A Maiden's Grave (22 page)

"As Handy's career's progressed," LeBow said to his audience, "he's gotten more violent." It was the severity and randomness of his crimes that seemed to escalate, the intelligence officer explained. Recently he'd taken to killing for no apparent reason and – in the robbery in which he'd most recently been convicted – started committing arson.

Potter interrupted to say, "Tell us specifically what happened at the Wichita robbery. The Farmers amp; Merchants S amp;L."

Henry LeBow scrolled through the screen, then continued, "Handy, Wilcox, a two-time felon named Fred Laskey, and Priscilla Gunder – Handy's girlfriend – robbed the Farmers amp; Merchants S amp;L in Wichita. Handy ordered a teller to take him into the vault but she moved too slow for him. Handy lost his temper, beat her, and locked her and another woman teller inside the vault, then went outside and got a can of gas. Doused the inside of the bank and lit it. The fire was the reason he was caught. If they'd just run with the twenty thousand they'd have made it but it took him another five minutes or so to torch the place. That gave the cops and Pete Henderson's men time to roll up, silent."

He summarized the rest of the drama: There was a shootout in front of the bank. The girlfriend got away and Handy, Wilcox, and Laskey stole another car but got stopped by a roadblock a mile away. They'd climbed out and walked toward the cops. Handy fired a hidden gun through Laskey's back, killing him and wounding two of the arresting officers before being wounded himself.

"Pointless." Budd shook his head. "That fire. Burning up those women."

"Oh, no, the fire was one way to regain control of the situation," Angie said.

Potter quoted, " 'They didn't do what I wanted. When I wanted it.' "

"Maybe people like Handy'll become your specialty, Arthur," Tobe said.

Two years until retirement; as if I need a specialty, thought Potter. And one that includes the Lou Handys of the world.

Budd sighed.

"You all right, Captain?" Potter asked.

"I don't know if I'm exactly made for this kind of work."

"Ah, you're doing fine."

But of course the young trooper was right. He wasn't made for this line of work; nobody was.

"Listen, Charlie, the troopers're probably getting antsy by now. I want you to make the rounds, you and Dean. Calm ' em down. See about coffee. And for God's sake make sure their heads're down. Keep yours that way too."

"I'll come with you, Charlie," Angie said. "If it's okay with Arthur."

"Catch up with him, Angie. I want to talk to you for a moment."

"I'll meet you outside," she called, and pulled her chair closer to Potter.

"Angie, I need an ally," Potter said. "Someone inside."

She glanced at him. "Melanie?"

"Was that really just a fluke, what she did? Or can I count on some help?"

Angie thought for a minute. "When Melanie was a high-school student there, Laurent Clerc was an oralist school. Signing was forbidden."

"It was?"

"It was a mainstream school. But Melanie realized that was stifling her – which is what all educators are now coming to realize. What she did was to develop her own sign language, one that was very subtle – basically just using the fingers – so the teachers didn't notice it the way you'd see people signing in ASL. Her language spread through the school like wildfire."

"She created a language?"

"Yep. She found that the ten fingers alone weren't enough for a working vocabulary and syntax. So the variable element she introduced was brilliant. It had never been done in sign language before. She used rhythm. She overlaid a temporal structure on the finger shapes. Her inspiration was apparently orchestral conductors."

Arthur Potter, who, after all, made his living with language, was fascinated.

Angie continued, "Right around that time there were protests to shift to a curriculum where ASL was taught and one of the reasons cited by the deaf teachers in favor of doing so was that so many students were using Melanie's language. But Melanie wouldn't have anything to do with the protests. She denied that she'd invented the language – as if she was afraid the administration would punish her for it. All she wanted to do was study and go home. Very talented, very smart. Very scared. She had a chance to go to Gallaudet College in Washington this summer on a fellowship. She turned it down."

"Why?"

"Nobody knew. Her brother's accident maybe."

