Takeover

by Lisa Black

  “Aside from the heatstroke.” She could not take time for sympathy. If she started to cry, she wouldn’t stop.

  Don nodded. “You’ve brought company?”

  She introduced Jason.

  Don told them, “Come on in for a minute. I’ll tell you what I’ve got so far.”

  Reluctantly Theresa abandoned the car a second time and followed her coworker. Jason went with them, pausing to stare at the array of cotton-draped gurneys in the dock area. “Don’t you refrigerate these things?”

  “These people,” Theresa snapped. “People. Yes, of course we do. These folks are either on their way in or on their way out. I need to stop at autopsy. You can wait in the parking lot if you want to.”

  Jason remained in step with Don and her. “No. I’ve seen dead bodies before. More than I care to think about.”

  “I hope that’s not a reflection on Cavanaugh’s negotiating abilities.” She was being a total bitch, and she knew it—but felt powerless to stop. Being back in her own world loosened some inhibitions, and stress freed the rest.

  “Nope. Gulf War.”

  She let out a breath, moved past the door with letters spelling AUTOPSY on its frosted glass. “Sorry. I’m glad you’re not going to faint on me, though. I want to ask Dr. Johnson here about her victim. Okay if we take a detour, Don?”

  “Always a pleasure to visit the good doctor.” He followed them through the door.

  Mark Ludlow’s autopsy had just been completed. The diener, or autopsy assistant, had placed the victim’s partially dissected organs inside a red biohazard bag and then into the torso’s cavity. He’d sewn the flesh back into place, over the bag, with heavy black thread and not particularly neat stitches.

  Christine Johnson stood near the head. The exposed skull lay in fragments, which she was piecing together on the stainless-steel table like a macabre jigsaw puzzle. She peered at Theresa with that all-seeing doctor gaze that can tell when you’re not sleeping well or haven’t touched a vegetable in a month. “How are you holding up?”

  “Okay. Paul’s all right, so far.”

  Christine, tall, black, and caring, stripped off a glove to reach out and put a hand on Theresa’s shoulder. Theresa remained rooted to the ground. As with Don, if Christine hugged her, she might collapse in her sympathy and hunker there for the rest of this crisis. “What can you tell me about this guy?”

  Christine summarized, “The late Mr. Ludlow had deposits of cholesterol in some veins and a precancerous lump in his left testicle that might have become a bad scene in another few years. Otherwise he was perfectly healthy until someone hit him over the head with something heavy, three times.”

  “Can you tell me what it was?”

  “A piece of thin pipe, maybe. But one impression has more of a defined, oval shape to it, so there might be two different weapons, or two surfaces on the same weapon.” The doctor frowned. She didn’t often encounter a weapon she couldn’t immediately identify. Her interest in the instruments of death bordered on the unhealthy, or so Theresa occasionally pointed out.

  “Metal?”

  “I can’t be sure, but I haven’t found any wood splinters.” With blue-latex-gloved fingers, Christine turned the right wrist outward to display the victim’s palm. “He held up his hands to defend himself and got two fingers broken, but he also had some skin scraped off. Whatever they used, I’m betting it isn’t smooth.”

  “I think I should wait in the hall,” Jason said. “If you don’t mind.”

  Christine glanced at him. “Who’s this cutie?”

  “His name’s Jason, he works with the negotiator.”

  “So you met Chris Cavanaugh? What’s he like? Does he look as good in person as on TV?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe you,” the doctor said. “Jason, tell him I read his book.”

  “Christine—”

  “Okay, okay. That’s all I have, anyway. I wish it were more.”

  Theresa continued to stare at the remains of Mark Ludlow, noting the reddish areas where the blood had pooled after death and then coagulated. “The lividity is all on his back, consistent with the way we found him.”

  “Yep.”

  “Don’t blows to the back of the head force someone down on their face? You’d think the last blow would be on the ground.”

