Under the Beetle's Cellar (17 page)

“Yeah,” Hector said, “I think we can do better than old Jacksonville is doing. What a dim bulb the guy is.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Walter said. “He may come out of it okay. Slow and steady wins the race.”

Hector snorted. “Slow and steady! That don’t win nothing. Don’t you go to the movies, man?” He smiled his big flashing smile. “Fast and mean wins the race. That’s how we gotta play it—fast and mean.”

CHAPTER

EIGHT

“As a young man I was recruited into a communal cult where we were brainwashed into following orders without thinking. They forced us to stay there and stripped us of our identities. This cult was heavily armed and very violent—the United States Army.”

L
IEUTENANT
G
RADY
T
RAYNOR
, A
USTIN
P
OLICE
D
EPARTMENT

Seeing Grady’s ancient green Mazda parked in her driveway made her pulse quicken. Molly hadn’t seen him for five days, and she’d missed him—lots. Too much. She didn’t bother with the garage, just pulled her truck in next to his Mazda. As she got out, she heard whimpers coming from the fenced yard at the side of her town house. She walked around toward the gate. Grady’s low voice floated out to her. “That’s right, Copper. Good boy.”

“What’s he doing to be a good boy,” she called over the high wood fence, “peeing on my grass?”

The gate opened for her. Grady Traynor, dressed in a gray suit that looked as if it had been slept in for several lifetimes, stood there smiling at her. His white hair and mustache looked limp and slightly greasy. The circles under his eyes had darkened alarmingly and his tan was fading fast. After forty-seven days, the standoff at Jezreel was taking a toll on him that twenty-eight years of police work, eight of it in homicide, had somehow failed to do.

He opened his arms wide and Molly stepped toward him, her heart quickening.

Before they could embrace, however, a low growl made Molly step back hastily. An enormous black dog snarled up at her, his lips drawn back to show large yellowed fangs. The coarse hair on his neck bristled and his legs were spread aggressively. His amber eyes were slits of malice.

“Goddammit, Grady. That scares me.” The dog had repelled her from the start, when Grady had brought him by for the first time three months ago. He was a Belgian Malinois, Grady had informed her, though to Molly’s eye he looked exactly like a German shepherd. It was an ancient working breed, Grady explained like a proud parent, bred in Europe to herd sheep and kill predators, now used almost exclusively for police and guard work.

This specimen was mostly black, but with a dusting of reddish tan on his muzzle, neck, and front legs. His long narrow muzzle had a downward bend in it about midway between the eye and the nose, and the ear on his left side had a ragged notch torn out of it.

“Sorry, Molly. I keep forgetting that he sees close contact as something he’s supposed to do something about. He doesn’t mean anything personal by it.” He squatted down to pat the dog. “Okay, Copper. It’s all right, sweetie.” He rubbed his black head and chest vigorously. The dog quieted down. “See. He’s a real pussycat. If you’d get to know him, you’d—”

“Grady, don’t start that.”

“Okay. But if you’d just keep him here for a few days, you’d see that he’s—”

“No. Not for a few days. Not even a few minutes. I don’t want a dog. And if I did, this dog would definitely not be the one I wanted. I think he’s dangerous, a time bomb. He shows too much tooth for my taste.”

“This disappoints me, Molly. I would think you’d see the challenge here.”

“I’ve got plenty of challenges in my life. The answer was no two months ago, and it’s still no. This is
your
reclamation project, Grady. I predict you’ll regret it. When this animal bites someone and you get sued.”

“But look at him,” Grady said, still scratching the dog’s chest. The dog had his eyes closed in ecstasy and his left rear leg was thumping reflexively.

“Well, you certainly have the touch.” She laughed, thinking how much she’d like to get Grady upstairs in bed for a few hours. “That’s one thing Copper and I agree on. When do you have to be back at Jezreel?”

“Tomorrow, six
A
.
M
. We’re still doing twelve hours on and twelve off.”

She walked over to one of the rickety lawn chairs on the little brick terrace and sat down. “Killer schedule. After six weeks of it, it’s amazing you’re still standing. How’s it going?”

He sat down next to her. “It’s not. It’s not going anywhere. It’s a bust.”

“Tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell. Forty-seven days, Molly—a month and a half—the best negotiators in the country working round the clock, and we have gotten fucking nowhere. Andrew Stein’s the guy who wrote the book on the subject. He’s got thirty years’ experience in talking perps out of doing insane things to hostages. He talked the Iraqi bombers out of the synagogue in Chicago; he negotiated fifty hostages out of that Colorado survivalist commune without a drop of blood getting shed. From Samuel Mordecai he can’t get one kid on the telephone for ten seconds. You know what we’ve accomplished in forty-seven days? We got one minute with the driver on the second day. And this morning—big breakthrough—we got him to agree to let us speak to the driver again. Tomorrow, he says. For that, we give him ten minutes on KLTX radio to play his sermon tape, plus we sent in some newspapers. We also stuck some inhalers in the bag with the papers in the hope that once they’re inside, he’ll give them to Josh Benderson.”

“Did you put listening devices in the inhalers?”

“Oh, God, Molly. We debated it all night, but if Mordecai found them, it would kill all chance of getting medication to the kid. So we didn’t.” He ran his hands through his hair. “That kid is seriously sick. Assuming he’s still alive. For all we know, they’ve all been dead from day one.” He said it fiercely.

“I don’t think they’re dead,” Molly said.

Grady sighed. “Me either. Not yet.”

“Have you figured out what he wants?”

“Sure. He wants an hour on network television. That’s what he’s really after, Molly—a worldwide satellite TV broadcast before Friday night. He wants to preach to the world.”

“So let him.”

“We will. Gladly. But he needs to give something in return.”

“All eleven kids and the bus driver?”

“That’s what we say. And they’d have to come out first.” He leaned over closer to her and whispered, “Just between us, we’d settle for six kids.”

“What does he say to it?”

“He doesn’t answer. He rants. He says we—the negotiators—are part of the military-industrial, computer-corrupted group of world leaders he’s marked to be made into blood statues. Didn’t he once threaten you with that?”

“Yes. When my cult piece came out.”

“So you may be wondering what blood statues are.” He raised his
eyebrows at her, always a dramatic gesture since they were jet black and met in the middle.

“No. But I can see you’re going to tell me.”

“I think it’s important for you to know this. Because we—the negotiators—have not acted on his message, Mordecai has marked our souls with bar codes that emit a blue glow that can only be perceived by angels. We are not talking about just any angels here, but a team of military attack angels led by the Archangel Gabriel. When the trumpets blow on Friday, they will swoop to earth and cut our throats with heat-sealing laser knives. Then they will hang us upside down in such a way that with our arms and legs outstretched we will resemble pentagrams. And we will remain blood statues, rotting and stinking through all eternity.” Grady watched her for a reaction.

“Does he—” The words stuck in Molly’s throat. “Does he talk about the kids and the bus driver as being part of that corrupted group of world leaders?”

“No. He refers to them as Lambs. Damn, Molly, I’m so damned sick of his sermonizing. One of the things you count on in long hostage negotiations is the perps getting tired, but this madman shows no signs of it. We, on the other hand, are zombies. Listen to this: He says we’re the captives, not him. He says we’re caught between Gabriel’s attack angels and his legions of cult members on the outside, what Mordecai calls his Sword Hand of God.”

“Is there truth to that?” Molly asked. “Legions of cult members on the outside?”

“Not legions, but there are some and they are damned effective. It’s been hard to get much intelligence. The ones we can locate who have left are terrified of talking about it.”

“Are you thinking of letting some parents talk to him?”

“Mrs. Bassett. Actually, he’s requested her. Saw her on television, Channel 33 news. He says he’d like to talk to her. We’ll probably give it a try. She’s a real persuasive lady, and we don’t see how it could hurt. He also says he might let her come in and see the kids.”

“Would you allow that?”

“No. An ironclad FBI rule—no one enters a hostage situation, ever, for no reason, period. But we are out of ideas, Molly, running on empty. He’s just been stringing us along, buying time. I don’t think he ever had the slightest intention of letting any of those kids go. I think he’s got other plans for them.”

“Oh, Grady.”

“This leaves the door open for the HRT tactical nuts, the knuckle-walkers, to take over. They’re sitting in a warehouse three miles away in
their Ninja suits cleaning their assault rifles. They’ve had an emergency assault plan ready from day two. They’re on fifteen-minute call-up and they are dieseling.”