Potter recalled that the young man was having surgery tomorrow. He wondered if Henderson had gotten in touch with the family. "Maybe," he mused, "there's just a certain timidity that goes along with being deaf."

"Excuse me, Agent Potter." Frances Whiting leaned forward. "Is that like a certain amount of fascism goes along with being a federal agent?"

Potter blinked. "I'm sorry?"

Frances shrugged. "Stereotyping. The Deaf have had to deal with it forever. That they're kings of the beggars. That they're stupid. Deaf and
dumb
. That they're timid… Helen Keller said that blindness cuts you off from
things
, deafness cuts you off from
people
. So the Deaf compensate. There's no other defining physical condition that's given rise to a culture and community the way deafness has. There's a huge diversity among – pick a group: gays, paraplegics, athletes, tall people, short people, the elderly, alcoholics. But the Deaf community is militantly cohesive. And it's anything but timid."

Potter nodded. "I stand chastised." The officer smiled in response.

He looked out over the scruffy field beside them. He said to Angie, "My feeling is that I can get only so far with Handy through negotiations. It could save three or four lives if somebody inside was helping us."

"I'm not sure she's the one who can do it," Angie said.

"Noted," he said. "You better go find Charlie now. He's probably wondering what's become of you."

Angie left the van, Frances too, on her way to the hotel to check on the hostages' families. Potter sat back in the desk chair, picturing the photo of Melanie's face, her wavy blond hair.

How beautiful she is, he mused to himself.

Then he sat up, laughing to himself.

A beautiful face? What was he thinking of?

A negotiator must never Stockholm with hostages. That's the first rule of barricades. He has to be ready to sacrifice them if need be. Still, he couldn't stop thinking about her. This was ironic, for nowadays he rarely thought of women in terms of physical appearance. Since Marian died he'd had only one romantic involvement. A pleasant woman in her late thirties. It was a liaison doomed from the start. Potter now believed you could return successfully to romantic love at age sixty and above. But in your forties and fifties, he suspected, the process was doomed. It's the inflexibility. And the pride. Oh, and always the doubts.

Gazing at the slaughterhouse, he thought: In the past fifteen years, since Marian, the most meaningful conversations I've had have been not with my surrogate cousin Linden or her clansmen or the women who've hung chastely on my arm at functions in the District. No, they've been with men holding oiled guns at the heads of hostages. Women with short black hair and Middle Eastern faces, though very Western code names. Criminals and psychopaths and potential suicides. I've spilled my guts to them and they to me. Oh, they'd lie about tactics and motives (as I did) but everyone told the exquisite truth about themselves: their hopes, their dreams dead and dreams living still, their families, their children, their scorching failures.

They told their stories for the same reasons Arthur Potter told his. To wear the other side down, to establish bonds, to "transfer the emotive response" (as his own highly circulated hostage negotiation guidebook, eighth printing, explained).

And simply because someone seemed to want to listen.

Melanie… will we ever have a conversation, the two of us?

He saw Dean Stillwell wave to him and stepped into the fragrant gully to meet the sheriff. He glanced at the shreds of fog wafting around the van. So Handy's weather report wasn't up to date after all. It gave him a fragment of hope – unreasonable perhaps, but hope nonetheless. He looked up at the late-afternoon sky, in which strips of yellow and bruise-colored clouds sped past. In a break between two of the vaporous shapes he saw the moon, a pale crescent sitting over the slaughterhouse, directly above the blood-red brick.

They appeared suddenly, the dozen men.

The slippery wind covered the noise of their approach and by the time the agent was aware of them they'd surrounded him and Dean Stillwell, who was telling Potter about the dock behind the slaughterhouse. Stillwell had looked over the river and the dock and concluded that, even though the current was fast, as Budd had reported, it was too tempting an escape route. He'd put some armored troops in a skiff and anchored them twenty yards offshore.

