Fire with Fire, page 21
Bendigo came out of the stall. He was so distracted by the story, by the struggle in Elsie’s voice, that he forgot to hide the scissors in his hand. Elsie was indeed leaning against the sinks.
“I figured when they grew up they’d be close.” Elsie shrugged. “There was time for them to ‘get’ each other eventually. And then, one day, there was no more time. It was over.”
She turned. When she saw the blade sticking out from his fist, her face tightened. She raised the gun and pointed it at his chest.
“Where did you get those?” she asked.
Bendigo didn’t know what she was talking about for a moment. Then he looked down at the weapon in his hand.
“Uh, I … I … I didn’t…”
“Put them on the counter.”
He did as he was told. Closed the scissors and laid them down, put the now-snipped sheath of toilet paper beside them. Elsie strode forward to grab them, but as she came within range of him, something snapped inside his brain. A hold released. A switch flipped. He made a grab for the gun. Elsie swiped sideways at him with her elbow, struck him in the sternum, bent him double. They fell on the counter together, scrambled and fought and shoved and slid to the floor. He got the gun and butted her in the mouth with his clenched fists. She wrenched the pistol free of his bound fists, but it clattered out of her fingers and slid away. Elsie kicked at him with both feet, knocking him down, before crawling over and snatching the gun from the corner under the sinks.
Bendigo lay on his back, propped on his elbows, watching her breathlessly as she rose to her feet. The aim of the gun was on his head.
And the handle of the scissors was jutting out of her stomach.
20
Saskia sat watching the teenager’s face as she bent over the paper and recording device Curler had given her. In a quiet spot at the back of the tent, huddled together in a circle of fold-out chairs, Saskia, the negotiator, and the two teens had been recording the message Curler had written for Jonie into a handheld device. Saskia knew that, somewhere else in the police encampment, Ashlea Pratt’s mother had arrived and been escorted into a different quiet corner to read a message written for her by one of Curler’s associates. Saskia hadn’t met the mother yet, but she’d seen the older woman being led through the checkpoint at the gates, two patrol officers sandwiched on either side of her, helping her walk. Her grief and horror had been visceral, even from a hundred yards away. She looked like a bombing victim being walked out of the charred blast zone.
Saskia turned back to Jonie. The teenager was blank-faced and watching the digital equalizer react as she spoke.
“I’m asking you to please listen to the police,” Jonie was saying, halfway through her fifth run-through of the message, “and do what they say. They know how to get Ashlea, Gary, and Ibrahim out of there safely. Mom, Dad, I love you. I need you both to come home safe. Please do this for me and for Tilly.”
Jonie handed the recorder back to Curler. He tapped a button to shut off the recording. “I think we have what we need,” he said.
“If I’ve done the recording, I probably don’t need to be here anymore, right?” Jonie said.
Curler glanced at Saskia.
The teen looked at her watch. “I mean, I’ve got a geometry test tomorrow morning. If I leave soon, I could get back and finish with my study group.”
Saskia opened her mouth to speak, but Curler put a hand on her knee.
“Jonie, we’ve spoken to your teachers. They’re happy to hold off on the test, given the circumstances.”
“So what am I doing, then, exactly?” Jonie swiped at her curls. “I mean, if they’re just going to be sitting in there for the next two days or whatever, are we all just going to camp out here and wait?”
“We’re hoping it won’t be two days.”
“I don’t understand why you’re not telling them I killed Tilly.” Jonie shrugged sharply. “Like, why isn’t that part of the recording?”
“It’s…,” Curler began. “It’s not as simple as that, Jonie.”
“To me it is.” The girl slumped in her chair. “If I were in charge of this thing, I’d let me just walk on in there. They’re not gonna blow me up.”
“Babe”—Tanner put a big hand on his girlfriend’s forearm—“maybe just keep your voice down a little. People are staring.”
“So what?” Jonie glared at him. “Hell, they need something to look at. Nothing’s moved over there all morning.” She gestured at Hertzberg-Davis.
