by Aaron Elkins
“You look terrific,” I told her sincerely.
She smiled. “You’re prejudiced.”
“Damn right. Listen, I’ve been thinking.”
“Oh?”
“Well, it occurs to me—” But the words stuck in my throat. It took more effort than I’d expected to force them out. “It . . . it occurs to me that that Iceland assignment might be fun after all. What the hell, what do you say we go ahead and do it?”
She was so astonished, it made me laugh. “I mean, what’s the big deal anyway?” I said.
“But—are you sure? The flight . . .”
I shrugged. “I’ll take a couple of Xanax. Or maybe a sleeping pill so I’m zonked out the whole time.”
“All things considered,” she said. “I think a sleeping pill might be better.” She squeezed my hand. Her eyes were shining. “Bryan—thank you.”
I squeezed back. Deep inside my chest, something glowed.
THERE had been a time, long ago, back when Shep had been a furry little ball of a puppy tripping over his too-big feet, when it wouldn’t have taken all this ridiculously agonizing dithering to come to a decision like this. You want to go to Iceland? I’d have said. Great, sounds like fun, let’s go.
Back then, I’d come to think that I could face my demons more directly than one does from a university classroom or a think-tank desk. I was twenty-seven years old, with a newly minted PhD, eager to do good in the world and under the impression that the horrors of my childhood captivity were safely buried at last. Freshly armed with that doctorate in labor relations and crisis management, I had joined the Crisis Intervention Center at the University of Southern California as a consultant, and there I became a much-sought-after hostage negotiator, and even something of a celebrity, taking part in seven incidents and bringing about the release of more than a dozen hostages with only a single loss of life—that of a hostage-taker, bent on suicide from the start, who had more or less forced the police to gun him down.
I was the one who secured the release of Leslie Goldwin, the fifteen-year-old grandson of Linda Smith Rutledge, the dynamic president of Le Sport Cosmetics. I was even the one who came up with the plan that resulted in the recovery of all but four hundred dollars of the $1.25 million ransom money, and the capture of the three kidnappers. Two of them could hardly wait to turn state’s evidence against the supposed “mastermind,” a part-time teacher at the boy’s private school, who was convicted after a two-day trial and a single hour’s deliberation.
That had been the high point of my career, or at least the most celebrated. The low point, the debacle of the Houghey twins, had followed close on its heels, less than a month later.
Chapter 3
Irwin Houghey had been a Hollywood television producer known for a couple of long-running police series on NBC. Among insiders, he was also known as one autocratic, nitpicking sonofabitch. A year or so earlier, in one of his on-set tantrums, he had humiliated and fired on the spot a middle-aged assistant director who had neglected to pencil in five needed extras on the morning call for a complex shoot that had taken most of the night to set up.
The fired assistant director, Stanley Auerbach, had been unable to find other TV work and had spiraled into an alcohol-fueled decline, spending two terms in jail, almost back-to-back, first on a drunkdriving charge coupled with resisting arrest, and then for threatening his girlfriend and her baby daughter with a rifle, an episode that ended with a forty-minute police standoff. Not long after his second release, on a warm September morning twenty-two months after he’d been fired, he had walked into the Longworth School on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, unkempt and incoherent, with a Glock semi-automatic .40-caliber pistol in his left hand and a short-barreled, pump-action Mossberg shotgun cradled in the crook of his right arm. He had terrified the students, firing one pellet blast into the ceiling and using the butt of the revolver to smash the cheekbone of the assistant principal who’d confronted him. Inside of five minutes he had driven off with Casey and Corey Houghey, the nine-year-old twin daughters of Irwin Houghey, thrown screaming into the rear of his van.
The Los Angeles Police Department responded quickly. By two o’clock in the afternoon, laden with leads, they had caught up with him. He was holding the girls in an abandoned agricultural workers’ shack, bereft of window panes and door, in an old celery field near the southeastern limits of the city, a few hundred yards from the Long Beach Freeway. I was brought in to assist.