Potter noticed Dean Stillwell look up and stare at something behind the agent. He turned.

The team was dressed in black and navy-blue combat gear. Potter recognized the outfits – the American Body Armor plated vests, the rubberized ducking uniforms and hoods, the H amp;K submachine guns with laser sights and flashlights. It was a Hostage Rescue Team, though not his, and Arthur Potter didn't want these men within a hundred miles of the Webber amp; Stoltz Processing Company.

"Agent Potter?"

A nod. Be gracious. Don't jerk leashes until leashes need to be jerked.

He shook the hand of the crew-cut man in his forties.

"I'm Dan Tremain. Commander of the state police Hostage Rescue Unit." His still eyes were confident. And challenging. "I understand you're expecting a Delta team."

"The Bureau's HRT actually. Jurisdiction, you know."

"Course."

Potter introduced him to Stillwell, whom Tremain ignored.

"What's the status?" Tremain asked.

"They're contained. One fatality."

"I heard," Tremain said, rubbing a gold pinky ring on which was a deep etching of a cross.

"We've gotten three girls out unhurt," Potter continued. "There are four other girls inside and two teachers. The HTs've asked for a chopper, which we aren't going to give them. They've threatened to execute another hostage at seven unless we have it here by then."

"You're not going to give him one?"

"No."

"But what'll happen?"

"I'm going to try to talk him through it."

"Well, why don't we deploy just the same? I mean, if it comes down to him killing her, I know you'll want to move in."

"No," Potter said, looking over at the press table, where Joe Silbert and his assistant were diligently typing away on a computer. The reporter looked up glumly. Potter nodded and glanced back at Tremain.

The state police commander said, "You're not saying that you'd let him kill the girl, are you?"

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

Acceptable casualties…

Tremain held his eye for a moment. "I'm thinking we really ought to move into position. Just in case."

Potter glanced at the men and gestured Tremain aside. They walked into the shadow of the command van. "If it comes down to an assault, and I certainly hope it doesn't, then my team'll be the one doing it – and only my team. Sorry, Captain, that's just the way it is."

Was this going to explode? Shoot straight to the governor and the Admiral in Washington?

Tremain bristled but he shrugged. "You're in charge, sir. But those men are state felons too and our regulations require us to be on the scene. And
that's
just the way it is too."

"I have no objection at all to your presence, Captain. And if they come out, guns ablazing, I'd sure welcome your firepower. But as long as it's understood that you're taking orders from me."

Tremain relented. "Fair enough. Fact is, I told my men that we'll probably be spending three hours drinking coffee and then pack up and go home."

"Let's hope so for all our sakes. If you want to go into position as part of the containment crew, Sheriff Stillwell here's in charge of that."

The two men nodded at each other coolly and every soul within earshot knew there was no way an HRT commander would put his men under the orders of a small-town sheriff. Potter hoped this would guarantee that Tremain would hightail it out of here.

"I think we'll just hang back. Stay out of sight. If you need us we'll be around."

"Whatever you want, Captain," Potter said.

Budd and Angie appeared, striding up the hill, and stopped suddenly. "Hey, Dan," Budd said, recognizing Tremain.

"Charlie." They shook hands. Tremain's eyes took in Angie's hair and face but it was a chaste examination, one of curiosity, and when his eyes dipped downward to her chest it was simply to confirm from her necklace ID that she was in fact an FBI agent.

"You boys heard about our little situation, did you?" Budd said.

Tremain laughed. "How 'bout, anybody watches TV knows about it. Who's working the CP?"

"Derek Elb."

"Derek the Red?" Tremain laughed. "I gotta say hi to him." Now jovial, Tremain said to Potter, "That boy wanted to join HRU but we took one look at that hair on him and thought he'd be just a little too prominent in a sniper's scope."

Potter smiled agreeably, pleased that there'd been no confrontation. Usually state and federal negotiators get along well enough but there's invariably tension between negotiators and tactical units from other branches. As Potter explained in class, "There're talkers and there're shooters. That's night and day and it won't ever change."

