Third Degree: A Novel

by Greg Iles

  “That must be where the son got out,” Ellis said.

  They could see the cruisers gathered in front of the house, and a roadblock at the entrance of Lyonesse Drive. Someone had even put up a red flag as a wind indicator, Danny noticed, on a pole standing in the clear space behind the department’s camper trailer.

  “There’s the command post,” said Ellis. “Set her down, Danny.”

  “Twenty seconds.”

  The sheriff unhooked his harness as Danny pulled back on the cyclic and flared in. Then Ellis opened the door and jumped to the ground like MacArthur going ashore in the Philippines. “Remember, stay close!” he called over his shoulder.

  Danny checked his phone for new messages. Finding none, he climbed out and secured the main rotor to the tail boom with the tie-down kit. There was liable to be some real wind before he flew out of this place again.

  When he was satisfied, he walked over to the command post, where a small knot of men had gathered around the sheriff. Three of them wore dark business suits, and one seemed to be getting in the sheriff’s face pretty good.

  The aggressive stranger’s hair was cropped short, and it had receded on both sides of his scalp, leaving a sharp V of aggression in the middle of his forehead. He looked about forty-five, but the flesh of his face was tight, with no sagging around the jaws. The kind of guy who woke up at 5 a.m. every day to run four miles. As soon as Danny was close enough to hear, he realized that the man in the suit was the agent Ray Breen had been complaining about: Paul Biegler.

  “States’ rights versus federal authority,” the sheriff was saying. “Somehow, it always seems to come down to that with you people. I guess you want to refight the Civil War right here, Agent Biegler.”

  “Yankee sumbitch,” someone muttered.

  “I was born in Arkansas,” Biegler snapped, cutting his eyes at Trace Breen.

  “Well, I don’t have time to debate constitutional issues with you,” Ellis said. “I’ve got a crisis to resolve.”

  “How?” asked Biegler. “You don’t have any intelligence.”

  Ellis drew himself to his full height. “You people may think we’re all dumb down here, but we—”

  “Information!” Biegler snapped. “You don’t have any information about your subject. Intel, Sheriff. Ring a bell?”

  For a moment Ellis was speechless, so Biegler charged on. “I’ve spoken to Kyle Auster’s office manager at the hospital. She’s in critical condition. Third-degree burns over forty percent of her body. She told me that she and Auster were behind the fraud. They’ve been having an affair for years. Shields went along with some of it for the past few months, but that’s all.”

  “If Shields is the good guy in all this,” said the sheriff, “then why did he shoot Auster?”

  “Maybe Auster provoked him.”

  “Or maybe this office manager’s really been screwing Dr. Shields,” suggested Ellis, “and she’s trying to do whatever she can to protect him.”

  Biegler shook his head. “Vida Roberts has worked in medicine for twenty years, Sheriff. She knew she wasn’t going to make it when she talked to me. That’s a deathbed confession. Admissible in court.”

  Ellis’s face was getting redder by the second. “So, what are you saying? We should just pack up and go home? Let these two fine fellows work things out on their own?”

  “Of course not! I’m saying that if Auster’s still alive, you’ve got two different subjects in there. Two different psychologies. And you don’t know who’s really controlling things.”

  “I think Auster’s dead,” Sheriff Ellis said with conviction. “I just talked to Dr. Shields. I heard his voice when he said Auster couldn’t come to the phone.”

  “You’d better be sure.”

  Ellis gave the agent a patronizing smile. “Well, I sure thank you for your brilliant insights.”

  “Sheriff, listen—”

  “Now, I’d appreciate it if you’d carry your ass about four hundred yards that way.” Ellis gestured back toward the highway with a sweep of his big forearm. “Down past my perimeter. I don’t want to see you back up here unless you’ve got something that will give me a tactical advantage in this standoff. Are we clear?”

  Biegler’s eyes went flat as a shark’s, and he spoke in a low voice. “I can federalize this scene, Sheriff. I will bring the FBI down here from Jackson.”

