We’ll have them ask the neighbors while they canvass.”
Theresa soaked her hand with the bottle’s frigid condensation and rubbed it on the back of her neck, hot again from the six-flight jog. “They’re probably done.”
“Jason, get Homicide. Have someone come over here with everything they found out about Ludlow. If they didn’t find the day care, send someone back to the neighborhood.”
Theresa sipped, watching the TV screen. “This woman’s got a gun pointed at her little boy, and she doesn’t even know that her husband is dead.”
“I haven’t lost a child on one of my jobs yet, and I don’t intend to start today.”
“You haven’t lost anybody yet.” Jason stood as he dialed, adding to Theresa, “Chris has a perfect record. Two hundred and sixteen hostage situations ended without bloodshed.”
“Not totally-there’s been some blood lost. But not fatally.”
That should make me feel better, Theresa thought, but it doesn’t. He talks about loss of life as if it’s a running bet on a basketball team. As Jason walked off with his cell phone, she asked Cavanaugh, “How did you get into this line of work? How do you talk them into giving up when they have to know they’re going to go to jail?”
“Mostly it’s about listening. You have to be a good listener. I’ll bet you would be good at it.”
“Not me.” She shuddered. “I don’t want live people depending on me.”
Cavanaugh laughed. “Dead ones are okay?”
“Precisely. I could fail to solve their case, to get justice for them, but I can’t make them any more dead.” She finished the water. “That probably sounds wimpy, but I don’t care.”
“It sounds sensible.”
“You, on the other hand-do you ever have to decide who lives and who dies?”
“Not in this case,” he said, neatly sideswiping the question. “The hostages are all together, and that simplifies matters. In domestics, particularly, you can have them scattered around in different rooms, so that at any given moment some are safe, some are not. We adjust our thinking accordingly.”
If it came down to Paul, who had chosen to be in the line of fire by virtue of his profession, and a civilian, he would adjust his thinking accordingly. She needed to stay with Cavanaugh, to be sure that did not happen.
She let out what had been weighing on her mind for the past hour. “Can’t we give them their damn car and let them move on?”
“Not in light of his parting statements. They take any person with them out of that bank, that person’s dead. Otherwise I’d be happy to let them have the car and all the money they want, and I don’t even care if they get away. That’s someone else’s problem. But I can’t give them a hostage.” He glanced at her face. “Don’t look like that. It’s not hopeless. I’m going to try to trade the car for leaving all the hostages behind.”
“They’ll never go for that. They have to know that once they poke their heads out that door without a hostage in front of their face, they’re dead.”
“That’s why it makes more sense to give themselves up. You have to let them reason through the scenarios themselves. Eventually they’ll get a grip on what is and is not a realistic option.” He glanced at her face again. “I just said it isn’t hopeless. I didn’t say it’ll be easy.”
Kessler stood to throw out his coffee cup. “But why kill Mark Ludlow? And if they’ve already killed once, doesn’t that make them more likely to… um…”
“We’re not completely sure they had anything to do with Ludlow,” Cavanaugh said. “We’re not even reasonably sure. But if they did, they don’t know that his body has been found or that we suspect he’s connected to this robbery. They want to have the option to walk away from this without anyone getting hurt, because they’re certain to get a lighter sentence that way. If we let them know that we’re waiting to hang a murder charge on them-”
“They have nothing to lose,” Theresa finished.
“Exactly. We need to keep them believing that it’s in their best interest to avoid hurting anyone.” Cavanaugh moved one hand to pick up the phone, then hesitated, long fingers stroking the receiver. “Tell me about your fiancé, Theresa.”
Would this man ever stop startling her? “Paul?”
Well, duh. How many other fiancés did she have? She took another deep breath. “He’s been a cop for seventeen years. He’s currently a detective in Homicide. He’s a good cop.”
Cavanaugh waited as she tossed her empty bottle into the wastebasket. “I’m sure he’s a great cop, Theresa, but I’m not writing a brochure for the department. Tell me what he’s like.”
Not a word came to mind, and she stared at him in confusion. Glass slides and databases were her bailiwick, not psychology. “I don’t know what you want.”
“It’s an open-ended question, I know. This is why I ask: He’s a cop in their midst, but he’s in plainclothes and he’s not tied up with the security guards, so our two guys in there clearly do not know that he’s a police officer. That means they haven’t searched him, haven’t found his gun, so now he’s ten feet away from these guys and he’s armed. What is he going to do?”
She glanced at the TV screen again; she had trouble looking away from it for more than a few seconds. Not much had changed in her absence. Paul still sat second from the end of the row of hostages, fidgeting now and then but obviously unhurt. “All he’ll care about is protecting those people. Frank says he’s a Boy Scout.”
“What do you think?”
It took her a while to answer. “I think he cares about doing the right thing. That’s why I want to marry him. My ex-husband never cared about the right thing. Paul is more like-”
“Your father?”
She gave a tiny jump, glared at him, and then looked away. She would never admit that; it made her sound like a neurotic little girl. No matter how true it might be.
Cavanaugh, mercifully, moved on. “Where did he propose to you?”
“What?”
“I’m just trying to gather information here, Theresa. Where did he propose?”
She smiled, unable to help it. “In an alley. In the rain. We had just cleared a triple homicide at a bowling alley, with about fifteen shots fired over three rooms-”
Cavanaugh’s dimples were showing, but his eyes seemed deadly serious. “So he’s kind of impulsive? You hadn’t expected a proposal?”
Her mouth formed a no, but that would be a lie. She had expected a proposal from their first kiss. “It wasn’t a complete surprise, but yes, a diamond popping out of nowhere sort of threw me.”
“Ah, he had the ring already. So he’s not that impulsive.”
“No, no. He’d had dinner reservations at Pier W, champagne on ice, the whole scenario, but then the pagers went off.” Apparently impulsivity was not a desired trait during hostage negotiations, which made sense. But what about the hostage takers’ impulses? “What did Lucas mean about having an idea to get the money?”
“I wish I knew. I called back, but he made Missy answer. She said Lucas does not wish to speak to me at this time, and neither does Bobby.”
She nibbled a fingernail, a habit she thought she’d broken in high school. “It would help if we could communicate with Paul. Can’t we text-message the Nextel?”
“It would beep. I already asked his partner that. We can’t risk drawing their attention to him.”
“No,” she agreed fervently. “We can’t. Where is Frank- Officer Patrick?”
“Trying to find someone in this city who knows Bobby Moyers. Supposedly he’s got a brother who works for Continental Airlines, and Patrick went to run him down.”