Curler nodded toward Saskia. They stepped away, stood out of the teens’ earshot by a bank of plastic tubs full of tactical equipment.
“What do you think?” Saskia asked.
“She’s in a state of deep derealization,” Curler sighed. “She’s not with us.”
“What does that mean, ‘derealization’?” Saskia looked back at Jonie, who was joggling one knee up and down beside her worried-looking boyfriend. “Does she know what’s happening around her right now or not?”
“She does, but she’s detached from it,” Curler said. “I’ve seen this before. I did some work with grieving parents during my first residency. I remember a father who lost his daughter in a hit and run. It happened right in front of him. She ran out into the street after a basketball. He said he felt in that moment as though he should be hysterical, screaming and panicking, but he couldn’t be. He just felt a weird, cold determination to put her back together like she was a jigsaw puzzle. He said the whole thing felt fake. Like it had been staged.”
“So Jonie’s not hysterical,” Saskia said, “because she doesn’t feel as if any of this is real?”
“Her mind’s not allowing her to feel like it’s real.”
“What does that tell us about whether she killed her sister or not? I mean, if something traumatic happens and she has this ability to just switch off and go through the motions, could she have done that on the day Tilly died?”
“Maybe. But the human brain is not a machine.” Curler shook his head. “Just because it has ease doing something today doesn’t mean it’s because it’s done it before.”
Saskia saw a tall, lean woman in heavy tactical gear approaching. The woman presented herself.
“Chief Ferboden, Agent Curler.” She snapped her heels together. Her accent was thick and Southern. “I’m Delta Hodge. Your new acting SWAT commander.”
“Oh,” Saskia said, feeling her stomach flip.
“I come in peace.” Hodge held up a hand like a stop sign. “I can guess the kind of thing Franklin said to get himself smacked out. He deserved the hit. And I deserved the promotion. You’re looking at the first Black, female SWAT leader in the history of American law enforcement.” She thumped her vest with a gloved fist.
Saskia suppressed a smile. “Well, congratulations, Acting Commander.” Saskia glanced at Curler. “What do you need from us?”
“I need to report news, good and bad,” Hodge said. “And I don’t have time to ask you what kind you want first. So here comes the bad news. Our tactical guys have had to pull the worm camera back from the drain hole in the floor of the lab for a hot minute. Ryan Delaney has been pacing since his wife took Bendigo to use the bathroom, and he got close to stepping on it. It was only sticking up over the lip of the drain by half an inch, but it’s not worth the risk of them finding out we’re listening. So, right now, we don’t have an ear in the room.”
“What’s the good news?” Saskia asked.
“Good news is we’ve now got better eyes. Our robot is all the way to the air-conditioning vent. So we have a visual of the spot we’re interested in.”
Hodge pulled a small tablet from somewhere on her tactical cladding and presented it to Saskia. She and Curler bent close to look at the black-and-white feed of Ryan Delaney slowly pacing the floor of the lab between two large steel tables, the gun in his fist swinging by his thigh. Ashlea Pratt and Ibrahim Solea were sitting on the floor, leaning against a second row of steel tables. Both appeared to be eating, with their wrists bound in front of them.
It was the first time Saskia had seen the young hostages, outside of the photographs that had been provided to her by their colleagues and families. They looked impossibly small beyond Ryan, who paced in the foreground. No one appeared to be talking. Now and then, someone would glance toward what Saskia assumed was the door to the hall and the restroom beyond.
“There are some things in this footage that make us wonder.” Hodge tapped a fingertip on the rubber edge of the tablet’s casing. “We see three duffel bags. The picture isn’t great, but we can discern that the third bag hasn’t been accessed yet. It’s full, and it’s zipped up.”
“So you’re wondering if there’s a bomb in there,” Curler said. “So are we.”
