Flash Point (6 page)

The Machete UNSUB exited the privacy room, dodging people now. From the moment he'd entered, he'd been the aggressor any time he crossed paths with someone, but suddenly, he was falling back. Letting the others do the dirty work.
Why?

Jenna squinted. Machete UNSUB moved in a definite direction, not lost or dazed. No. He had a clear intention. She just had no clue in hell what it was.

Back at the bank door where the group had entered, he joined another black figure carrying a long sword. The two ventured right, out of view of the cameras.

Jenna jumped up and gestured at where they had exited. ‘Where are they going? The two who were just here?'

‘Which?' Porter asked.

‘Shit,' Teva said. ‘So many damned moving pieces. I've been following the same one since it started … the guy who looks like he stepped out of the 1800's. So I don't know who you're talking about.'

‘Well, you should,' Saleda said. ‘Because I've been watching Machete Kills since he went in first, and the sword guy just left off camera with him.'

Saleda's instinct seemed to have been the same as Jenna's: watch the first person in. He was bound to be the group's leader.

The tech running the footage paused it, backed it up. Pressed play again.

Jenna looked away at the exact moment she knew the lady in the privacy room was about to be cleaved in two. No need to see that moment twice.

She returned her gaze the following second though, ignoring the horrible machete scene in favor of locating the figure with the sword prior to his meeting up with Machete. Amidst the flying knives and falling bodies, she spotted the Long-Sword UNSUB on the right hand side of the video behind the teller counter alongside another attacker. The two black-clad assailants each took on one of the two tellers, the one Jenna was watching wielding his sword toward the counter and downward. The video's angle didn't show the death that resulted, but Jenna knew the victim to be the slender black female teller found lying face-first on the carpet underneath the employees' side of the countertop. Jenna had noted during the crime scene walkthrough that it appeared she had tried to crawl toward the exit when she was first knocked under the counter during the skirmish, because her initial fall landed her only a foot or so away from where her pretty blonde co-worker had taken her last breaths. But she didn't make it far. She was stabbed multiple times in her torso and thighs.

A golden color flashed in, though Jenna couldn't readily identify it.

She let it go, since it didn't match the other, more important thought in her head.

‘He passes right by where Ashlee had to have been crawling under the counter toward the staircase,' she said. ‘Back it up one more time.'

The tech obliged and, again, the team watched the screen as the Long-Sword UNSUB lashed at the teller the angle didn't show, then stood and exited from behind the counter. He joined up with Machete on the left side of their screen, not far from where the attackers had entered the bank, and they moved out of the frame's visibility.

‘The staircase is on that side,' Dodd noted. ‘Someone
did
have to escort Ms Haynie down, give her the message, and lock her in the safe, after all.'

‘One person, though. Not two. She said one guy,' Teva replied.

‘Doesn't mean they didn't head off together at first then split up. One had a separate task while the other scared the daylights out of our favorite living witness,' Porter said.

Jenna cringed at Porter's words. They all tended to kid at times in ways that would make anyone not in their line of work assume they needed etiquette lessons and a Bible, but for some reason, calling the one person who'd survived the carnage ‘favorite' highlighted for Jenna why surviving might end up being worse for Ashlee Haynie. She'd never escape the images in her head, the screams burned in her memory.

Another color tried to break forth, but Jenna forced it back. She needed to think not get bogged down.

Then again, this sickening second by second, blow-by-blow chronicle of the deaths of twenty-one people would soon be etched in the memories of millions. CNR might've had the good judgment to keep it off the air and inform the FBI, but unfortunately, Jenna had no doubts that the terrorists had passed the footage on to other journalists, too. The FBI could yank feeds, keep it at bay as long as possible, but in the age of the hungry Internet and even hungrier media, all it would take before anyone with a broadband connection could see it would be one foreign server.

‘They swiped the security footage to give to the media but left it intact,' she whispered.

‘What?' Saleda asked, turning to face her.