Tremain stepped into the van. Potter eyed the dozen men. Somber, artful, and oh-so-pleased to be here. He thought of Robert Duvall in
Apocalypse Now
and supposed these men too loved the smell of napalm in the morning. Potter finished his conversation with Stillwell. When he turned back he was surprised to find that the HRU, to a man, was gone. When he climbed into the van he saw that Tremain too had left.

LeBow entered the information about Stillwell's skiff into his electronic memory.

"Time, Tobe?" Potter was staring at the "Promises/Deceptions" board.

The young man glanced at the digital clock.

"Forty-five minutes," Tobe muttered, then said to LeBow, "You tell him."

"Tell me what?"

The intelligence officer said, "We've been playing with the infrared monitor. We caught a glimpse of Handy a minute ago."

"What was he doing?"

"Loading the shotguns."

The Kansas State Police Hostage Rescue Unit, led by Captain Daniel Tremain, slipped silently into a stand of trees a hundred yards from the slaughterhouse.

The trees, Tremain noted at once, were not unoccupied. There were a state police sniper and two or three local deputies in position. Using hand signals Tremain directed his men through the trees and down into a gully that would take them around the side of the slaughterhouse. They passed undetected through the small forest. Tremain looked about and saw – fifty yards toward the river – an abandoned windmill, forty feet high, sitting in the middle of a grassy field. Beside it were two state troopers, standing with their backs to the HRU as they gazed warily at the slaughterhouse. Tremain ordered the two men into a line of trees out of sight of both the north side of the slaughterhouse and the command post.

From the windmill, the HRU team walked into a gully and made their way closer to the slaughterhouse. Tremain held up his hand and they stopped. He tapped his helmet twice and the men responded to the signal by switching on their radios. Lieutenant Carfallo opened the terrain map and the architectural drawings. From his pocket Tremain took the diagram of the inside of the slaughterhouse that Derek the Red, Derek the trooper, Derek the spy, had just slipped him inside the van. It was marked with the location of the hostages and the HTs.

Tremain was encouraged. The girls weren't being held in shield positions by the windows or in front of the HTs. There were no booby traps. Derek reported that the men inside were armed with pistols and shotguns only, no automatic weapons, and they had no flak jackets, helmets, or flashlights. Of course the hostages weren't as far away from the takers as he would have liked, and the room in which they were being kept had no door. But still Handy and the others were twenty or so feet from the girls. It would take a full five seconds for Handy to get to the hostages, and that was assuming he'd already decided that he would kill them the instant he heard the cutting charges. As a rule, in an assault, there were four to ten seconds of confusion and indecision while the takers tried to scope out what was happening before they could take up effective defensive positions.

"Listen up." Hands tapped ears and heads nodded. Tremain pointed at the chart. "There are six hostages inside. Three HTs – located here, here, and here, though they're pretty mobile. One checks on the girls with some frequency." Tremain nodded to one trooper. "Wilson."

"Sir."

"You're to proceed through this gully along the side of the building here and surveil from one of these two windows."

"Sir, can you get them to shift that light?" Trooper Joey Wilson nodded toward the halogens.

"Negative. This is a clandestine operation and you're not to expose yourself to the friendlies."

"Yessir," the young man barked. No questions asked.

"The middle window is hidden by that tree and the school bus. I'd suggest that one."

"Yessir."

"Pfenninger."

"Sir."

"You're to return to the command van and your orders are consistent with what you and I discussed earlier. Is that understood?"

"Yessir."

"The rest of us are moving to this point here. Using those bushes and trees for cover. Harding, you take point. All officers move out now."

And they dispersed into the dusky afternoon, as fluid as the dark river flowing past, more silent than the wind that bent the grass around them.

"Let's have a smoke," Potter said.

"Not me," Budd answered.

