The air-conditioning worked. Well.
“Everyone keeps asking me how I catch a cold when it’s ninety-five freakin’ degrees outside,” Eric Moyers groused. “This is how. The tarmac is like a blast furnace, and then in here it’s a refrigerator. In, out, in, out. Then you have people flying in with germs from everywhere in the world. I’m sick all the time, working here.”
Patrick nodded, feigning sympathy but watching the moving belts instead. He decided to invest in a sturdier set of luggage and one of those locks that only TSA could open. “Bobby is the youngest?”
“Yeah. I’m thirty, he’s twenty-seven.”
“How many kids are there?”
“Just the two of us, and Mom. I guess it’s the old ‘growing up without a father’ thing. Our dad split just after Bobby was born. We had my mother’s brother and his wife around for a while, up the street from us for… I don’t know, at least ten years. Then the steel mill cut back. My uncle went to Gary to work, and Bobby didn’t have anyone to follow around. I was working by then, just trying to keep the rent paid.” Eric Moyers stared at the f loor, hands hanging loose between his knees. “First he started coming home from school early. Then he started getting sent home from school early. Then he started getting sent home from school in a police car.”
“How did your mother react?”
“She did her best. She tried understanding, she tried tough love. At first he stole from our neighbors, friends, people who knew our situation and wouldn’t press charges, at least not heavy ones. But Bobby never had the sense to stay where he was safe. Let me describe my brother to you, Officer. He’s never had a job. Ever. Not flipping burgers or delivering the damn paper. The only thing he’s ever done is steal, and he can’t even do that right. I’d understand if he were dumb, but he reads books, he’s a whiz at math. He’d just rather die than work for a living.”
No surprises so far. Frank said the cop’s prayer to himself: Please, God, let me find out something useful. “So he went to jail.”
“He robbed a check-cashing place on Lorain, him and this guy he knew from his high school gym class. Unfortunately, the clerk was the kid they both used to toss into the locker-room trash can, and he sent the cops their way. Bobby got one break-the surveillance tape sucked so bad that you couldn’t tell if he had a gun or a bag in his hand. He got a decent sentence.”
“Where’s the other guy now?” Could this be Lucas?
“Tried to cozy up to a gang of skinheads, thinkin’ they’d protect him inside. They killed him within a week.”
Patrick looked around for a place to dump his empty pop can. The only wastebasket in sight was filled to the brim. “That’s Bob-by’s only conviction?”
“That’s the only felony. He’s got all sorts of juvie stuff.”
“Then he went back for the parole violation.”
“My mother’s hair went gray during his stint at the Mansfield prison. When he got out, it was the whole ‘I’ve learned my lesson’ song and dance that we’d heard a thousand times and that Mom still believed. But when he started bringing drugs home, to the place his mother slept, the place I was paying the rent on, it was time for more tough love. I called the cops, gave him another chance to learn his lesson. Which obviously didn’t take any better than the first time.”
“That’s why I’m here.” Patrick balanced the can in the unsteady pyramid of trash.
“They empty that twice a day,” Eric Moyers told him. “We just dehydrate so fast in this heat.”
“Mr. Moyers. Your brother is in a very dangerous situation right now. I think we’re going to need your help to save his life.”
Eric Moyers pitched his can at the wastebasket, collapsing its contents into a noisy jumble. “Why on earth would I want to do that?”
14
11:43 A.M.
“You think Bobby and Lucas are from Atlanta, Georgia?” Cavanaugh asked. “Why?”
Theresa spoke rapidly, without taking her eyes from the TV. Paul sat terribly still, left arm clamped to his side, hiding his firearm. “The key chain for the car is a red, rubberized relief of men’s faces. I think it’s from Stone Mountain State Park outside Atlanta, where Jackson, Lee, and Davis are carved into a cliff. The dirt I found in the floor mats is clay with iron oxide. Rust, that’s what the toxicologist told me.”
“Georgia’s red dirt,” Cavanaugh said. “Exactly. Don thinks the twig in the trunk is from a magnolia.
They grow here, but they’re especially abundant in Georgia.” “Jason? Is that right?” “Yep. Bobby just served eight months on felony parole violation at the federal prison in Atlanta.” “Give the girl a cigar. What about his cellmate?”
“Thirty-one-year-old black male from Raleigh, name of Dunston Taylor.”
Theresa saw her own disappointment mirrored in Cavanaugh’s face.
“Not Lucas, not even as a middle name, but he did get released the week before Bobby,” Jason went on. “They’re searching the database now for any Lucas who would be out now.”
“What about guards?” Theresa asked.
“They’re searching the employee list, too.”
“So how do two run-of-the-mill scumbags in prison hook up with a bank examiner from the Federal Reserve?” Cavanaugh asked.
Jason didn’t have an answer, and Theresa didn’t care. “Can’t we figure that out later? Right now they just shot and killed one of the hostages. What are we going to do before they shoot the rest?”
Cavanaugh perched himself, catlike, in front of the phone. “I’m going to ask Lucas who he shot and why. And then we’ll talk about his feelings.”
Theresa returned to the telescope. The line of hostages remained one short, but otherwise nothing had changed.
Ms. Elliott, the head librarian, materialized at her elbow. “How are you holding up?”
“Fine,” Theresa said.
Ms. Elliott waited.
“I keep breathing in and out. Beyond that, I don’t know.” Theresa sank against the wide windowsill, leaning one thigh against it; even the marble had turned hot in the overhead sun. She breathed in the scent of book dust. “My grandfather used to work here.”
Peggy Elliott questioned her kindly, as if Theresa were a particularly bashful student asking to use a periodical. “At the Federal Reserve?”
“No, here at the library.” She spoke without turning from the glass, but she could see the other woman’s solid form, safely tucked against the wall between the windows, watching her. “Of course that would have been… what, 1930? He was a page. Do they still have those? Pages?”
“Sure. We call them clerks now.”
“What do they do?”
“Shelve books, help readers find what they’re looking for.”
“He always read a lot.” Theresa gazed across the street, at the building for once, instead of its windows. These stone structures had been here for a long time, but so much had changed. What had it been like in 1930, when a fourteen-year-old boy could go downtown to work by himself and no one worried, before terrorists blew up planes and automatic rifles had been invented? The study of crime told her that the world had always been a dangerous place, but at least it used to require more effort.
Ms. Elliott hadn’t moved. “We have a staff lounge. Would you like to come and sit down for a while?”
The woman’s gentle tone frightened Theresa. She must look like she was about to collapse. She straightened her back, brushed what curls the humidity had left her out of her eyes, and said, “No, thank you, I need to stay here,” in as firm a voice as she could muster.
Cavanaugh then ruined the effect by asking her to stay away from the windows, in the same tone one would use to a child. It infuriated her, mostly because she knew he was right. She and Peggy Elliott moved back into the reading nook, and Theresa sat across from the hostage negotiator as he got Lucas on the phone.