Black Friday (4 page)

Mall of America

“W
e’ve got a problem,” Asante growled into his wireless headset. He avoided people in the parking lot, some standing in the frigid cold just staring while others ran to their vehicles.

“What’s the problem?”

Asante could barely hear the response.

“We’ve got one carrier still on the move.”

There was silence and Asante thought perhaps the connection had faded out.

“How is that possible?” came the reply.

“You tell me.”

“There were three blasts. No one could survive that.”

“You watched them?” Asante asked with careful accusation.

“Of course.” But the conviction wavered against the hint of Asante’s irritation.

“You saw each one?”

“Yes. I saw all three arrive in the food court area.” Hesitation, then the admission. “Carrier #3 brought two friends along. I didn’t think it was a problem.”

Asante stayed silent when he wanted to remind his point man that he didn’t get paid to think. No matter how willing, no matter how capable they appeared to be, Asante had learned to trust no one but himself. It was a tough lesson he had learned long before Oklahoma City, one that had taught him to always, always have cutaways like McVeigh and Nichols for each and every project no matter how small or large.

“I’m headed back in.”

More silence. Asante knew exactly what the man was thinking.
You must be insane.
But of course, he wouldn’t dare question the Project Manager.

“What do you want me to do?” The question came quietly, hesitantly and probably with the hope that Asante would not request that he accompany him.

“Find out who those other two are.” He could almost hear the other man’s relief.

Asante continued, making his way through the cold and the snow to the back of the mall, toward the same exit he had used earlier to flee. Before he’d left the sanctuary of his getaway car, he’d exchanged his Carolina Panthers baseball cap for a navy blue cap with PARAMEDIC embroidered on the front. He’d also changed his jogging shoes for a pair of hiking boots. On purpose the boots were three sizes too large for him. A shoeprint could be as incriminating as a fingerprint and in the snow the print might be well preserved. He had already prepared the boots with socks in the toes, making them a comfortable enough fit that he could run in them if necessary.

The jogging shoes he’d kept and thrown into a duffel bag with everything else he would need including a syringe filled with a toxic cocktail he always carried for himself. It was one more detail, a safeguard for a project manager who insisted on controlling even the details of his own death if it came to that. Today he’d need to use it on the surviving carrier instead of on himself.

He had never intended to return to the scene but took every precaution if it became necessary. He had researched and studied the mall’s routine until he knew it by heart. Within seconds the mall’s security would come over the public address system announcing “an incident” and ordering a lockdown. Shops would pull down their storefront grates. Kiosks would close down and secure their merchandise. By now the sprinkler systems on the third floor would have been activated. Escalators and all portions of the amusement park would come to a screeching halt.

The fire department would be alerted as soon as those sprinklers opened. Asante expected their sirens any moment now. In fact, he was surprised he didn’t hear them already, but the snow might slow them down. The local police would follow. As soon as a bomb was suspected, a bomb squad and a sniper unit would be sent. Mall security carried no weapons. Asante figured he had ten minutes at least, thirty minutes at the most, before he had to deal with a ground and air mass invasion of armed responders.

As he plodded through the snow he set his diver’s watch to count down the seconds. Thirty minutes should be more than enough time to find the errant carrier and terminate him.

P
atrick shattered the glass to get the fire extinguisher. Yards away, the explosion had blown out storefronts and ripped open brick walls, yet here it hadn’t left even a crack in the glass case that housed the fire extinguisher. He pulled the extinguisher’s pin, ready to use it, but found only smoke, no fire. Still, he pushed his way through the gray mist, thick and wet like a fog on a humid summer morning. Again, he was going the wrong direction. He waited until a stream of shoppers shoved by, then he tried to move forward.

Over the intercom he heard the mechanical voice repeating the same calm message, “There’s been an incident at the mall. Please remain calm. Walk, don’t run, toward the nearest exit.” The Muzak system was still playing holiday songs. No one noticed either.

Patrick stopped to help a woman who had gotten shoved to the side. She was wrestling her baby out of a stroller. The infant looked unharmed but was screaming. The mother was wide-eyed and panicked.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” she kept mumbling.

Her hands were shaking and jerking at the blankets and straps that kept the baby restrained inside the stroller. She stumbled and rocked back and forth, losing her balance like someone who had too much to drink. Patrick noticed she didn’t have any shoes on. Her feet were already bloodied from the shower of glass that glittered the floor. He looked around and discovered the three-inch heels tossed aside. He scooped them up and offered them to her.

