Takeover (7 page)

9:46
A.M
.

The click of his hang-up filled the room, and then everyone began to talk at once.

“He didn’t mention his partner,” Theresa observed.

Frank lit a cigarette, and Theresa resisted the urge to snatch it from his fingers and take a few puffs. “Have the money come to him,” Frank said. “These guys aren’t as dumb as I thought they were.”

“And they know something about the Federal Reserve. Please don’t smoke in here, Detective,” Cavanaugh added, nearly in unison with the librarian, Ms. Elliott.

Theresa watched while Frank stared at the smoke curling up as if wondering how it got there, dropped the cigarette into his water bottle, and gave the librarian a sheepish smile. She also wondered why the librarian had been allowed to remain, but then they might need further assistance from the building, and after all they
were
occupying her workspace. Besides, she wouldn’t become emotional.
Her
fiancé wasn’t one of the hostages.

Cavanaugh addressed the Fed executive. “Mr. Kessler.”

“Yes?” It seemed to require physical effort for the man to tear his gaze from the television monitor.

“How long would it take to bring up the money from the vault?”

“Actually, he’s right,” Kessler admitted, his voice steeped in misery. “We could do it in about ten minutes. The
paperwork
would take two days, but I assume he means for us to skip that step.”

“I think that’s a reasonable assumption. Can a robot really deliver the cash?”

“Not to the lobby. They won’t fit on a passenger elevator. They’re designed to use the freight elevators at the back of the building, and they don’t go to the lobby.”

“I wonder if he knows that,” Cavanaugh said.

“But I suppose it could install the pallet in the passenger elevator and send it to the ground floor. I’m not really sure—it’s never happened.”

Theresa spoke. “He knows about the robots but not that there’s eight million piled downstairs to be shredded instead of four. It’s possible these two guys
don’t
have anything to do with Mark Ludlow’s murder.”

“That’s true.” Cavanaugh wiped the phone receiver down with a disposable alcohol swab as he talked. “Or maybe they couldn’t carry eight million. Wouldn’t that take up a football field or so?”

“In ones,” Kessler said. He spoke firmly and calmly once on a familiar subject. “If they took only the hundreds, four million dollars in hundreds would weigh about eighty pounds and fill six hundred forty-three cubic inches, or four good-size briefcases. Be
tween the two of them, they could carry it out. Or they could make more than one trip.”

“They’d have to let go of the hostages.” Frank fingered his water bottle as if he regretted using it as an ashtray. “They couldn’t keep a gun on them and carry all that at the same time.”

Theresa found it hard to take her eyes off the TV screen. “That looks like a duffel bag on the floor. They could fill that up, sling it across their backs, and still be hands-free. Or they could make the hostages help them carry it.”

Cavanaugh murmured, “That’s another good point. We keep forgetting they have a ready supply of labor in there with them.”

Theresa thought of something else. “What if Ludlow was their inside man? That’s why there’s no signs of coercion on his body—he gave them the information freely. Then they decided to cut him out.”

“Leaving them short one getaway driver. But Ludlow’s only been here a month. Not much time to hook up with a team.”

“He’d be an unlikely suspect for that very reason, and a month’s long enough to get the layout.”

Kessler stirred. “Mark Ludlow came with an excellent recommendation and has—had—worked for the Federal Reserve for a long time. At least ten years, I think.”

“I’m sure he did,” Cavanaugh soothed. “Why did he want to move here from sunny Atlanta?”

“I don’t know. The weather, maybe. It can get miserable there in the summertime.”

“Do me a favor—most of the employees should have been evacuated to the Hampton Inn. Would you call whoever recruited
Ludlow and the Human Resources person who coordinated his hire and get them over here? Maybe they’ll know how Ludlow came to transfer here, and why, and something about his wife.”

“Certainly.”

A new voice sounded. “What’s going on here?”

Theresa turned from the window. The bigwigs had arrived.

At the head stood a towering man with gray hair and a matching mustache. Despite appearing a little too paunchy and florid to be an FBI agent, he introduced himself as the special agent in charge of the Cleveland office, and the two young men Theresa had seen earlier flanked him like a pair of groomsmen. “My name’s Torello. You’re Cavanaugh?”

“That would be me. I just spoke with the hostage taker named Lucas. He wants four million and his car back. In an hour.”

“He called you?”

“We’re on a first-name basis already,” Cavanaugh said, which of course didn’t answer the question.

