Or maybe the guy just wasn’t a killer. But then, what had happened to Cherise?
Cavanaugh, meanwhile, had Don on the speakerphone. “¿Qué hace allí?” the DNA analyst snapped. “¿Cómo pudo usted dejar Theresa ir-”
“La sacaremos,” Cavanaugh said. “No se preocupe.”
“You had better get her out safely! How could you let her go in there in the first place?”
Patrick leaned over the desk to interject, “Don, who’s Oliver?”
The young man paused, probably in surprise. “There’s a guy named Oliver in Toxicology.”
Cavanaugh explained what Theresa had said to him. “We’re assuming that’s some kind of clue. What is her relationship with Oliver? Are they friends?”
“Nobody’s friends with Oliver-he’s too big a pain in the ass. But Theresa can get more out of him than anyone else. She gave him some stuff from that dead guy this morning. That’s probably what she meant. You want me to transfer you?”
“No, stay with me a minute. Jason will get Oliver on another line. What can you tell me about Theresa? Have you ever seen her under pressure?”
“Pressure? We work for Leo.”
Apparently Don also had them on speakerphone, because they heard the boss’s voice in the background. “Hey!”
“This job is nothing but pressure. Theresa handles it. The bodies just keep coming in, attorneys get in her face, she just gets colder and quieter.”
“Is she likely to take action?”
Patrick wondered why the hell Cavanaugh wasn’t asking him. He had known Theresa since the day she was born-but then Cavanaugh didn’t know that. He spoke up. “No.”
“No,” Leo said.
Don sounded defensive. “She’s very tough.”
“But not assertive,” Patrick said.
“I don’t know,” Leo put in. “She certainly gets uppity enough with me.”
“So she’s more likely to cooperate, to try and keep things calm,” Cavanaugh said.
“Unless they’re going to hurt someone,” Don insisted. “Then she’ll rip the guy’s heart out.”
“I guess we’ve just seen evidence of that. Thank you. I’m going to hang up now. Jason’s got Oliver on the other line.”
“Espero que usted sea tan bueno como dicen,” Don warned. I hope you’re as good as they say you are.
“I’m better,” Cavanaugh told him, and hit a button on the phone. “Is this Oliver?”
“Who wants to know?”
Patrick leaned over the microphone. “Oliver, this is Patrick from Homicide. Did you talk to Theresa today?”
“Yeah.”
“What about?”
“Now what’s going on?”
“What did she say?”
Patrick didn’t care for the appraising look Cavanaugh gave him, perhaps considering if Patrick would need to be evicted from the command center as well.
“I told her the dirt from the floor mat of that car was oxidized soil. Red clay, if you will.” After another moment he added, “I assume from your silence that means about as much to you as it did to me.”
“Like from the southern states,” Patrick said. “Georgia.”
“Sure, could be.”
“Anything else?” Cavanaugh asked.
“Yeah. About forty-five minutes ago, I called her back with the smear that was on your dead guy’s shoulder this morning. She collected it from… let me see-”
“His suit coat,” Patrick supplied.
“Yeah. And I told her it was cyclotrimethylene trinitramine.” Not even the hollow sound of the speakerphone could disguise the disdain in his voice. “Now I assume from your silence that you have no idea what I just said.”
“Is that C-4?” Cavanaugh asked.
“RDX, actually, but you’ve got the general idea.”
“Plastic explosives?” Patrick sat down. “Can this get any worse?”
Oliver pointed out with unseemly haste, “Things can always get worse.”
“Where would they get RDX?” Patrick mused. “Maybe Lucas was in the military. Bobby sure wasn’t.”
Oliver spoke again. “Considering the liberal use of Vaseline as a plasticizer, they probably made it themselves. All you really need is bleach and potassium chloride.”
“What are they going to do with that?” Patrick wondered. “And where is it? It’s not in the car.”
Cavanaugh stared at the monitor. “They could have it strapped to themselves, but I can’t see it. The jackets hang open, and there doesn’t seem to be anything on or under the T-shirts.”
“It’s hard to tell,” Jason offered, “with dark colors against dark colors on a black-and-white monitor.”
“That leaves the duffel bags. Oliver, how stable is this stuff?”
“It all depends on the skill of your amateur terrorist, how thoroughly he filtered the crystals out, et cetera. If it hasn’t gone off yet, that’s your best indication.” The toxicologist paused for a split second, then added, “It’s… um, not near Theresa, is it?”
“It’s about ten feet away,” Patrick told him. “I assume from your silence that this situation is less than ideal.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself, Detective.”
Patrick eyed the monitor. “I’m going over there.”
The air hung still, without even a fishy breeze from the lake to lift the sand-colored strands of hair from Patrick’s forehead. He took the long way around, down East Third and up Rockwell to the rear of the Federal Reserve building. Beyond the sawhorses blocking the roads, Clevelanders were going about their daily business, working, eating lunch, ducking out of the heat and back into the air-conditioning before their ties wrinkled and their makeup ran.
He passed the corner where Pat Joyce’s Tavern used to sit and found himself wishing for his younger years, when whether or not to write out a parking ticket would be the toughest decision he had to make the whole day.
Unless he wanted to walk all the way around the Hampton Inn to the Superior entrance, Patrick needed to enter the building via a plunging vehicle ramp overseen by a guard turret encased in glass, which Patrick assumed to be bulletproof-and air-conditioned, or the poor guy in it would have passed out by now.
His badge got him inside without getting shot. One of the many Fed security SRT responders, sweating in his assault gear, escorted Patrick up to Mulvaney’s office on the sixth floor. The chief of the Fed security force wasn’t happy.
“What the hell did she do that for? Driving that car up to the door! One of my guys got shot at in order to take their wheels away, and she gives it back to them?”
“Trying to save a cop’s life.”
“And did she?” Mulvaney’s head bobbed from side to side as he studied his mosaic of surveillance videos. “Did he live?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“There she is, that other girl.” Jessica Ludlow appeared on one of the monitors. She had just stepped out of the elevator onto the third floor. “Let’s go.”
He didn’t seem to care, or even notice, if Patrick tagged along.
They caught up with her in the hallway-the young mother no doubt further terrorized to have a group of large, heavily armed men descend upon her, but that could not be helped. Mulvaney identified himself.
“You have to let me go back,” she said. Her entire body shook, the jumbled blond hairs quivering like plucked harp strings. “If I don’t go back, he’ll kill my son.”
Without thinking, Patrick reached out to pat her shoulder, and she jumped away like a startled rabbit. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Ludlow. We’re doing everything we can.”
“You know who I am? Is my husband here? Where’s my husband?”
Patrick kept his expression neutral. The woman seemed close enough to collapse; learning of her husband’s murder would finish her off. “We’ve evacuated the building.”