Keeping Caroline

by Vickie Taylor

  “Well—” the deputy scratched his head “—she’s not exactly in custody.”

  A thousand questions bubbled in Caroline’s mind. Why had Gem done this? How could Caroline have prevented it? What would happen to the girl now? What would happen to her babies? Only two made their way to her mouth.

  “Is she all right? What about Max and Rosie?”

  The slow-talking deputy explained. “We don’t exactly know, ma’am. We got a clerk claims she’s been staying at a motel in Calico, ’bout thirty miles down the interstate from here. No one answers the door, though. But someone’s in there—picked up the phone, just won’t talk to us. Strangest thing I ever saw.”

  Caroline felt Matt tense beside her. She heard him talk about hostage situations enough to know that H.T.s who wouldn’t talk were the worst kind. Matt couldn’t negotiate with someone who wouldn’t talk to him.

  “You folks have a tactical team on call?” Matt asked.

  “Already roused ’em, sir. But with those babies maybe bein’ in there, they’re not too keen on forcing their way in.”

  “Gem would never hurt her babies,” Caroline insisted.

  The two men shared a look. Matt opened his mouth to speak, squeezing her hand again. She pulled away from him, crossed her arms over her chest. Her heart thumped against them. Gem wouldn’t hurt her children. She would not.

  “Maybe not,” Matt said gently. “But she might not be alone. She was with a man. If they’re barricaded in there together…”

  The way he let his sentence trail off told her just how bad that situation could be. She closed her eyes and said a brief prayer. When she opened them, she realized the answer to her prayers was standing right in front of her.

  She stepped up close to him, laid her palms on his chest. “You’ve got to go.”

  His muscles turned to granite beneath her touch. “Caroline, it’s not my jurisdiction—”

  “Actually, sir, that’s why I’m here,” the deputy said. Matt diverted his gaze from Caroline to the uniformed officer. “Tactical team’s already on the way, but word is, you’re the best negotiator in the state. We don’t have anybody with that kind of training. Nobody with the kind of experience you have. We were hoping—” The deputy looked at the ceiling, crumpled the brim of his hat in his fingers. “That is, we thought you might help out on this one.”

  Caroline poured her heart into her look, her touch. “Please, Matt.”

  She knew what she was asking. If she knew nothing else about her husband, she knew how his mind worked. What hostage situations with kids involved took out of him.

  She hated the position she put him in, but she couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to Max or Rosie. Or Gem, even after all the girl had done. They were just babies, all three of them.

  “Gem knows you. She’ll trust you,” she said. “I trust you.”

  The problem was, she wasn’t sure he trusted himself.

  Chapter 14

  The sheriff’s department cruiser flew along the highway between Sweet Gum and Calico, Texas, the county seat, like a predatory bird swooping down on its prey. The siren whooped its hunting call. Red and blue lights flashed their challenge.

  When he’d left Port Kingston, Matt thought he’d left all this behind for a while. He’d been wrong.

  He hadn’t asked for this responsibility. Didn’t want it. But the talons of adrenaline took hold of him just the same. The rush of wind through the open window hit him like a slap in the face. His heart rate accelerated. Hackles stood on the back of his neck. He felt the thrill of the chase. The anticipation.

  The dread.

  Once again, he held life and death in his hands. What if he failed?

  Caroline’s pleading eyes swam in his vision. You’ve got to go…. She’ll trust you. I trust you.

  Damned if he was going to betray that trust.

  The cruiser fishtailed to a stop, spewing gravel in a ten-foot plume across the parking lot of the High Plains Motel. A short man with a mild case of Dunlop’s disease—his belly lopped over his belt—opened Matt’s door and stuck out a hand.

  “Sheriff Tulane.”

  Matt climbed out of the car and shook the man’s hand.

  “Glad to have you, Sergeant Burkett.”

  All business, Matt got right to work. “You have a problem working with someone outside your department?” Cop politics could be tricky, especially in the sheriff’s department, where keeping a job meant winning an election.