  As in any full autopsy, the scalp had been cut at the top of the head and flipped forward to reveal the skull. Christine moved it back into place. “When someone’s down and having their head pounded into the pavement, it usually leaves injuries to the face. He has none, which makes me think this attack was quick and brutal, with massive force applied to the skull. He died before he had time to fall.”

  Jason sidled toward the door. “I’m going to—”

  “Come with me.” Don led him out.

  “What about time of death?” Theresa persisted.

  “From the rigor I’d say four to eight hours before he arrived here. So any time between midnight and four A.M.? Of course, if he died inside and they had the air-conditioning on, the time of death could be last evening. If he stayed outside the whole time, with this heat, he could have died only an hour before you found him. I can’t be sure.”

  Theresa thanked her and rejoined Don and Jason. Under the receptionist’s watchful eye, they continued through the lobby and punched the button for the elevator. The woman had come with the building and meant to stay there until the walls fell down.

  The doors slid shut, and Jason asked if there was a men’s room handy.

  The third floor housed the trace evidence and toxicology departments, decorated in the same worn 1950s linoleum and shabby paint as the rest of the building. At least the air-conditioning had been having a good day, and the temperature hovered around sixty-five. Theresa felt clammy in her sweat-soaked clothing but didn’t complain. If anyone tried to adjust the thermostat, it would turn off, and tomorrow they would all swelter. A happy medium could not be found.

  “Oliver had something to tell you,” Don said as they stepped off the elevator. “You want to see him first?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jason lunged for the door labeled MEN.

  Theresa knocked for admittance to the toxicology department and made her way past a row of plastic bottles—gastric contents, something she avoided whenever possible. She found Oliver, the overweight, ponytailed toxicologist, in his usual lair at the rear of the building, protected by a fortress of compressed air tanks and scarred countertops.

  “I suppose you want to know about your dirt. Seems an appropriate summary of my professional life: I work with dirt.”

  “Dirt is important,” Theresa told him. “It’s what the earth is made of. Can you tell me something about the stuff from the floor mat?”

  “Aluminum and silicon, mostly. Clay. Clay with a little rust in it. That tell you anything?”

  “Not really. Any industrial applications?”

  He snorted with enough force to ruffle the papers on his desk. “About a million, from bricks to paper to toothpaste. But the grains are coarse and the sample is anything but pure, so my extremely well-educated guess would still be dirt.”

  She sighed. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “You find anything more useful, bring it back.”

  “Volunteering for work, Oliver? You’re going to ruin your reputation.”

  “Good point.”

  “What about the stuff from the victim’s suit jacket?”

  “Again, dirt. I can’t get enough of the stuff today.” He patted the dusty beige box that housed the mass spectrometer, possibly the only physical entity in the universe to receive his affection. “It’s running as we speak. I’ll page you if it’s interesting.”

  “Call me even if it isn’t, okay?”

  Oliver nodded and turned back to his desk without another word, and she went to find Don and the coffeepot. En route she rang Frank for an update, which he could not provide. The robbers were pacing in front of the hostages, but their body l
anguage did not seem particularly agitated.

  “Actually,” he said, “they seem to be the coolest guys in downtown Cleveland today.”

  “I know you’re trying to make me feel better, but that doesn’t make any sense. We assumed at first that they thought they were robbing a regular bank and could grab the cash and run. But if they know there are stacks of it in the basement, then they know exactly where they are.”

  “Lucas never mentioned the basement. He just knows there’s a lot of money somewhere, and that’s hardly a tough deduction once you’re in the building.”

  “If they thought they were hitting the local savings and loan, then they’re not the deducing type. I think they know exactly where they are,” Theresa said. “Did you notice that Lucas’s demand is exactly half the amount to be shredded?”

  “But then why not all? Besides, if they knew it was the Fed, they’d have expected the tight security. They’d have had a better plan.”

  “Yeah, but all they had to do was get close enough to grab a clerk and put a gun to her head. No security force in the world can do much once that has happened.”