In the three steps it took Torello to reach the reading table, Theresa could see his mind churning as he analyzed Cavanaugh’s actions, motives, and results, accepted same, and moved on. This did not surprise her—one didn’t make it to the top FBI slot in a large city without possessing both sense and self-control. “Laura Reisling will get here from D.C. in an hour and a half. She can be secondary.”

Cavanaugh spoke with every appearance of sincerity. “It will be great to see her again.”

SAIC Torello did not sit but kept the psychological advantage of looming over the upstarts at the table while the rest of his party filtered in. Theresa recognized Viancourt, the assistant chief of
police, who took a seat next to a graying man in fatigues. This man’s name tag read
MULVANEY
.

She remained by the wall, close enough to the window to grab a peek through the telescope but not close enough to be warned away from the opening should the robbers emerge shooting. She tried to make herself invisible and glanced over at the librarian, Ms. Elliott, who had retreated into the rows of texts in order to do the same. Or perhaps they’d simply been pushed back by a mushroom cloud of testosterone.

The diplomatic Jason opened the discussion with a refreshingly nonjurisdictional question. “What about the secretary of state’s visit? I know we’re several blocks away, but what if this is some sort of diversion? We get every cop in the city over here, it might put holes in the security at the convention center.”

Assistant Chief Viancourt shook his head. “No, the plan for the secretary of state will stay intact. There’s Secret Service coming in, too, to fill out the ranks.”

“Still, the timing is suspicious,” Cavanaugh pointed out. “Any available cops not working the luncheon will be working that Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction concert tonight, so if this thing goes on, our resources are going to get stretched pretty thin. Maybe one or both should be canceled, or at least change the venue for the State luncheon.”

“Are you nuts?” Viancourt began to flush at the very idea. “
Cancel?
Cleveland needs this exposure, needs to show the rest of the country that we’re still a major city. Our star began to fade shortly after the paint dried on Jacobs Field, and by now it’s in an all-out spiral. Canceling is not an option. Besides,” he added, “it’s too late now. The secretary’s going to land any minute, and—”

“Okay,” Torello broke in smoothly. “We’ll keep our security detail informed of what’s happening here, and they can make their own decisions. Surely these two don’t have any sort of direct assault planned, since they couldn’t affect the convention center from a block and a half away unless they set off a nuclear bomb. Let’s talk about his demands. You, sir—you’re the Fed president?”

“Vice president,” Kessler told him. “The president is in Washington at a Federal Open Market Committee meeting. The presidents of all twelve Reserve banks are there, plus the board of governors,” he added morosely. “They only meet eight times a year, and it had to be today. I don’t—”

Cavanaugh interrupted. “Are you willing to give them four million dollars?”

“It’s not mine!” Kessler protested at first, then hedged: “Can you guarantee we’ll get it back?”

Receiving no response from Cavanaugh, he appealed to Torello, who said, “No.”

Mulvaney, the man in fatigues, announced without heat, “We don’t deal with terrorists.”

“No, we don’t deal with terrorists,” Cavanaugh clarified. “But we’ll
negotiate
with anyone. At least I will. We want them to take the money and leave the hostages. It’s only money. It’s not worth lives.”

Maybe I could like Chris Cavanaugh,
Theresa thought,
even if it’s his own reputation he’s really trying to protect.

“And if they will, then our situation goes from being a complicated standoff to the relatively simple pursuit of an armed felon. The problem is,” he went on, “that the money is usually the stalling point. I can put people off for hours over the difficulties in raising a
large amount of cash. But in this case the money is right there and he knows it. Mr. Kessler, you said those robots aren’t designed to use the lobby elevators?”

“Correct.”

“Okay, we’ll use that. Meanwhile the car. Where is it?”

“We sent it to the medical examiner’s office,” Theresa told him, wincing as nearly every man in the room turned to wonder who the hell she was.

“That gives me something to work with. His insistence on a flatbed will help, too. I can delay about finding one.”

“Tell him they’re all broken,” Viancourt suggested.

“He won’t believe that. Besides, I can’t lie to him. Stretch the truth, maybe—after all, the robots
aren’t
designed for the lobby, and we
don’t
have a flatbed standing by.”

“He’s a scumbag,” Mulvaney said. “Lie through your teeth.”

Cavanaugh inched his console farther out onto the table, expanding his personal work area and lessening everyone else’s. Theresa wondered if that was one of the tricks they taught you in negotiator school. “That won’t work, and it gets people killed. The two hardest things about this are, first, figuring out what it is they’ll give themselves up to get. Usually
they
don’t even know, and that’s what makes it tough. Second is resisting the urge to promise them anything, including the moon. Unless they’re mentally disabled, they’ll see through it in a second, and then people can get hurt. Theresa, what’s special about this car?”