  The sheriff snorted. “I’d work with the devil himself if it would get this thing over without anybody getting hurt—especially those kids.” He opened the motel office door and held it while Matt stepped through. “I got kids of my own, you know.”

  Inside, he studied Matt curiously. “You?”

  Matt’s tongue tripped over the automatic no he usually gave to that question. “Yeah,” he said deliberately. His heart gave a little twist that had nothing to do with adrenaline. “Yeah, I do.”

  A pair of khaki-clad deputies hurried over, notepads in hand.

  “Whatta we got?” Matt asked. The sheriff answered the deputies’s silent inquiry with a nod.

  “Housekeeper confirms Gem Millholland has been staying in Room 214, along with a guy,” one of the deputies said.

  “Black male,” the second officer corrected.

  “Anybody see what he was driving?” Matt asked.

  The deputies checked their notes. “Light blue pickup.”

  “All right, that’s our man. And he’s definitely violent. Tried to run me and my wife off the road the other day.”

  The first officer eyed his partner balefully. “Housekeeper also says she saw them carrying two toddlers into the room last evening. No one’s seen them since. The drapes are pulled, lights and TV appear to be on and there’s a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. But there’s no answer to a knock and you’ve already been briefed about the phone. With those kids in there, we didn’t want to make a hard entry.”

  “You did the right thing,” Matt said. “You evacuated the rest of the building?” He got twin affirmative nods.

  “All right,” he said, his mind already formulating a strategy to hook Gem or her accomplice into talking to him. “The phone is out, for now. Somebody get me a damn bullhorn and let’s get to work.”

  Caroline picked up the phone in her downstairs office and jabbed a couple of times at the flash hook. No dial tone. Not that she’d really expected one. The fire had fried the wiring.

  She wanted to call the hospital to check on Savannah.

  She was about to suggest to the Johnsons that they all head back to their farmhouse—Jeb and Hailey needed naps, anyway—when a maroon pickup speeding up the drive caught her attention. She stopped and watched the vehicle through the screened door.

  Noting its reckless speed, her heart stalled for a moment.

  Matt. Had something gone wrong? The sheriff’s deputies had no way to contact her to let her know. What if he was hurt? What if Gem was hurt?

  Reason quickly dampened her panic. Matt hadn’t been gone an hour. More than half that would have been spent just getting to the motel where Gem had reportedly been holed up.

  Caroline knew from experience that barricade and hostage situations were rarely resolved quickly. Sometimes hours passed before the negotiating ever began while police set up a perimeter, implemented surveillance and gathered intelligence on their suspect.

  But this wasn’t a suspect. This was Gem.

  Caroline didn’t think she could bear it if the standoff dragged on so long this time.

  The pickup truck skidded to a stop in front of the house and a black man got out. A very large black man. His blue denim work shirt and jeans stretched tight across his muscled frame. His step was heavy, powerful, and his eyes were red-lined.

  Caroline’s hand tightened on the door frame, calculating whether or not she could slam the door shut and slide home the dead bolt Matt had installed before this guy got a big hand or foot inside i
f trouble started, and not liking the answer.

  “Can I help you?” she asked warily as he clomped onto the front porch.

  “I hope so, ma’am.” To her relief—and no small surprise—he stopped a respectful distance away. “My name is Tom Justiss.”

  “Gem, pick up the phone. We need to talk.” Matt lowered the bullhorn and waited, not really expecting a response. He’d been trying to establish communications for a quarter hour. With every additional minute that passed, his nerves stretched tighter. Responsibility ate at him like a rat on cheese.

  He turned to the sheriff. “I want listening equipment in the rooms on either side of her. If she so much as sneezes, I want to know about it.”

  The sheriff’s bald head glistened under the Texas sun. He mopped it with a white handkerchief. “We don’t have that kind of fancy equipment. We’ll have to bring it in from Livingston County.”

  “Then bring it in from Livingston County,” Matt snapped. The sheriff wasn’t the only one sweating. “Tell them to make it fast.”