I found the police surrounding the shack in efficient, by-the-book fashion. There was a manned outer perimeter about two hundred yards from the shack, through which only law enforcement people, other response personnel, and one or two informally approved media people were permitted. Then a sort of no-man’s land where there was a lot of cigarette smoking and milling around, and finally, about ninety feet from the shack, the inner perimeter: a circle of a dozen uniformed, body-armored officers, some with rifles, hunkered down behind their cars. This was the tactical team—the sharpshooters and apprehension specialists who would make the assault, if an assault became necessary. Having satisfactorily identified myself to a guard at the outer perimeter, I was fitted out with a flak jacket and taken to the mobile command post, an air-conditioned RV-like truck that sat just beyond the inner perimeter, armored with steel plate and crammed with communication and scanning equipment. Detective Lieutenant Ed Reese, a burly, redfaced man seated with a sergeant at a table that folded out from the wall, looked up from a roughly penciled diagram. “And you are?”
“I’m Bryan Bennett, Lieutenant. I’m—”
“Yeah, chief told us they called you in.” He stood and offered a callused hand. “So, you going to give us some advice here, or what?”
“Advice, yes, if you want it, but actually, what I generally do is to more or less handle the negotiations part of it—if that’s all right with you.”
I was being properly deferential here. Police officers aren’t known for tolerating civilian interference on their turf, and I was walking on eggshells. Ordinarily, the police used their own trained personnel for hostage negotiations, but LAPD was trying something new. I was there as part of an experimental—and controversial—program in which the police department had contracted with the USC Crisis Intervention Center to bring in people like me to deal with particularly sensitive situations. The idea behind it was to separate the negotiator from the police in the mind of the hostage-taker. Still, there was only one person in charge, and that was the designated incident commander, Lieutenant Ed Reese.
“Hell, yeah,” he said. “We can use all the help we can get. Only there’s nothing to negotiate. Creep hasn’t asked for anything.”
“Oh, there’s always something to negotiate, it can just take a while. Fill me in on what’s been happening, will you? Are the girls all right?”
“Yeah, we can hear them every now and then. They sound okay. I mean, they’re weepy, but there’s no sign he’s hurting them.”
“Good. He’s not making threats?”
“Nope. He just sits in there. But he’s armed. A shotgun and a handgun, a semiautomatic. He took a couple of wild shots at us a while back, but I don’t know how serious he was. He’s real spacey, lah-de-dah. Besides which, he’s crazy to begin with. You know that, don’t you?”
“So I hear. What about demands?”
“Nothing. We don’t know what the hell he wants. I don’t think he knows. We ask him and he yells back to shut up, he’s trying to think. So I figure the best thing is to wait him out. If we get any sense he’s hurting the kids we’ll rush him, but so far they seem okay.”
“Good, that makes sense. How are you communicating with him?”
Reese laughed. “Who’s communicating? But we’ve been trying with a bullhorn. “You want to give it a try?” He reached behind him to offer it.
“No, thanks.” At this point the thing I needed to do was to build some rapport with Auerbach to get him talking. And if there was any way to establish rapport with a bullhorn, no one
had yet figured it out. “How about a portable phone? Do you have one?”
“Oh yeah, take your choice. We got a throw phone right here. A thousand feet of wire and all the bells and whistles. We got an Army field—”
“The throw phone will be fine. You haven’t tried to get it in to him?”
“Yeah, we tried. That’s when he took his potshots.”
“Hey, you cops!” It was Auerbach, his voice cracked and reedy, yelling from the shack. Everyone stiffened.
“This is something new,” Reese said.
“It’s damn hot in here,” Auerbach yelled. “How about something cold to drink?
“Do you have anything to give them?” I asked the lieutenant.
Reese gestured with his chin. “The fridge over there is full of stuff.”
“Can’t see him,” one of the nearby cops said. “He’s not at either of the windows. He can see us, though. Lots of cracks between the boards.”
“Somebody better answer me!” Auerbach called. “I’m telling you.”