  “This thing’s gonna be over with before you get anybody down here.”

  Biegler sighed. “If you think that, you don’t know much about hostage situations.”

  “I reckon we’ll see, won’t we?”

  “Ellis, if you fuck this up, you’ll answer to the attorney general. And I’m not talking about the one in Mississippi.”

  “Go suck an egg.”

  Sheriff Ellis walked away from the trailer and signaled Danny to join him.

  Biegler stared after them for a few moments, then turned and marched off toward the roadblock.

  Trace Breen barked a laugh. “That sumbitch is shakin’ like a dog shittin’ a peach pit.”

  “You sure told his ass,” Ray agreed.

  Ellis rounded on his deputies, his dark eyes blazing. “You TRU boys have been spending a boatload of my budget on training and equipment. Well, you got till exactly dark to prove you’re worth it. Understood?”

  The smiles vanished. “Yessir,” Ray snapped out. “Let’s get to it, boys.”

  Danny had to stretch out his legs to stay up with Ellis as the sheriff strode down the border of the Shieldses’ front yard.

  “Where are we headed?” Danny asked.

  “Neighbors’ house. Frank Elfman’s. They got Dr. Shields’s boy over there. I think we ought to hear him out ourselves before we shoot anybody, don’t you?”

  Danny felt the coiled spring in his chest loosen just a little. “Absolutely.”

  • • •

  Laurel lay on her side on the great room sofa, her arms and legs once again bound tightly with duct tape. Warren had taped her ankles first, so she had risked slipping the Razr from her pocket and sliding it beneath her before he taped her wrists. The forty seconds it had taken him to do that were the tensest she’d experienced since the ordeal began.

  Beth lay sound asleep on the red leather sofa in the study, thanks to a sedative dose of Benadryl calculated by her father. Warren himself was sitting at his study desk. His large, flat-panel computer monitor hid his face from Laurel, and she was thankful, because it allowed her ready access to her cell phone. The Roche-Bobois sofa was a modern piece, with spare lines and minimal padding on the arms. There wasn’t much of a crease in which to hide the Razr, but she had stuffed the phone as deeply as she could into the crack between the arm and the seat, leaving only a thin line of exposed metal.

  Danny had sent two messages since she’d checked the phone in the laundry room, the first telling her he was on the way with the sheriff, the second asking several questions about the situation inside the house. She’d sent back a message that read: KA dead by W. Self-defense. Me & B all right 4 now. Tied up tho. More 2 come. Be patient.

  Danny’s question as to whether Warren intended harm was harder to answer. Warren had hit her twice after Beth shorted out the laptop, and hard. But he hadn’t shot her. What he had done was download another copy of Merlin’s Magic into his study computer, so that he could try to break into her Hotmail account online. She wasn’t too worried about that, since she didn’t save e-mail messages online. There might be one or two of Danny’s last e-mails in her online mailbox, but she didn’t think so. Even if there were, the password-cracking program had to start again from scratch.

  She was more worried about the safe room.

  After taping Laurel up, Warren had carried his father’s old deer rifle and some plastic trash bags into the safe room. His shotgun was presently leaning against his desk in the study. He’d been quite open about what he was doing, announcing that the trash bags could serve as temporary toilets. There was already enough food and water in t
he safe room to last for days, if not weeks, and the gun was self-explanatory. But he had not tried to move Laurel or Beth in there. She had a feeling that Warren saw the safe room as his last resort, a final redoubt in the event of a police assault, rather than a place to commit some terrible crime. His primary goal still seemed to be the discovery of her lover’s identity, through cracking the Hotmail account.

  She wanted to tell Danny about the guns and the safe room. But if she did, what would happen? Would she trigger an immediate rescue attempt? Were there people outside capable of bringing off a rescue without loss of life? She thought about the hostage rescues she’d read about or seen on the news. In most cases, it seemed, at least some hostages died before the hostage taker was killed.

  Before the hostage taker was killed . . .

