Takeover

by Lisa Black

  The trace evidence department supervisor took a morose sip of coffee, surrounded by ten other gurneys, each bearing a grim burden. The morning meeting, or “viewing,” would shortly commence, as the department supervisors and all the pathologists gathered for a briefing on the day’s cases and to decide which doctor would autopsy which victim. “As if we don’t have enough to do.”

  “You say that like it’s my fault.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, you still have three sets of clothing to examine, from yesterday’s suicides and that crib death. And we’ve got the National Transportation Safety Board coming in to see the harnesses from that helicopter crash last week. Not to mention that everyone is going to be late because traffic is backed up now that the freakin’ secretary of state is going to grace Cleveland with her presence.” But he said all this absently, without any real concern. Their field of work was, by definition, reactive. Without a way to investigate crimes before they occurred, they were always behind. As long as Theresa kept sufficiently current with the caseload so that Leo didn’t have to do any of it, all was right in his world.

  Now he wrinkled his nose at a heart-attack victim who had lain in her own kitchen for several days before being found, and he opened his mouth to go on.

  “Theresa!” Don Delgado, moving with uncharacteristic haste, pushed aside a gurney to approach them in the badly lit hallway. As the occupied gurney was stopped, none too gently, by the tiled wall, the young DNA analyst grasped both her shoulders, and she knew that something was very, very wrong. “Theresa. There’s a problem.”

  Her throat tightened. “Rachael,” she rasped out.

  “No.” His shiny olive skin had paled, which did nothing to reassure her. “Your dead guy from this morning—”

  “Him.” She jerked her head to the gurney that rested against her hip.

  “Yeah. He worked for a bank downtown. Two guys just tried to rob it. Security tried to contain them, and they grabbed a bunch of people in the lobby as hostages. CPD has the place locked down, but at the moment it’s a standoff.”

  Okay, she thought. Why is that so—

  “It’s Paul, Theresa. He’s in there with them. He’s one of the hostages.”

  CHAPTER 2

  8:14 A.M.

  “There’s nothing you can do, honey,” Frank told her over the phone. “Just don’t panic. He’ll be okay. No one’s dead yet.”

  Yet? “What happened?” she asked for the third time, her Nextel crammed to her ear. She barely felt the hard folding seat of the old teaching amphitheater underneath her, or Don’s arm around her shoulders. Her brain had disconnected from her body, and her body, with animal instinct, knew that survival lay in staying calm and quiet. Hysteria would attract disaster, like lightning to a metal pole.

  Her brain, meanwhile, worked to keep up. “What happened?”

  “We had a takeover about ten minutes ago. Two guys rolled up in front of the bank and went in, armed with some heavy guns. They grabbed some Fed workers before security could do anything, but one guard who’s either stupid or crazy ran outside and removed their car. So they stayed put, with the guns and the hostages. Paul had gone to the Fed to talk to the coworkers and the boss about Ludlow. I had roused a neighbor to get the scoop on our little family, so he went on without me. No one is hurt, Tess. You getting me?”

  Something smelled bad, she thought. Literally. A pathologist must have opened up the first victim in the autopsy room next door, and for once her stomach rebelled at the odor. “How do you know Paul’s there? Maybe he’s not there.”

  “Fed security has cameras in the lobby, and I spoke to the guy who took the car—Paul had to show his ID to get through the metal detector. But he’s not hurt, that’s what you have to focus on.”

  “Have you called him? Does he answer his—”

  “Tess. He’s in plainclothes. If these guys haven’t searched him for the gun and badge, then they probably don’t know he’s a cop, and I don’t want to tip them off by ringing his Nextel. Don’t call him.”

  She shivered, and Don’s arm tightened around her. “Okay, yeah…if Ludlow is somehow related to this, then these guys have already murdered today.”

  “I know.”

  The upset in her stomach melted into a pain, flowing through her insides like a cancer. The helplessness felt even worse; she failed to see how her expertise in forensic science would help in a bank-robbery case. “I’m coming—”

  “The situation is stable at the moment, and they’re calling in the negotiator. If everyone stays calm, it might be all right. In the meantime I need you to work, Tess.”

  “Work?” He might as well have suggested that she paint her nails. How could she possibly work at a time like this?

  “The car. I’m having it brought out to you.”

  She’d crushed the phone to her head so hard that it hurt, and she switched ears. Don’s arm slid from her shoulders, but he stayed in the seat beside her. “I’ll come there.”

  “No—”

  “You’d have to flatbed it here, to avoid losing any evidence, and how are you going to get a wrecker in there? You probably have the streets full of cop cars, don’t you?”

  He didn’t have an immediate answer, and she knew she would win. “It would be much faster for me to come there. We don’t have time to argue about it.”

  He sighed, surely knowing her argument for the BS it was. “No, I guess we don’t. Come on out—at the moment this car is all we’ve got. I’d like to know if these two are responsible for Ludlow. I’d like to know if they’re high, if one is diabetic, if they left their cell phone in the glove compartment, or if the registered owner has been stuffed into the trunk. Look at this car, Tess, and tell me everything you can about these guys.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  She took the DNA analyst with her, for both extra help and moral support. They had been through bad times before and understood that the way to keep going when only a heartbeat from disaster was to act as if it were just another day on the job. Don Delgado—younger, the third son of a black mother and a Cuban father, who grew up in the DMZ near East Ninety-third and Quincy—and Theresa had little in common besides attitude, and both could not have cared less.

