Takeover (21 page)

She looked back at where her daughter stood sweltering and hoped Rachael would not become motherless in the next few minutes. “Tell my daughter—”

“What?”

Should she tell Rachael to go to the hospital, to stay with Paul, assuming he still lived? Was it fair to leave the burden of a death watch to a seventeen-year-old who hadn’t quite sorted out how she even felt about her future stepfather?

But Theresa didn’t want him to be alone.

“Get moving, Theresa.” Lucas spoke with more urgency than before.

“Tell her I love her,” Theresa said, and passed the package in her hands to Brad.

The sergeant said, “If they start shooting, get everyone under the reception desk if you can. It’s marble, it will protect you.”

“Okay.”

“Otherwise just stay down.”

“Mmm.”

“This is the last one.”

Theresa held it but looked at the crowd behind the sawhorses. This might be the last time she ever saw her daughter. It might be the last time Rachael saw her.

“Tell her I love her,” she repeated.

“Will do,” the sergeant promised, and began to back away from the door.

“Wait!” Brad shouted. “You’re
leaving
us here?”

She understood him. To be this close to help, to rescue…There were limits to one’s discipline, even in the cause of self-preservation.

“What did you think?” Lucas asked. “They’d ride in on white horses? Shut up and turn around. If a cop enters this room, all of you die. Is that what you want?”

Brad groaned again, a low, grating sound.

“Don’t worry,” the sergeant told all of them. He continued to walk backward, and the expression on his face told her that it pained him as much as it did them.

“Get us out of here!” Missy screamed at him.

The other officers withdrew as well. Leaving them.

“Move back, folks,” Lucas ordered. “Don’t make me shoot
Jessica. Brad, help Missy unwrap those packages. Separate the one-hundred-dollar bills. That’s all we’ll be taking.”

Theresa made her feet shuffle backward as she watched her daughter until the thick wall of the Federal Reserve building blotted out the rest of the universe. Her world once again shrank to a room of cold stone and strangers.

Missy muttered, “But I’ve got a baby.”

“I’d like a chance to have a kid,” Brad said, sinking to the floor.

“My little girl is used to me being there.”

“So?” Brad demanded. “You deserve to live more than me?”

Theresa, unasked, began to unwrap the plastic from the money bundles as well. She spilled the bills, held in stacks by paper bands, onto the floor. “You’re wasting your breath, I’m afraid.”

Missy struggled with the wrappings. It would have been much easier with some sort of knife. “At least your daughter got to see you.”

Theresa’s self-control slipped. “As a captive! With a gun to my head! You want to talk about
trauma
?”

“Shut
up.
” Brad dropped the loosened bundles of hundred-dollar bills into one of the two duffel bags. “Will you guys drop it with the kids business? He doesn’t care! No one else cares! Why do all you people with children think that you’re more important than everyone else just because you have
kids
?”

“It means something,” Missy insisted.

“Only to you!” Perhaps fear had turned to anger; Brad ripped open another plastic-wrapped pack. “Anybody can have a baby. You don’t get a medal for it.”

Lucas followed this exchange with the ghost of a grin. “Is this a sore spot, Brad?”

He’s a student of human nature,
Theresa thought. Or perhaps of child rearing, given the history written in scarred flesh along his arms.

“They take days off and assume you can cover for them. Their vacation week gets approved because it’s Junior’s Little League tryouts or something. They act like I don’t have a real life because it doesn’t revolve around some little rug rat.”

Lucas had reached the end of his attention span. “People—”

Missy ripped the paper band off a packet of money with enough force to send a few stray bills wafting to the floor. “No, because you’re a self-indulgent party boy who—”

“People!”

They fell silent.

“Let me reintroduce some reality here. None of you are getting out of here until Bobby and I have this money safely stowed in our car. I don’t care who has kids and who doesn’t. It may be a noble undertaking, but it does not confer any special immunity in life. I also don’t give a crap if you’re caring for an elderly parent, or your dog has diabetes and needs its medication, or if you’ve won the lottery and intend to donate it all to charitable organizations.
I don’t care.
Are we clear on this?”

The phone rang.

“Nobody move,” Lucas said. “Bobby, don’t answer that. Missy, you got that one zipped up?”

