Hunted (6 page)

“What?” Caroline’s shocked reaction was instantaneous and instinctive. “No way in hell.”

“That’s the story,” Dixon said. “Just to be sure, I gave John Hendricks in Internal Affairs a call to confirm it for myself. It’s true.”

Miller nodded vigorously.

Caroline shook her head. “I don’t believe it.” She did a lightning mental review of everything she personally knew about Ware. She thought of his years of service and his professional reputation, which was solid. Then she thought of all the things she probably didn’t know about him, about the rumors of his partying, about the death of his ex-wife and child. Had any of those things been enough to turn a good cop bad?

“I don’t believe it,” she said again, but more slowly. Because the truth was, she couldn’t be sure.

You have no idea what this is about,
was what he’d told her. Could this—the bribery charge, his firing—be what he had been referring to? Caroline’s attention was drawn back to the monitor by a sudden movement on the screen.

“You know they’re out there prepping for a SWAT attack or something, right?” The shrill-with-fear voice, a woman’s, came clearly over the phone, and had Caroline refocusing on the other monitors in a hurry. There it was: a woman in a green satin ball gown had lifted her head from the floor to hurl the question at Ware. As she continued, her tone teetered on the brink of hysteria: “The only way you even have a chance of getting out of here alive is if you let us go!”

The rest of the hostages were reacting. Several of them moved restlessly. Some dared to raise their heads and take surreptitious peeks at their captor. Caroline’s heart stuttered. An ill-considered move by the hostages could get everyone in that room killed.

“Calm down, Ellen,” Martin spoke sharply. Caroline registered that it was the first thing she had heard him say since Ware had threatened him if he didn’t stay silent, even as she recognized the woman, a fortyish, reed-slim, perfectly groomed redhead, with a sense of shock: Ellen Tremaine, New Orleans’ city attorney. Caroline had had no idea that she was among the hostages. Even if he lived through the night, Ware’s future just kept getting bleaker and bleaker: from what Caroline knew of Ellen Tremaine, once she was released the woman would go after Ware with everything the legal system could throw at him.

He could be facing decades, maybe even the rest of his life, in jail.

Ware pointed his pistol at the attorney. “If you want to get out of here alive I suggest you put your face down and shut the hell up.”

“Do what he says, Ellen,” Martin snapped. Ms. Tremaine held Ware’s gaze for a moment, almost pitiably defiant, then as he steadied his aim she grimaced and subsided back down onto the carpet, resting her cheek against the scarlet fibers so that only the top of her head remained visible to the camera. Martin’s eyes shifted to Ware. “You know she’s talking sense, Ware. You want to live, you’ll let us go.”

Ware bared his teeth in what could only be described as a snarl. “You ever think that maybe I don’t want to live, Superintendent? And that maybe I’d be real happy to take all you people with me when I go?”

Caroline’s mouth went dry. Her heart gave a weird little kick. If this was the answer, if he really was suicidal, the hostages were in even more danger than she had supposed. She could almost feel the anxiety level in the room rising right along with hers. If the hostages were to lose their nerve, try to rush Ware, or make a break for it, it could precipitate something catastrophic. The situation would deteriorate in a hurry. Which begged the question: how much time did she really have?

Pouring oil on troubled waters was her specialty, she reminded herself.
So get on with it.

“We’re working hard to get you all out of there,” Caroline said loudly, hoping to be heard throughout the room. Whether she was successful or not, she couldn’t tell: there was no visible reaction from the hostages, as far as she could see. Ware definitely heard: his eyes shifted toward the camera, and it was like he was looking right at her again. Her father heard, too: she could tell by the way his eyes also flickered in the camera’s direction, and the deepening of his scowl. “We’re committed to doing whatever it takes to keep everybody safe, so stay cool.”

“Nobody’s going to do anything stupid,” her father answered. “Except for Ware, of course, who already has.”

Ware’s mouth twisted. “I thought I told you to shut up.”

