Takeover

by Lisa Black

  The conversation, if it could be so called, between Lucas and the querulous Cherise bounced off the eighty-six-year-old marble walls and curved along the elaborate ceiling frescoes. Paul could make out most of it, once the dog piped down, as they moved in and out of sight behind the wall.

  “How much is that?”

  “Thirty-eight thousand, four hundred.”

  “Okay. Next drawer. Fit the screwdriver into the lock.”

  “It won’t move.”

  “Pry it. Get the tip into the crack there and twist.”

  “Tell you what.” Paul heard Cherise’s words as clearly as if she stood next to him, though he could not see either of them. “Why don’t you try it? I’ll hold your gun.”

  “She’s always like that,” Thompkins muttered, and shook his head.

  “Quiet,” Bobby told him, including the rest of the row in his glance. “And stop fidgeting.”

  From the stress in his voice, it seemed that some of Lucas’s cool had evaporated. “Do it!”

  Cherise said a few words Paul couldn’t make out. Then “No!”

  The gunshots echoed through the lobby. The sound seemed to gather strength with every rebound off the polished tile until the waves deafened him. Missy screamed, Jessica Ludlow held her son’s head to her chest, and Thompkins came partially to his feet. Paul’s hand moved toward his gun. But he froze when Bobby and his M4 carbine materialized three feet in front of them.

  He’s in the center! Paul screamed silently to the unseen police snipers who had to be stationed in the windows of the library across the street. One of them must be able to get a bead—Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!

  But now Lucas could not be seen, not by the snipers and not by Paul.

  “Did he shoot her?” the janitor asked. Missy sobbed. The security guys were all shouting, mostly obscenities, but Paul heard one say, “I can’t see.”

  Brad moaned, “We have to get out of here. He’ll kill us all, one by one.”

  “Are there offices behind the teller cages?” Paul asked Thompkins. “Other rooms back in there?”

  “Three. Mine and—”

  “I said shut up!” Bobby shouted at them as he backed up to the teller windows. “Lucas, you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Be there in a sec.”

  “If he killed that girl, then you’re both in very serious trouble,” Paul said to Bobby.

  “Gee, like we weren’t before? You wanna act as my lawyer? Get me a deal?”

  “You haven’t hurt anyone—yet. You should get out now, quit while you’re ahead.” Paul fought to keep his voice steady, reasonable, watching every minute for an opening. If Bobby would turn away, even for a second, Paul could fire, close the fifteen-foot gap between them before Lucas emerged, grab Bobby’s gun, and—

  Bobby not only pointed the rifle at him, he raised it to his eye as if taking special aim. “You should shut up and quit while you’re ahead. I’ll hang with Lucas and kill all of you—”

  Missy gasped.

  “—but I ain’t never going to trust no cops. My whole family is dead because of them.”

  Lucas reappeared behind him, with the backpack but without any sign of Cherise. “What’s going on?”

  “This guy thinks I should give myself up.”

  “Well”—Lucas dropped the now-stuffed backpack onto the floor—“a man’s entitled to his opinion. We have four hundred and eighty thousand and some-odd dollars, Bobby. I don’t think that’s enough.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Did you kill that girl?” the janitor asked again.

  Lucas said, “Let’s just say we won’t be seeing Miss Cherise again soon. But right now we need to put our heads together. Where else in this building can we find some money?”

  CHAPTER 13

  11:36 A.M.

  “Something just happened,” Theresa said. “Every person there just jumped a foot.”

  “I wish we had sound,” Cavanaugh said.

  Jason picked up the phone. “They have sound at the monitor station. I’ll ask.”

  Theresa caught her breath as she saw Paul’s hand move to his side, going for his gun. It was an ingrained response, she knew. He wouldn’t even have time to think about it, wouldn’t even have time to stop himself, but Bobby Moyers would have time to pull the trigger on that submachine gun before Paul could get his Glock up and pointed.

  She watched Bobby approach Paul. But the robber merely shouted something, and Paul’s hand stopped midmotion. He did not pull out his gun. “What the hell is going on?” she demanded.

