"They shot Matt. They shot up the station."
"Would you say that their primary goal was to shoot Detective Hogan?"
Even though Lena had heard Nick giving someone details over the phone, she was surprised the woman knew Matt's name.
Wagner prompted, "Detective Wallace?"
Frank shrugged again. "I don't know."
"You know more than we do, Detective. You were there. What did they say?"
"I don't know. They were yelling. Well, one of them was yelling. He started slapping Marla around. I went to the back of the station to call Nick."
Lena chewed the tip of her tongue. She had never liked Marla, but there was something horrific about beating up an old lady. Considering all they had done, Lena should not have been surprised, but still, hearing about Marla took her anger up yet another notch.
"Wait a minute," Frank said. Judging by his look, a lightbulb had gone off in his head. "He asked for the Chief. The one who said his name was Smith. He told Marla he wanted to see the Chief. She told me, and I found Jeffrey and…" He had spoken in a rush until he got to Jeffrey's name.
Somehow, Wagner made sense of what he was trying to say. "They asked for Chief Tolliver but they shot Detective Hogan?"
"I…" Frank shrugged. "I guess."
She looked around the room, finding Pat Morris over by Lena. "You're Morris?"
He nodded, obviously uncomfortable with being singled out. "Yes, ma'am."
She gave him a disarming smile, as if they were old friends. "You were there from the beginning?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"And what did you see?"
"Same as Frank."
Her smile thinned slightly. "Which was?"
"I was at my desk typing up a report," Morris began. "The Chief came into the room and I asked him a question about how to get to the D-15 screen. I'm not that great with computers."
"That's fine," Wagner soothed. "And then?"
Lena could see Morris swallow hard. "And then Matt came in the front door. Marla said something to him, like 'There you are,' then Dr. Linton screamed."
"Just screamed?"
"No, ma'am. She said, 'Jeffrey,' like she was warning him."
Wagner took a breath, then let it go. She pressed her lips together and Lena noticed her lipstick had smeared a bit. "So, we could have a case of mistaken identity."
Frank said, "How's that?"
"The shooter thought Detective Hogan was your Chief." Wagner looked around the room. "I know this is a silly question, but is there a particular perp your Chief put away who might be capable of doing something like this?"
Lena racked her brain for cases, wondering why she had not done this before. There were plenty of people she could think of who were angry enough to want to kill Jeffrey, but none of them had the balls to do it. Besides, it was never the big talkers who acted on their threats. It was the quiet ones, the ones who let their anger burn in the pit of their stomachs until it exploded, who actually showed up with a gun.
"It was worth a shot." Wagner addressed the group again. "Either way, mission accomplished for our two shooters. They came to kill Tolliver and as far as they know that was done in the first two minutes. Their escape was blocked by our helpful dry cleaner here, who ran into the street with his shotgun. I would guess their primary goal right now would be to get out of the building without being killed."
"Amanda?" Nick said. He walked through the room holding a rolled-up blueprint in his hand. "Ventilation plan."
"Good," she told him, spreading the schematic out on the table. She studied the layout of the ventilation system for a moment, tracing a shaft along a section of the back wall. "This looks like the best spot," she decided. "We can go through the drop ceiling in the conference room to access the duct and slide a Minicam through to get a bird's-eye of what's going on."
Frank said, "Why can't we just go through the ceiling?"
"The tiles break too easily. We don't want dust falling down and alerting them to -"
"No," he interrupted her, his voice excited. "The drop ceiling goes the whole length of the station. You could just climb over that back wall and drop down and -"
"End up killing everyone in there," Wagner finished. "We're far from last resorts at this point, Detective Wallace. What we want now is video and sound coming out of that room. Our first step toward controlling the situation is knowing what they're up to."
Wagner motioned her team closer, and they bent over the map, planning their point of entry. Lena watched them for a few minutes, trying to follow their jargon as they ran down the supplies they would need. She noticed Nick standing to the side, a hard look on his face. How he had left this kind of action was beyond her. There had to be more to the story of the Whitfield hostage situation than Frank knew. There was always a darker truth behind those sorts of rumors. God knows what kind of shit people had made up about Lena when she left the force.
Beside her, Pat Morris shifted against the table holding the coffee machine. He whispered to Lena, "You following anything they're saying?"
She shook her head.
"They seem to know what they're doing," Morris told her, and though Lena agreed, she did not comment.
"It's so weird," Morris continued, his voice still low. "The shooters, they can't be much older than my little brother, and he's still in high school."
She turned to him, warning bells going off in her head. "You're serious?" she asked. "How young? How young did they look?"
He shrugged. "They gotta be older, but they looked eighteen at the most."
"Why do they have to be older?" Lena asked. She noticed that Wagner and her team had grown quiet, but she didn't care. "Slight builds? Androgynous?"
Morris shifted uncomfortably under the pressure. "I don't know, Lena. It happened so fast."
Wagner broke in. "What are you thinking, Detective Adams?"
"The last case I worked on before I left," Lena said, the lump rising in her throat making it hard for her to speak.
Nick slammed his fist into the table, saying, "Goddammit," and Lena imagined the horror on his face mirrored her own. He had worked the case, too, and seen the damage firsthand.
"Oh, no," Molly said. "You don't think…"
Wagner's tone said her patience was running low. "Let's cut the suspense, folks."
"Jennings," Lena finally said, the name bringing the taste of bile to the back of her throat. "A pedophile who's good at getting young men to do all the dirty work."
Chapter Eight
Monday
Jeffrey helped the paramedics carry Robert down the front steps. He was still refusing to get onto a stretcher for his own hardheaded reasons, and every time Jeffrey tried to talk to him, Robert just shook his head, as if he could not speak.
Jeffrey offered, "I'll be by the hospital as soon as Hoss gets here."
Robert shook his head for the hundredth time. "No, man. I'm okay. Just make sure Jessie gets to her mama's."
Jeffrey patted his shoulder. "We'll talk tomorrow when you're more up to it."
"I'm okay," Robert insisted. Even when they loaded him into the back of the ambulance, he only said, "Make sure you look after Jess."
Jeffrey walked back to the house, but he did not go in. Instead, he sat on the front steps, waiting for Hoss to show up. Clayton Hollister was the town's sheriff – had been as long as Jeffrey could remember – and when he'd called about the shooting, Jeffrey had learned that the old man had literally gone fishing. Hoss was heading back from Lake Martin, which was about half an hour's drive away. When Jeffrey had offered to go ahead and help process the scene, his old mentor had told him to hold up. "He'll still be dead when I get there."
Two sheriff's deputies stood outside talking to Robert's neighbors, both of them knowing better than to go inside the house until the boss arrived. Hoss ran his force with an iron fist, a management style Jeffrey had never taken to. Jeffrey knew the old man would be doubly attentive on this one; Robert and Jeffrey would likely be career criminals right now except for Hoss's early intervention. He had ridden them hard when they were teenagers, hawking their every move. Even when Hoss wasn't around, his deputies knew that the two boys were his special project, and they were just as vigilant as the sheriff, maybe even more so.