What You See (33 page)

The more she protested, the more they demanded, the beefy guy showing off his muscles by clamping even harder on the top of her right arm. Jane’s tote bag banged against her side, the leather strap twisting tighter around her shoulder.

No way.
She sure as hell was
not
going to be shoved into some probably windowless office to face these two steroid-guzzling rent-a-guards. She’d done nothing wrong. She understood their concern, sure. She could even imagine how it must have looked on surveillance, with no context, but this was a mistake, a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation. Nothing civilized people couldn’t work out in a civilized—
dammit
.

She stiffened her body, resisting. “You can’t do this!”

“Watch me!” Beefy was even stronger than he looked. He pulled her arm behind her back, moving her, against her will, across the floor. During all her years of journalism experience, she’d been in tough situations before, even dangerous ones, but this was the most absurd. She couldn’t even figure out what her rights were. She heard sirens outside, approaching. They had called the police? About
her
?

“Hey, that hurts!” And it did, it really did, but she had been so angry it almost didn’t matter. Could they do this? Take a person into custody? They weren’t even cops. She waved her free arm, tried to, at least. “I’m
Jane Ryland.
Ask the desk guy. Ask the manager. Ask anyone.”

“Ask me if I care,” Beefy said.

She was a few steps away from the front exit, but also a few steps away from captivity. Three steps from that unmarked door. Must be the security office, their private lair. Where they probably tortured people. No windows, no phone. Jerks. Yeah, they were doing their job, but they were doing it
ridiculously.
She wished she could get at the Quik-Shot in her tote bag. She should be taping this. She was either outraged or terrified, and either way, there should be a record of it. This was unfair. Absurd.

“Sir? Sir?” She kept trying to talk, get through to these thugs, but it didn’t matter. They were on a mission and she was it. In two seconds they’d be in that back room, and not a person in the lobby was moving to help her. Some jerk had actually
applauded.
Well, yeah, she was the child molester, after all. She’d only been trying to—

“Hey!” She’d tried to twist herself out of this guy’s grip. “Hey! I want to make a phone call!”

“Police! Freeze!”

Four Boston cops, uniforms, but guys she didn’t recognize, powered though the revolving front door, heading across the expanse of lobby, almost past the fountain and onto the carpeting. Coming right toward her.

Her captors stopped. They backed her against the white stucco wall beside that unmarked door. “Over here!” Beefy yelled. He yanked her, hard, keeping her in place.

“Under control!” The other guard called out. “Got her!”

Got her?
Fine. You know what? Bring ’em on, Jane thought. The police might even help her. At least they’d be sane, unlike
these
creeps. The police would know her. If they didn’t, she could drop Jake’s name. Which would be unfortunate, but holy
crap.
She squirmed, flexed her shoulder, trying to loosen this moron’s grip. This was ridiculous.
Ridiculous.

The first blue uniform got halfway across the room. At least it would be over soon. How had she ever gotten drawn into this?

Then she heard the shot. One. Then another.

Gunshots? Definitely.
Shots.
She ducked, instinctively, even pulled herself closer to the hulking security guard. Who was shooting? At who? The hotel lobby exploded into a chaos of screaming.

“Gunshots!”

“Run!” someone yelled.

And now every scream was contagious, each setting off a cacophony of others, as fear and terror filled the room, echoes clattered off the double-tall windows, amplified and intensified. Four police officers, as one, drew their weapons, held them at their sides, racing toward the sounds of the shots.

Over past the elevator?
Jane felt her heart pounding, felt her fear stealing her breath. Gunshots.
From where?
Upstairs? It was hard to tell.
Where was Gracie?

The guards exchanged looks, then Beefy dropped her arm, swearing, leaving her, and ran toward the cops, his colleague speeding after him. Jane sank to her knees, sliding her back down the nubby wall, trying to figure out what to do. If someone was shooting—which they were, or had been, there didn’t seem to be any more shots but who knew what was about to happen—the security guards’ unmarked office might be exactly the right place to be. On the other hand, any way she turned, any way she ran, might be exactly the wrong way.

Or—hell no.