“Your feet,” he pointed.

She didn’t seem to hear him. She didn’t even look up at him. Once she had the baby in her arms she ran for the escalators, leaving behind the stroller, a diaper bag, a purse…and her shoes. She didn’t notice the trail of blood her feet left.

Patrick put out one fire, a kiosk of cell phones already charred from the blast. He recognized a couple of stores and knew he was close to the food court. It had to be just around the corner. The smoke was thicker here. Harder to see. He had to feel alongside the wall and watch his feet. Debris littered the floor, slick and crunchy. He worried the rubber soles of his One Star high-tops might not be thick enough to withstand the larger pieces of glass and metal. Through the smoke he saw a sign for the restrooms. It dangled overhead and he realized this was where he had last seen Rebecca.

Finally.

Only Patrick couldn’t see the doorway. It was gone, replaced by a huge, ragged hole. The wall was buckled, lopsided and charred. Bricks bulged and hung loose like toy building blocks tossed and shoved out from the other side. Water seeped from one of the holes in the wall and a smell like rotten eggs, maybe sewage, flooded the area. He prayed that Rebecca wasn’t still inside the restroom when the blast went off.

That’s when Patrick tripped, slamming himself against the sharp bricks, ripping the palm of his hand open, but managing to stay on his feet. When he looked down he saw the long dark hair first and thought he had tripped over a mannequin. After all, the legs were twisted and knotted together like they were made of plastic and were stuffed into a garbage bag. But there was nothing plastic about the eyes that stared up at him through the tangled hair. Her jaw had been torn away, leaving a wide gaping smile. Patrick’s first reaction was to reach down to help her up. Then he jerked back when he realized she must be dead.

He took a better look at the twisted pile of legs he had tripped over and for the first time his head began to swim and his knees felt a bit spongy.

The legs were no longer connected to the rest of the woman’s body.

Lanoha’s Nursery
Omaha, Nebraska

N
ick Morrelli pulled out a credit card. He knew his sister Christine was watching him so he tried not to wince, flinch or clear his throat. All signs she would be looking for.

She had already told him that he didn’t have to pay for the fresh-cut nine-foot Fraser fir Christmas tree. In fact, she had told him three times, leading him to insist, making him pretend that it was no big deal. And why would it be a big deal? Never mind that he had just left a prominent position with the Suffolk County prosecutor’s office in Boston to move back to Omaha. It wasn’t like he was fired or let go. The decision had been entirely his choice.

Choice, not impulse.

Impulse was the word his mom and Christine used.

“Your father knows you love him, Nicky,” his mom had said when he told her he was moving back to Nebraska. “He doesn’t expect you to leave your life and be at his side.”

At the time Nick wanted to tell her that the old Antonio Morrelli would want that exactly. He’d want everyone to uproot and rearrange their lives to accommodate his schedule especially now when he appeared to be near death. A massive stroke had left Nick’s father paralyzed and bedridden several years ago. Now his only means of communication were his eyes. Maybe it was simply Nick’s imagination but he swore he could still see that same disappointment and regret in those eyes—now watery blue instead of ice blue—every single time the man looked at him.

Nick had tried most of his life to do what his father expected, tried to fill the huge shoes. His father had played quarterback for the Nebraska Huskers, so Nick made sure he played quarterback for the Nebraska Huskers, but Nick only played for one season. A disappointment to his father who had redshirted as a freshman. His father had gone to law school, so Nick went to law school, only he had no interest in practicing law or filling the vacancy his father had left for him in the law firm his father had started.

Nick had even run for and had been elected county sheriff, the position the elder Morrelli retired from as a living legend. But Nick had embarrassed his father, again, by tracking down a killer his father had allowed to go undetected under his own watch. It should have made up for all the rest. Nick had succeeded after all. But that wasn’t the way Antonio Morrelli looked at it. Instead he saw it as his son embarrassing him, showing him up and making him look bad publicly.

Nick’s move to Boston had probably been the first thing he had ever done on his own and for himself without the influence of the elder Morrelli. His father had never been a district attorney. Had never argued high-profile cases involving anything close to what Nick found himself a part of, from drug trafficking to double homicides. These were the types of cases Nick tackled on a regular basis as a Deputy County Prosecutor for Suffolk County. And yet it wasn’t enough. Apparently it wasn’t, because here he was, returning home still searching for something. Hopefully his father’s approval didn’t remain on that search list.

