No, they were here. He had known it, of course.
He tried to study the building. He thought of what the various rescue personnel had told him. The east stairwell, the one nearest Kerr’s office, had collapsed completely. The top two floors of the west stairwell had also sustained severe damage, but where the old and new courthouse buildings were attached to each other on the lower five floors, there had been less destruction. From that point downward, the west stairwell was, in fact, two adjoining stairwells, with connecting doors between each flight of the old and new. Each had collapsed in a different way. Portions of the stairways for the second, third, fourth, and fifth floors were inaccessible, but they were not reduced to dust.
The bomb squad suspected that additional charges had been placed near the stairwells to close off escape routes to survivors. Or at least, Frank thought bitterly, to survivors on the seventh floor. The more damaged east stairwell had been the one they thought Judge Kerr would have most likely used.
Another five minutes and he would have been inside. Once inside, it would have been hard to stop him from — from what? he asked himself. From dying in the blast? From being buried in the rubble? If Irene and Seth were trapped in there, what help could he offer, even now?
Word came to him that the bomb squad had cleared the building. The technical rescue operation went into full swing — core teams of four to six members with highly specialized training, each supported by eight to twelve others. Using jacks and lifts and other equipment, they would shore up the collapsed structure, level by level — all the while trying to locate trapped victims, knowing every minute might be one a victim spent bleeding or crushed, suffocating or in pain, the likelihood of survival decreasing.
He should just get the hell out of the way, he told himself. But he couldn’t make himself leave. Not when they were so close. Irene was a survivor. She had proven it again and again. Frank had to wait. He had to be sure.
He thought of how much she hated enclosed spaces. Of all that Seth had already been through. Please, God, don’t let them be terrified. Don’t let them be hurt. Don’t let them be suffering. Don’t let them be…
No, he wouldn’t even think it.
After a time, he wasn’t waiting alone. He wasn’t entirely sure when it had come about, but Reed and Pete found him. Hale, too. Vince was still keeping an eye on the airport, they said, and would have been here if he didn’t want to capture Haycroft so badly. Frank didn’t want to capture him. He wanted to kill him. He would have gladly killed him for what he had seen in the last twenty minutes alone.
Somehow Hale had made it possible for them to remain within this highly restricted area. They did not try to cheer Frank up with talk of miracles or try to buoy him up with false hope. For that, he was grateful. The waiting changed — his tension eased slightly in their presence, although they said little.
Utter helplessness should not be discussed, he thought, even among friends.
No, he told himself. There is something you can do. What?
He closed his eyes and forced himself to think of the scene here an hour or so ago. In a second call to Irene’s boss, he had learned that she had had an appointment to meet with Kerr just before the ceremonies. Kerr was going to show off the new office for a few minutes, then walk down to the dais with them. She would have been there when the first small blast had taken out the telephones, though she might not have heard it, up on the seventh floor. She would have heard the second one — the one that had taken out the elevators.
He was picturing the big window, Seth and Irene looking down at the plaza, seeing everyone seated in anticipation of the ceremony — but no, that’s not what she would have seen. She would have seen people being evacuated.
“Frank?”
He gave a start, then turned to see Reed Collins. Next to Reed, seeking support on his arm, was a weeping woman in her fifties. She was wearing business attire. There was something in Reed’s manner, in his reddened eyes, that made Frank want to stop time. He wanted Reed to stop walking forward with this woman.
He knew what this primly dressed woman was. She was a harbinger.
And he knew what was weighing Reed down. Sympathy.
“No,” he said aloud, but he didn’t move.
“This is Maggie…”
“Maggie Koopman,” she supplied.
“Kerr’s clerk,” Reed said.
“I’m so sorry,” Maggie said. “It’s all my fault!”
Frank looked at Reed.
“She says Irene and Seth were with the judge when the phones got knocked out. She said she told them that they should stay—” Reed stopped, then rephrased it. “She offered to go downstairs to check on the problem, which she was convinced was a new-building glitch.”
“A glitch,” Frank repeated dully, looking at the ruins.
“There was no way of knowing it was anything else,” Reed said. “So she left.”
“And the others stayed.” All these words were turning him to stone. He could feel it happening, from the inside out.
