Murder Inside the Beltway (23 page)

Sue Rollins gathered up a selection of photographs of Samantha and handed them to an officer, who quickly left the house to put them into circulation. Jerry Rollins headed for his first-floor study: “I need to make some calls,” he announced.

“I wouldn’t, sir,” Jackson said, “not until Detective Kloss gets here. He’ll manage the case. They’re sending a tech unit to put taps on your phones.”

“Your mother,” Rollins said to his wife. “She’ll hear it on the radio or TV and—”

“No, Jerry. Please.”

“Did you see any press before we left?” Rollins asked Sue.

She nodded. “A WTOP car was pulling up.”

“Damn!” Rollins said.

“Sir,” Jackson said, “any chance of getting a cup of coffee?”

The Rollinses looked quizzically at him. So did Mary.

Jackson smiled. “I think we should all sit down, have a cup of coffee, and wait calmly. Maybe we can use the time for you to fill me in on anyone who might have had a grudge against you or your daughter, someone with a motive to have taken her.”

“Motive?” Rollins blurted. “What sick bastard could have a motive for taking a beautiful, precious, innocent little seven-year-old girl?”

Neither Jackson nor Hall gave a response. Everyone’s thoughts were the same.
A pervert. A child molester. A deranged monster to whom the life of a child meant little, if anything.

The silence was broken by a ringing phone.

Rollins moved toward the kitchen.

“Extension?” Jackson asked.

“Here,” Sue said, leading him to a small cordless one on a table in the living room. Jackson rested his hand on it and looked through to the kitchen, where Rollins was about to pick up. Jackson nodded. Both phones were raised simultaneously.

“Jerry? It’s Bob. What the hell is this I’m hearing? Samantha kidnapped?”

Jackson recognized the distinctive gravelly voice of the presidential candidate.

“I’ll come over,” Colgate said. “I can’t believe this. I—”

“Sir,” Jackson said into the phone. “Governor Colgate. This is Detective Matthew Jackson, MPD, sir.” He glanced at Mary, whose open mouth said it all. “Sir, I would advise that no one come here, that no action be taken until our special units are in place and a plan has been put into motion.”

“What’s he saying?” Colgate asked Rollins.

“He’s a detective, Bob. I think we should do what he suggests.”

“Jesus! How’s Sue?”

“Upset, of course. No. Frantic.”

A knock on the door caused Rollins to say, “I have to go, Bob. I’ll be in touch as soon as it’s the right time.”

Mary Hall opened the door to allow Kloss and other detectives to enter. She looked across the street, where a MPD van had parked. Two men exited the vehicle and came to the house carrying black cases of the sort used by airline pilots to carry aeronautical charts. They removed digital tape recorders; a central tap to trace calls had been installed through C&P Telephone.

Sue Rollins busied herself in the kitchen filling a coffeepot, and pulling an assortment of cookies from a cupboard. The younger detective’s suggestion that there be coffee made sense to her, gave her a purpose, and helped distract her from the terrible thoughts that flooded her mind. Mary’s offer to help was accepted, and she joined Sue in the kitchen.

Kloss and his next in command, a middle-aged Hispanic detective, sat with Jerry Rollins at the dining room table. Jackson was invited to join them. “All right,” Kloss said, “let’s start from the beginning, from the moment you got up this morning. Who knew you planned to spend the day at the Mall?”

The question left a blank expression on Rollins’s face. “I don’t know,” he eventually said. “I might have told friends we had these plans. I canceled an appointment today so we could do it.”

“An appointment with who?”

“Ah… with, ah, Governor Colgate. I work with him on his campaign.”

“He called before you got here,” Jackson said.

“He knew?” Kloss said.

“Yes,” Rollins said.

“Quick.”

“Not surprising,” Rollins said.

“What did he have to say?”

“Nothing. He was shocked, that’s all. He asked how my wife was. Your detective here—”

“Matthew Jackson, sir,” Jackson helped.

“Yes. Detective Jackson here was on the extension when I spoke with the governor. He was going to come but Detective Jackson dissuaded him until you’d arrived.”

Kloss nodded at Jackson.

“What is the plan?” Rollins asked as Sue and Mary delivered the coffee and cookies.

