Fire with Fire, page 26
Ryan slammed the laptop shut. Saskia watched the automatic glass doors of the Hertzberg-Davis building, the darkened reception area beyond. Seconds passed, then minutes, the tension pounding between her ears.
She sought distraction to latch on to. An island in the turbulent sea. Next to her, Delta Hodge was following Tanner Court with her eyes as the boy paced the side of the tent. She reminded Saskia of an eagle she’d seen in a documentary once, the huge bird of prey tracking a rabbit across a distant riverbank. Unmoving. Lethal. One of her team came and gave her a progress report, and Hodge gave the slightest nod in response, still tracking the boy with eerie stillness.
“You don’t like that kid, do you?” Saskia asked Hodge.
“Reminds me of some fuckboy I used to know.” She finally stole her eyes away from the teen. “I got three snipers set up and two grab teams in position. I’ll join them when we have a visual on the women.”
“Sounds good,” Saskia said.
Saskia and Hodge stood side by side, watching the doors of Hertzberg-Davis. It was Curler who shattered the silence in the tent.
“There they are.”
Saskia saw a figure emerge from the darkness, Ashlea Pratt taking awkward, slow steps toward the inner doors. Her pale hands were raised, shaking visibly, on either side of her face. As the automatic doors slid open, Saskia expected a wave of shouts and activity from the press camp on the hill. But there was no sound. Even the choppers overhead seemed to have been muted. Saskia saw a pale hand on Ashlea’s shoulder, then a slice of Elsie Delaney’s face came into view.
Saskia was surprised to see Hodge crouched with her team at the edge of the police camp. She hadn’t felt the officer leave her side. She recognized the SWAT commander’s arm waving her team of five officers forward. There was another team at ninety degrees to the first, ten pistols in total aimed at the pair, more guns on the hill, on nearby buildings, wherever Hodge had hidden them.
The women walked, Elsie almost stepping on Ashlea’s heels, their bodies all but touching. Saskia couldn’t see a gun, but she had to assume it was jammed into Ashlea’s spine. Saskia’s mind fought to stay in the moment, in the agonizing seconds ticking by. But she couldn’t tear her thoughts away from that—from the hidden gun pointed directly at Ashlea’s back. At the baby inside her. The world watched silently as one mother led another out into the sunbaked no-man’s-land between the doors of Hertzberg-Davis and the waiting SWAT teams. The young journalist’s tear-filled eyes flicked from one team of SWAT officers to the other.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” Ashlea’s whimpers came across the space to Saskia loud and clear.
“Slowly! Slooooowly!” Hodge’s low, hard voice echoed across the empty lot. “Alpha team, hold! Hold! Hold!”
Saskia didn’t even realize she was gripping Curler’s hand until he tore it from hers, his whole body flinching at the sound of the gunshot. It seemed as if the glass door fifteen feet behind Elsie shimmered in the air, suspended, before it dropped like a curtain. Elsie’s head whipped around to see the impact of the shot that had missed her by less than a foot. Ashlea and Elsie dropped into a crouch together. Both SWAT teams flattened on the asphalt, their guns still raised, Hodge’s scream ringing across the parking lot.
“Hold fire! Hold fire! Hold fucking fire!”
“Who the fuck is firing?” Saskia looked instinctively toward the hill, but she had no idea where Hodge’s snipers were. When she looked back, the SWAT officers were descending on Ashlea and Elsie. Ashlea shook off the man trying to lift her off her feet and carry her out of harm’s way. She was pointing frantically at Elsie, who was squashed under two officers in tactical gear.
“She’s hurt! She’s hurt! Get them off her!”
* * *
A pop. A crash. Voices shouting. Ryan was standing well back from the window, positioned so he could see the parking lot through a crack in the blinds without being spotted by the snipers. From the floor, Bendigo saw the impact of whatever had happened outside hit Ryan so hard his whole body jolted. For a moment, Bendigo’s brain told him Ryan had been shot. That the bullet had somehow defied the laws of physics and entered his body without penetrating the glass or the roller blind. But the hostage-taker recovered, clapped a hand to his mouth, a moan of shock muffled by his sweaty palm.
