A Maiden's Grave (30 page)

Frances understood and cried out, "No, please no. Do something!"

"There's nothing to do," Angie whispered.

Tremain leaned his miserable face down to the window and looked out.

Handy's voice filled the van. He sounded reasonable, wise. "You're a lot like me, Art. Loyal. That's what I think. You're loyal to them that do what they're supposed to and you don't have time for those that don't." A pause. "You know just what I'm saying, don't you, Art? I'll leave the body outside. You can come get it. Flag of truce."

"Lou, isn't there anything I can do?" Potter heard the desperation in his own voice. Hated it. But it was there just the same.

Who will it be?

Angie had turned away.

Budd shook his head sorrowfully. Even boisterous Roland Marks could find nothing to say.

"Tobe," Potter said softly, "please turn down the volume."

He did. But still everyone jumped at the stark sound of the gunshot, which filled the van as a huge metallic ring.

As he stumbled toward the slaughterhouse, where the body lay pale in the halogen lights, he pulled off his flak jacket and dropped it on the ground. His helmet too he left behind.

Dan Tremain walked on, tears in his eyes, gazing at the still body, the bloody body, lying in the posture of a rag doll.

He crested the rise and saw from the corner of his eye troopers standing from their places of cover. They were staring at him; they knew he was responsible for what had happened, for this unconscionable death. He was walking up Calvary Hill.

And in the window of the processing plant: Lou Handy, a gun pointed directly at Tremain's chest. It made no difference, he was no threat; the captain had dropped the utility belt holding his Glock service pistol some yards back. On he stumbled, nearly falling, then just catching his balance like a drunk with some irrepressible sense of survival. His despair was deepened by Lou Handy's face – the red eyes, set back under bony brows, the narrow jaw, the five o'clock shadow. He was smiling, an innocuous smile of curiosity, as he gazed at the sorrow on the cop's face. Sampling, tasting.

Tremain gazed at the body lying there in front of him. Fifty feet away, forty. Thirty.

I'm mad, Tremain thought. And continued to walk, staring into the black eye of the muzzle of Handy's gun.

Twenty feet. Blood so red, skin so pale.

Handy's mouth was moving but Tremain could hear nothing. Maybe God's judgment is to make me deaf as those poor girls.

Ten feet. Five.

He slowed. The troopers were standing now, all of them, staring at him. Handy could pick any of them off, as they could him, but there would be no shooting. This was the Christmas Eve during World War I when the enemy troops shared carols and food. And helped each other collect and bury the shattered bodies strewn throughout no-man's-land.

"What have I done?" he muttered. He dropped to his knees and touched the cold hand.

He cried for a moment then hefted the body of the trooper in his arms – Joey Wilson, Outrider Two – and lifted it effortlessly, looking into the window. At Handy's face, which was no longer smiling but, oddly, curious. Tremain memorized the foxlike cast of his face, the cold eyes, the way the tip of his tongue lay against his upper lip. They were only feet apart.

Tremain turned and started back to the police line. In his mind he heard a tune, floating aimlessly. He couldn't think of what it might be for a minute then the generic instrument turned into the bagpipe he remembered from years ago and the tune became "Amazing Grace," the traditional song played at the funerals of fallen policemen.

Arthur Potter thought about the nature of silence.

Sitting in the medical tent. Staring at the floor as medics attended to his burnt arms and hands.

Days and weeks of silence. Silence thicker than wood, perpetual silence. Is that what Melanie's day-to-day life was like?

He himself had known quiet. An empty house. Sunday mornings, filled only with the faint tapping of household motors and pumps. Still summer afternoons by himself on a back porch. But Potter was a man who lived in a state of anticipation and for him the silence was, on good days at least, the waiting state before his life might begin again – when he would meet someone like Marian, when he would find someone other than takers and terrorists and psychos with whom he might share his thoughts.

Someone like Melanie? he wondered.

No, of course not.

He felt a chill on the back of his hand and watched the medic apply some kind of ointment, which had the effect of dulling most of the stinging immediately.

Arthur Potter thought of Melanie's photograph, saw it hanging over the diagram of the slaughterhouse. He thought of his reaction when he understood, a few minutes ago, that Handy was going to kill another hostage. She was the first person in his mind.

He stretched. A joint somewhere in his back popped softly and he admonished himself: Don't be a damn fool…

But in another part of his lavish mind Arthur Potter English-lit major thought, If we have to be foolish it ought to be in love. Not in our careers, where lives hang in the balance; not with our gods or in our lust for beauty and learning. Not with our children, so desirous and so unsure. But in love. For love is nothing but the purest folly and we go there for the purpose of
being
impassioned and half-crazy. In matters of the heart the world will always be generous with us, and forgiving.

Then he laughed to himself and shook his head as reality descended once more – like the dull ache that returned along his seared arms. She's twenty-five – less than half your age. She's deaf, both lower- and upper-case. And, for heaven's sake, it's your wedding anniversary today. Twenty-three years. Not a single one missed. Enough nonsense. Get back to the command van. Get to work.

The medic tapped him on the shoulder. Potter looked up, startled.

"You're all set, sir."

