by Jan Coffey
“Is it bad news?” Bryan asked his partner.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. There’s just some stuff going on. You can decide for yourself if it’s bad or good or weird,” Hank said from the other end.
Bryan rose to his feet and walked to the window. “What kind of stuff?”
“Would you stop asking questions and just get down here?” Hank asked.
“I want to know if someone else should sit in on this, too.”
“FBI and locals?”
“No.”
“Stop playing twenty questions.” Hank said.
“I’m busy right now, talking to Dr. Bradley,” he drawled for his partner.
“You want to know if you should bring her down for this.”
“You’re really getting old and senile” Bryan said under his breath. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
He faced the window and the dark sky outside. It had started snowing. He heard Hank exchange a few words with someone else.
“Sure. We might be able to get some medical background information from her.”
“It might take five to ten minutes to get down there,” Bryan told his friend.
“Moving at a snail’s pace.”
“Just wait for me.”
Bryan ended the call and turned back to Lexi. She was watching him. Once again, he found himself thinking about how weak and pale she looked.
“When was the last time you ate something?”
“I don’t have to answer that question, Agent Atwood. It’s totally irrelevant.”
She did have a stubborn streak. “Are you strong enough to go downstairs with me?”
“That depends on the reason.”
“To the cafeteria, to get some food in you.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m not on any hunger strike. I’ll go and get something to eat after I talk to Juan’s doctor.”
He changed tactic. “Are you strong enough to go and see his doctor?”
“Right now?” she asked, sitting up straight.
“Yes.”
“Is he on the floor?” she asked pulling on her shoes and grabbing her shoulder bag.
“No, we’ll meet him in his office on the second floor.”
Lexi stood up, only to sit down again. Bryan saw the look. She was trying to focus on everything around her with no success. He couldn’t let her pass out on him again.
“Guess what, Dr. Bradley,” he said, walking over and taking her by the arm.
“I’m fine,” she whispered. She didn’t fight him when he helped her slowly to her feet again.
“I know you’re fine. That’s why you’re keeping my company as we stop at the cafeteria on our way to see your son’s doctor.”
She opened her mouth to say something but quickly closed it when he darted a threatening look at her.
“You’re no good to anyone…including your son…if you end up with a concussion from repeatedly bouncing your head off the floor. You’re going to eat something, keep your strength up, and then talk to Juan’s doctor. Got it?”
She nodded.
“I’m glad we understand each other,” Bryan said, leading her to the door.
~~~~
Chapter 9
Wednesday January 16, 9:10 p.m.
Colony High School, Orlando, Florida
It was a standing room only crowd.
The grandstand seats, the entrance doors—everywhere, people packed the gym. And everyone was on their feet. The cheers were deafening. Streamers of black and red, Colony’s school colors, danced in the air above the home team stands. Twenty-four basketball league championship banners hung along the gymnasium walls, speaking of their years of domination in this sport.
Fourth quarter. Just thirty-seven seconds remaining to the end of the game. They were down by two points.
The visiting team had the ball, but with a dive, one of the Colony players batted the basketball away. There was a wild scramble at half court, and the call went Colony’s way. A cheer went up as the home team called time out. They were still in this.
As the teams huddled in front of their benches, Hilary Mitchell, Colony High School’s principal, held on tightly to her husband’s hand. They’d both graduated from Colony back in ‘82. Paul, her husband, had played basketball for the high school in the old gym. He’d been a guard, and Hilary hadn’t missed too many games back then. She didn’t miss any at all now and truly hoped someday their son would be playing on this same court.
The referee’s whistle called the ten players back onto the court. No one in the stands bothered to sit down. The benches were empty. Coaches and players lined the side of the court.
Hilary felt her cell phone vibrate. Her mind immediately went to her twelve-year old son at home. He was at that in-between age where he didn’t want a sitter, but at the same time he got worried if the parents were running a few minutes late. As she tried to dig the phone out of her pocket, everyone around them exploded with cheers as one of the Colony players sank a three-pointer. They were ahead by one with twenty-five seconds left.
The cell phone display told her that the call was coming from the main office of the high school. Hilary had locked the outer door herself before the game. Sometimes one of the night custodians called her at this time to check on when they should lock a certain door or if a room needed to be set up for the morning, but she couldn’t imagine why anyone would be in there tonight.
Hilary answered her phone, but with all the background noise she couldn’t hear a word.
The ball was thrown in and the opposing players moved it down the court. They were going to try to hold the ball for a single shot, but as their guard took the ball into the corner, the Colony defense sprang into action, collapsing on him. In panic, a time out was called—their last one. Six seconds were left on the clock.
The principal pressed a hand to her other ear, trying to block the noise. “I can’t hear you. Say that again.”
“I think…down.”