She dug into the tote bag, got out the Quik-Shot, flipped up the screen, hit Video, pushed the green button. She was getting this on camera.

Focus, focus, focus,
she told herself. She tried to concentrate, on breathing, on thinking, on slowing her galloping heart. Crouching behind the row of fake palm trees, she rolled video, forcing her hands to keep steady. Protected, she hoped, by serpented plastic trunks and plumes of spiky leaves.

Jane had covered enough stories about snipers, shooters, crazies with guns. But all had been aftermath, reaction. She’d read about them, too. Why didn’t she remember what you were supposed to do if you were actually
in
an attack? Run? And maybe get caught in the line of fire? Or hide? And maybe get caught in the line of fire?

But she was a reporter.
That
role she understood. If she’d been assigned to this story—
shots fired at the University Inn!—
racing here in a news car, leaping out with her photographer, she’d do anything to get this vantage point. Now she had it. She checked the red Record light. Yes. Still rolling.

She trained the lens on the cops who’d stampeded toward the sound of the gunfire, which seemed to be—upstairs? Not on the lobby level, she was pretty sure. The camera captured the last glimpse of their uniformed backs as they crashed through a metal fire door, setting off a relentless clamor of clanging alarms.

As the fire door banged shut, Jane panned the Quik-Shot in time to record the concierge huddling underneath his ornate wooden desk. The registration clerk had ducked behind her counter, the top of her curly dark hair still showing. Tourists, a few yelling, one scooping up a wailing toddler, had abandoned their shopping bags and headed for the sheltering wood-and-metal barricade of the broad front desk. No Gracie. No Lewis.

The whirl of the revolving door came from behind her. She kept low behind the row of plants, cowering, wondering how much of her was visible. Maybe she should have run the heck out of here while she had the chance. Now she was trapped by her own decision.

What if more bad guys were on the way in? Would they see her? They would. And where was Gracie? Where was Lewis
?
What if—
No. Don’t create an imaginary problem. Reality is bad enough.

She held her breath, gritted her teeth, and tried to shoot through the spiky green fronds. Tried to be small. Tried to be invisible. She couldn’t turn to look to see who was coming in or she’d be instantly in view.

“Freeze!” An angry voice, commanding, came from behind her. “Come out from behind that thing!”

She turned, hidden behind the pot, back against the wall, still looking through the camera lens.

A gun was pointing straight at her.

And then she saw the gun leave her viewfinder, as the voice slowly pointed the weapon to the floor. “What the hell are you doing here?”

She lowered her camera and looked up.

“Jake,” she said.

*   *   *

“Jane?”

What the hell was she doing here? She seemed to be okay enough—rattled, he could tell by the way she was blinking so fast, the way her eyes, wide, clung to his, the way her hand clenched and unclenched. Jane in the middle of some kind of shootout—
shit.
Had she been sent to cover a story? Had she gotten caught in the middle of the child molester case? Had she seen the guy? How had she gotten past the police? How’d she get here—with a camera?—faster than he did?

“You okay?” He tried, almost failing, to keep his voice calm, while scanning the lobby at the same time. “What the hell—did you hear the shots?”

“I’m okay. Yeah, I heard two and—”

“Hang on.
Stay down.
”

He scouted ahead of him, scoping out the situation, taking one assessing step at a time, his mind speeding ahead. At least four cops had been dispatched upstairs. No police presence here in the lobby except for him. Backup was on the way. When he’d run inside the hotel, he saw some people sprinting, yelling, piling into the revolving front door, almost clogging the spin in their panic to get out. So, theoretically, those people were safe. A team was tasked to monitor the perimeter, make sure no one was in danger out there.

But inside. The shots had been fired inside. A guy in a suit huddled under a big desk. Heads, the tops of them, visible behind the registration counter. People were inside, bystanders, and each one of them would be terrified.

“It’s okay, I’m police,” he called out as he scanned the lobby. Front desk, couch, chairs, palm trees, fountain. Glass-fronted gift shop, empty? Elevators, closed. “Please stay where you are. Stay calm.”