“Let’s go talk to him,” I said. “Closer, where it’s easier.”
Reese shrugged, and he, the sergeant, and I all got out of the truck, keeping low to the ground, and dropped to our knees beside one of the police cars, where we could peer over the hood and see the shack.
“Okay if I answer him?” I asked Reese.
“Be my guest.”
“Mr. Auerbach!” I yelled. “My name is Bryan Bennett. I’m not a policeman, sir, I’m a negotiator, and from now on I’ll be the one you’ll be talking to.”
“Like I’m supposed to give a shit what your name is? Just get us something to drink in here.”
The us could be a positive indicator, I thought. If it meant that Auerbach was concerned about the girls, thinking of them as something more than objects—as human beings—that was good, a really good sign.
Or it could mean absolutely nothing. “Well, here goes,” I murmured.
I stood up slowly, in plain sight now, brushing the lieutenant’s restraining hand from my sleeve. Over the years I’d developed a pretty good sense of when a situation was risky and when it wasn’t. And this one wasn’t, not yet. Auerbach hadn’t shot anyone at the school, after all. In any case, I was wearing body armor, and the chances of Auerbach being able to hit me in the head, or anywhere else for that matter, with a handgun were remote. As for the shotgun, at this distance the pellet spread would be too thin to do me much damage, or so I hoped.
“Well, I understand that, sir,” I called, “and I think we can arrange that.”
“I don’t believe this,” I heard one of the cops mutter to his partner. I knew what was bothering him. I was being too polite with this dangerous psycho. But my agenda was different from the police’s. I had to get on Auerbach’s good side; they didn’t.
“But you’ll have to make a deal for it,” I shouted. “That’s the way we work things.”
This brought on a hoarse laugh of disbelief. “I’m not making any deal. What are you, stupid? These kids die of thirst, it’s on your head, man.”
I had placed where his voice was coming from by now. Auerbach was to the right of the doorless entry, probably in the corner, low to the floor. Chances were he was peering between the loose boards down there. “Don’t you want to hear what the deal is?”
“No. Fuck you. All you want to do is kill me, you think I don’t know that?”
“That’s not true, Mr. Auerbach, but if you’re not in the mood for a deal now, let’s forget it. We can talk about it later.” I settled back down behind the car.
“Yeah, you can talk to yourself about it,” Auerbach yelled.
“You know, those kids probably do need something to drink,” Reese said. “What’s the problem with giving them something? Why do we need to make a deal for that?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get them their drinks. Look, Lieutenant, what we have to do is make him understand that anything he wants, he has to negotiate for. He doesn’t get anything from us unless he gives us something in return. He has to work for everything he gets. Otherwise, he’ll start feeling as if he’s the one holding all the cards. And that’s when things really get dangerous.”
“Yeah, like they’re not dangerous now. But what do we get from him in return? You think maybe he might let one of the girls go?”
“Too early for that, I think. But—”
“What kind of deal?” Auerbach shouted, and I stood up again, my hands held out from my sides so he could see that they were empty.
“Mr. Auerbach, nobody here wants to kill you. I’d really like to talk to you, just you and me, because I think we can work something out, but we can’t do it this way. I’d like you to let us put a telephone in there. Then we can talk, just the two of us. My job here is to help you out if I can. Really, I think we might be able to work something out.”
Auerbach hooted, hee-hee, ho-ho. He sounded crazy, all right. I got down behind the hood of the car again.
Auerbach was quick to take it as a sign of weakness. “Hey, old buddy, you don’t need a telephone. Just come on right in and set right down. We can talk right here, just you and me.”
“No, I’m not ready to do that yet. I’m trying to establish a little trust here. So, what do you say? We deliver a six-pack of ice-cold Cokes, and in return you let us put a portable phone in there.”
There was no answer.
“What do you say?”
“Do you have Pepsi?” Auerbach asked.
“I’ll be damned,” the lieutenant said.