"Yes, thank you."

He rose and walked unsteadily back to the van.

A figure appeared in the doorway.

Potter looked up at Peter Henderson. "You all right?" the SAC asked.

He nodded cautiously. Tremain might have been the main perp but Potter would have bet a week's salary that Henderson had played some role in the assault. Ambition? A desire to get back at the Bureau, which betrayed him? Yet this would be even harder to prove than the existence of the suspected gas bomb in the generator. Forensics of the heart are always elusive.

Henderson looked at the burns. "You'll get yourself a medal for this."

"My first wound in the line of duty." Potter smiled.

"Arthur, I just wanted to apologize for losing my temper before. It gets dull down here. I was hoping for some action. You know how it is."

"Sure, Pete."

"I miss the old days."

Potter shook the man's hand. They talked about Joe Silbert and his fellow reporters. They'd refer the matter to the U.S. attorney but concluded there was probably nothing to hold them for. Obstruction of justice is a tricky charge and absent interfering with an ongoing criminal prosecution judges usually come down on the side of the First Amendment. Potter had contented himself by walking ominously up to Silbert, who stood in a circle of troopers, cool as a captured revolutionary leader. The agent had told him that he was going to cooperate in every way with the widow of the dead trooper, who would undoubtedly be bringing a multimillion-dollar wrongful-death action against the TV station and Silbert and Biggins personally.

"I intend to be a plaintiff's witness," Potter explained to the reporter, whose facade cracked momentarily, revealing beneath it a very scared, middle-aged man of questionable talents and paltry liquidity.

The negotiator now sat back in his chair and gazed at the slaughterhouse through the yellow window.

"How many minutes to the next deadline?"

"Forty-five."

Potter sighed. "That's going to be a big one. I'll have to do some thinking about it. Handy's mad now. He lost control in a big way."

Angie said, "And what's worse is that you helped him get it back. Which is a form of losing control in itself."

"So he's resentful in general and resentful at me in particular."

"Though he probably doesn't know it," Angie said.

"It's lose-lose." Potter's eyes were on Budd, gazing mournfully at the slaughterhouse.

The phone buzzed. Tobe picked it up, blew soot off the receiver, and answered. "Yeah," the young man said. "I'll tell him." He hung up. "Charlie, that was Roland Marks. He asked if you could come see him right away. He's got his friend with him. Somebody he wants you to meet. He said it's critical."

The captain kept his eye on the battlefield. "He's… Where is he?"

"Down by the rear staging area."

"Uh-huh. Okay. Say, Arthur, can I talk to you for a minute?"

"Sure you can."

"Outside?"

"Taken up imaginary smoking, have you?" Potter asked.

"Arthur started a trend in Special Ops," Tobe said. "Henry's taken up imaginary sex."

"Tobe," barked LeBow, typing away madly.

The young agent added, "I'm not being critical, Henry.
I'm
going to imaginary AA."

Budd smiled wanly and he and Potter stepped outside. The temperature had dropped ten degrees and it seemed to the negotiator that the wind was worse.

"So, what's up, Charlie?"

They stopped walking. The men gazed at the van and the burnt field around it – the devastation that the fire had caused.

"Arthur, there's something I have to tell you." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tape recorder. He looked down and turned it over and over in his hands.

"Oh," the agent said. "About this?" Potter held up a small cassette.

Budd frowned and flipped open the recorder. There was a cassette inside.

"That one's blank," Potter said. "It's a special cassette. Can't be recorded on."

Budd pushed the play button. The hiss of static brayed from the tiny speaker.

"I knew all about it, Charlie."

"But -"

"Tobe has his magic wands. They pick up magnetic recording equipment. We're always sweeping locations for bugs. He told me somebody had a recorder. He narrowed it down to you."

"You knew?" He stared at the agent, then shook his head in disgust with himself – for having been outsmarted at something he didn't think was very smart to begin with.

"Who was it?" Potter asked. "Marks? Or the governor?"

"Marks. Those girls… he's really in a state about them. He wanted to give Handy whatever he wanted in order to get them released. Then he was going to track him down. He had this special homing device he was going to put in the chopper. You could track 'em from a hundred miles away and they'd never know."

Potter nodded at the crestfallen captain. "I figured it was something like that. Any man willing to sacrifice himself is willing to sacrifice somebody else."

"But how'd you swap the cassettes?" Budd asked.

Angie Scapello stepped down through the open doorway of the van and nodded a greeting to the men. She walked past Budd, touching his arm very lightly as she passed.

"Hi, Charlie."

"Hey, Angie," he said, not smiling.

"Say, what time do you have?" she asked him.

He lifted his left wrist. "Hell, it's gone. My watch. Damn. And Meg just gave it to me for my -"

Angie held up the Pulsar.

Budd was nodding, understanding it all. "Got it," he said, and hung his head even lower, if that was possible. "Oh, brother."

"I used to teach the pickpocket recognition course at Baltimore PD," she explained. "I borrowed the recorder when we were strolling around in the gully – having our loyalty talk – and switched cassettes."

Budd smiled miserably. "You're good. I'll give you that. Oh, man. I've been messin' up all night long. I don't know what to say. I've let you down."