  The sheriff’s face turned as red as the top of his head. He wheeled around, yelling for a cell phone.

  Matt wiped his brow with his forearm and turned back to the dingy motel. He forced a calm he didn’t feel into his voice.

  “Gem, I just need to know you’re okay in there. If you could pick up the phone and let me know what’s going on, maybe I could help you. I’m here to help you.”

  Waiting for a reply he knew instinctively wasn’t going to come, Matt couldn’t help but think about the last hostage taker he’d claimed to have come to help. He’d sure been a big help to James Hampton, hadn’t he? To the Hampton kids, who had watched their father die.

  No. He wouldn’t let that happen again. Not to Gem. Not to her girls. Not just for Gem’s sake, or even Max’s and Rosie’s.

  For Caroline. For himself. Because he’d rather die than have to tell his wife he’d let her down again.

  He sucked in a deep breath and blew it out slowly. Waited for his pulse to slow a notch, then picked up the bullhorn.

  “Gem? It’s okay if you’re not ready to talk just yet.” Patience, he told himself. He had all the time in the world. As long as Gem and her accomplice were listening to him, they weren’t hurting her kids, themselves or anyone else. “I’ll do the talking until you feel like chiming in. You can just listen.”

  Matt paused, for the first time as a negotiator, unsure where to start. He raked his mind for something they had in common, a shared bond, no matter how small. But the only thing they had in common was Caroline, and given the girl’s current feelings toward his wife, that might not be the best place to start. Recognition of the second bond he shared with Gem came slowly, almost as if Matt’s mind hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it.

  They both had daughters.

  He licked his lips. “Maxine and Rosie are beautiful kids, Gem. I hope Hailey is as pretty as them when she’s their age.”

  He waited, giving Gem a chance to respond, if she wanted.

  No dice.

  That was all right. He was used to carrying on one-sided conversations. He raised the bullhorn again. “I never thought about having a daughter until I found out about Hailey. But now when I look at her, when I even think about her, my chest gets all tight. That how you feel when you look at your girls, Gem?”

  He swallowed hard. “You suppose it’s always going to feel that way, even when they’re grown and living out on their own? We’ll probably both be overprotective parents, won’t we?”

  He waited again, listening, trying to not let the disappointment affect him when only silence answered. Without missing a beat, he rolled right into a story about a friend of his who was struggling to raise a teenage daughter and kept talking until the words blurred, one into the next, and his story became one giant run-on sentence. He talked until, by the time a Livingston County deputy arrived with the high-tech surveillance equipment, waves of impatience, of frustration at his inactivity, his ineffectiveness, pounded in the back of his mind like an ironworker hammering hot steel.

  The camera was only about two inches square, and as thin as a credit card so it could easily be slid beneath a door. In minutes, Matt was back on the bullhorn, this time with a black-and-white monitor in front of him, while a deputy in body armor crawled—staying well below window height—to the door marked 214.

  The deputy glanced back to Matt and the sheriff. The sheriff gave the go-ahead wave. His eyes never leaving the monitor, Matt kept up a steady stream of words.

  The electronic eye panned right. A soap opera unfolded across the hotel room’s TV screen. Farther right, some sort of mesh strung up. The camera swung to the left.

  “What was that?” Matt steadied the microphone on his headset and spoke to the deputy manipulating the camera from outside the motel door. “Back to the right.”

  Dutifully, the deputy displayed the scene to the right again. The mesh came back into view, a pudgy fist twined in it as one of the twins pulled to her feet. Rounded cheeks and wide, sleepy eyes. A little farther, and the other twin came into view, sitting in the floor of the playpen, thumb in mouth and blankie snuggled against her cheek, watching her sister.

  Thank God, thank God.

  Matt gave a thumbs-up to the crew of officers behind him. Relieved whispers rippled through the restless crowd.

  “Now pan back left,” Matt instructed. “Go left.”

