“Mom put up with our dad. She said she loved him, and you had to be willing to do anything for love. I never quite got where loving the kids she brought into the world figured into the equation, but apparently that’s normal. The nonabusive parent-some kids side with them, while others, like me, resent them even more than the abusive one. A shrink told me that once. Question is, why am I telling you?”
“Because your brother murdered one, maybe two, people this morning for no apparent reason.”
“One thing I know about my brother,” the woman said. “He’s got a reason. It just won’t make sense to anybody but him. And I’ve got thirty seconds to get to my duty station.”
“Thank you, Ms. Parrish.”
“Good luck.”
He steeled himself to enter the map room. He had held Rachael in his arms three days after her birth, true, but on the other hand he had no children and went to some effort to avoid dealing with anyone under twenty-five. Now he moved toward Theresa’s daughter as one might approach an injured tiger. The analogy fit almost too well-Rachael was desperate, unpredictable, and definitely wounded.
He pulled up a chair, sitting in front of her so she could see him and the monitor at the same time. The boyfriend-a pretty even-keeled kid, to Patrick’s great relief-noticed him first, then Rachael. She regarded him warily, wondering if he now functioned in the capacity of cop or loving uncle.
“I don’t have any news. The situation is still just as you see it on the TV here-your mom is fine.”
“What are you guys going to do?”
“We’re going to negotiate until they give themselves up peacefully. That’s how these things usually end, especially bank robberies. But I wanted to tell you that the hospital called, about Paul.”
“How is he?”
She looked like her mother, he noticed for the first time. Her eyes, brown instead of Theresa’s crystal blue, had always thrown him off, but now he could see it in the shape of her lips and the line of her jaw. And like her mother, she hid her vulnerability well, refusing to even hint at its possibility.
But Rachael was only seventeen, and about to face a decision he wouldn’t want on his shoulders at fifty. “He’s in pretty bad shape.”
She seemed surprised, but then teenagers still believed in immortality. And she hadn’t seen the blood. “Is he going to die?”
“They don’t know. But I have to tell you it’s a possibility.”
She did not respond, simply absorbed. Just as her mother would have done.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Rachael, when I know you’re so worried about your mother. I wish it could be avoided.” Seventeen or not, Rachael was a human being and deserved the truth. Paul had been about to become her stepfather. “I’ll let you know as soon as I get any further news.”
“Mom would want me to go and stay with him.”
Patrick wrote down the names of the hospital and of Paul’s doctor but said nothing. Theresa would probably prefer him to get Rachael away from the scene, both for psychological reasons and to be out of harm’s way in the event of explosions or gunfire, but he couldn’t bring himself to influence the girl. Deciding things for other people did not come as easily to him as it did to, say, Chris Cavanaugh.
He left her there to think about it, sighing with guilty relief as he left the room-on little cat feet, the way one leaves a funeral parlor.
Moving back upstairs, he turned his mind to Lucas Parrish and tried to fit the information Lucas’s sister had provided into some useful framework. He couldn’t. The conversation had served only to convince him that Parrish had a loftier goal in mind than getting a teller to stuff some cash in a bag.
On the other hand, the sister had listed “wealth” among his aspirations. Perhaps Lucas Parrish was exactly what he appeared to be, a kid blessed with enough smarts to have a dream but not enough to bring it to life. Maybe it really was just the money.
27
2:58 P.M.
“Detective?”
Peggy Elliott skipped up a few steps to catch him. She carried a textbook that must have weighed seven pounds, easy. “I’ve been reading up on RDX.”
He paused on the landing. “That was quick.” “I’m a reference librarian. It’s what I do.” His partner had an appointment with death penciled in, Theresa sat out of reach with a gun to her head, and yet Patrick found himself wondering if Ms. Elliott had a significant other, and if not, how she might react to an offer of coffee or lunch…
Later. “Thanks. Please don’t tell anyone else-I’d get in trouble for discussing an investigation in progress. What did you find?”
“Nothing, unfortunately. There is no way to neutralize it- chemically, I mean. You could always throw it in the lake or blast it into space. Or just pull out the detonator.”
“The lake, huh?” She nodded. “Then run like hell.”
Patrick returned to the negotiator’s area like a moth to the flame, afraid to look at the television monitor but unable not to. He retook his seat just as Lucas Parrish finally answered the phone at the information desk across the street and said, “Hello, Chris.”
“Thanks for picking up, Lucas. I was getting worried about you.”
“That’s so sweet, Chris. Remind me to drop you a card on your next birthday.”
“I’m glad you have your money, but now we need to work out where you’re going to go from here.”
“I have an aunt in Chicago. I figure she’ll let me sleep on her couch for a few weeks. After that, I’ll head for Las Vegas. Ever seen the Grand Canyon, Chris?”
“I’m mostly concerned with Cleveland right now. You know there’s a whole lot of cops with guns on this block who are pretty worried that you’re going to hurt some of those hostages. You have to know they’re willing to take you out to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“I wouldn’t respect them if they weren’t, Chris.”
“We’re going to have to work together to come up with a good exit strategy, one where no one gets hurt.”
“Exit strategy. I like that. It sounds all corporatelike.”
Again Patrick felt a desperate need to travel through the wires and strangle the little shit.
“Why don’t you tell me what you have in mind?”
“I could tell you, Chris, but then I’d have to kill you.”
Cavanaugh wiped moisture from his nose, then pinched the bridge. Patrick wouldn’t say he seemed worried, exactly, but he did not speak with the confidence he had earlier that morning. It scared him. Cavanaugh had been through this process hundreds of times more than Patrick had, and something about this situation was atypical. But then, hell, from Paul to Theresa to Rachael, nothing about the day had been typical.
“I’ll go first,” Cavanaugh offered. “If you put down the weapons and come out, you have my word that you will not be harmed in any way.”
“You can go first, last, and always, Chris. It doesn’t matter, because this is not a negotiation. We’ll leave when we want to leave, and if your cops try to stop us, we’ll kill a few hostages. End of story.”
“If you hurt people, I can’t guarantee your safety.”
“We’ve already hurt people, in case you haven’t been paying attention. So I’m guessing our safety has become irrelevant. At least I can still pick the way I go.”
Patrick found himself chewing on a knuckle. Lucas had gotten it, finally-he had no way out. He could collect the money, he could keep the cops at bay by threatening the hostages, he could trade barbs with the famous negotiator-he could do everything but leave. He had two choices: He could give up, or he could go out in a blaze of glory or some other suitably dramatic ending.
Dreamy, his sister had said. Romantic.
Patrick had no doubt which choice Lucas would take.
“That’s not true.” Cavanaugh continued to work on it. “We can still salvage the situation. No one else has to die today. We can work this out as long as we trust each other.”