  She craned her neck and looked at the top of Warren’s head, just visible over his monitor. Rather than hatred, she felt pity for him. She had the sense of looking at a mental patient, a man who had been perfectly normal one day and woke up schizophrenic the next. Warren’s mind had locked itself into the track of marital infidelity, and he could not disengage it. Did he deserve to die for that? Could she send out words that might doom him in the next few minutes?

  Danny’s assertion that no one outside knew of their phone link gave her pause. Was he simply trying to keep their love affair secret? Or did he not trust the sheriff completely? For that matter, was the sheriff even in charge out there? Nell Roberts had mentioned federal agents on the phone. What if the FBI was outside? Would Danny trust them? She needed to know more before deciding what further message to send out.

  “Warren?” she called. “Would you come over here, please?”

  “Why?”

  “I need to ask you something.”

  More than a minute passed before his chair squeaked and he rose to walk into the great room. Time means nothing to him, she thought. He’s receding from the world. The house phone had rung a half dozen times, yet he hadn’t answered since he’d let her talk to Sheriff Ellis. She forced away the memory of Danny’s voice during those few precious seconds; she couldn’t focus when she let that sound loose in her head.

  As Warren came toward her, she recalled how boyish and wild he’d looked this morning, after staying up all night searching for something Nell Roberts had warned him about. The irony was exquisitely tragic: Nell had tried to save Warren from Kyle and Vida, and by so doing had led Warren to Danny’s letter, which might ultimately cause his death. Warren stopped three feet from her and sat on the ottoman he’d used earlier. He looked as though he’d aged fifteen years since this morning.

  “I want to ask you something,” Laurel said softly. “We’ve been married for twelve years, and in all that time you never raised a hand to me. You’ve been calm, rational, even kind most of the time. And now, in the span of a few hours, you’ve become a totally different person. Can you help me understand that?”

  “You never betrayed me before.”

  “I don’t think that’s it. I really don’t. If I’d told you a week ago that you were going to beat me and tie me up, you wouldn’t have believed it. Not even because of adultery or anything else. And in front of our six-year-old child? You couldn’t even have imagined that.”

  He blinked but said nothing.

  “I’m worried about your mental health, Warren. I’m serious.”

  The faintest of smiles touched the corners of his mouth. “Your worries no longer worry me.”

  This set her back. “And our children’s worries?”

  “They’ll know someday who really cared about them.”

  “What does that mean?” Laurel struggled against her bonds in frustration. “You’re talking like a Delphic oracle. You keep telling me I’ve broken a trust. All right, what if I have? From what Kyle said, you’ve done the same thing with your patients. Or with yourself. Maybe both. I don’t know, because you won’t tell me. But he was talking about prison, Warren. Whatever you did must have been pretty bad. I don’t understand it, but then I don’t have to. Because I can forgive you, whatever you’ve done. I know you’re a good man, deep down. So why can’t you forgive me?”

  “It’s different. Completely different.”

  “How? Stealing is a lesser sin than adultery?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what I’ve done, or why.”

  “I want to!”

  “And I want to know what you’ve done. Are you going to tell me?”

  She bit her bottom lip. She had certainly thought about confessing. If she admitted her affair with Danny, Warren would believe her, she knew. After the initial shock had passed anyway. Because every word she spoke would ring with the conviction of truth. The question was how Warren would react once he’d accepted that truth. If her lover had in fact been Kyle, or someone else of that caliber, Warren would probably scream and yell in disgust, then kick her out of the house and divorce her. But Danny McDavitt was a different thing altogether. For Warren, the essential nature of masculine honor was sacrifice, and he respected Danny more than almost any man he’d ever met. He admired Danny’s war record, of course; that was a given. But he also saw Danny as a dedicated family man. When he and Danny coached the girls in soccer last year, little Michael had come along for most practices, and all of the games. Many times Laurel had caught Warren staring as Danny patiently tried to engage his son in activities with the other kids. And what she’d seen etched into her husband’s face at those times was a combination of pity and admiration. Once, Warren had actually climbed into the car after practice and said, “Danny McDavitt’s a better man than I am. If Grant had been born like that, it might have killed me.” This happened months before Laurel and Danny started seeing each other, but Laurel sometimes wondered if Warren’s admiration for Danny had formed some perverse part of her attraction to him.