Again he caught her off guard, which annoyed her. “What?”

“Usually they ask for
a
car. But he wants
his
car. You examined it—what’s so special?”

“Nothing. It’s a Benz with a nice paint job and a clean interior.”

“Maybe that’s all the reason there is,” Frank said. “It’s hard to find a decent used car these days.”

Cavanaugh persisted. “Has it been modified in any way? Police scanner installed? High-performance engine?”

“I didn’t look under the hood.” She didn’t add that she wouldn’t know a high-performance engine from a four-cylinder econobox.

“Go look. And take someone from the bomb squad with you—they might have explosives strapped to the frame as some sort of Plan B. We can’t snow him about the money, so we’re going to have to work with the car. Jason, go with her, and take a remote. Get me—us—some answers. We’ve got forty-five minutes.”

10:09
A.M
.

Theresa had even bought a dress. A wedding dress. A floor-length white dress with lace and a few modest sequins. Hope, this time, would triumph over experience. That was what she hadn’t told Paul about, what she felt a little silly about confessing. Now, not telling him seemed a vote of no confidence, a betrayal. Never mind that if he didn’t make it out of there, the damn dress would cease to matter anyway.

She waited behind the M.E.’s office, in a sliver of shadow along the brick wall, eyeing the Mercedes, which now sat in the middle of the parking lot as three outfitted bomb squad members worked on it. Two examined the undercarriage with small mirrors on retractable handles, and a third attached a wire to a latch embedded in the front grille.

Be careful,
her grandfather had always instructed her.
Don’t ride your bike in the street. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t drive too fast.

She had always listened. But surely there had to be a time when
caution produced diminishing returns. “Do they understand that we’re in a hurry?”

Beside her, Jason sketched the coupe’s outline on one page of his notebook. “They understand they don’t want to get blown up.”

She swallowed her frustration. The poor guys must be close to passing out, working with all that protective gear in this humidity. And an explosion would cause a great deal of damage to her coworkers’ automobiles, not to mention what it would do to herself and Jason.
Be smart and think,
she told herself. This car was all they had. If Cavanaugh had sent her to it just to get rid of her, he wouldn’t have spared Jason. “What’s that on your belt, that remote that Cavanaugh told you to bring?”

“It’s a one-way radio. It connects with our phone equipment, so I can listen to both sides of the conversation. I can’t talk to them on it, but it will keep me up with current events if they call Chris again.”

“Is he always so…” Words failed her. Abrupt? Peremptory? Unsympathetic?

“Chris? He’s pretty matter-of-fact, but he has to be. Aren’t you matter-of-fact around dead bodies?”

“They’re already dead before they get here,” she said, aware that this did not answer the question. “There’s nothing I can do about that.”

“Chris has to stay calm because no one else will. There isn’t time to second-guess. This has been a reasonable job so far. Sometimes the bad guy just shouts threats for an hour or two, nonstop, and Chris has to stay with him for every second. These guys, I’m beginning to think, are professional criminals. They rob banks for a living.”

Despite the sweat trickling down her spine, a chill swept her skin. “So they’re more likely to use violence.”

“Less likely,” Jason assured her. “They have a more reasonable assessment of what will and will not happen, and they’re able to judge accordingly. They know that should they go to jail—and by the time they come out of the bank, they’ll have accepted that they’re going to jail—their sentence will be much less if they haven’t hurt anyone. Other hostage situations—like political terrorism or psychotics or domestics, which are the
worst,
let me tell you—are much more dangerous.”

She suspected that unlike his boss, Jason had a few minutes to try to make her feel better, and that he had slanted his statistics for her sake. But she appreciated it.

“You might want to duck,” one of the bomb squad guys told them, shouting to be heard from behind his Plexiglas face shield. “Or go inside.”

She crouched in the shelter of a Grand Marquis. It belonged to a pathologist of whom she was not particularly fond, and she hoped any flying debris would shatter its rear windshield instead of herself or Jason. But if they blew up the Mercedes, what would Lucas do? If they didn’t…“Do you have a tracking device to install on this?”

“They have that downtown and can pop it on just before we give it back. It only takes a second. We’ll also add a remote switch, so that even if they take off in it, we’ll be able to kill the engine at any time.”