I looked at Reese, who looked at the sergeant, who shook his head. “Coke, root beer, and Dr Pepper.”
“Sorry,” I called. “Coke, root beer, or Dr Pepper.”
“Okay, Coke.” There was a pause. They could just hear the choky, complaining voices of the girls and a hissed “Shut up!” from Auerbach. Then: “And one Dr Pepper. Listen, what do they have to do to get this phone here? I’m not letting anybody inside.”
“No, it’s just a handset on a line—you know, pretty much like a regular telephone with a wire back to here. Whenever you feel like talking to me, you just pick it up, and I’ll be on the other end. Tell you what. We’ll put the drinks and the phone down right by the door and then back off. If you don’t like the idea of getting them yourself, you can hold on to one of the girls and let her bring them in.”
“How do I know there’s no bomb in it, or gas, or something?”
“Do you think we’d risk hurting the kids?”
There was a pause. “Okay, you can bring the phone, but don’t expect me to talk on it.”
“Is that okay with you, Lieutenant?” I asked.
“What makes you think he won’t start shooting again if somebody goes out there with it?”
“Because he wants the drinks, and he wants to trust me. I think it’s safe. I’ll be glad to take them to him.”
Reese rolled his eyes. “Oh, right, that’s all I need, getting a civilian killed. No, thanks. Pender here’ll do it.”
“Oh, hey, thanks a million, Lieutenant,” the officer in question said.
Back in the truck, Reese got out the telephone set, a high-tech assemblage of equipment packed into its own fitted case, with headsets for me, himself, and one other person; a tape-recording device; and a hidden, voice-activated microphone in the ordinary-looking receiver that would go to Auerbach. Once it was inside they would be able to continuously monitor what was going on in the shack.
“I sure as hell hope you don’t object to snooping on him,” Reese said, getting the components out of the case. “Because if you do, then you and me might have a difference of opinion.”
“No, I don’t object. The more we know about what’s happening in there the better.”
“Remember, I’m watching you,” Auerbach shouted. “You hear this kid crying? That’s because she’s got a gun stuck in her ear. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Let’s nobody do anything stupid,” I called back.
Pender, slip
ping on a protective helmet and face piece in addition to his body armor, guardedly made his way toward the shack, a six-pack filled with five Cokes and one Dr Pepper in one hand and Auerbach’s receiver, trailing wire from a spool in the truck, in the other. A cop—a sharpshooter with a telescopic-sight-equipped rifle, raised himself up slightly, the barrel of the rifle propped on a small tripod on the hood of a police car and trained on the doorway.
The delivery went without incident. The six-pack and the telephone were left in the doorway, the policeman retreated, and Auerbach, or perhaps one of the girls, used a jointed piece of pipe to drag them into the shack and out of sight. The sharpshooter hunkered down behind the car again.
“Nobody’s saying anything,” said the officer tuned to the microphone that was now in the shack. “The sound’s not real good, but I can hear them popping the cans. “Wait . . . one of the kids says she has to pee. He’s telling her: tough, he does too . . . she’s starting to whimper . . . he says, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, do it in your pants.’ Now she’s bawling, and he’s cussing.”
“How do you make this thing ring in there?” I asked. I was at the table with Reese now, with one of the headsets clamped over my ears and the attached mike beside my lips.
“He just said he wouldn’t talk,” Reese said.
“They say all kinds of things. No harm in finding out.”
Reese flicked something in the case and I heard a staccato buzz in the headset. A second later Auerbach’s voice was in my ears. “Hello?”
“Hi there, Mr. Auerbach, this is Bryan Bennett again. How are things in there?”
“Doing just fine, great. Couldn’t be better. Happy little family.”
“How are the Cokes? Cold enough?”
No answer.
“Look, do you mind if I call you Stanley? You can call me Bryan.”
“What do you want?”
“Well, it occurred to me, maybe you might like a cold beer for yourself. I think I can probably arrange that too.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Auerbach. “You could also just arrange to put something in it to knock me out.”