Caroline missed whatever Martin might have said in reply because her attention was distracted by the sudden movement of the SWAT team. The unit was getting into some kind of formation on the ground to the left of the house, apparently just awaiting word to ascend to the second story via the ladder: she could see them on a monitor. She knew that ideally they liked to wait until the sniper team assessed the situation first, but whether a sniper would even make the attempt tonight would depend on several factors, the most important of which was whether such an action might set off a bomb or bombs. Her eyes ran over Ware again. He was talking to her father now, his voice too low for her to decipher the words, his expression as ugly as her father’s was stony. It was obvious that there was crackling animosity between the two. Again, if Ware was wearing an explosive vest, as she’d been advised he was, she saw no sign of it. But from the way his left hand was fisted, and the position of his thumb, she was increasingly convinced that he was indeed holding a dead man’s switch. Which meant, of course, that there was indeed a bomb.

A cherry picker with a sniper in the bucket was positioning itself so that, Caroline realized as she watched the action on a monitor, it could potentially get a shot off through the gap in the library curtains.

Her heart thumped in her chest.

“You still there, Caroline?” Ware asked, his eyes shifting toward the camera again as though he could feel her looking at him. They were as shiny black as jet. His mouth was tight. He appeared to be growing increasingly restless and Caroline wondered if the hopelessness of his position might be starting to sink in. If so, and he was suicidal, that could be very bad news.

Looking at those gleaming eyes, she wondered again if Ware was on something.

“I’m here,” she replied, trying her best to sound reassuring. What she said next was part of the game plan: stall for time. “We’re still working on locating Hollis Bayard.”

“There’s a deadline on that,” Ware said. “In case I forgot to mention it. You tell Dixon and whoever else is running the show out there that I gave ’em an hour. For all of it. Starting from the time I first told you what I wanted. Which means”—he glanced to his left, and from his next words Caroline presumed he was checking with a clock—“you have forty-five minutes left.”

“That’s not enough time,” Caroline protested automatically, both because it was true and because that was the classic negotiator’s gambit.

Ware said, “It’s all you’ve got.”

“I want to help you,” Caroline said. “I’m doing everything I can to see that this works out and you get what you want and everyone gets out of there safely. We all are. But you need to be realistic about how difficult this is, and give us a reasonable amount of time.”

Again, Ware seemed to be looking right at her through the monitor. “You really think you can bullshit me, Caroline?”

Forgetting that he couldn’t see her, Caroline shook her head. “I’m not trying to bullshit you. It’s the truth.”

“Well, you better figure out a way to speed things along. Because I’m starting to get a little antsy here.”

With that Ware laid his pistol down beside him on the desk, leaned sideways, and pulled a wheeled leather desk chair into view. In it sat New Orleans’ mayor Harlan Guthrie, his portly, tux-clad body secured to the chair with bungee cords and zip ties. A strip of duct tape covered his mouth. His pale eyes bulged angrily. The rest of his pudgy face was as red as a chili pepper beneath his shock of dyed black hair, which was usually worn in a pompadour and was now wildly disheveled. His brow glistened with sweat.

In his lap rested a big, black backpack.

Caroline’s heart leaped. Dixon made a sharp sound.

She knew they were both having the same thought.

Bomb.

The sensation Caroline experienced was akin to having a cold hand grip the back of her neck. She shivered. Cradling the hard plastic telephone receiver, her palm felt suddenly damp. There was nothing—no protruding wires, no telltale bulge—that she could see to help identify what the backpack contained. But combine the dead man’s switch, which she was now certain was what was in Ware’s hand, with the expressions on his and the mayor’s and her father’s faces, and the very fact that the backpack had been brought into play at all, and she was pretty damned sure she knew.

They all were pretty damned sure they knew.

There’s no way back from this. No possible happy ending.

The best she could hope for was that nobody would die tonight.

If that backpack really did contain a bomb, and every sign indicated that it did, all it would take would be one slipup from any of them and it could easily be game over for everybody in that room.

“I’d hate to see the mayor here—and your dad, and the rest of these people—get vaporized,” Ware said, in what was an almost uncanny echoing of her thoughts. She’d missed it—too busy ogling the backpack—but he’d picked up his weapon and once again had it in hand. “But that’s what’s going to happen if I don’t get what I want.”