"You confessed. No harm done."

"It was Marks?" Angie asked.

"Yep." Budd sighed. "At first I was thinking like him – that we should do anything to save those girls. I gave Arthur an earful about that this morning. But you were right, a life's a life. Doesn't matter if it's a girl or a trooper. We gotta stop him here."

"I appreciate that Marks had noble motives," Potter said. "But we have to do things a certain way. Acceptable losses. Remember?"

Budd closed his eyes. "Man, I almost ruined your career."

The negotiator laughed. "You didn't come close, Captain. Believe me, you were the only one at risk. If you'd given that tape to anyone
your
career in law enforcement would've been over."

Budd looked very flustered then stuck out his hand.

Potter shook it warmly though Budd didn't grip it very hard, either out of shame or out of concern about the fluffy pads of bandages on the agent's skin.

They all fell silent as Potter gazed up at the sky. "When's the deadline?"

Budd looked again at his wrist blankly for a moment then he realized that he was holding his watch in his right hand. "Forty minutes. What's the matter?" The captain's eyes lifted to the same jaundiced cloud that Potter was targeting.

"I'm getting a bad feeling about this one. This deadline."

"Why?"

"I just am."

"Intuition," Angie said. "Listen to him, Charlie. He's usually right."

Budd looked down from the sky and found Potter looking at him. "I'm sorry, Arthur. I'm plumb outta ideas."

Potter's eyes zipped back and forth over the grass, blackened by the fire and by the shadow of the van. "A helicopter," he blurted suddenly.

"What?"

Potter felt a keen sense of urgency seize him. "Get me a helicopter."

"But I thought we weren't going to give him one."

"I just need to show him one. A big one. At least a six-seater – eight- or ten- if you can find one."

"If
I
can find one?" Budd exclaimed. "Where? How?"

A thought slipped into Potter's mind from somewhere.

Airport.

There was an airport nearby. Potter tried to remember. How did he know that? Had somebody told him? He hadn't driven past it. Budd hadn't told him; SAC Henderson hadn't said anything. Where -

It was Lou Handy. The taker had mentioned it as a possible source of a helicopter. He must've driven by it on the way here.

He told this to Budd.

"I know it," the captain said. "They got a couple choppers there but I don't know if there's anybody's there who can even fly one. I mean, if we found one in Wichita they might make it here in time. But hell, it'll take more'n forty minutes to track down a pilot."

"Well, forty minutes is all we have, Charlie. Get a move on."

"The truth…" Melanie is crying.

And de l'Epée is the one person she doesn't want to cry in front of. But cry she does. He rises from his chair and sits on the couch next to her.

"The truth is," she continues, "that I just don't like who I am, what I've become, what I'm a part of."

It's time to confess and nothing can stop her now.

"I told you about how I lived for being Deaf. It became my whole life?"

"Miss Deaf Farmhand of the Year."

"I didn't want any of it. Not. One. Bit." She grows vehement. "I got so damn tired of the self-consciousness of it all. The politics of being part of the Deaf world, the prejudice the Deaf have – oh, it's there. You'd be surprised. Against minorities and other handicapped. I'm tired of it! I'm tired of not having my music. I'm tired of my father…"

"Yes, what?" he asks.

"I'm tired of him using it against me. My deafness."

"How does he do that?"

"Because it makes me more scared than I already am! It keeps me at home. That piano I told you about? The one I wanted to play 'A Maiden's Grave' on? They sold it when I was nine. Even though I could still hear enough to play and could for a couple years more. They said – well,
he
said, my father said – they didn't want me to learn to love something that would be taken away from me." She adds, "But the real reason was that he wanted to keep me on the farm."

So
you'll be home then
.

Melanie looks into de l'Epée eyes and says what she's never said to anyone. "I can't hate him for wanting me to stay at home. But selling the piano – that hurt so much. Even if I'd had only one day of playing music it would have been better than nothing. I'll never forgive him for that."

"They had no right to do that," he agrees. "But you managed to break away. You've got
a
job away from home, you're independent -" His voice fades.

And now for the hard part.

"What is it?" de l'Epée asks softly.

"A year ago," she begins, "I bought some new hearing aids. Generally they don't work at all but these seemed to have some effect with certain pitches of music. There was a recital in Topeka I wanted to go to. Kathleen Battle. I'd read in the paper that she was going to sing some spirituals as part of the program and I thought…"

"That she'd sing 'Amazing Grace'?"

"I wanted to see if I could hear it. I was desperate to go. But I had no way of getting there. I can't drive and the buses would have taken forever. I begged ray brother to take me. He'd been working all day on the farm but he said he'd take me anyway."

"We got there just in time for the concert. Kathleen Battle walked out on stage wearing this beautiful blue dress. She smiled to the audience… And then she began to sing."

"And?"

"It was useless." Melanie breathes deeply, kneads her ringers. "It…"

"Why are you so sad?"

"The hearing aids didn't work at all. Everything was muddled. I could hardly hear anything and the notes I could hear were all off key to me. We left at intermission. Danny was doing his best to cheer me up. He…"