“They shot her!” he cried.
“Who?” Ibrahim asked. His voice was high and soft, full of terror. Any and all possibilities related to the sound they had heard being a gunshot were going to be bad. Cataclysmic. Bendigo wanted to freeze time permanently, to delay ever finding out what horror awaited him next. Schrödinger’s bullet.
“Who’s shot?” Ibrahim insisted. “Who’s shot?”
Bendigo heard a scream among the frantic voices outside.
“She’s hurt! She’s hurt! Get them off her!”
“They … shot … my wife…” Ryan’s words were gulped. Inhaled. Like the very ability to speak had left him. Bendigo dropped his eyes to the gun in Ryan’s fist. Was now his moment? Was Ryan so distracted, so incapacitated by what was happening outside, that Bendigo could end all this in a single, calculated move? He got to his knees. Ryan walked stiffly to the table, seized a cell phone, and dialed. Bendigo’s courage faltered. He slid back down next to Ibrahim and spoke while Ryan was on the phone, his voice fast and low and near to Ibrahim’s ear.
“Where did you hide the second pair of scissors?”
“You shot her! You fucking shot her! She was surrendering, and you shot her!”
Ibrahim’s eyes were locked on Ryan. “We can’t do this, man. We can’t kill them. Those scissors sticking out of Elsie … I-I-I can’t do a thing like that. I don’t know how you did it.”
“Is she dead?”
“I didn’t do it.” Bendigo sighed. “It was an accident.”
“I can see now what’s going to happen as soon as I surrender. Your people are going to take me out.”
“Listen.” Ibrahim inched closer. His breath was sour. Exhaustion. Hunger. The heat and the long hours of terror roiling in his stomach. “The cops have it out for these two. Okay? They want revenge. They’re gonna bust in here as soon as they can, and they’re going to blast anything that moves. They don’t care about getting us out of here anymore. Okay? This is about nailing Elsie and Ryan for destroying all those cases.”
“We can’t think like that.” Bendigo shook his head.
“We have to think like that!” Ibrahim’s pupils were huge. A terrified house cat outmatched in a fight with a cougar. “We’re gonna get caught in the cross fire here, man. I’ve seen what cops do when you piss them off like this. And it’ll all be inside this lab, away from the cameras. They can say whatever they want about what happened in here.”
“We can turn this around,” Bendigo said. He’d never heard his own words sound so phony emerging from his mouth. So false. “We can get Ryan to back down.”
Bendigo and Ibrahim were distracted by a noise. It was Ryan, marching to the fridge by the door, the huge steel machine from which he and Elsie had drawn all the samples they had burned so far. They watched as he snatched up a handful of vials and started popping the caps off each one in turn.
25
A coyote was calmly traversing the rocky landscape beneath one of the cantilever houses on Mulholland as Charlie emerged from a hairpin turn halfway into the Hills. Lamb had been up into the hills behind LA a couple of times in her life, as everyone born in California probably has, either to ogle celebrity mansions or on school excursions to the observatory. When she was in high school, an emo boy a few grades above her had mumbled an invitation to go with him one night to see the Sharon Tate murder house, and Lamb had been so stunned by the offer she’d ignored its painfully bleak theme and accepted. They’d ended up talking awkwardly in his car for a half an hour outside the fenced-off, bare slab of land where Charles Manson’s crew had murdered a bunch of people decades before Lamb was born. When the atmosphere and the paint-thinner vodka and hazy moonlight failed to have any amorous effect on her, Lamb told the boy she had period cramps and walked home. The boy had never acknowledged her existence again.
Charlie took over driving. His familiarity with the area was apparent from the speed with which he rounded the tight corners and flew down the narrow streets crammed with expensive cars and construction vehicles. He wedged the car into a driveway Lamb would not have noticed, the entrance to the property a mere dent in a huge wall covered with thick ivy. Charlie leaned on the horn, huffing at the security cameras settled on top of the wall like gulls.
“Come on,” he sighed. “It’s not like she doesn’t know we’re coming.”
A sharp blast of music made both of them jump. Charlie scrambled for the cell phone that was pumping out “Bad Case of Loving You” by Robert Palmer from the change well under the radio.