Abandoned shopping bags littered the lobby floor, a ladder-back chair had toppled on its side, one little white shoe lay by the fountain.

Who was the shooter? Where was he now? Why? Was he connected to the child molester thing? Was there a child involved? Had they caught that creep? Was the child safe?

There was no traffic on his radio. Why?

“We’ve got this under control,” Jake called out, attempting to reassure the heads behind the registration desk. “We’ll have you out of here very soon.”

He hoped that was true.

Where were the cops they’d sent in? The damn Muzak seemed incongruous, the sappy synthomusic underscoring an unfolding crime drama. It had been only five minutes, maybe six, since he’d gotten the shots-fired call, raced down the City Hall stairs, across the street, and over to the hotel. DeLuca, on the corner, had given him the finger as he ran by. The black Isuzu, he saw, had not budged.

He finished his sweep of the room. Nothing. Jane was still behind that plant. And she was a witness.

“Jane? What happened? Did you see anything? Anyone?” Jake kept an eye on the room as he questioned her again, his voice low. Weapon at the ready. The lobby, with its bubbling fountain and chandeliers and palm trees, looked like the setting for a giant game of hide-and-seek. With everyone still hiding.

“Why were you here?” he said.

“I was—they were—” Jane, whispering, had edged to her feet, one hand on that big pot, and started to come toward him. Was she holding a camera?

“Gracie and Lewis are supposed to be here, and—”

“Get
down,
” he ordered.

She did. Safer for her to hide behind the plants than risk getting out. The others, too. Best if everyone stayed hidden. He hoped. The cops were here, though, so the shooter would be found. He hoped. Their training had instructed them to play it by ear. Each situation is different. Secure the scene. Protect the victims. Get the bad guy. Christ, what if he’d run out the back?

“Just stay there, Jane, for crap sake, until I tell you it’s okay. So Gracie and Lewis? Where are they?” He scanned the room again. Still nothing on the radios. What the hell was everyone doing? “Where’d the shots come from?”

48

Tenley could barely keep up with her mother as she strode down the corridor of City Hall. Her mom could walk really fast, even in those heels. Tenley knew the look on her face, even though she was three steps behind her. Mom was pissed. Why? Something about Brileen, she guessed. But what? How’d she even know her?

“Come with me, right now, Tenley,” her mother had ordered. She had steered her out of the surveillance room, all fakey-pleasant, Tenley could tell, fluttering a fakey-nice good-bye wave to those now returned to their desks. But once they’d gotten out into the corridor, the two of them alone, Mom had freaked.

Mom had yanked open the stairway door, almost slung Tenley through. “I’ve got to check the security desk. If there’s something going on across the street … But then we’re going to my office.
Then
you are going to tell me—how exactly did you meet Brileen Finnerty? And exactly what is your relationship with her?”

The door slammed behind them, their footsteps clattering down the metal stairway.

Tenley couldn’t keep up, not with her mother’s pace, not with her mother’s questions. She didn’t understand
anything.

Mom opened the door to the lobby, strode toward the security guy, then stopped.

“Stay right there, Tenley.” Her mother pointed to a tan square on the checkerboard tiles of the hallway floor. “Away from the windows. Do not move. I have to make a call.”

Mom had picked up the security guy’s desk phone and was pounding the numbers on the keypad. How did Mom know about Brileen? She’d tried to ask on the way down, like about a million times, but her mother had never let her get a word in. Did Brileen have something to do with her father? Or the black car?

Wait a minute.
Tenley stared at the tan square on the floor, thinking. The cop upstairs hadn’t said anything about her father being killed in Curley Park. He’d asked to see just the same place,
exactly
the same place, but without mentioning Dad.

She did not understand the world. Not at all. She fiddled with the hem of her T-shirt, stretching it out, letting it snap into place. Her mom was still on the phone, hunched over the desk. Ignoring her.

Tenley took one little step off her square. Then another. A long padded bench lined the wall across from her. It was vacant now, but Hall employees often sat there waiting for rides, or sipping the last of their take-out coffees before reporting for work. Someone had left the want ads from the morning paper, sections carelessly refolded, askew on one end. Another step. Another.