Run the Risk

by Scott Frost

  He reached into an equipment bag and pulled out some clips and a wire. “Only if I make a mistake.”

  He slipped his hand back under my shirt and began to carefully attach the clips and the wire to the leads.

  “I saw his eyes, Harrison.”

  He continued to work to attach the clips to the leads.

  “The drawing of Gabriel is a fabrication. He doesn’t exist. It’s how he’s hidden.”

  He finished attaching one of the clips then slipped his hand across my chest to the other.

  “He befriends one of his victims to give us a description then kills them later.”

  “Philippe,” Harrison said, without looking up.

  I nodded.

  “He must have done the same thing in France.”

  The words hung uncomfortably in the air for a moment, though I wasn’t sure why. I heard the faint click of the second clip being attached to the lead, then Harrison withdrew his hand, picked up a small wire cutter and eased it up under my shirt. The absurdity that it took a bomb to feel the thin, soft hair of a man’s arm on my chest made me want to cry, or laugh, I wasn’t sure which.

  Harrison positioned the blades of the clippers against the wire. I could feel its cold steel just above the warmth of his hand.

  “If I’ve made a mistake, neither of us will know it.”

  He looked up at me and I nodded.

  “Cut it,” I whispered.

  The muscles of his hand contracted and the blades sliced through the wire without a sound. He closed his eyes for a moment, a prayer, maybe, then took a deep, thankful breath.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He slid his hand out from under my shirt then settled his eyes grimly on the motion detector.

  “Be very still,” he said softly as he moved in close to examine the sensor.

  The words that I had left hanging surfaced again and demanded attention.

  “What did I say about France?”

  He glanced up from the bomb without having heard a word. “I’m a little busy.”

  I ran quickly back through it.

  “He befriends a victim then kills them after they’ve given the description.”

  Harrison reluctantly took his attention away from the device. “Why is that important?”

  I thought about it for a moment, but I had only gone through the report once, and that seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “What’s important is that . . .” The details slipped past my fingertips just out of reach.

  “Shit.”

  And then it settled right in front of me as if it were an answer in a trivia game.

  “What’s important is that it didn’t happen.”

  He looked at me, a question forming in his eyes. “What didn’t happen?”

  “The victim who gave the description in France survived. He wasn’t killed.”

  “He was lucky.”

  Even before he had finished saying the words, Harrison looked at me and shook his head. The words just didn’t fit, didn’t apply to Gabriel, not “luck.”

  “You don’t believe that either?”

  “No. He survived for a reason.”

  “But what reason?”

  “The simplest is always the best.”

  “If you can see it.”

  Harrison thought about it for a moment, but it eluded him.

  I took a leap. “Why did Gabriel cut off Philippe’s head?”

  The lines around Harrison’s eyes tightened as he pictured the scene in the Dumpster.

  “To scare the hell out of us.”

  “He’s already done that. Why else?”

  “To make ID impossible.”

  “But why? What doesn’t he want us to know?”

  Harrison shook his head.

  “There’s a picture in my shirt pocket. Can you reach under the vest and get it?”

  Harrison gently eased his hand in between the vest and my shirt until he reached the pocket and slid the photograph out. He then inched his hand back out from under the vest, holding the photograph from Philippe’s apartment.

  I took it and looked at the eyes, but the detail wasn’t there. It was too wide a shot.

  “That doesn’t help.”

  I stared at the picture for another moment. He was standing in front of a large white building. There was writing above the entrance in French. There were cars, pedestrians, and—

  “What are you looking for?”

  “This.”

  I held the photograph out and pointed to a blurry object moving in the background. Harrison studied it for a moment.

  “An ambulance.”

  “Look at the writing above the entrance. What is that?”

  “I think it’s a hospital.”

  “Why would you take a snapshot in front of a hospital?”

  “You don’t—” He saw it. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “It’s where he killed his first victim,” I said.

  “The murders in the hospital.”

  I nodded. “This was the first picture for his collection.”

  Harrison looked at me dumbfounded. “Philippe is Gabriel.”

  I thought about it a moment to be sure.

  “When I was blindfolded, Gabriel knew your name, but I had never mentioned it. He knew you because you took the bomb off his lap in Philippe’s apartment.”

  The pieces tumbled together like building blocks.

  “And he wasn’t taken from the safe house. He just cut his own hand and climbed out the window.”

  It all made sense in a way it hadn’t before, and the understanding only made my feelings of personal failure more profound. To have had a killer in custody and to have released him is every cop’s nightmare.

  “The body in the Dumpster is a security guard for Armed Response.”

  “He had to know that we would eventually find that out.”

  “But by then he’d be gone, so it wouldn’t matter.”

  We looked at each other in disbelief, and then tears filled my eyes.

  “Goddamn, we had him.”

  I buried my face in my hands and began to tremble with a flood of emotions.

  “He fooled us all, not just you,” Harrison said.