  “That young woman didn’t come back,” Cavanaugh pointed out.

  “Shots fired,” Jason said. “It sounds like he killed that girl.”

  Don’t move, Paul. Don’t do a thing.

  Cavanaugh let loose a string of expletives. “Can security see behind the teller cages?” he asked Jason.

  “Just the counter area at each window. There’s no camera coverage in the offices behind the cages. She went back there with Lucas, and only Lucas came out.”

  “Can’t we see through the windows? The ones in the outer walls are clear.”

  Jason knelt on the window seat, phone in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other. Where did he get those? Theresa wondered, resisting the urge to rip them out of his hands. She moved to the telescope instead.

  “I don’t see anyone,” the young man reported. “There’s cabinets stacked against a few of the windows. They must be behind those.”

  “So she could be alive.”

  “The other hostages are asking if she’s dead,” Jason went on. “He’s not denying it. They can’t make out much else.”

  “Why not?”

  Jason dropped the phone onto the table. “Fed security snaked a mike down an air vent. It’s over on the east wall, so most of the talk is unintelligible. You can only make out what someone’s saying when they shout.”

  “Crap. Who was that girl? Kessler?”

  “I don’t know,” the bank executive told them. Theresa watched Paul through the telescope. Did he know she was there? Sense it, maybe?

  “Is she an employee?”

  “Oh, she works there. She looked familiar to me, but I don’t know her name.”

  “Call your security team. They should have names to go with all the faces now.”

  “I asked them an hour ago,” Jason told him. “They were too busy trying to keep the FBI agents out of their desk chairs.”

  Kessler reached for the phone, then hesitated.

  “What?” Cavanaugh demanded.

  “I felt this sudden desire to ask if I could just go home.” The man’s face had become ashen over the course of the morning, approaching the shade of his shirt. “Cowardly, I know. I’m just not used to this.”

  “You’re not supposed to be, sir.” Cavanaugh spoke more gently. “It’s not your job, it’s mine, and I should have thought to get a list of the hostages an hour ago. Maybe everyone on it would still be alive.”

  Theresa couldn’t help but wonder if the bitterness in his voice had more to do with a woman’s untimely death or his perfect no-bloodshed record. “Now that he’s started killing people, he might keep on going.”

  He did not thank her for stating the obvious. “If we’re right about Ludlow, he had already started. It may be time to let him know we suspect him of Ludlow’s death, to let him get used to the idea he’s not going to be walking away from this, even if we can’t confirm the woman’s murder.” Cavanaugh’s hand strayed toward the phone, then stopped. “Wait a minute. When we were talking about Bobby having been sent out of state, you said you bet you knew where. I’ll bite. Where?”

  “Atlanta.”

  Bobby Moyers had a brother. Eric Moyers worked as a baggage handler for Continental Airlines. He described his job as slinging golf clubs and countless wheeled suitcases onto a moving belt for people who could afford to go to much nicer places on vacation than he could. He had the same sandy hair and stocky build, a head cold, and he didn’t want
to talk about his brother.

  “What’s he done now?” he asked Patrick as they both had a cigarette on the tarmac outside Concourse C. An Embraer jet began to push back from the elevated walkway.

  The heat levitated from the asphalt in visible waves, but Patrick wanted a smoke badly enough to risk passing out. “He’s robbing a bank and has taken a bunch of people hostage.”

  “What?”

  Patrick repeated himself, shouting this time.

  “Can’t say I’m surprised,” Eric Moyers said, once the jet left for the runway.

  “Why not? Has he said anything about it?”

  “He hasn’t said anything to me in over a year. I didn’t even know he’d been released from jail, or that he came back to Cleveland. No, I mean I’m not surprised about it because Bobby has been going from bad to worse his whole life, and I can’t see any reason why he’d stop now. It killed our mother, you know, seeing her baby go to jail.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Patrick said automatically as he mashed his butt beneath one shoe. “Is there anyplace we can talk? With air-conditioning? And maybe less noise?”