Molly had been fearing it might come to that. She groaned.

“Yeah,” he continued, “giving up on negotiations probably condemns those kids to death. Eighty-six percent of the hostages who die get killed during an assault. If the bad guys don’t shoot them, we do. And Mordecai has convinced us—he will kill them all the second he thinks an attack is starting. Anyway, how can we attack when we still don’t know where in the compound they’re being held?” He closed his eyes. “But we have no choice anymore. And we’re going to lose them. Oh, Molly, it’s impossible.”

He let his head fall back on the chair. “I’m crisped.”

She’d never before heard Grady say anything was impossible. She reached out to take his hand, but the dog, lying at his feet now, looked up and growled low in his throat. Molly drew her hand back.

She was quiet for a minute. She had been trying to decide whether to tell him about Dorothy Huff and Samuel Mordecai’s adoption. It was a dilemma: Grady was a wonderful sounding board, the best person she knew to brainstorm with. And if there was a prayer of tracking down Mordecai’s birth mother, she needed his help. The problem was, Grady was a cop, first and foremost. If she told him, he’d feel he had to pass it on to his boss or to the FBI.

Grady said, “Well, are you going to tell me or aren’t you?”

Molly turned her head. He hadn’t opened his eyes. “What?”

“Whatever it is you’re agonizing over.”

“If I tell you, will you promise to let me decide how to use the information?”

His eyes were open now, studying her face. “Not if it’s something to do with this mess in Jezreel. Not if I think it’s police business.”

“Then I can’t tell you. I have a feeling about this.”

“Molly, don’t do this. You need to tell me.”

“I’m afraid the authorities will muck this up, that they won’t use it right.”

“Molly, my sweet, I am one of the authorities and you are the most overconfident human being I know. What makes you so sure you are better qualified to deal with whatever it is than, say, the FBI’s chief negotiator, or a thirty-year police veteran like myself?”

“You’re not in charge there.”

“True. But they’re not bad, these FBI agents. They want to negotiate the kids out and they have more experience doing that sort of thing than
anyone else in the country. Some of them are assholes, but, hey, so’s Samuel Mordecai.”

She thought about it. “One thing I know, Grady: If I don’t tell anyone, there can’t be any leaks to the press.”

“You are the press,” he pointed out.

“No. Not in this case I’m not. This is nothing I want to write about. This information may have a much higher use.”

Grady was quiet, clearly weighing it. Then he put a hand over his heart and said, “Trust me.”

She leaned forward in her chair. “Did you know that Samuel Mordecai was adopted as a baby?”

The black eyebrows went up in surprise. “Evelyn Grimes was not his mother?”

“She adopted him when he was an infant.”

“Says who?”

“Says his grandmother, Dorothy Huff.”

He sat back in his chair. “Tell me everything.”

Molly knew that when he said everything, he meant absolutely everything, with no detail omitted. So, while the dog lay panting at their feet, she told him about Samuel Mordecai’s being found floating in a beer cooler in Waller Creek and about the adoption. Grady listened the way he always did, actively, and with total concentration, nodding and grunting and raising his eyebrows in astonishment.

“I have the robe and the adoption papers in my truck,” she finished. “Oh, here’s something else you may not know: Gramma Huff says that Annette Grimes, Mordecai’s wife, is not in the compound. She left months ago and is in hiding.”

“Really? She’s on our list of the hundred and twenty people we think are inside.” He stroked his long white mustache with his index finger. “That is mighty interesting. I would
love
to talk with Mrs. Grimes. Do you think Granny has any idea where she is?”

“No. I’m sure she doesn’t. Annette wrote Dorothy Huff to say goodbye and that she’d never be able to contact her again. Apparently she’s terrified for her life.”

“I bet. Molly, that’s important. I have to pass it on to Lattimore and Stein. We’ll find her.”

“Grady, here’s what I’ve been thinking about the adoption issue. Mordecai seems desperate to know who his birth mother is. He’s tried to find her and failed. It’s real important to him. What if we could find his mother for him?” She watched his face to see if he was responding the way she wanted him to. “If we could do it, it could be a major bargaining chip to use with him. We’d reveal her identity, maybe let him talk to her
on the phone if he’d release some kids. I haven’t thought it through, but before you resort to force, this might work.”