“I’d like you to join us, Mrs. Rollins,” Kloss said. “I was asking your husband who knew that you intended to go to the Mall today.”

She looked at Jerry. “I told a few people, I’m sure. Friends. I was happy that we could find family time.”

“Did your daughter know of your plans?” Kloss asked.

“Of course,” Sue replied. “She was tickled pink. I’m sure she told her friends at school about it.”

Kloss made notes in a pad before saying, “Okay, let’s talk about your daughter’s friends. She have run-ins with any of them lately?”

“Not that we know of,” Sue said.

“How about you, Mr. Rollins? You’re a pretty familiar face around Washington—lawyer, clients who maybe felt they got the short end of the stick in a case you handled for them.”

“That’s always possible, but…”

And on it went for the next hour, their conversations interrupted by an increasing number of phone calls, all of which were taped, the callers’s voices heard through the recorders, the answering machine delivering Rollins’s outgoing message. No calls were answered directly, per orders from Kloss. Many were from the press. Soon, vehicles from the city’s media outlets arrived and parked outside, their reporters and crews ready to spring at anyone coming through the Rollinses’ door. Kloss called in for uniformed officers to keep them at bay. Kloss’s cell phone was busy, too, including a succession of calls from Chief Carter informing him that until the Rollins kidnapping was resolved, it took top priority over any and every other pending case.

“So, what do we do now?” Rollins asked Kloss after they’d settled again at the table, and a fresh supply of coffee had been brewed.

“We wait,” Kloss said. “The chief has every spare cop out looking for your daughter. They’ll have her picture. They’ll do their job, Mr. Rollins. In the meantime, we learn to sit tight.”

W
alt Hatcher learned of Samantha Rollins’s abduction from Mae. Rearranging the garage had tired him, and he’d fallen asleep on a chaise lounge on their patio.

She came from the kitchen, where she’d been watching TV while seasoning chicken for dinner. He opened his eyes at the sound of her. “Walter,” she said, “there’s been a kidnapping at the Mall. That lawyer, Rollins, the one who works with Colgate and his campaign. His daughter. Seven years old. It’s on the television.”

He lowered his feet to the floor and shook his head. “Kidnapping?”

“Yes. Come in and watch. It’s all over the news.”

He followed her to the kitchen where an anchor on a local channel brought viewers up to date.

“…and according to Chief of Detectives Willis Carter, a massive search has been launched, using all available manpower. The victim, seven-year-old Samantha Rollins, is the daughter of prominent D.C. attorney Jerrold Rollins, a close advisor and confidant to presidential candidate Robert Colgate. Calls to the Rollins home have not been returned. More on this breaking story.”

He lumbered from the kitchen to the stairs, pulling his belt tight.

“Where are you going?” Mae called after him.

“Work. Nobody called me.”

“Maybe they—”

His broad back disappeared into the upstairs hall. Ten minutes later he returned, dressed in a suit, a muted two-tone tan dress shirt that didn’t match the gray suit, and red tie. He’d never been known as a fashion plate. “I probably won’t get back tonight,” he told Mae on his way out the door. “I’ll call.”

She returned to the kitchen and wrapped up the night’s dinner fixings to go in the fridge. A TV dinner would do that night.

Hatcher went directly upstairs at Metro and was told that Chief Carter was out. He stepped into the street to dial Jackson’s cell, but a half-dozen reporters and a TV crew scotched that plan. Back inside, he found a quiet corner of the main booking room and made the call.

“Jackson.”

“Jackson, Hatcher. Where are you?”

“I’m, ah—Mary and I are with the parents.”

“Why are
you
with them?”

“Detective Kloss brought us. Look, I can’t talk, Hatch. Can I call you later?”

“You can’t talk? What the hell do you mean by that? Get your ass down here to Metro.”

Hatcher heard a male voice in the background bark, “Can the call, Matt.”

The line went dead.

Hatcher swore under his breath and retreated to the locker room, where he splashed tepid water on his face and looked at himself in the old metal mirror, wishing he’d shaved before leaving the house. He sat on a wooden bench and tried to wedge clear thinking into his congested brain. What the hell was Kloss thinking, taking from him his two juniors? It wasn’t done that way. You didn’t go around raiding other detectives’ squads. The department had been going downhill every year, as far as Hatch was concerned, a bunch of pols running things, turning things upside down and making it tough to do your job—to be a cop—to rid the streets of the lice that come out of their nests at night.