  As he followed the young man through a heavy door into the building, Patrick wondered, for at least the tenth time that day, how this case would affect his chances of becoming the head of the Homicide unit. He had passed the sergeant’s exam with flying colors, but then he’d been doing that for years. There had always been guys with more seniority and a better grasp of ass kissing to move ahead of him. This time, though, he had a shot. McKissack, though not truly a moron, had only slightly more schmoozing ability and nothing like Patrick’s case-clearance rate. This time he had a chance.

  He had never thought of himself as an ambitious man. But then, most humans didn’t think of themselves as carnivores until they spied a perfectly grilled filet mignon.

  And for the tenth time, it bothered him that he could even think about such a thing at such a time. Though he told himself that the bad guys would give up and Paul would emerge with a wise-crack and a rumbling stomach, Patrick had been a cop too long not to know that it could all go very badly wrong at any moment. They hadn’t killed the security guards, true, but the guards were expected and clearly labeled by their uniforms. If they discovered Paul’s profession, it would startle them, and that was the worst thing anyone could do.

  He hadn’t worked with Paul even a full year yet, and they probably wouldn’t even socialize if they didn’t have to work together—the kid was too damn virtuous. He’d have the chief’s slot in an instant if he asked for it. The department’s golden boy. And why his cousin didn’t want more of a…well, a man’s man…it was beyond him.

  Maybe it wasn’t. Theresa just wanted the opposite of her asshole ex-husband, that was all. And Paul was a good cop. Frank would work like hell to get him out of there in one piece.

  But still.

  At the back of the luggage sorting room, the employees had a corner that doubled as a lounge, with some beat-up armchairs and a pop machine. It was out of everything except Mountain Dew, which Patrick loathed but drank anyway.

  The air-conditioning worked. Well.

  “Everyone keeps asking me how I catch a cold when it’s ninety-five freakin’ degrees outside,” Eric Moyers groused. “This is how. The tarmac is like a blast furnace, and then in here it’s a refrigerator. In, out, in, out. Then you have people flying in with germs from everywhere in the world. I’m sick all the time, working here.”

  Patrick nodded, feigning sympathy but watching the moving belts instead. He decided to invest in a sturdier set of luggage and one of those locks that only TSA could open. “Bobby is the youngest?”

  “Yeah. I’m thirty, he’s twenty-seven.”

  “How many kids are there?”

  “Just the two of us, and Mom. I guess it’s the old ‘growing up without a father’ thing. Our dad split just after Bobby was born. We had my mother’s brother and his wife around for a while, up the street from us for…I don’t know, at least ten years. Then the steel mill cut back. My uncle went to Gary to work, and Bobby didn’t have anyone to follow around. I was working by then, just trying to keep the rent paid.” Eric Moyers stared at the floor, hands hanging loose between his knees. “First he started coming home from school early. Then he started getting sent home from school early. Then he started getting sent home from school in a police car.”

  “How did your mother react?”

  “She did her best. She tried understanding, she tried tough love. At first he stole from our neighbors, friends, people who knew our situation and wouldn’t press charges, at least not heavy ones. But Bobby never had the sense to stay where he was safe. Let me describe my brother to you, Officer. He’s never had a job. Ever. Not flipping burgers or delivering the damn paper. The only thing he’s ever done is steal, and he can’t even do that right. I’d understand if he were dumb, but he reads books, he’s a whiz at math. He’d just rather die than work for a living.”

  No surprises so far. Frank said the cop’s prayer to himself: Please, God, let me find out something useful. “So he went to jail.”

  “He robbed a check-cashing place on Lorain, him and this guy he knew from his high school gym class. Unfortunately, the clerk was the kid they both used to toss into the locker-room trash can, and he sent the cops their way. Bobby got one break—the surveillance tape sucked so bad that you couldn’t tell if he had a gun or a bag in his hand. He got a decent sentence.”

  “Where’s the other guy now?” Could this be Lucas?

  “Tried to cozy up to a gang of skinheads, thinkin’ they’d protect him inside. They killed him within a week.”

  Patrick looked around for a place to dump his empty pop can. The only wastebasket in sight was filled to the brim. “That’s Bobby’s only conviction?”