She had filled it to bulging. A small stack of leftover bundles rested on the floor. “Yes.”

“Good. Jessica, go sit down where you were before. Missy and Brad, slide the bag in front of the reception desk. It’s going to be heavy, but you’re both so ticked off you can probably pull it with
out too much trouble. Then everyone sits down. Theresa, you, too.”

Lucas followed behind Theresa, close enough that the barrel of the gun prodded her spine with every few steps. The phone continued to ring. Lucas had the money and the car, with nothing to stop him from taking off with a few hostages in tow. Except Chris Cavanaugh, assuming he really could talk anybody into anything.

“I think you should answer that phone,” Theresa said to him.

Lucas ignored her suggestion. “You could have run for it, Theresa. You could have been out that door before I shot you. Why didn’t you go?”

“How many people would you have killed if I had?”

“Half of them.” The answer came so quickly, so lightly, that it chilled her blood. “Just like I said. But so what? You love your daughter. Aren’t you willing to sacrifice others for her well-being?”

The question made her heart pound, more so than the gun at her back.
Should
she have been willing? Why did Lucas ask? Trying to sort out what happened during his childhood, what the adults in his life should have done versus what they did? Or did he simply enjoy poking an open wound?

Should
she have run, put Rachael above these other people, these strangers?

“Love has to be balanced,” she said as they reached the reception desk, “with being a human being. You can’t truly do one without being the other.”

His face grew still again, hard, almost disappointed. “I disagree,
Theresa. Real love is
un
balanced, and you have to be willing to sacrifice everything and everyone for it.”

For the second time, she asked, “Is that what you’re doing this for? Love?”

“Sit down, Theresa.”

She sat.

2:35
P.M
.

“What did you do with the daughter?” Cavanaugh asked.

Patrick, Cavanaugh, and Jason sat at the librarian’s desk. Assistant Chief Viancourt perched on a folding chair, one ankle over the opposite knee. He seemed to have forgotten his irritation at Patrick—he’d never been the sort to hold a grudge—but he also seemed to have lost interest in the whole ordeal.

Patrick could not remember when he’d last felt this tired. He didn’t have the energy to light a cigarette, and his clothes, even his pants, clung to his sweat-soaked body. Yet the last active cell in his body rose up at Cavanaugh’s tone. “Rachael. Her name is Rachael.”

“Rachael, then. Where is she?”

“She’s watching the monitor in the map room.”

The hostage negotiator studied him. “If this goes bad—”

“She might witness her mother’s slaughter, yes, I know that. But what else could I do? Stick her in a closet and tell her to be quiet
like a good girl? If it was my mother, I’d sure as hell want to see what was going on.”

“It will give her nightmares for the rest of her life. Why don’t you send her to the hospital to stay with the fiancé? Paul,” he added hastily, seeing the look on Patrick’s face. “He was almost her stepfather.”

Is going to be,
Patrick thought, but he felt superstitious about insisting, felt afraid to acknowledge Cavanaugh’s use of the past tense when it came to Paul Cleary. “I thought of that. She didn’t ask much about him before, but I’ll have to tell her what kind of shape he’s in. I won’t make her go—I keep picturing Tess bleeding to death on the floor of the Federal Reserve building. Having to be here if that happens, yes, would traumatize Rachael for life. But knowing she might have had a chance to say good-bye if I hadn’t sent her off to Metro…well, she’d hate me forever.”

“So are you basing this decision on her feelings or yours?”

Patrick damned the man. That was probably what made him a good negotiator, the ability to cut through words to the crux of the matter. “That’s just it—it’s going to have to be her decision.”

Cavanaugh shrugged. “Whatever. Just keep her out of here.” He dialed the phone again. “He still isn’t answering. This is not good.”

It felt better to discuss anything besides himself or Theresa. “What’s his plan?”

“That’s just it, I don’t know. After the entrance, the exit is the most dangerous time, and it’s best to have every detail worked out. You think they were trigger-happy before…. They should be even more worried about it than I am. I don’t get it. Did we hear from the storage facility that had Bobby’s car?”

“Whoever left it there gave his name as Bobby Moyers. Surveillance tapes have since been recorded over, and the employee who assigned the unit got fired three months ago. Decatur PD is trying to track him down on the off chance he can give us a description.” He dialed again.