“What was that?” she yelled into the phone, barely recognizing the voice as Bob, one of the custodians who was just back last week after recovering from a stroke.
There was more cheering as the teams returned to the court. The crowd in the stands was stomping their feet and chanting, “Defense.”
Hilary sat down and bent her head closer to her knees. “I can’t hear what you’re saying, but there are only seconds left in the game. I’ll stop at the office right after.”
“Lock Down…”
This time she heard it. Over the past couple of years, they’d been doing a lot of drills to lock down in case of emergencies. During some of the drills, students were detained in classrooms while police and dogs scoured the campus, looking for drugs or weapons. This was a controversial approach to keeping schools safe, but it was a new world. Despite the fact that there had never been an episode of serious violence at Colony High School—except for a student riot in 1972—Hilary and the staff were all for the searches.
“We had a drill yesterday morning,” Hilary said into the phone, thinking Bob’s question had something to do with that.
“No…Police s…”
Suddenly, three popping sounds came from outside the gym doors, like someone setting off firecrackers. An opposing team player was standing on the far sideline, the ball held above his head. The crowd hushed, but only for a moment. Immediately, the sound of screams from the doorways pierced the silence.
Hilary jumped to her feet, the phone forgotten in her hand. The people who’d blocked the main entrance of the gym were surging onto the court. There was instant mayhem. Someone went down. The crowds in the stands shifted as everyone tried to move away from the door. Hilary heard two more popping sounds.
She dialed 911 as she tried to step down onto the court. Her husband, though, was holding her jacket from behind.
Standing on the first row of seats, Hilary could see blood under the digital clock. One of the basketball players and a parent were dragging an
other player quickly across the floor toward the stands. The blood was coming from him.
Though there was chaos everywhere in the gym, the main entrance was now clear of people. A moment later, Hilary froze at the sight of the boy lurching into the gym. He was carrying a rifle.
This nightmare could not be happening, she thought. It just wasn’t possible.
Mike Forbes, a sophomore, the top student in his class, the starting guard on Colony’s basketball team was carrying the gun. He’d been a no-show for the game tonight.
“No, Mike,” she whispered.
As everyone watched, the boy stumbled onto the court, turned the muzzle of the rifle to his chin…and fired.
~~~~
Chapter 10
Wednesday January 16
West 76th Street, New York
The deadline at the end of the month was looming. There were hundreds of things he needed to be doing. He didn’t need his family’s help in getting him distracted. He managed just fine by himself staying neck deep in trouble.
He’d specifically asked his wife to keep their daughter and grandkids at their house in Connecticut. He’d promised to go up Friday night and stay for the weekend. Of course, he’d said the same thing last weekend, but he never made it.
“Grandpa!” The youngest of his grandchildren caught him coming through the door and limped across the foyer toward him.
He put his briefcase down, crouched down and opened his arms to the four-year-old. David had spina bifida, and wore a brace on his right leg that he swung forward to walk. The child had digestive track problems, and some hearing, vision and possible sensory processing issues, as well. At his young age, he’d already been through half a dozen surgeries, but none of that dampened the spirit of the little boy or affected his intelligence. He was as smart as a whip.
“I missed you, Grandpa,” the bright-faced child said, not releasing him from the bear hug around his neck.
His annoyance melted away in an instant. It would have suited his schedule to be short and make some excuses to the rest of the family and send them packing. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t do that to this child. He pressed a kiss on the little boy’s mop of blond hair.
“Where’s the rest of your crew?”
“Mommy and the girls are out shopping. We already had dinner on the way. Did you have dinner, Grandpa?” he asked, pulling back. The blue eyes behind the thick glasses looked right into his.
“Yes, I’ve had dinner.”
The four-year-old tried to pick up the older man’s briefcase. It had to weigh as much as he did. “Nanna’s been talking to somebody on the phone forever. Will you work on my puzzle with me?”
“Well, I don’t know.” He pushed himself to his feet and closed the door. There were phone calls he had to make, email to answer. There was a hundred-page report that he had to read and make some notes on for a nine o’clock meeting tomorrow morning. When the doorman had warned him downstairs that the family was here, he should have turned around and gone back to the office.
“Please?” David asked.
“Okay, but only for a few minutes.”
His wife appeared in the doorway to the living room with the phone stuck to one ear.
“I told you if we talked long enough he’d get in,” Ann said before putting her hand over the receiver and mouthing a name to him.
He shook his head and made a motion of not wanting to talk to anyone.
She shook her head, rounded her eyes, and gave him her standard look of not being happy with his response.
“I’ll be thinking of you, honey,” his wife said, coming over. “He’s right here, Elsa. Of course he has time to talk to you.”
He only had enough time to peel off his winter coat before she handed him the phone. He made a face, tried to place the name. Elsa…and then it was all there. Elsa Harvey. Mitch’s wife.