  “That’s the only felony. He’s got all sorts of juvie stuff.”

  “Then he went back for the parole violation.”

  “My mother’s hair went gray during his stint at the Mansfield prison. When he got out, it was the whole ‘I’ve learned my lesson’ song and dance that we’d heard a thousand times and that Mom still believed. But when he started bringing drugs home, to the place his mother slept, the place I was paying the rent on, it was time for more tough love. I called the cops, gave him another chance to learn his lesson. Which obviously didn’t take any better than the first time.”

  “That’s why I’m here.” Patrick balanced the can in the unsteady pyramid of trash.

  “They empty that twice a day,” Eric Moyers told him. “We just dehydrate so fast in this heat.”

  “Mr. Moyers. Your brother is in a very dangerous situation right now. I think we’re going to need your help to save his life.”

  Eric Moyers pitched his can at the wastebasket, collapsing its contents into a noisy jumble. “Why on earth would I want to do that?”

  CHAPTER 14

  11:43 A.M.

  “You think Bobby and Lucas are from Atlanta, Georgia?” Cavanaugh asked. “Why?”

  Theresa spoke rapidly, without taking her eyes from the TV. Paul sat terribly still, left arm clamped to his side, hiding his firearm. “The key chain for the car is a red, rubberized relief of men’s faces. I think it’s from Stone Mountain State Park outside Atlanta, where Jackson, Lee, and Davis are carved into a cliff. The dirt I found in the floor mats is clay with iron oxide. Rust, that’s what the toxicologist told me.”

  “Georgia’s red dirt,” Cavanaugh said.

  “Exactly. Don thinks the twig in the trunk is from a magnolia. They grow here, but they’re especially abundant in Georgia.”

  “Jason? Is that right?”

  “Yep. Bobby just served eight months on felony parole violation at the federal prison in Atlanta.”

  “Give the girl a cigar. What about his cellmate?”

  “Thirty-one-year-old black male from Raleigh, name of Dunston Taylor.”

  Theresa saw her own disappointment mirrored in Cavanaugh’s face.

  �
�Not Lucas, not even as a middle name, but he did get released the week before Bobby,” Jason went on. “They’re searching the database now for any Lucas who would be out now.”

  “What about guards?” Theresa asked.

  “They’re searching the employee list, too.”

  “So how do two run-of-the-mill scumbags in prison hook up with a bank examiner from the Federal Reserve?” Cavanaugh asked.

  Jason didn’t have an answer, and Theresa didn’t care. “Can’t we figure that out later? Right now they just shot and killed one of the hostages. What are we going to do before they shoot the rest?”

  Cavanaugh perched himself, catlike, in front of the phone. “I’m going to ask Lucas who he shot and why. And then we’ll talk about his feelings.”

  Theresa returned to the telescope. The line of hostages remained one short, but otherwise nothing had changed.

  Ms. Elliott, the head librarian, materialized at her elbow. “How are you holding up?”

  “Fine,” Theresa said.

  Ms. Elliott waited.

  “I keep breathing in and out. Beyond that, I don’t know.” Theresa sank against the wide windowsill, leaning one thigh against it; even the marble had turned hot in the overhead sun. She breathed in the scent of book dust. “My grandfather used to work here.”

  Peggy Elliott questioned her kindly, as if Theresa were a particularly bashful student asking to use a periodical. “At the Federal Reserve?”

  “No, here at the library.” She spoke without turning from the glass, but she could see the other woman’s solid form, safely tucked against the wall between the windows, watching her. “Of course that would have been…what, 1930? He was a page. Do they still have those? Pages?”

  “Sure. We call them clerks now.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Shelve books, help readers find what they’re looking for.”

  “He always read a lot.” Theresa gazed across the street, at the building for once, instead of its windows. These stone structures had been here for a long time, but so much had changed. What had it been like in 1930, when a fourteen-year-old boy could go downtown to work by himself and no one worried, before terrorists blew up planes and automatic rifles had been invented? The study of crime told her that the world had always been a dangerous place, but at least it used to require more effort.