The bomb squad yanked the wire, which pulled the latch under the front grille and released the hood. Nothing happened. They slowly opened the engine area and continued their exam. After another ten minutes, they started stripping off gear. “It’s clean.”

Theresa pushed herself up from the bumper of the Grand Marquis just as Don appeared on the loading dock.

“What are you doing out here,
chica
?” the DNA analyst inquired. “Trying to get yourself blown up?”

“Risking heatstroke.”

“You’re doing okay?” The young man came closer, studying Theresa’s face, ready to provide comfort if it was wanted or put it aside if it wasn’t.

“Aside from the heatstroke.” She could not take time for sympathy. If she started to cry, she wouldn’t stop.

Don nodded. “You’ve brought company?”

She introduced Jason.

Don told them, “Come on in for a minute. I’ll tell you what I’ve got so far.”

Reluctantly Theresa abandoned the car a second time and followed her coworker. Jason went with them, pausing to stare at the array of cotton-draped gurneys in the dock area. “Don’t you refrigerate these things?”

“These people,” Theresa snapped. “People. Yes, of course we do. These folks are either on their way in or on their way out. I need to stop at autopsy. You can wait in the parking lot if you want to.”

Jason remained in step with Don and her. “No. I’ve seen dead bodies before. More than I care to think about.”

“I hope that’s not a reflection on Cavanaugh’s negotiating abilities.” She was being a total bitch, and she knew it—but felt powerless to stop. Being back in her own world loosened some inhibitions, and stress freed the rest.

“Nope. Gulf War.”

She let out a breath, moved past the door with letters spelling
AUTOPSY
on its frosted glass. “Sorry. I’m glad you’re not going to faint on me, though. I want to ask Dr. Johnson here about her victim. Okay if we take a detour, Don?”

“Always a pleasure to visit the good doctor.” He followed them through the door.

Mark Ludlow’s autopsy had just been completed. The diener, or autopsy assistant, had placed the victim’s partially dissected organs inside a red biohazard bag and then into the torso’s cavity. He’d sewn the flesh back into place, over the bag, with heavy black thread and not particularly neat stitches.

Christine Johnson stood near the head. The exposed skull lay in fragments, which she was piecing together on the stainless-steel table like a macabre jigsaw puzzle. She peered at Theresa with that all-seeing doctor gaze that can tell when you’re not sleeping well or haven’t touched a vegetable in a month. “How are you holding up?”

“Okay. Paul’s all right, so far.”

Christine, tall, black, and caring, stripped off a glove to reach out and put a hand on Theresa’s shoulder. Theresa remained rooted to the ground. As with Don, if Christine hugged her, she might collapse in her sympathy and hunker there for the rest of this crisis. “What can you tell me about this guy?”

Christine summarized, “The late Mr. Ludlow had deposits of cholesterol in some veins and a precancerous lump in his left testicle that might have become a bad scene in another few years. Otherwise he was perfectly healthy until someone hit him over the head with something heavy, three times.”

“Can you tell me what it was?”

“A piece of thin pipe, maybe. But one impression has more of a defined, oval shape to it, so there might be two different weapons, or two surfaces on the same weapon.” The doctor frowned. She didn’t often encounter a weapon she couldn’t immediately identify. Her interest in the instruments of death bordered on the unhealthy, or so Theresa occasionally pointed out.

“Metal?”

“I can’t be sure, but I haven’t found any wood splinters.” With blue-latex-gloved fingers, Christine turned the right wrist outward to display the victim’s palm. “He held up his hands to defend himself and got two fingers broken, but he also had some skin scraped off. Whatever they used, I’m betting it isn’t smooth.”

“I think I should wait in the hall,” Jason said. “If you don’t mind.”

Christine glanced at him. “Who’s this cutie?”

“His name’s Jason, he works with the negotiator.”

“So you met Chris Cavanaugh? What’s he like? Does he look as good in person as on TV?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you,” the doctor said. “Jason, tell him I read his book.”

“Christine—”

“Okay, okay. That’s all I have, anyway. I wish it were more.”

Theresa continued to stare at the remains of Mark Ludlow, noting the reddish areas where the blood had pooled after death and then coagulated. “The lividity is all on his back, consistent with the way we found him.”

“Yep.”

“Don’t blows to the back of the head force someone down on their face? You’d think the last blow would be on the ground.”