  No confession, she decided. If Warren were to find out now that I’m in love with Danny—and that Danny loves me—he’d self-destruct. A colder woman, she thought, might reveal the truth to try to drive her husband to suicide, but Laurel couldn’t consider it. First because she didn’t want her children to lose their father. Second because Warren might decide to make his wife and children precede him into death. A lot of fathers had done so in the past. All you had to do was watch the news to know that. And last, of course, there was the selfish consideration. Danny might be in love with her, but he was unwilling to give up custody of Michael to marry her. Even if Warren died tonight, it would bring her no closer to a future with Danny.

  “We both need to talk about the bad things we’ve done,” she said. “But not right now. Right now we need to find a way out of this trap we’ve made for ourselves. We need to make sure our children are safe.”

  Warren actually looked as if he was considering it. “What about Kyle?”

  “What about him? He tried to kill you. You acted in self-defense. I’ll testify to that.”

  Warren looked toward the study. “I just want you to know one thing. Everything I’ve done this past year was for the children. And for you. Even the bad things.”

  “Warren, how can that be? Please help me understand!”

  “I can’t. You know how I am. Some things I just can’t talk about.”

  The phone rang again, but he ignored it.

  “Don’t you think you should answer? They’re probably getting pretty antsy out there.”

  He nodded. “They are. I can see them on my computer.”

  Laurel was thunderstruck. She had entirely forgotten about the security cameras they’d installed when the house was built. She’d never used them, but Warren had the cameras connected to his computer via wireless connection, and he was obviously monitoring them now. No wonder he was so calm! Sitting there while the phone rang endlessly! He’d know the assault was coming in plenty of time to retreat to the safe room. She needed to text Danny about the cameras right away.

  “I don’t think they know I can see them,” Warren said. “Or t
hey’d be concealing themselves better.”

  “The cameras are pretty hard to see,” Laurel observed, remembering how well the architect had hidden them in the molding outside.

  “You insisted on that, remember?”

  Yeah, great. “So, you’re not going to answer the phone anymore?”

  “Ray Breen’s an idiot. Sheriff Ellis isn’t much better.”

  “You need to talk to somebody. So they don’t come charging in here and hurt Beth.”

  Warren nodded slowly. Then, after a few moments, he said, “Danny.”

  Laurel’s heart thudded. “What?”

  “I wouldn’t mind talking to Danny. He was in the chopper with Ellis, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Danny’s a family man, all the way. And his wife is a little . . . difficult. The major would understand what I’m going through.”

  Laurel wanted to smash Warren’s face. Here in the heart of hell, she was being compared to Starlette McDavitt, one of the women she despised most in the world.

  “Ask for Danny, then,” she said. You son of a bitch.

  Like a man suddenly remembering he’d left something on the stove, Warren got up and walked back to his computer. Laurel rolled to face the sofa back, then slid her Razr from its niche and began working the keypad with her thumb.

  • • •

  Bonnie Elfman had led Danny and Sheriff Ellis to a TV room at the back of her house, where they found Grant Shields sitting on a wicker sofa with Deputy Sandra Souther, pretending to watch TV. Ellis had questioned the boy gently enough, and he got a recap of what Ray Breen had already relayed to him: a nine-year-old’s perspective on a violent family argument and possible murder. Now the sheriff was trying to tease out details.

  “How many shots did you hear, son?” he asked. “One? Or maybe two?”

  Grant closed his eyes like a psychic trying to guess what card someone was holding. “Three, I think.”

  Ellis glanced at Danny. “How many guns does your dad own?”

  The boy’s eyes opened. “Um . . . three.”