“What the hell is that?” Lamb asked.
“Surge,” Charlie sighed. “He gives you a phone, he always sets a ringtone for himself. The man’s a comedian. Yeah?”
The speaker was so loud Lamb could hear the bear-shaped man on the other end. “I’m gonna send you some more images. They’re weird.”
“Okay,” Charlie said. “What else?”
“I nailed down the six license plates from the video,” Surge said. “No Rojer. No Rojer relatives. Nothing interesting about the owners of the vehicles. I got one guy who was arrested for an aggravated assault on his wife, but that doesn’t mean much in this context and, besides that, it was fifteen years ago. Far as I can tell, a sale of one of the cars went through four months after Tilly went missing, but it was a woman selling the vehicle to her sister. So … not something you’d do if you wanted the vehicle out of your life because it was full of evidence.”
“Keep at it,” Charlie said. “This is good, fast stuff. How’s Binchley?”
“I fed him.”
“Why?”
“Because he was bringing me down,” Surge said. “He’s a very negative person when he’s hungry.”
Lamb found herself smiling.
“I also checked up on the dumpster thing,” Surge said. “A lot of the garbage workers down there were pinch hitters. Students and migrants. It’s a shitty job. Long hours, heavy labor. So most of them have moved on, but I might have a lead on a guy who worked the waterfront that month.”
“Good,” Charlie said. He and Lamb watched the solid slab of ivy before them part into two gates, revealing a long, flagstone driveway. “Good stuff.”
“Listen, you two see the latest from the lab?”
“What latest?” Lamb asked before Charlie could.
“It’s all over the news,” Surge said. “Sorry, Hoss.”
Charlie hung up, swiped the call away, and opened a Google search page. Lamb leaned over. Charlie’s thumb hovered as he tried to decide which headline to click on.
Shots fired outside Hertzberg-Davis siege.
One hostage freed in dramatic shoot-out.
Ryan Delaney revenge video follows shooting.
Police insiders tell of new Delaney threat.
Charlie selected a headline. Lamb watched the empty driveway before them as he read aloud.
“LAPD officials are not commenting on whether a sniper shot that hit a glass door at the Hertzberg-Davis forensic laboratory minutes ago was deliberately fired or whether the gunshot came after tensions among members of law enforcement reached boiling point.” Charlie’s reading was muffled as he chewed his fingernails. “Hostage Ashlea Marie Pratt and her alleged captor Elsie Ann Delaney were approximately fifty yards from police, in the midst of a dramatic surrender, when the shot was…”
His voice trailed away. Lamb’s thoughts were crashing into each other.
“Elsie’s in custody,” Charlie said. “Fuck. Fuck!”
Charlie punched the dashboard. Lamb held her head, afraid to hear more.
“This is good, isn’t it?” Lamb said. “One hostage and one perpetrator are out. We’re nearing the end.”
“They shot at his wife,” Charlie said. He shook his head. “This is gonna piss him off.”
“What’s the revenge video?” Lamb asked. “What was that all about?”
“Ryan Delaney responded to the shooting with a video sent directly to the LA Times,” Charlie read. He clicked a link.
Lamb leaned over again. They watched as Ryan Delaney appeared on the screen, holding a fistful of swabs over the Bunsen burner flame.
“There are five samples here,” he said. His lip curled viciously, his eyes reflecting the flame, blazing gold. “I’ll send the ID numbers after this video. This is what you get, you stupid, useless motherfuckers. You shoot at my wife, I fuck your cases!”
“Five samples,” Lamb said. “Five samples at once.”
“One of mine will be in there,” Charlie said. “It has to be. We know they already got the Navarro sample out of the fridge.”
They sat back in their seats, watching the breeze trace its fingers up the walls of the thick, green hedges ten feet in height that lined the driveway.
“We’ve got to call Chief Ferboden and find out what’s going on,” Lamb said.
“I don’t want to know what’s going on.” Charlie stepped on the accelerator. The car lurched up the long, ornate drive. “I don’t want to feel any more helpless than I do right now. Let’s stay on track here. We’ve got to find the kid and end the siege.”