“Where’s the secretary of state now?” Patrick asked suddenly. “The luncheon should be over.”

“Yeah, it’s over,” Viancourt answered from the couch, a bitter edge to his words. He had probably hoped to attend at least part of it. “They’re bundling the secretary into a bulletproof limo as we speak. So I guess this had nothing to do with that after all. I’m glad I didn’t even suggest to the chief that we cancel it,” he added pointedly. He had been right and they wrong.

Patrick checked his Nextel, hoping the hospital would call him if Paul’s condition changed. “Maybe he was waiting for the traffic to clear.”

Cavanaugh asked what he meant.

“We’ve gotten the feeling all day that Lucas was stalling. First he refused to wait for this shipment, and then he changed his mind, even after going through the whole rigmarole of sending the Ludlow woman to rob the bank-loan department. Maybe he wanted to wait until the secretary departed, taking a lot of traffic and a lot of cops with her.”

Cavanaugh nodded. “It could be. It works in our favor as well—if we have to pursue, which I pray we don’t, at least we won’t be running into the motorcade or convention-center traffic. Of course, if he heads east from here, it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. I need to know what he’s planning. If he waits any longer, we’re going to run into that Hall of Fame concert traffic.”
He dialed the phone again, punching the numbered plastic buttons with violence.

“What about Cherise?” Patrick said. “Did you check out what Theresa told that SRT guy?”

Cavanaugh gestured at Jason, who answered. “I spoke with her parents—as much as I could; they were hysterical—and her brother, and three other Fed tellers. She’s had no recent changes in her behavior or her habits. She’s been dating the same guy for a year and a half, a production assistant at WMMS. They break up off and on, but he’s been away with a church mission trip for the past ten days, rebuilding homes in New Orleans. Her finances have stayed steady. She deposits her salary and pays her bills. No big purchases. If there’s some dark secret in her life, she’s hidden it well.”

Cavanaugh kept dialing, so Patrick lowered his voice and spoke to Jason. “Lucas, then. Did we ask his sister what Theresa told the sergeant about abuse?”

“I tried her, but the line was busy. Apparently there are still people in this country who don’t have call-waiting. Or a DSL line.”

“Mind if I try?”

“Be my guest.” Jason stood up. “I’ve got to have a bathroom break anyway, or it’s going to get messy in here. Here’s the number.”

Patrick moved out to the center of the building, by the elevators, where the early-afternoon sun slanted through the wall of windows facing the courtyard and the Eastman Reading Garden. Miraculously, Lucas Parrish’s sister answered on the first ring. As soon as he identified himself, she said, “I’m not interested in helping you kill my brother, and besides, I have to be at my post in ten minutes.”

“Ma’am, he’s surrounded by approximately thirty-five cops and security guards. I don’t want anyone to shoot him, because once one bullet flies, you know more will follow, and there’s a lot more people down there besides your brother. So I’m as desperate to keep him alive as you are, understand?”

Slowly she agreed.

“Do you have any idea why your brother is doing this?”

“Why he’s robbing a bank? Because he’s a dreamer without a real job, that’s why.”

“He doesn’t want to work for a living?”

From the tone of her voice, she took no offense at the question. “He’s not lazy—he’s impatient. He wants grand adventures, tons of money, a beautiful woman who will love him forever and ever. He aims too high, I guess you could say.”

“I’ve been told Lucas suffered some abuse as a child. Can you tell me how that happened?” He tried to sound knowledgeable, when in truth he had no idea how Lucas’s friggin’ childhood could help them in this situation. But Theresa had taken some risk to pass along this information, and he would act on it.

“You mean the burns?”

“Uh…yeah.”

“My mother’s husband. Our father, I guess, though I’ve never really been too sure about that.”

“He left when you two were kids?”

“Yeah.” She waited, no doubt wondering what the hell Patrick was getting at. He wondered, too.

Patrick began to pace, then entered the stairwell to move down one floor. “Is that when Lucas began to get in trouble?”