Their wives had been good friends years back. He knew they’d stayed in touch, despite the husbands going in different directions.
He cleared his throat, headed for the room to the left of the foyer that he used as a home office. It was bad enough that Mitch called him daily. Now, his wife was on the phone. He hoped Mitch wasn’t becoming stupid enough to share anything with Elsa after all these years. The families had never been part of it. They had no clue about specifics.
“Elsa,” he said in as cheerful a tone as he could muster, considering everything. “It’s been forever since I’ve talked to you. How are you? How’s the family?”
She blurted out an obviously well rehearsed summary of how each of their kids and grandchildren were doing. He didn’t know most of the names, didn’t know so-and-so was married and had two children of her own. But he let her chatter away. Her voice was a higher pitch than when she’d been younger. He wondered if this was because of something Mitch had told her.
He sat down behind his desk and spotted his grandson waiting in the doorway, watching him. The honesty in the child’s face and the look of worship that he always sent him made his palms go clammy. He was relieved when his wife came and took the child by the hand, leading him back to the living room.
“The reason why I called…”
He pulled himself together. “Yes, you were saying.”
“I’m really worried about Mitch.”
Dozens of objections rose in him. Things like, it wasn’t his problem that her husband was a spineless coward who needed someone to hold his hand at the fist sign of any problem.
“Worried about what, Elsa?” he asked instead.
“He’s missing,” she said in a tense tone.
Prickly cold washed down his back. He remembered the last time the pain in the ass had called him. Yesterday morning. There hadn’t been any new information, no new incidents, just the same panicky tone.
“What do you mean missing?”
“He didn’t come home last night, and this morning he didn’t show up at the college.”
Christ. He wasn’t the jerk’s fucking babysitter. He kept that comment to himself, too.
“Did you call the police?”
“I called them. But they said it’s too early to report him as missing. They recommended that I should check with friends and family first.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Arizona, babysitting for my oldest son’s children. The parents are in Hawaii for a week.”
He sat back in the chair, frustrated that, with everything else in his life, he had to be bothered with this. He wasn’t their relative and no longer a close friend, by any means.
“Elsa, I really don’t know what I can do for you from New York. I haven’t seen Mitch for—“
“Curtis, you’ve been talking to him every day,” she said quickly.
The comment took him by surprise. The shithead had leaked something.
“I checked his cell phone record online. He’s been calling you everyday. That’s why I called you first.”
Cold turned to heat. He wiped the perspiration on the back of his neck. Nothing had better have happened to this guy or the same records would be available to any schmuck detective who went looking for Mitch. He didn’t need to be involved with police on the eve of his company going public.
“He’s been curious about what we’re going through with my company right now,” he explained, thinking fast. “Everything is happening at the same time, with the pending FDA approval and the stock sale at the end of the month. I think he misses not being in the middle of it. You know…like he was in the old days.”
“Could it be that he’s in New York to see you?”
“I can’t see why he’d do that,” he said, hoping he was right. He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “I really don’t know where Mitch is, Elsa.”
“There are also a half dozen calls to Nevada this past week,” she continued on. “The number belongs to one of those self-storage places. I’ve tried it a few times, but I only get an answering machine. Now, I know you two worked in Nevada fourteen or fifteen years ag
o, but do you know if he might have left something behind? I don’t know...he’s never mentioned it, but the storage place is only a half hour from where you used to be. I’m probably just grasping at straws.”
What storage place? They were supposed to leave nothing behind, he thought bitterly. But that had been Mitch’s job, to clear out and destroy all records. And now Mitch was running around like loose cannon. A piercing headache was suddenly threatening to split his head in two.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here, Elsa,” he said in what he hoped was a calm voice. “I don’t know what to tell you. There’s nothing that I can think of, no reason why he should go to Nevada. Nothing that has anything to do with me.”
“What am I going to do? I don’t want to call the other kids and get them wound up if it’s nothing. And he’s going to show up—”
“Tell you what. Is there any way you can email me or fax me the listing of everyone that Mitch has called in the past couple of weeks?” He needed to figure out how much damage his old partner had already done.
“Of course. I can print it off the computer and fax it to you.”
“Good. Let me make some calls here,” he said, anxious to get off the phone. “I’ll contact some of the other people we used to work with. Most of them are in New York, anyway. I’ll go over your list as soon as I have it, and then I’ll call you if I find something. It’s probably nothing, Elsa.”
“You’re probably right,” she said gratefully.
After hanging up, he sat and considered the situation. This had the potential for getting out of control…just like the development with the kid in Wickfield, Connecticut who’d survived the shooting. He needed to handle both problems.
The situation in Connecticut was manageable, though. The right people were in place, ready to do what needed to be done. They were just biding their time waiting for the right moment to execute their plan.