A detective came into the room. “Hey, Hatch, you okay?” he asked.

Hatch, who’d been sitting with his head in his hands, looked up. “Yeah, I’m okay.” He walked back upstairs, where Carter had now come from his office and conferred with two other white shirts.

Hatcher intruded on their conversation. “You got a minute?” he said.

Carter grimaced. “Not now, Hatch.”

“I need to talk to you,” Hatcher persisted.

Carter excused himself from the others and led Hatcher into his office, closing the door behind him with some force. “Maybe you haven’t heard,” the chief said, “but we’ve got a high-profile kidnapping on our hands.”

“Yeah, I heard. That’s why I’m here. I call Jackson and he tells me that Kloss pulled him from me—Hall, too—and has them with the parents of the kid. What gives?”

“What gives, Hatch, is that we’ve got every available cop on this case, and that’s the way it’ll be until it’s resolved.”

“Good. So, get Jackson and Hall back here and we’ll work it.”

Carter shook his head. He was distracted by an administrative officer who entered the office and handed him a file folder.

“You hear what I said?” Hatcher asked after the officer had departed.

Carter sighed. He backed to the side of his desk and perched on its edge. “I talked with Kloss only a few minutes ago,” he said. “The parents—you know who they are.”

“Yeah, the hotshot attorney, Rollins, Colgate’s buddy.”

“Right. Kloss says Mr. and Mrs. Rollins have asked that Jackson and Hall remain with them.”

“Why, for christsake?”

A tiny smile came to Carter’s lips. “Maybe because they’ve bonded with them, Hatch. It happens.”

“Bonded?” he snorted. “That’s a laugh.”

Carter pushed away from the desk. “I have to go, a joint press conference with the Bureau. Stay around. Check in with Eldridge in missing persons. He’ll have something for you to do—
without
Jackson and Hall.”

The chief slapped him on the arm and was gone.

P
aul, as he was called, watched television. The kidnapping dominated every news cycle, pushed anything and everything else off the electronic front pages of the cable news channels, and local stations, too. There was little other news to report, each segment rehashing previous ones, talking heads trying desperately to inject fresh insight into the story, to outdo one another, to scoop the competition. One channel had managed to obtain a grainy picture of Samantha from its photo and video morgues and displayed it behind the newscaster’s voice-over.

Paul sat up when Governor Bob Colgate’s face appeared on the screen, caught by camera crews as he exited his Georgetown home. “I have no comment at this time,” he said. “It’s a police matter. I will say, however, to whomever did this, you can make it right by returning Samantha safely to her family.”

“Have you spoken with the Rollinses?” a reporter shouted.

Colgate ignored the question and climbed into a waiting limousine.

Paul left the TV, put on his ski mask, and opened the door to the bedroom where Greta, as she was called, sat on the bed with Samantha. He motioned with his finger for her to come out of the room.

“Anything new on TV?” Greta asked.

“They just had Colgate on. Big nothing. There’s a press conference coming up. The FBI’s been brought in.”

“No surprise, state lines and all.”

“Yeah. No surprise. I hope it stays that way.”

“No word from Y-man?”

“No.”

“So we sit and do nothing until we hear.”

“That’s the drill. How’s the kid?”

“She’s all right. Scared. Keeps asking me why we did this to her.”

Paul’s grin was crooked. “And you told her, of course.”

“I told her it was strictly business, that once the business was over she could go home.”

“She eat?”

“Some. I just hope Y-man doesn’t let this drag out too long. The Virginia cops will be all over it, too.”

“He said two days max.”

“I hope he’s right. Want me to make dinner?”

“I’ll go out and pick up a pizza.”

“Go out?”

“Yeah. Nobody knows who we are or what’s gone down. I’m in the mood for a pie. Besides, I have to make the call.”

The wait continued at the Rollinses’ house, too, although pizza wasn’t on the menu. Kloss called Metro and instructed someone to pick up Chinese food and deliver it to the house, despite Jerry and Sue’s protestations that they weren’t hungry. The phone continued to ring incessantly, each time causing everyone to tense. The media’s hounding of them intensified.