  The image on the monitor blurred as the camera moved then focused to reveal the corner of a bed. A pair of thin, bare feet came into view. It was hard to tell in black and white, but the toenails appeared to be painted a precocious pink. Before he could decide for sure, the scene traveled up a pair of equally bare legs, skinny and slack across the bedspread.

  Matt’s breath caught. His fingers curled into clammy fists. He didn’t like this. His instincts screamed it wasn’t right.

  The camera caught the frayed edges of a pair of cut-off jeans, then a bare midriff, skimmed up over the mounds of a pair of small breasts barely covered by a T-shirt that had ridden high on the girl’s body. Finally the camera focused in on Gem’s face.

  Matt’s breath exploded. His fingers unfisted and reached for his weapon. “No,” he said, as if denial could make it not be true. “God damn it, no!”

  “Mr. Justiss,” Caroline said, willing Jeb to stay put in the office. Praying he would stay put.

  Tom Justiss must have seen her eyes go wide. She’d never been good at hiding her emotions.

  He held a hand to her, not trying to touch her, just…reaching. “Don’t be afraid, ma’am. I didn’t come here to hurt nobody.”

  “Then why are you here, Mr. Justiss?”

  “It’s Savannah. I heard she’d been hurt and, well, they won’t let me see her at the hospital.”

  If Caroline’s protective instincts weren’t on full alert before, they were now. He’d been to the hospital? With Savannah lying unconscious and defenseless?

  “I can understand they wouldn’t let me in. Wouldn’t give Savie no comfort to see me there. But they wouldn’t even tell me nothing. Wouldn’t tell me what happened to Jeb, either. Where he was. If he was hurt, too.”

  Caroline swallowed hard, gathering her courage. “Under the law, you lost your right to know anything about Jeb, his condition or his whereabouts.” As far as Caroline was concerned, he didn’t deserve to know. But the man in front of her looked so distraught, so much like every other concerned father—like Matt—that she couldn’t help but feel a niggle of compassion for him. Whether he deserved it or not.

  “I can tell you this much,” she said carefully. “Jeb wasn’t hurt. He’s worried about his mother, but other than that he’s fine. And he’s in good hands. He’ll be taken care of until Savannah recovers.”

  “Thank you,” Justiss said, nodding his head repeatedly. “Thank you kindly. I sure am glad to hear that.”

  He took a step backward, then paused. “I know I haven’t got no claim on them no more. Neither one of them, after what
I done. But, well…I’ve been going to counseling, just like the judge ordered. Working real hard on controlling my anger.”

  He shuffled his feet nervously, and Caroline’s heart opened up to him a little more, even though she didn’t want it to. She just wanted him to leave.

  “Maybe you tell Savannah that, when she’s feeling better. Just so she won’t be afraid anymore.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Caroline promised, and closed the door as Tom Justiss clomped down the porch steps. She watched out the window until the pickup had wound its way down the hill and turned onto the county road, relief mixing with an odd sense of melancholy over Savannah’s ex-husband’s short visit. She hadn’t quite shaken the image of his slumped shoulders and deferential stance from her mind when she turned around, and found another strange man standing behind her. He must have come in the back without knocking.

  This man was much younger than Tom Justiss, and melancholy was not one of the feelings he incited in her. He stood there in clothes that hung on his thin frame like a wet potato sack on a telephone pole. The boy needed a good meal or two, that much was sure. Not to mention a decent pair of jeans and a shirt without holes in it. His hair was in disarray, but it was his eyes that sparked the first ember of fear in her as they studied each other in silence. His eyes were tired. Much too old for his years. And angry.

  Despite the smile on his face, his eyes were very, very angry.

  Caroline edged backward. “Can I help you?” That line was getting old this afternoon.

  “I hope so,” he said.

  She took a step back, toward the door behind her, but she knew she couldn’t leave. Hailey was in the office, napping, Jeb with her. She couldn’t abandon the children.

  “Do I know you?” she asked.

  He crossed the room in the long, gangly strides of a teen not quite used to his rapidly changing body, but managed to look menacing all the same. “No, ma’am. You don’t know me from Adam,” he said calmly.