Jenna shook her head, trying to make sense of it all. ‘We thought they stole the security footage because there was something on it that would show us more to these attacks … something that might differ from the picture they were leaving the note and the witness to paint. But here's the footage. Obviously, it cuts off the moment they yanked the tapes, so we can't know what happened after everyone was dead and they left the building, but otherwise, it's seemingly in full and untampered with. So their sole reasoning in taking it was to deliver it to media directly, but why?'

‘Or maybe they want us to
think
that's their sole reasoning,' Dodd countered.

‘Maybe, but humor me for a second. Why leave a witness if you're leaving access to a full-length video?' Jenna asked.

From the side, Porter grunted a curious-sounding, ‘Hmph.'

Jenna whirled to face him. ‘What? What did you just notice?'

He smiled close-lipped, though it wasn't happy. Just interested.

‘Vocals,' he replied.

Slate gray burst forth in Jenna's mind, the same color that had tried to peek through moments ago after Porter's comment about Ashlee Haynie being their favorite living witness. Of course. The color she associated with the sense of hearing. It wasn't just images that would be burned into Ashlee's memory. It would also be the screams, the chokes, the sputtering.

And any words they said
other
than what they told her to pass along to us.

‘I need to talk to Ashlee Haynie again,' Jenna said. ‘I need to find out what else she heard.'

‘No, no, no, no, no!' Ashlee's voice got louder with every word as she shook her head, eyes squeezed shut tighter and tighter. ‘I don't want to!'

‘Ashlee, I wouldn't ask if it wasn't extremely important. I wouldn't make you relive that nightmare unless I thought it could help me catch the people who did this,' Jenna said softly.

‘I feel like I'm going to throw up,' Ashlee said weakly.

‘Agent Dodd, will you get Ms Haynie a glass of water, please?' Jenna said. ‘Take a few deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth, Ashlee.'

Jenna watched the bank worker round her lips into an O, slowly blowing out a breath. The woman's flushed, red complexion evened, and hand trembling, she accepted the paper cup of water from Dodd. She took a slow sip.

‘That's it,' Jenna said, nodding. As bad as she needed information, eyewitnesses were sketchy at recalling moments under duress. Uncooperative, hyperventilating eyewitnesses made for even worse testimonies. If the terrorists had simply wanted to pass the phrase
important to be earnest
on to the cops, they could've just written it on the same note that warned authorities they would strike again. But they hadn't.

Instead, they'd left them a living witness instructed to give the message.

Which was why Jenna now knew that whatever else Ashlee had heard come from any of their mouths was vital. They'd have known the video wouldn't have audio. They'd have also known that leaving a witness alive meant leaving a standing, testifying account of any vocalizations they made inside the building – be they statements made directly
to
the witness or not. Rookie cops might discover this nugget and think it a goldmine, but Jenna knew better.

Quite an oversight for a precise attack executed without so much as a hiccup, bank alarm, or errant cell phone call made by one of the twenty-two people inside the bank as it was being overtaken. Nope. It wasn't an oversight. Leaving Ashlee Haynie alive was deliberate.

And so was anything they allowed her to hear.

‘OK,' Jenna said, her voice light and soothing. ‘Now, I want you to think about the moments inside the bank after you heard the woman scream. It's going to be hard, but remember, you're physically OK. As you're imagining those minutes that your mind is fighting so hard to forget, in the back of your mind, I want you to let yourself know that it's safe to remember those things. Not comfortable. Not
OK
by any definition of the word, because no one should have to remember what I'm asking you to. But you are safe. The events are physically in the past.'

Ashlee nodded, eyes wide. She wrung her hands in her lap. ‘I'll try.'

‘That's all I can ask for,' Jenna said. ‘OK. I want you to close your eyes and go to the moment inside the bank when you heard the woman near the door scream. Can you hear her?'

Ashlee winced. ‘Yes,' she whispered.