As in any full autopsy, the scalp had been cut at the top of the head and flipped forward to reveal the skull. Christine moved it back into place. “When someone’s down and having their head pounded into the pavement, it usually leaves injuries to the face. He has none, which makes me think this attack was quick and brutal, with massive force applied to the skull. He died before he had time to fall.”

Jason sidled toward the door. “I’m going to—”

“Come with me.” Don led him out.

“What about time of death?” Theresa persisted.

“From the rigor I’d say four to eight hours before he arrived here. So any time between midnight and four
A.M
.? Of course, if he died inside and they had the air-conditioning on, the time of death could be last evening. If he stayed outside the whole time, with this heat, he could have died only an hour before you found him. I can’t be sure.”

Theresa thanked her and rejoined Don and Jason. Under the receptionist’s watchful eye, they continued through the lobby and punched the button for the elevator. The woman had come with the building and meant to stay there until the walls fell down.

The doors slid shut, and Jason asked if there was a men’s room handy.

The third floor housed the trace evidence and toxicology departments, decorated in the same worn 1950s linoleum and shabby paint as the rest of the building. At least the air-conditioning had been having a good day, and the temperature hovered around
sixty-five. Theresa felt clammy in her sweat-soaked clothing but didn’t complain. If anyone tried to adjust the thermostat, it would turn off, and tomorrow they would all swelter. A happy medium could not be found.

“Oliver had something to tell you,” Don said as they stepped off the elevator. “You want to see him first?”

“Yeah.”

Jason lunged for the door labeled
MEN
.

Theresa knocked for admittance to the toxicology department and made her way past a row of plastic bottles—gastric contents, something she avoided whenever possible. She found Oliver, the overweight, ponytailed toxicologist, in his usual lair at the rear of the building, protected by a fortress of compressed air tanks and scarred countertops.

“I suppose you want to know about your dirt. Seems an appropriate summary of my professional life: I work with dirt.”

“Dirt is important,” Theresa told him. “It’s what the earth is made of. Can you tell me something about the stuff from the floor mat?”

“Aluminum and silicon, mostly. Clay. Clay with a little rust in it. That tell you anything?”

“Not really. Any industrial applications?”

He snorted with enough force to ruffle the papers on his desk. “About a million, from bricks to paper to toothpaste. But the grains are coarse and the sample is anything but pure, so my extremely well-educated guess would still be dirt.”

She sighed. “Okay. Thanks.”

“You find anything more useful, bring it back.”

“Volunteering for work, Oliver? You’re going to ruin your reputation.”

“Good point.”

“What about the stuff from the victim’s suit jacket?”

“Again, dirt. I can’t get enough of the stuff today.” He patted the dusty beige box that housed the mass spectrometer, possibly the only physical entity in the universe to receive his affection. “It’s running as we speak. I’ll page you if it’s interesting.”

“Call me even if it isn’t, okay?”

Oliver nodded and turned back to his desk without another word, and she went to find Don and the coffeepot. En route she rang Frank for an update, which he could not provide. The robbers were pacing in front of the hostages, but their body language did not seem particularly agitated.

“Actually,” he said, “they seem to be the coolest guys in downtown Cleveland today.”

“I know you’re trying to make me feel better, but that doesn’t make any sense. We assumed at first that they thought they were robbing a regular bank and could grab the cash and run. But if they know there are stacks of it in the basement, then they know exactly where they are.”

“Lucas never mentioned the basement. He just knows there’s a lot of money somewhere, and that’s hardly a tough deduction once you’re in the building.”

“If they thought they were hitting the local savings and loan, then they’re not the deducing type. I think they know exactly where they are,” Theresa said. “Did you notice that Lucas’s demand is exactly half the amount to be shredded?”

“But then why not all? Besides, if they knew it was the Fed, they’d have expected the tight security. They’d have had a better plan.”

“Yeah, but all they had to do was get close enough to grab a clerk and put a gun to her head. No security force in the world can do much once that has happened.”

“Hell of a chance,” Frank grumbled.

“It worked.” She wondered why they were even debating it. It didn’t matter whether the suspects meant to hit the Fed, a regular bank, or the corner 7-Eleven. All that mattered now was getting them to come out without killing anyone—except she still couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that all was not as it seemed.

“I don’t know,” Frank was saying. “These guys aren’t even smart enough to bring a driver.”

“If they did get the setup from Ludlow, they knew that the money wouldn’t take long to come up the elevator. Is it risky? Sure. But it could have worked. If they hadn’t lost the car, they could have been in and out in ten minutes. I sure wish they had been.”