The house was as Lamb had imagined it from what she’d seen in glossy magazines and “at home with” specials on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Huge, white, sprawling. A network of gaping spaces accented with matte black glass, shimmering water features, or strategically placed blocks of pale pine. In the foyer, which was as big as her parents’ store, there was a full-size horse carved from white marble, wearing a lampshade for a hat. No other furniture. Viola Babineaux opened her own door, stood back, and took in their appearance with her manicured brows hanging low over her wolfish blue eyes.
“What happened?” she asked, looking at Lamb. The surreal and paralyzing intimidation Lamb had felt at first meeting Viola swelled again, threatened to choke off her words or bring tears to her eyes, but she straightened her shoulders and pushed it away hard.
“We had a little disagreement with a palm tree,” she said, giving a pleasant smile. “We’re fine.”
“Where’s the kid?” Charlie asked.
“Through here.” Viola motioned. Charlie walked off with a speed and confidence that told Lamb he was immune to the gallery-like reverence the enormity of the house commanded. Lamb caught up to Charlie in a bowling alley–size space she guessed served as a living room. On a long, low couch, a girl was sitting, facing away from them, taking in the panoramic view of the lush gardens behind the house. Charlie stood staring at the back of the child’s head. The crown of chocolaty ringlet curls.
Tilly Delaney’s curls.
Lamb stopped beside her partner, her brain screaming a single, high note of rattling exhilaration.
When the child turned, sensing their presence, Lamb heard that thrilled cry strangled into silence as surely as if a bird were being throttled. The girl was about nine or ten, taller and fairer than Tilly Delaney had been, and her face was instantly recognizable.
“Ruby Monacco,” Lamb said. Another little surge of intimidation hit her chest as she recognized the child actor. Lamb had watched Ruby Monacco run and fight and cry alongside Nicolas Cage and Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt in half a dozen or more movies, and now she had stepped across the screen into Lamb’s real world. The otherworldly sensation was interrupted by Charlie barking at Viola.
“Is this a joke?”
Ruby got up and turned to them all.
“What? No?” Viola gestured to the child. “You’re looking for the kid, right? The one on the news. Tanya Delaney. She was supposed to have been on Santa Monica Beach on the nineteenth of October. Well, Ruby called me a couple of hours ago and said it was her.”
“It was you?” Lamb asked.
Ruby nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I was there that day. I have proof.”
“You said you had Tilly here!” Charlie hadn’t taken his eyes off Viola. “You said, ‘I have the kid. You can thank me later.’ This isn’t the kid! This is one of your fucking movie star friends!”
Charlie’s phone pinged in his pocket. Lamb’s did, too. She pulled it out. Surge had texted them a photograph of a Japanese man leaning against a brick wall before a sprawling beach. In the background, a small girl was walking with her head down, her brown curls spilling out from beneath a wide-brimmed, panama-style hat.
Have found this kid, Surge’s message read. Tilly? But clothes not right.
“My understanding is”—Viola held her hands up—“that Ruby here was on Santa Monica Beach that day. The day you’re talking about. So wherever your missing girl was, she wasn’t there. It was Ruby.”
“She was there.” Charlie’s face and neck were dark with anger. “Haven’t you been paying attention? Haven’t you read the articles? We know Tilly Delaney was there at the beach that day! That’s where she went missing from!”
“Ruby, you must have been there at the same time,” Lamb said. No one heard her.
“Charlie, I haven’t read the articles!” Viola’s voice had risen to meet his. “I haven’t been paying attention to it! I’ve been busy. All I know is that you were looking for Tanya Delaney on the beach and Ruby was on the beach, and they look the same, and—”
“It’s Tilly Delaney!”
“Whatever the fuck!”
“Okay, stop,” Ruby said. The little girl pressed her palms together, the corner of her perfect cupid’s-bow lips pulled tight in a disbelieving smirk. “You guys need to just chill, okay? I don’t do raised voices.”
Charlie pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned. “Oh god.”
“Everybody sit down.” Ruby gestured to the couches.
Charlie went and slumped onto one of the sofas while Viola and Lamb perched carefully on another. Beyond the huge windows, a big red parrot settled into a towering tree as though joining the meeting.