"An imaginary one."

"How's that?"

"Let's step outside, Captain."

They wandered away from the van twenty feet into a stand of trees, the agent adjusting his posture automatically to stand more upright; being in the presence of Charlie Budd made you want to do this. Potter paused and spoke with Joe Silbert and the other reporter.

"We've got two more out."

"Two more? Who?" Silbert seemed to be restraining himself.

"No identities," Potter said. "All I'll say is that they're students. Young girls. They've been released unharmed. That leaves a total of four students and two teachers left inside."

"What did you trade for them?"

"We can't release that information."

He'd expected the reporter would be grateful for the scoop but Silbert grumbled, "You're not making this very fucking easy."

Potter glanced at the computer screen. The story was a human-interest piece about an unnamed trooper, waiting for action – the boredom and the edginess of a barricade. Potter thought it was good and told the reporter so.

Silbert snorted. "Oh, it'd sing like poetry if I had some hard news to put in. When can we interview you?"

"Soon."

The agent and the trooper wandered down into a grove of trees out of the line of fire. Potter called in and told Tobe where he was, asked for any calls from Handy to be patched through immediately.

"Say, Charlie, where'd that attorney general get himself to?"

Budd looked around. "I think he went back to the hotel."

Potter shook his head. "Marks wants Handy to get his helicopter. The governor told me he wants Handy dead. The Bureau director'll probably be on the horn in the next half-hour – and there've been times when I've gotten a call from the president himself. Oh, and mark my words, Charlie, somebody's writing the script right at this moment and making
me
out to be the villain."

"You?" Budd asked, with inexplicable glumness. "You'll be the hero."

"Oh, not by a long shot. No, sir. Guns sell advertising, words don't."

"What's this about imaginary cigarettes?"

"When my wife got cancer I quit."

"Lung cancer? My uncle had that."

"No. Pancreas."

Unfortunately the party with whom Potter had been negotiating for his wife's recovery had reneged on the deal. Even so, Potter never took up smoking again.

"So you, what, imagine yourself smoking?"

Potter nodded. "And when I can't sleep I imagine myself taking a sleeping pill."

"When you're, you know, depressed you imagine yourself happy?"

That, Arthur Potter had found, didn't work.

Budd, who'd perhaps asked the question because of the funk he'd been in for the last hour, forgot his dolor momentarily and asked, "What brand aren't you smoking?"

"Camels. Without the filter."

"Hey, why not?" His face slipped and he seemed sad again. "I never smoked. Maybe I'll have me an imaginary Jack Daniel's."

"Have a double while you're at it." Arthur Potter drew hard on his fake cigarette. They stood among flowering catalpa and Osage orange and Potter was looking down at what appeared to be the deep tracks of wagon wheels. He asked Budd about them.

"Those? The real thing. The Santa Fe Trail itself."

"Those're the
original
tracks?" Potter was astonished.

"They call ' em swales. Headed west right through here."

Potter, genealogist that he was, kicked at the deep, rocklike tread mark cut into the dirt, and wondered if Marian's great-great-grandfather Ebb Schneider, who had traveled with his widowed mother from Ohio to Nevada in 1868, had been an infant asleep in the wagon that had made this very track.

Budd nodded toward the slaughterhouse. "The reason that was built was because of the Chisholm Trail. It went south to north right through here too, from San Antonio to Abilene – that's
our
Abilene, in Kansas. They'd drive the longhorns along here, sell off and slaughter some for the Wichita market."

"Got another question," Potter said after a moment.

"I'm not much of a state historian. That's 'bout all I know."

"Mostly, Charlie, I'm wondering why you're looking so damn uneasy."

Budd lost interest in the swales at his feet. "Well, I guess I wonder what exactly you wanted to talk to me about."

"In about forty minutes I've got to go talk Handy out of killing another of the girls. I don't have a lot of ideas. I'd like to get your opinion. What do you think of him?"