“We need to know if there’s a bomb,” Hodge said. “Or, at least, we need to know the likelihood. Because if there’s no bomb, we’ll be working toward a forced extraction. That would mean you hit the green button, ma’am, and we swoop in and pound the room with everything we’ve got, pull those hostages out of there, and try to resist the urge to shoot one of the Delaneys in the head. But if there is a bomb, us all rushing in like a football team at a free barbecue is the worst idea anyone’s got.”
“How big a bomb could fit in a bag like that?” Saskia asked. “One big enough to take down the building? Should we be worried about the teams you have positioned on the roof?”
“It’s not a simple question to answer, ma’am.” Hodge squinted. “Thing is, yeah, sure, you could fit a bomb that powerful in a bag like that. But are a couple of suburban parents going to have the know-how to build something so sophisticated? I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” Saskia said.
“More likely they’ve put together a pressure-cooker bomb or something similar out of household items,” Hodge said. “It’s not gonna bring down the building, but it could take out everyone in the room if you pack it right.”
“I’ve got detectives trawling through the Delaneys’ online lives.” Saskia glanced at her watch. “I imagine someone would have let me know by now if they’d found searches for bomb-making instructions on their phones or home computers.”
“Well, we have another source we could ask,” Curler said.
They looked over at Jonie and Tanner, who were sitting and leaning against each other on the fold-out chairs.
21
OLI: Hello?
HOSKINS: Hey, is this Oli?
OLI: Yeah.
HOSKINS: Hey, it’s Charlie Hoskins here. I’m just responding to your ad on Craigslist from a week ago. You had some speakers for sale?
OLI: Oh, man, sorry. Those are gone. I thought I took the ad down.
HOSKINS: Damn.
OLI: Sorry, man.
HOSKINS: Listen, urgh. This is going to sound weird, but—
OLI: Just leave it in the back!
HOSKINS: Sorry?
OLI: Nothing. Just talking to my cousin.
HOSKINS: I was wondering if you could give me a lead on who bought them. The speakers.
OLI: What?
HOSKINS: I know it’s a long shot. But there’s just nothing around like that at the moment. And I’ve got a certain budget. Those speakers were right in my range, you know?
OLI: Uh. I don’t know. The guy’s name was Simon? He was from Long Beach? That’s all I remember. Dude hit me up through the app, so there was no number.
HOSKINS: Oh, right. You think you could—
OLI: Gotta go, man.
* * *
Charlie ended his phone call and lay back on the bed. He’d snapped awake but found his limbs so heavy, his chest so tight with urgent drumming that he hadn’t been able to face getting up right away. He lay there and made a series of calls, sent a handful of texts, and was ready to stand in ten minutes. He stumbled out into the kitchen area and found Surge and Binchley sitting on the bench seat, shoulder to shoulder, working on separate laptops. Lamb was in the armchair, tapping away at her own. No one looked up. He asked a question that he wasn’t sure he wanted the answer to.
“Have they burned anything else?”
Surge shook his head, eyes still locked on the screen before him. “You were only down for an hour and ten.”
“Show me what you have,” Charlie said. He slid into the bench seat across from Binchley. Lamb came over and sat next to him. Charlie had a flash of memory, of himself and Binchley and Dean and Franko crowding into a booth like this in a diner somewhere outside Vegas a couple of years earlier. Pancakes on the table. Bikes lined up in front of the building, the windows grimy with desert dust. They’d been trying to decide whether to rob a small-time casino run by Native Americans near Corn Creek. He looked up at Binchley, wondered if he, too, was remembering when they’d been on the other side of the mirror together. Two criminals, now cop and captive.
“Get ready,” Surge said, whirling his laptop around to show Charlie the screen. “Because we’ve found our girl.”
Charlie looked at the image. It was a selfie taken by a young couple sitting on a bright pink beach towel. He was bald and tanned. She was blond and slinky. In the background, Charlie could make out the figure of Jonie Delaney walking with a plain red beach bag, leading a smaller girl in a pink dress by the hand down toward the water. He could see it was the Delaney girls by their crowns of brown curls swept back from their fair faces by the sea breeze, the strap of Tilly’s swimsuit poking up from the collar of the dress.