The ache in the woman's voice stung Jenna to her core. Before she'd come back to the BAU last year, she'd spent years helping patients cope after unfathomable traumatic events, coaching them on how to control reliving their nightmares at a speed that wouldn't overwhelm them. These days, it was commonplace to consider talking through experiences healing, but in truth, for some people, calling to mind memories of the incident that had catapulted them into therapy in the first place actually exacerbated all kinds of symptoms. And, in that setting, she had a chance to develop a rapport with the patient, establish herself as an ally.

Here, Jenna knew good and well her intentions weren't first and foremost to preserve Ashlee Haynie's mental health. Her job as an investigator was to extract the damned memories inside the woman's head at whatever cost and use them to protect future lives. Never mind the life right in front of her that still needed saving.

Ashlee might've survived the attack inside the bank, but really, she wasn't so different from Jenna. The screams. The blood. They'd formed a single, defining moment of her existence. One she couldn't return from, couldn't erase.

Bloody handprints … the door, so close.

Ashlee Haynie might be alive, but a part of her had died inside that bank just like the others. Jenna knew it all too well.

After all, Jenna was a survivor, too.

‘OK. Where are you when you hear her scream?'

A sharp intake of breath as if Ashlee was being pierced with a needle. ‘Right inside the door of the drive-through teller room. I turn and see the people coming in, and I back up to the wall. I crouch down. Before I chicken out, I crawl as fast as I can out the door and across the carpet until I'm under the teller counter.'

‘And what's the next thing you hear?'

Ashlee bit her lip, her face contorting in a pained expression. ‘Grunts. More screams.'

‘All right,' Jenna said fast, cutting off the stream of consciousness. If Ashlee got lost in the terror of the moment, she would miss any pertinent information that she might have locked in her memory. ‘Try to think about the very first
singular
noise you can separate from the rest. The next thing to hit your ears that doesn't just muddle together with the other sounds in the building—'

‘I can't!'

‘You
can
. You're physically safe in this room, and a dozen or more FBI agents are surrounding the outside of the building now in addition to the handful surrounding you in this very room. You're safe here,' Jenna said. The bank employee might never again feel safe, and it was wrong to tell her that her trauma was over. It might be months or years. Might be never. But Jenna had learned over the years that, just after a trauma, reminding victims of their immediate physical safety – something that didn't insinuate their plight was easy or their distress was being downplayed, but rather, addressed a valid immediate concern rightly held – was one of the few things that eased panic.

Ashlee's eyes flew open, widened. ‘How do you know that?' she squealed.

A shade of blue flashed in, and Jenna begged her mind to recognize it. She inwardly flipped through the shades of blue in her lexicon, mental images attached to some of them that might spur clarity. Her thoughts landed on a freeze-frame of Ayana catalogued in her mind, one where her daughter was coloring a picture of a princess in a coloring book. With a blue crayon.

Wild Yonder Blue was its name, according to Crayola. The color she associated with the normal, everyday mundane long before she'd even conceived Ayana.

Everyday life.

Of course Ashlee would question her safety even if, under normal circumstances, dozens of Feds would make a person feel untouchable. It was the reason the terrorists had chosen this normal, everyday bank in a normal, everyday place to attack. It was easy for people to convince themselves that they wouldn't be subject to a terrorist attack, in a small, off-the-radar town or unlikely place. Much harder to pretend you didn't go to the bank as part of your weekly or even monthly errands.

‘Because these criminals don't want to get caught,' Jenna said truthfully.

‘How could you know
that
?' Ashlee asked, blinking and staring at Jenna. ‘I've seen movies where guys who leave a note … where the note means they secretly
want
to be found! What about
them?
'

‘It's my job to read people. Criminals. It's the reason I'm called for cases like this. To give my opinion on their mindsets. It helps us form a picture of who we think they are based on what they did. It also helps law enforcement find them by predicting what they might do next. Based on this crime scene …' Jenna stopped. Took a deep breath.
Honesty. Honesty is still best.
‘Ashlee, I wish I could tell you my reasoning for thinking this, because I have very solid reasons to think it. But right now, with the case still under investigation and you our only reliable witness—'