“Yes. She’s sure of it. As it was, she went down to the first floor and then, of course, she wasn’t allowed to remain in the building.”
“I told them!” she said miserably. “I told them, ‘I have to go back! Judge Kerr and a reporter and a little boy are still inside!’”
Frank felt Reed’s hand tighten on his shoulder, and he realized he had swayed on his feet. He tried to steady himself, but found he couldn’t, and reached out for Reed’s shoulder with his own hand, bracing himself.
“I told them, ‘You’ve got to let me go back and get them!’” Maggie Koopman was saying. “They told me officers were going through the building floor by floor, evacuating it, and that they’d make sure the judge and the others were brought out safely. But they didn’t!”
“The guy they sent up to get them was on the east stairwell when the next blast hit,” Reed said.
Frank looked at the ruins of the stairwell.
“No,” he said. “No.”
Pete stayed next to him. Talkative Pete, not saying a word. Reed took Maggie Koopman, mourning a man she had worked with for twenty years — whose death she was convinced she had caused — to where her daughter waited to take her home. Pete still hadn’t said a word by the time Reed came back.
“We’ve left a message on your home phone for Elena,” Reed said. “Unless she’s been near a radio or TV, she probably doesn’t even know this has happened.”
Was it a good thing or a bad thing, not to know? he wondered.
Too damn bad, he told himself. You know. So think!
He closed his eyes and thought of Irene looking down on the plaza, seeing the evacuation. He felt sure that she had done so. She looked out windows, and not only because she was claustrophobic. She was an astute observer. They both worked in professions where one survived by observing others.
So Irene looks out on the plaza and sees the evacuation. A clerk tells her to stay where she is. And Irene — Irene stays put?
“She didn’t stay in that office,” he said aloud.
Reed and Pete exchanged a look.
I know Irene, he thought. What did she do next?
His thoughts were interrupted by the barking of a dog — a German shepherd wearing an orange vest bounded over to greet him.
“Hello, Bingle,” he said. “Am I ever glad to see you.”
“He’s glad to see you, too,” Ben Sheridan said as he caught up with his dog. He was wearing orange coveralls with “SAR” printed on the back. “Bingle wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t let him say hello before we got started.”
“Anna here, too?” Frank asked. Ben’s girlfriend was also a dog handler.
“Our whole search-and-rescue dog team is here.” He paused, then said, “They’ve just briefed us.”
Frank looked up but didn’t see the look of sympathy that Pete and Reed wore now. Did Ben know?
“Yes, I know,” Ben said. “Actually, this little greeting ceremony has another purpose.” He smiled. “I told the team that you and Bingle are old friends. I stretched the truth a bit and said that you had already worked with Bingle on a search and that I wanted you to search with us again.”
Frank felt a rush of gratitude so overwhelming, he couldn’t speak for a moment. He finally managed, “Thanks, Ben.”
“Before you thank me, make sure you want to do it. Aside from the fact that it’s dangerous to be crawling around in a structurally damaged building, this work can be grim — even for a homicide detective. We aren’t expecting many victims, thanks to the evacuation. But many is not zero, and we may not make any live finds. And a person found alive may not make it — it takes time to get them out and the injuries tend to be severe.”
Frank nodded.
“Allow me to be ruthless, Frank. Whether the people they find are dead, alive, crushed, or mutilated, these dogs do this work because it’s a game to them — so I’ll have to respond to Bingle’s finds in a positive way, praising him, playing with him — and you have to get the hell away from him if you think you might start to give him any other kind of response. I don’t want you to deck me if I’m playing Frisbee with my dog a few feet away from your wife’s body. That’s one reason we don’t usually bring relatives along for these searches — it’s asking a lot of you.”
“I understand.”
“Then understand this, too — you can’t just focus on three people. That might be the hardest part.”
“Let me help. Let me do something besides… imagining.”
“All right. We’ll have to hurry — we’re expecting the bomb squad to let us get to work any time now. I’ve brought equipment for you — hard hat, goggles, radio set, work gloves, that kind of thing. Let me see if I can get you a set of coveralls. Nothing we can do about the shoes, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll go barefoot, if that’s what it takes,” Frank said.