  I looked at him and shook my head.

  “It’s my case . . . mine.”

  Harrison started to speak but held it. There was nothing to say, nothing more to understand.

  “How much time is left?” I asked.

  He glanced at his watch.

  “Twenty minutes.”

  I tried to refocus on the details, to think about anything other than how we had been Gabriel’s partner in his deception.

  “We don’t have time to disarm all of these, do we?”

  Harrison looked into my eyes and shook his head.

  “No.”

  Thinking you understand something and then hearing it said are two different things. I looked down at the vest, but all I could see was a clock running out of time.

  “So, we . . .”

  I began to lose my way. It was all too much. The weight of the vest was beginning to suffocate me. I wanted my daughter back. I wanted to hear her voice and hold her and never let go. I wanted not to know that I had released the man who was going to kill her.

  “So we what?”

  I looked at Harrison, hoping he could find a way out of the abyss I was slipping into.

  “Some of these are just meant to delay, so we only worry about the trigger he’s going to use. The only way he can do this is remotely,” Harrison said.

  He reached up, opened a pocket of the vest just above the explosives and gently slid the phone out. His eyes recognized something that mine didn’t.

  “This isn’t right,” Harrison said in a near-whisper.

  I looked into his eyes, trying to read the level of fear, but if it was there, he had long ago found the ability to mask it, probably the same way he had found to hide from love since his wife’s murder.

  “Wha
t isn’t right?”

  He took out a small knife, pried open the back of the phone, and stared at the circuit boards.

  “There’s nothing here. It’s just a phone.”

  “Meaning?”

  He stared at the vest for a moment, then reached out and sliced open one of the pockets containing the nails, which poured out onto the gravel like entrails.

  “There is no goddamned remote trigger,” he said, flushed with anger.

  He sliced open the rest of the pockets containing the shrapnel.

  “I’ve wasted time.”

  “What are you saying, Harrison?”

  He looked into my eyes. “Don’t you see it?”

  I shook my head.

  “I shouldn’t have been able to remove the shrapnel like that, not if his intention was to kill a lot of people.”

  He stared at the pockets containing the explosives, looking for something, following the wires from place to place with his eyes. He carefully opened one of the pockets containing explosives. His fingers traced a wire, his eyes dissecting the meaning behind it.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  He pulled the brick of explosive out and yanked the detonator out of it, then squeezed the soft material in his fist.

  “It’s clay.”

  He tossed it aside. He quickly opened three more pockets.

  “It’s just goddamn clay.”

  He yanked them out and tossed them aside. I looked down at the one pocket he didn’t touch.

  “Except that one.”

  Harrison nodded. “Yeah.”

  “That’s for me.”

  “And you’re the trigger.”

  “The motion detector.”

  “In the journal, when he talks about you and Lacy dying, I just assumed that because you die on Colorado that others die with you.”

  He stared at me for a moment.

  “He could kill dozens, but it’s just you he wants?” he said.

  I thought for a moment. “He doesn’t need to kill anyone else other than me.”

  “Why?”

  “Television. It’s how we experience everything now, isn’t it? Two hundred million people will have invited him into their living rooms to watch a parade. Two hundred million people will fear him when they watch me die.”

  I saw the whole horrible picture.

  “Choose,” I whispered.

  Harrison looked at me apprehensively.

  “He couldn’t take the chance that I wouldn’t kill others, so he made the choice simpler, one I would make without hesitation. I could listen to my daughter’s screams, or . . . stop them.”

  I looked out toward the rim of the arroyo, which was lined with people walking to the parade. All of Gabriel’s twisted needs suddenly came into focus.

  “Serial killers need the act of violence to be intimate. Gabriel’s going to kill with words, just words, whispering into my ear like a lover would. There’s nothing more intimate than that. And millions of people are going to see it . . . and fear him. What could be more powerful? He gets everything he wants.”

  We stared at each other trying to sort out the new landscape.

  “Do you know where he took you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t think that’s where he has her, though. He would take her to a place that means something to me, that would demonstrate how much more powerful he is than we are. . . . One more reason for me to do what he wants.”

  “But where?”

  I looked around at the walls of the arroyo and the houses dotting the hillsides.

  “Home,” I whispered, turning to Harrison. “He said he felt like he was part of my family.”

  Details were flying past me.

  “Was Lacy’s garage door opener in her car when we found it?”

  He thought for a moment then shook his head.

  “I don’t remember it in the inventory. But there’s an officer there.”

  “Give me your phone.”

  Harrison gave me his phone and I tried my number. The machine picked up after four rings. “You’ve reached Alex and Lacy. Please leave a message.”

  The machine beeped, and there was only silence until the tape ran out and I hung up.

  “He could be out in his squad,” Harrison said.

  There was something else, though, lost in the tattered fabric of the last few days.

  “The phone machine,” I said to myself.

  “What about it?”