“You
are
going to get what you want. You just need to give us some time,” Caroline assured him, as, cursing under his breath and shooing Miller before him, Dixon turned and strode toward the other end of the van.

Ware’s eyes seemed to bore into hers. “Like I said, you got forty-five—no, make that forty—minutes.”

“Do what he says, Caroline,” her father said. He was breathing more heavily than before, and white lines bracketed his mouth. That look in his eyes—was he afraid?

Of course he was afraid. He would be a fool not to be afraid.

Caroline’s chest felt tight with dread. She had barely noticed what cramped quarters she was in until now, when the walls of the van felt like they were closing in around her. The air seemed to thicken, making it difficult to breathe. For most of her life, she would have said that she didn’t give a damn if her father lived or died. Now, she realized that wasn’t true: for all their differences, for all the hurt he had caused her and her sisters and their mother, there apparently was still some vestige of family feeling there. During her training, she’d seen the effects of a bomb detonated at close range: in one hideous instant, bodies were reduced to shredded meat and blood spatter. If Ware carried out his threat, death would be instantaneous, and gruesome, for everybody in that room.

For the hostages. For her father.

And for Ware.

At the involuntary image that planted in her mind, she got momentarily light-headed.

Was Ware prepared to carry out his threat? She couldn’t be sure, but it might well be a deadly error to assume that he was not.

She took a deep, steadying breath.

“You don’t want to hurt anyone, Reed,” she said. To hell with stirring up Ware’s memory where their past was concerned: the situation had just ratcheted up a couple of hundred notches on the desperate scale. Anyway, she doubted that he’d forgotten any excruciating detail of her teenage crush: she knew she hadn’t. To anyone else who was listening, she hoped she would just sound like a hostage negotiator trying to establish a closer relationship with a perp.

“I don’t want to,” Ware agreed. “So don’t make me.”

Holding up his clenched left fist, he waved it at her almost casually. Caroline was sure, now, that what she was seeing was a dead man’s switch: he had his thumb on the small flat disk that was the detonator, holding it down.

“Better call off your snipers,” Ware added, and smiled at the camera. It was an almost malicious smile, and it caused Caroline to wonder again if he was quite sane. “I take a bullet, and this whole place and everyone in it goes boom.”

A voice beside her said, “Damn it,” and with a sideways glance Caroline saw that Dixon had returned with Villard and that both men were staring at Ware on the monitor.

“He has a dead man’s switch,” Caroline pointed out, just in case they’d missed it.

“It sure looks like it,” Villard agreed, then asked the technicians, “Can you get me a close-up look at that backpack?”

“Nobody wants you to take a bullet,” Caroline said to Ware, maintaining her even tone with effort while the technicians worked to zoom in on the backpack. With the clock ticking, she needed to pick up the pace on winding her way up the behavioral change stairway, which was what negotiators called the process of building trust with a perp, until she reached the point where she could persuade Ware that surrendering was in his best interest. “We want you to come out of this alive, along with everyone else.”

“I doubt your colleagues there agree with you.” Ware’s tone was sardonic. “In fact, I know they don’t.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “Nobody wants you to die tonight.”

His mouth twisted. “You don’t know much about much, do you, cher?”

Caroline frowned. “It’s the truth.”

“You trying to fool yourself or me?” he asked.

“I’m not trying to fool you. I’m trying to help you,” Caroline replied even as her eyes darted from monitor to monitor, trying to pick up clues about what was going on outside. Dixon and Villard were huddled together a little apart from her, conferring about the close-up of the backpack that the technicians had pulled up on one screen. “You can still walk away from this. All you have to do is release the hostages and come out. No one will hurt you. No one has to get hurt.” She stressed that last part for emphasis.

“So I can just walk away like none of this ever happened, right?” The skepticism in Ware’s voice was unmistakable.

“You’ll face some charges.” Her voice was steady. “But at least they won’t include murder. And at this point, even the severity of the charges is on the table.”

“Is there a rainbow out there anywhere?” he asked. Caroline was mystified: the question made no sense at all.