  Now they surveyed the 1994 Mercedes-Benz parked on the grassy mall between the public library and the convention center. She could see the Federal Reserve building, stately and aloof, its pink granite gleaming in the sun. Metal barricades and red NO ACCESS tape closed off East Sixth Street from Rockwell to Superior. The sports coupe had a pearlescent paint job that appeared a pale peach from one angle and a warm caramel from another. “As getaway cars go,” Theresa said, “they could have chosen a less conspicuous one.”

  She barely heard her own words, her mind occupied with Paul’s fate. Was he crouched on the floor with his hands on his head? What if his jacket fell open and the badge showed? Would they shoot him? Had they already shot him?

  “Maybe that’s the idea. Who robs banks in a Mercedes?” Don turned to a uniformed female officer, leaning against her marked unit. “Who is the car registered to?”

  She stopped staring at his many physical attributes long enough to admit, “I don’t know.”

  “Find out.”

  “SRT is probably doing that.” She meant the Special Response Team, a catchall phrase for cops who respond to out-of-the-ordinary calls.

  “There’s no reason you can’t do it, too.”

  Theresa saw the young woman’s admiration of the handsome Don turn to a scowl. Perhaps all her friends were around the corner at the standoff or at least on the field trip providing extra security for the secretary of state’s visit, and here she was, sweating next to an old German car, taking orders from a hottie with no wedding ring and an all-work, no-play approach.

  “Now would be good,” Don added, smiling sweetly. “We need that information.”

  The woman walked out of earshot, with her radio and a notebook. Don continued to click photos of the car, front and
back, driver’s side, passenger side. “At least the owner isn’t in the trunk, right?”

  “Yeah, they checked.”

  “They didn’t wait for us?”

  “If someone had been inside, they’d need medical attention, from the heat if nothing else.” In some ways Theresa had been right not to inspect the car at the medical examiner’s office. Their only garage had lousy lighting; at least the grassy mall blazed with brilliant sunlight. She would have to stand the heat to have the illumination.

  The exterior of the Mercedes had been well maintained, even beyond the fancy after-market paint job, its only flaw being a slight dent in the back bumper. The tires were beginning to bald, however, and the front right showed irregular wear.

  “Camber’s off,” Don said. “The wheel is angled inward just a touch. Probably hit a pothole or something.”

  “How do you men do that? You can’t remember your mother’s birthday, but you know the timing sequence on a ’68 Mustang.”

  “The same thing happened to a Riviera I used to have. And I never forget my mother’s birthday. Or yours.”

  Theresa brushed black fingerprint powder over the glossy paint. The tedious work frustrated her, but she knew that the exterior of a vehicle is an ideal surface for prints, and she needed to collect them before any more people, including herself, climbed in and out of the car. The security guard and their young patrolwoman, at the very least, had already been too close to it. She forced herself to work calmly, without missing any of the surface.

  “They must have left it running when they went into the bank.” She spoke aloud, trying to get her mind around the events of the morning. The pictures would not form. What would Rachael do if he died? How would she react? She didn’t seem to love Paul, not yet, but he had been well on his way to becoming a second father to her. “The security guy would hardly have the keys to it, so it must have been running when he came out and moved it, which seems really weird to me, but apparently that’s the protocol: contain the bad guys and cut off their escape.”

  “Wouldn’t it be safer to let them take the money and run?” Don asked, lifting a piece of tape just enough to slide a card underneath it, lest the weak breeze blow the card away. “Then capture them later when there aren’t a bunch of civilians standing around?”

  “This is a federal bank.” Theresa brushed the powder liberally over the surface, holding her arm out as far as it would go to prevent the fine black grains from settling back on her. “They don’t let nobody take nothing.”

  “A federal bank does things differently?”

  Clear finger marks sprang to life; Theresa could only hope they belonged to the criminals. She concentrated, to keep herself from devolving into panic. “It’s a Federal Reserve bank. It’s like a bank for banks. The Fed lends money to banks, oversees all transactions by check, and controls the physical amount of currency in circulation.” She noted her coworker’s raised eyebrows. “I chaperoned Rachael’s sixth-grade field trip.”

  “But it’s still a bank, right?”

  “I guess so. But they’d have been better off going to the Fifth Third across the street.”

  The young officer returned; her body appeared fit, but her face flushed red from the heat, and she had used the short trip to her vehicle to snag a bottle of water. She offered her own theory: “Maybe they meant to, and then they got the wrong building. They ain’t too bright, and that’s a fact.”

  Enough speculation, Theresa thought. “Who’s the car registered to?”

  “Robert Moyers. Resides in Brookpark, no record, doesn’t answer his phone.”

  “And hasn’t reported it stolen?”

  “Hasn’t reported squat.”

  Theresa lifted a palm print with wide, clear tape. “How old is he? Could he be one of the robbers?”