“No. He didn’t go in for petty stuff—he’s never aimed low. I got in more trouble than he did. He liked school, worked part-time here and there. He read a lot. I guess that’s how he got so dreamy—he read books and drew pictures to get through the days at our house. I went out and played football with the boys, climbed fences, anything to be with other people. We all cope in our own ways.”

Patrick couldn’t stand in one place. He escaped the sunlight and slipped between the cool stacks, up to the glass-walled map room. Rachael had her back to him, glued to the monitor, watching the small group of pixels representing her mother.

Patrick asked, “Did he show any violence to other people? Act out against what his father would do?”

“Again, that was me.
I
fought.
I
got expelled for throwing another girl into the high-school trophy case. Lucas was more philosophical, like our mother. I guess that’s why him and me aren’t close.”

Through the glass he could see Rachael’s boyfriend, Craig, offer her a bottle of water, wet with condensation. She took it, and Patrick felt oddly comforted. At least the kid hadn’t gone completely comatose. “What do you mean?”

“Mom put up with our dad. She said she loved him, and you had to be willing to do anything for love. I never quite got where loving the kids she brought into the world figured into the equation, but apparently that’s normal. The nonabusive parent—some kids side with them, while others, like me, resent them even more than the abusive one. A shrink told me that once. Question is, why am I telling you?”

“Because your brother murdered one, maybe two, people this morning for no apparent reason.”

“One thing I know about my brother,” the woman said. “He’s got a reason. It just won’t make sense to anybody but him. And I’ve got thirty seconds to get to my duty station.”

“Thank you, Ms. Parrish.”

“Good luck.”

He steeled himself to enter the map room. He had held Rachael in his arms three days after her birth, true, but on the other hand he had no children and went to some effort to avoid dealing with anyone under twenty-five. Now he moved toward Theresa’s daughter as one might approach an injured tiger. The analogy fit almost too well—Rachael was desperate, unpredictable, and definitely wounded.

He pulled up a chair, sitting in front of her so she could see him and the monitor at the same time. The boyfriend—a pretty even-keeled kid, to Patrick’s great relief—noticed him first, then Rachael. She regarded him warily, wondering if he now functioned in the capacity of cop or loving uncle.

“I don’t have any news. The situation is still just as you see it on the TV here—your mom is fine.”

“What are you guys going to do?”

“We’re going to negotiate until they give themselves up peacefully. That’s how these things usually end, especially bank robberies. But I wanted to tell you that the hospital called, about Paul.”

“How is he?”

She looked like her mother, he noticed for the first time. Her eyes, brown instead of Theresa’s crystal blue, had always thrown
him off, but now he could see it in the shape of her lips and the line of her jaw. And like her mother, she hid her vulnerability well, refusing to even hint at its possibility.

But Rachael was only seventeen, and about to face a decision he wouldn’t want on his shoulders at fifty. “He’s in pretty bad shape.”

She seemed surprised, but then teenagers still believed in immortality. And she hadn’t seen the blood. “Is he going to die?”

“They don’t know. But I have to tell you it’s a possibility.”

She did not respond, simply absorbed. Just as her mother would have done.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Rachael, when I know you’re so worried about your mother. I wish it could be avoided.” Seventeen or not, Rachael was a human being and deserved the truth. Paul had been about to become her stepfather. “I’ll let you know as soon as I get any further news.”

“Mom would want me to go and stay with him.”

Patrick wrote down the names of the hospital and of Paul’s doctor but said nothing. Theresa would probably prefer him to get Rachael away from the scene, both for psychological reasons and to be out of harm’s way in the event of explosions or gunfire, but he couldn’t bring himself to influence the girl. Deciding things for other people did not come as easily to him as it did to, say, Chris Cavanaugh.

He left her there to think about it, sighing with guilty relief as he left the room—on little cat feet, the way one leaves a funeral parlor.

Moving back upstairs, he turned his mind to Lucas Parrish and tried to fit the information Lucas’s sister had provided into some
useful framework. He couldn’t. The conversation had served only to convince him that Parrish had a loftier goal in mind than getting a teller to stuff some cash in a bag.

On the other hand, the sister had listed “wealth” among his aspirations. Perhaps Lucas Parrish was exactly what he appeared to be, a kid blessed with enough smarts to have a dream but not enough to bring it to life. Maybe it really was just the money.