  “Before Lacy was taken, I had called home and left a message. She said she never got it, and when I checked it, it wasn’t there. I think he’s already been inside my house. He erased it.”

  I looked down at the vest. “How long will it take to disarm the rest of this?”

  Harrison shook his head. “Too long.”

  “So I just have to be careful.”

  He looked at me, the possibilities being played out just under the surface of his eyes. “Very careful.”

  I looked up and saw Chavez step up behind Harrison. He tried to find something to say but couldn’t manage it. He glanced at the vest, then looked at me, his eyes filled with concern.

  “We’re running out of time. You want me to delay the parade?”

  “You do that, Lacy’s dead.”

  Surprise, then relief registered on his face.

  “She’s alive?”

  I nodded. He looked at me for a moment, clinging to a certain amount of doubt, not because he didn’t want to believe but because doubt’s a constant companion after thirty years on the job.

  I held the photograph out to him.

  “Philippe’s not dead. He’s Gabriel.”

  He stood for a moment like a tourist looking into the Grand Canyon for the first time.

  “Gabriel’s greatest role wasn’t the terrorist, it was the victim,” I said. “We’ve been chasing a piece of fiction.”

  “You saw him?”

  “No.”

  “This is a hunch then?”

  “I agree with her,” Harrison said.

  I handed my windbreaker to Chavez.

  “I need a female officer to walk out onto Colorado in my windbreaker.”

  “No problem.”

  “She’ll need a phone for instructions and pants the same color as mine.”

  He took it and nodded.

  “Where’s SWAT?”

  “They’re positioned along Colorado along with everybody else.”

  “How many officers are available?”

  He studied me for a moment, then it dawned on him what I was talking about.

  “You don’t think he’s at the parade?”

  I shook my head. “I think he took her home.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No, I’m not. And if I’m wrong, I lose my daughter.”

  “Alex? We’re here, ready. This is our best shot.”

  “So there are no officers available, that’s what you’re saying? Not for a hunch.”

  Chavez glanced over his shoulder at Hicks, then took a breath.

  “He’s going to kill her, Ed. I have to follow this.”

  Lacy’s big Latino grandfather took a breath as if it were a shot of tequila. If I was wrong and something happened at the parade and he had pulled officers . . . Shit . . . that would be it for him. He would attend the funerals of all the victims. And then watch the finger-pointing as thirty years of work was destroyed. I couldn’t ask that. Not for me. Not even for Lacy.

  “Harrison and I will check it,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “I’m available,” Chavez said.

  26

  HARRISON TURNED THE CORNER on Mariposa and pulled the squad to the curb. Three-quarters of the way up on the left, my house sat atop the sloping grade of ivy and ice plants. On the street in front, the unmarked squad of the officer who hadn’t answered the phone was empty.

  “He’s not sitting in his squad,” Harrison said.

  He glanced at me. “And the paper’s still on the dri
veway.”

  Chavez scanned the front of the house with binoculars. “Curtains are closed on all the windows.”

  “I left them open,” I said.

  I stared at the house trying to recognize it as the place where I had conceived a child and then brought her home from the hospital, but it was no longer recognizable as mine. My house couldn’t be this one. Not the fake shutters, not the yellow paint, not the pathetic bed of roses I had once planted in a misguided quest to be a normal suburban parent. Everything looked exactly as it had every morning for the last eighteen years. But the sameness only made it more frightening. Inside, the fever dream that hides in every child’s nightmare had been let loose from under the bed.

  “In two minutes we should hear four F-15s fly over the length of the parade route,” Chavez said. “Two minutes after that the first band starts around the corner and begins the parade and a hundred thousand people will start to cheer.”

  I could feel the momentum begin to gather speed. I wanted to slow it down, to catch my breath, but there was no stopping it.

  “Four minutes,” I said, as if I needed to hear the words in order to believe them.

  “How do you want to make entry?” the chief asked.

  “There’s a door on the north side of the garage,” I said. “He won’t be able to hear from inside the house. He has her in either my bedroom or hers. Probably hers.”

  I glanced down at the motion sensor strapped to my chest.

  “How many feet do I need to be clear of everyone else if this . . .” I let it go.

  Harrison and Chavez glanced uneasily at each other, then Harrison’s eyes moved over the bomb, quickly calculating its destructive force.

  “Out in the open, anyone within ten feet would be severely injured. Inside a house, that changes. It becomes more dangerous with objects flying.”

  I pictured Dave disappearing in the debris at Sweeny’s.

  “Glass and doors,” I said.

  Harrison had the look you see on people’s faces at funerals where finality is for the first time measurable.

  “Every object in a house becomes a weapon: a spoon, pen, coffee cup . . . everything.”

  I glanced at my watch, which now took on the appearance of a weapon. I quickly began to fumble with the buckle, desperately trying to get it off. Chavez’s big, thick hand clamped down gently on my wrist. His eyes met mine with the same assuredness they had held when he told me I was to be the head of Homicide.