  The young woman shrugged again. “Moyers is twenty-seven. But they’re wearing hats and sunglasses, so who can tell?”

  “Driving your own car to rob a bank is so dumb it should be a charge in itself,” Don said. “But then we’ve already established their level of intelligence. Or lack thereof.”

  The cop wiped her face again. “All I know is, it’s too early in the summer for it to be this hot. It’s freakin’ June, feels like August, and I got to work a special detail tonight at the lake tonight, too. Mosquito heaven.”

  Theresa stripped off the black-smeared latex gloves and donned a fresh pair, finally ready to move inside the car. She glanced up at the Federal Reserve building, as she had every five seconds since arriving. For a moment she felt more frustration than fear—so close, and yet…

  Paul could die today. He might be dead already; the walls of that building were thick enough to withstand a nuclear attack, certainly thick enough to muffle a gunshot—

  Enough, she told herself. Focus on what you can do. Focus.

  The interior had been cared for as meticulously as the exterior. The faded leather upholstery had no holes, and the bits of woodlike paneling shone deep and glossy. A steering-wheel cover had been carefully laced up and satellite radio installed. She assumed that Sirius could trace the unit to the owner’s account, but that would certainly take days, and Paul didn’t have that kind of time. She noted the location of the seat, already positioned so that her five-foot-seven-inch frame could reach the pedals comfortably.

  Under the driver’s seat, she found a gas receipt from the Lakewood Marathon station, dated the day before, 11:32 A.M. The driver had paid cash. She also found an empty container for candy mints, a wisp of foil packaging, and a toothpick. Great for DNA evidence. Not too informative in the short run.

  Under the passenger’s seat, she found an empty white number-ten envelope that had been sealed and then ripped open. Oddly, it had no mailing address or return address, only a metered postmark for forty-one cents, dated the previous October.

  Both floor mats yielded yellowish grains, which Don lifted with clear packing tape and placed on sheets of clear acetate, labeling each sheet with a Sharpie marker.

  The sun ducked behind clouds occasionally, but the humidity persisted. Theresa’s handsome coworker disappeared long enough to cart the first set of evidence samples back to the lab, then returned bearing something even more attractive: an ice-cold bottle of water. “You okay out here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your face is as red as a beet.”

  Theresa nearly spit out the water. “Hell, Don, don’t say that! My mother always used to tell me that.” It had annoyed her at twelve and still annoyed her at thirty-eight.

  “Sorry. I took that dirt from the floor mat to Oliver to run in the GC/mass spec.” The mass spectrometer, coupled with a gas chromatograph, would separate the substance into its chemical compounds. “I thought I’d have to offer to wash his car, but he heard about…about what’s happening and took it without argument. I think he likes you.”

  “Impossible.” Theresa lifted the rear floor mat. “Oliver doesn’t like anybody.”

  “I’m not trying to tell you your business, but have you checked the glove compartment?”

  “I did. There’s an owner’s manual and a receipt for an exhaust system from Conrad’s in Strongsville, dated four years ago, which our little patrol officer is supposed to be calling about right now. She returned to her air-conditioned squad car the minute you left and emerges only to deliver the occasional bulletin. I also found a travel package of Kleenex and a bottle of Advil. That’s it.”

  “And no sign of the owner?”

  “Still isn’t answering his phone. They’ve sent someone to the address.” Theresa straightened up and snatched the keys out of the ignition. Aside from the ignition and trunk keys, the ring held a rubberized red profile of some historic-looking figures and a smaller key, apparently meant for a Master padlock. She opened the trunk.

  “No body,” Don confirmed. “Nothing back here but a jack and a spare and a set of jumper cables. This guy keeps a very neat car.”

  “Man after my own heart. I hope he’s still aliv
e. Maybe out of town or something, blissfully unaware that his vehicle has been used in the commission of a felony, and perhaps a murder to boot.” With a flashlight in one hand, she combed through the dark gray carpeting with the other, picking up loose hairs and fibers and dropping them into a petri dish. This is a waste of time, Theresa thought. They’d stolen this car to rob a bank—they had no reason to even look in the trunk, much less leave her any clues there. She plucked up a dried twig with two leaves still attached. “You know what this is?”

  Don took it from her fingers. “A twig?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sorry. Magnolia? Birch? You really shouldn’t ask me—I flunked botany.”

  “So did I.” And she couldn’t see how any of this would help Paul anyway.

  The beam of light caught a dark smear on the carpet’s surface. She moved the flashlight to study it from different angles. “This could be blood.”

  “Want a Hemastix?”

  “Please.”

  From the equipment Theresa had piled on a clean paper bag on the pavement, Don slid a paper strip out of a bottle and wet the end of it with a squirt of distilled water. Theresa touched the yellow pad at the end of it to the smear, and it turned dark blue. “Hmmm.”

  “Blood.”

  “It could be Ludlow’s,” Theresa said, more to herself than to Don. “They could have killed him somewhere else and then dumped his body on his own lawn, but I don’t think so. He didn’t look disheveled enough, and there would be a lot more blood here. It could be from whatever they used to beat Mark Ludlow to death.”