“Where is this?” Charlie rubbed his eyes, tried to clear the painkiller fog from his mind. “What time?”
“Okay, so, this blue spot in the distance? We think this is lifeguard tower number twenty.” Lamb leaned over and pointed to a speck of blue on the horizon of the image. “And there’s no pier in the background, obviously. That’s the bike path on the left, and we have these trees … So we think this image was taken in front of parking lot number three, facing southeast. It lines up with what Jonie said in her statement about where she entered the beach.”
“Time stamp says 10:01,” Binchley piped up. “But that’s when the image was uploaded to Facebook. Doesn’t mean that’s when it was taken. Could be they took it and uploaded it right away. Could be that they waited. I can’t know without access to their phones.”
Everyone looked at Binchley.
The biker lifted his eyes at the silence around him. “What?”
“Look at you, getting in on the mystery!” Surge hugged the man close. “You’re using your talents for good for once! I’m so proud of you! Welcome to the team!”
“I’m not on the team, and you’d better get this fucker off me, pronto,” Binchley snarled at Charlie. “I’m cooperating with you because I want to get out of here. He keeps hugging me and I’m going to lose it.”
“You want to ‘get out of here’?” Charlie looked at Surge.
“I may have renegotiated while you were asleep,” Surge said. “We had some resistance, and I’m all out of stick. I needed carrot. I said we’d let Binchley go when he was through here.”
“I’ll never sell that to Saskia,” Charlie said. “She needs to know he helped the Delaneys.”
“Just let me handle it,” Surge soothed.
Charlie stretched in his seat, cracked his stiff neck. “Confirming when and where the girls entered the beach is helpful, but it’s not our priority,” he said. “I want to see the parking lot. I want to see eleven o’clock, when Tilly disappeared.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just do that,” Surge wondered aloud, fishing around on his laptop. “Just call up a moment in the past and see it from a hundred angles. We’re heading there. One day everything will be recorded. Everything, everywhere.”
“We get close to the moment,” Lamb said. She drew up an image on her screen of a happy yellow Labrador sitting on the sidewalk, wearing a pair of sunglasses. The dog’s leash ran up toward the camera, and Charlie could see the shadow of the person holding the phone. “This was taken right at the edge of the parking lot. Time stamp says 11:05.”
She clicked on the image. A video began to play. The dog wagged its tail, mouth gaping and tongue jiggling. Charlie heard wind crackling in the phone’s microphone, the same gentle breeze that had been streaking through the Delaney girls’ hair as they headed down the beach. The camera swung around to reveal a woman in her thirties in a Dodgers cap. She was squinting in the sun, flashing a peace sign.
“Just chillin’ with my fur baby!” she said. The video blinked off.
“If we take it back,” Lamb said, rolling the cursor back to the dog in the video, “we get some cars in the parking lot.”
Lamb paused the video after a second and a half. Charlie felt a zing of excitement in his chest. He shuffled forward, looking at the slanted image of six cars parked in the front row of the lot, closest to the beach. It was a good camera. The plates were unblurred. Charlie flicked his eyes over them.
“Have you run these plates?” he asked. “Who are these cars linked to? Is Rojer there? Anyone from the suspect list? Any of the witnesses?”
“Slow down.” Lamb touched his arm. “We don’t even have all the images yet. Binchley is still trawling. It’s only been an hour.”
“An hour is an hour,” Charlie said. “One more of those, and the Delaneys will burn another piece of evidence, maybe one of mine.”
“We know,” Lamb said.
“So what else is there?” Charlie pressed. “If we can find an image right now of Tilly Delaney heading back toward the water alone, that would be a game changer. It would shift our investigation completely.”
“Yeah,” Lamb said. “It would make things a whole lot faster. Easier. We could tell the Delaneys that their daughter drowned and everyone can go home.” Her gaze was fixed on him. “Is that what you want?”
