed out.

  “On it,” she yelled back as she passed, and finished snapping the rubber band in place around the ponytail she had just scooped her thick, shoulder-length coffee brown hair into, then tucked the tail up under her black JPPD baseball cap. Her eyes, artfully made up tonight to bring out the green tinge in her hazel irises, were busy darting every which way as she tried to gather as much information as she could before the ball bounced into her court.

  Sometimes the smallest detail could be used to establish a connection with the perp.

  In this case, rich envy was a no-brainer. She could definitely use that, see if he would bite, see if she couldn’t get him feeling like he and she were on the same, poverty-stricken side of the fence. That was key: to make him—hostage takers were almost universally male—feel like she was his ally, like he could trust her. She didn’t know who he was or what his motivation was yet, but that wa
s an easy place to start trying to build some rapport. The palatial houses in this section of Old Metairie were so far out of touch with most people’s lifestyles that it was hard to remember that these enormous structures—with their elaborate fountains, wide porticos, and multiple wings—were indeed people’s homes. With many of them ablaze with Christmas lights, the neighborhood looked like something conjured up by Disney. Directly in front of her, the huge white southern-style mansion where the hostages were being held had been decked out to impress. Festoons of evergreen boughs intertwined with sparkling white lights adorned the three long verandas, one fronting each level of the three-story house. More sparkling white lights illuminated the wide staircase leading up to the front entrance. The small round bushes lining the sidewalk were aglow with lights. Farther out on the lawn (it would be almost sacrilegious to call an expanse of grass so well kept a yard), the small flowering trees had been wrapped in white Christmas lights, too. The revolving red flashes of light from multiple police cruisers that danced across the pillared facade could almost have been part of the holiday decor—if the holiday decor in this exclusive enclave had been real cheesy this year.

  ’Twas the night before Christmas . . .

  And the owner of the house, billionaire Allen Winfield, had been holding his annual black-tie ball. Only the rich, famous, and powerful were inside.

  Where some of them—she had no idea of the exact numbers yet—were currently at the mercy of a crazed gunman. Who may or may not have planted bombs throughout the house, and may or may not be wearing a suicide vest with a dead man’s switch that would blow the whole place sky-high.

  As a hostage negotiator, it was her job to talk him into giving himself up without harming anyone. Or at least to keep him talking until SWAT could overpower him or a sniper could take him out.

  “About damned time.” JPPD Major Tom Dixon, command officer, greeted Caroline with a scowl as she pulled up, breathless, outside the van, before he turned back to continue the discussion that he had been in the midst of. He was in a huddle with senior officers from both police departments—Caroline knew most of them, at least by sight—because, while Jefferson Parish PD had jurisdiction over Old Metairie, the NOPD had a vested interest in what was happening considering that their superintendent of police and the mayor were inside. She knew Dixon well, having been in his chain of command until, after three years on the force, she had been accepted onto the Hostage Negotiation Team and whisked away for the initial FBI-sponsored training course. Given the high-profile nature of this event, she had been informed en route that the two departments were collaborating, with Dixon in charge, at least unless or until another, higher-ranking officer appeared on the scene. Despite the night’s low-seventies temperature, she could see the sheen of sweat on Dixon’s thick-featured face. Well, no surprise there. The burly, gray-haired fifty-five-year-old veteran officer was under a lot of pressure, Caroline knew. If this went down wrong, high-profile casualties were a virtual certainty. Old Metairie could be the next Colorado theater shooting. International headlines. The darling of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. And Dixon could kiss his fanny—and his career and his pension—good-bye.