  “Hell of a chance,” Frank grumbled.

  “It worked.” She wondered why they were even debating it. It didn’t matter whether the suspects meant to hit the Fed, a regular bank, or the corner 7-Eleven. All that mattered now was getting them to come out without killing anyone—except she still couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that all was not as it seemed.

  “I don’t know,” Frank was saying. “These guys aren’t even smart enough to bring a driver.”

  “If they did get the setup from Ludlow, they knew that the money wouldn’t take long to come up the elevator. Is it risky? Sure. But it could have worked. If they hadn’t lost the car, they could have been in and out in ten minutes. I sure wish they had been.”

  “Hang in there, baby.”

  Hopelessness flooded her, trying to seep into her bones, and she snapped the Nextel shut. Her cousin’s calling her anything other than her name could not be a good sign. All might be calm for the moment, but they had a long way to go.

  CHAPTER 10

  10:23 A.M.

  Theresa grabbed a coffee, for once not for the caffeine but for the heat. She’d gone from sweltering to shivering in a flat ten minutes, the silk blouse having cooled to a wet shroud.

  Don sat in front of a computer terminal, explaining the images to Jason. “Of the prints we got from the car, seven fingers and the palm match Robert Moyers. Ten other prints don’t match anyone in our database.”

  “There’s ten other people on this car?”

  “No, it could be ten fingers from one person or, more likely, ten fingers from two or three other people. There’s no way to tell for sure.”

  “That doesn’t help much,” Theresa admitted. “Moyers owns the Benz—Wait a minute. Why is he in the database?”

  “Armed robbery.”

  “So that could be him in there.” Theresa sipped, letting the scalding liquid aggravate an already fluttering stomach. She had begun to think these crooks were smart, but who would use their own car for a burglary? “Is there still no one at his house? Do we have a work address or anything?”

  “CPD just called Jason about that. The address is old—the woman living there bought it last spring. Doesn’t know anything else about him, not even what he looks like. CPD checked her out, and she’s, like, Snow White: a fashion designer, two kids. Not the type to be an armed robber’s moll.”

  “So where’s he been since last spring? He sure hasn’t been living in that Benz, unless he’s a neat freak of the highest order. It’s clean.”

  “You keep saying that,” Jason said.

  “We see a lot of cars,” Theresa explained. “Most are filthy. Some have their own supply of cockroaches.”

  Jason made a face. “I see. This is the Ohio state database that these prints turned up in?”

  “You betcha. And before you ask, we can’t search the country unless we send it to the FBI and wait four or five weeks.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “It’s not like TV,” Don explained gently. “Moving right along. I superglued the Advil bottle, the Tic Tac container, the Kleenex package, and even that little piece of foil but didn’t get any fingerprints of value. The fumes only brought up a smudge here or there. I used mag powder on the owner’s manual and the envelope and the receipt, since the pulverized metal is better on porous surfaces. And tell Paul,” he added to Theresa, “I hope he appreciates it, because I hate that black powder crap.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “I got nothing with the mag powder either. CPD called Conrad’s about the receipt, but it had been paid with cash by Robert Moyers, with the same address, the one he sold to the fashion designer. No one at Conrad’s remembers anything about one sale four years ago. And no one at Sirius will tell me anything about the satellite radio account either, so the cops are running that down.”

  “Have you called about the meter on that envelope?”

  “The what?”

  “Where is it?”

  Don moved to a counter and picked up the number ten envelope, now sooty from the mag powder used to process it. “It’s blank. Nothing but the forty-two-cent imprint.”

  Theresa peered through the plastic at the inked red markings. “Postage meters are closely regulated. You have to lease them from a dealer authorized by the United States Postal Service. This is a Pitney Bowes; if we call them with this serial number, they should be able to give us the name of the company that metered this envelope.”

  Jason listened attentively. “That easy, huh?”

