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.”
“Hang in there, baby.”
Hopelessness flooded her, trying to seep into her bones, and she snapped the Nextel shut. Her cousin’s calling her anything other than her name could not be a good sign. All might be calm for the moment, but they had a long way to go.