It must have been what his mother was thinking. She made it sound like Nick was moving back to be close to his father whose deteriorating condition would most likely make this his last Christmas. And his sister, Christine, seemed to think Nick had moved back to play role model to her fatherless teenaged son. That was partly true. He cared about Timmy and wanted to be in the boy’s life. But the truth was, at least when Nick admitted it to himself, his reasons were not quite so lofty or noble. In fact, they were fairly selfish.

Yes, he wanted to be close to his family during this last holiday together but he also wanted to be away from the sudden loneliness in his life. There was an emptiness that permeated his Boston apartment and even leaked over into his job. It definitely felt as though he had lost something, but it wasn’t his ex-fiancée Jill Campbell. Surprisingly, her absence from his life had little to do with the loneliness he was experiencing. What was worse, leaving Boston didn’t help either. The emptiness followed him. This hollowed-out feeling was something that he was carrying around with him. Maybe that wasn’t the right way to describe it but it was definitely what it felt like.

His new job at a high-level security corporation kept him distracted. He liked the new challenge. And the position actually paid very well…or at least it would. Eventually. He had only started a month ago.

“I know you’re a little miserable,” Christine said, interrupting his thoughts.

“I’m not miserable.”

“It’s okay to admit it.”

“I’m not miserable.”

She was giving him that look, that “you’re so full of crap” look.

Okay, so maybe he was a little miserable. Miserable went well with hollowed out.

“It’s understandable.” Christine seemed to think they should discuss his life in the middle of Lanoha’s Nursery. “You recently broke off your engagement. What’s it been? Five months?”

“I’m not miserable because of Jill,” Nick insisted through clenched teeth, hoping his sister would get the idea to lay off and at the same time realizing he had probably verified her accusation. If she knew him as well as she thought she did, she’d know it had nothing to do with Jill.

“If it’s not Jill,” Christine said, pretending to keep it casual by fingering the price tags on some holiday wreaths, “then it must be Maggie.”

It was like she stuck a dagger in his side and Nick had to keep from wincing. He had spent the last month convincing himself that Maggie O’Dell had moved on and had no interest in being a part of his life. He had given it his best shot. Anything more and he’d become some psycho stalker. It was over. Time to move on. He told himself this over and over. His head heard him loud and clear. It was his heart that ignored him.

“I know,” Christine said, taking his silence as confirmation. “It’s complicated.”

But it wasn’t all that complicated. Nick had met Maggie four years ago, working a case when he was sheriff of Platte City, Nebraska. She dropped into his life as an FBI profiler, smart and witty, tough but beautiful. Nick had known a lot of women—he’d been with a lot of women—but he’d never met anyone quite like Maggie O’Dell. There had been instant chemistry. At least that’s how Nick remembered it. But she was married then.

They’d stayed in touch and after her divorce he gave her plenty of opportunity to be charmed by him, even advertised that he was open to a relationship. A real relationship, something Nick Morrelli rarely considered. But Maggie turned him down for whatever reason. Perhaps she just wasn’t ready. That’s what he wanted to believe. Being rejected was a new concept for him.

But last summer they crossed paths again. Another case with ties to the one four years ago and for Nick it brought back all those memories and some feelings he didn’t realize he still harbored. Feelings that slammed him hard. Hard enough that he canceled his wedding engagement.

Then he did the only thing he knew how to do. He pursued Maggie with cards, e-mails, flowers, requests to spend time together despite her living in the D.C. area and him in Boston. Nick thought he was being the proper suitor. That is until he discovered there was someone else in her life. He had let her slip away, blown his chances. This time it was too late.

He’d let her slip away to a guy named Benjamin Platt. Nick had looked up the license plate on a Land Rover he saw parked outside of Maggie’s house. Platt was an army colonel, a medical doctor, a scientist, a soldier. He wasn’t sure that even a tall, dark and charming quarterback-turned-lawyer stood a chance to compete with that.

“Can we concentrate on Christmas?” he asked after too much silence. He could already see Christine knew she was right. He took no pleasure in the fact that to his big sister he seemed to be an open book.

Before Christine could respond two store clerks interrupted them, coming into the center of the store.

“There’s been an explosion at Mall of America,” one of them announced. “There may be dozens of people dead.”

Customers throughout the store came up the aisles to hear the news.

“That’s one of ours,” Nick told Christine. He barely got his cell phone out of his jacket pocket when it began to ring.