  “Not really—they’ll want faxes on letterhead and a few other forms of identification before they’ll release the information. I’ll take the envelope back with me and get some police VIP to call.”

  Don thrust a printed form and a pen at Theresa. Chain-of-custody procedures had to be maintained, even under extenuating circumstances, up to and including Armageddon. “Sign here and it’s all yours. Now, follow me.”

  She led them into one of the back rooms, pausing at the door.

  “That looks—” Theresa stopped.

  Don nodded. “Yep.”

  “Like Leo. At a microscope.”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s like he’s working.”

  “You betcha.”

  “I can hear you, you know.” Her boss spoke without moving his lean face from the ocular lenses of an old polarized light microscope. “I can also hear the percentage of your cost-of-living increase dropping like a sow’s litter.”

  Theresa approached with caution, as if a heavy tread could shatter the tableau. “What are you doing?”

  “Pollen.”

  “What?”

  “Remember pollen? The powdery stuff that busy little bees carry from one plant to another, making most of our food supply possible? Identifying them with polarized light was a big deal in the fifties and sixties, tracking dastardly criminals back to the apple tree behind the crime scene.” He replaced a pair of glasses on his nose, long fingers flicking with excess energy. “It’s a dying art, sadly. No one does it anymore.”

  “Yeah, like hair comparisons,” Theresa commiserated. “We have a reference collection for pollen?”

  “In the basement. Way back in the corner, behind the piece of fence from that torso in the park and the skull-under-glass thing from those satanic wannabes. I’ve probably breathed in enough dust to give me pleurisy.” Indeed, the one-by-three-inch glass slides scattered around on the countertop appeared dusty, and the mounting media had yellowed. The corners on their hard vinyl case had abraded into powder.

  “So what is it?”

  “Pine.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “That’s all?”

  “Nothing exotic, sorry. It’s kind of odd to see so much of it, though.”

  He skittered his chair back a few feet as Theresa bent her head to the eyepiece, viewing the pink-stained grains. They seemed to have three se
ctions, a central orb with two kidney-shaped appendages. “Why is the amount odd?”

  “It rains regularly here, even in summer. That knocks most of the pollen out of the air.”

  “So they might be from some other area?”

  “But I thought your guy lived here.”

  “His car does. Or did. Where would we expect to find a lot of pine pollen?”

  Leo began to fit the glass reference slides back into their kit. “I remembered how to use a polarizing microscope, Theresa. That doesn’t make me a botanist. But I’ll see if someone at the Museum of Natural History can help us.”

  Leo, volunteering to make a phone call, hunt up a specialist? Tears pricked the backs of her eyelids. Don’t start, she warned herself. Don’t.

  Jason’s remote radio chirped at the same time as Don’s Nextel.

  Jason put it to his ear, then held it out so they could hear it. “Chris just called them. The receptionist answered.”

  She heard Cavanaugh’s voice, full and deep even on the radio’s tiny speaker. “Can I speak to Lucas?”

  Don took his call out of the room.

  “Chris.” Lucas’s voice sounded much less real than Cavanaugh’s and had an echo to it. The robber had them on speakerphone, so that the hostages could hear every word of the process meant to free them. Theresa wondered if that made Paul feel better or worse. “You’re early.”

  “I needed to give you the heads-up. First, though, is everyone in there still doing okay?”

  “They’re getting tired and thirsty and will probably have to go to the bathroom soon, Chris, so it would be best if we could take our show on the road. What are you telling me? The chief won’t part with four million dollars that’s not even his?”

  “No, they’re still talking about the money. It’s the car. They took it to the medical examiner’s office and—”

  “What did they do to it?”

  “Nothing. It’s fine. It’s just that the flatbed isn’t there to pick it up yet, so I know it isn’t going to be back here to you by the one-hour deadline. There’s no way. And I didn’t want to wait until the last minute to tell you. Things usually go smoother with that policy—I don’t surprise you, you don’t surprise me, okay? Can we agree on that at least?”