“No,” he said aloud, but he didn’t move.
“This is Maggie…”
“Maggie Koopman,” she supplied.
“Kerr’s clerk,” Reed said.
“I’m so sorry,” Maggie said. “It’s all my fault!”
Frank looked at Reed.
“She says Irene and Seth were with the judge when the phones got knocked out. She said she told them that they should stay—” Reed stopped, then rephrased it. “She offered to go downstairs to check on the problem, which she was convinced was a new-building glitch.”
“A glitch,” Frank repeated dully, looking at the ruins.
“There was no way of knowing it was anything else,” Reed said. “So she left.”
“And the others stayed.” All these words were turning him to stone. He could feel it happening, from the inside out.
“Yes. She’s sure of it. As it was, she went down to the first floor and then, of course, she wasn’t allowed to remain in the building.”
“I told them!” she said miserably. “I told them, ‘I have to go back! Judge Kerr and a reporter and a little boy are still inside!’”
Frank felt Reed’s hand tighten on his shoulder, and he realized he had swayed on his feet. He tried to steady himself, but found he couldn’t, and reached out for Reed’s shoulder with his own hand, bracing himself.
“I told them, ‘You’ve got to let me go back and get them!’” Maggie Koopman was saying. “They told me officers were going through the building floor by floor, evacuating it, and that they’d make sure the judge and the others were brought out safely. But they didn’t!”
“The guy they sent up to get them was on the east stairwell when the next blast hit,” Reed said.
Frank looked at the ruins of the stairwell.
“No,” he said. “No.”
Pete stayed next to him. Talkative Pete, not saying a word. Reed took Maggie Koopman, mourning a man she had worked with for twenty years — whose death she was convinced she had caused — to where her daughter waited to take her home. Pete still hadn’t said a word by the time Reed came back.
“We’ve left a message on your home phone for Elena,” Reed said. “Unless she’s been near a radio or TV, she probably doesn’t even know this has happened.”
Was it a good thing or a bad thing, not to know? he wondered.
Too damn bad, he told himself. You know. So think!
He closed his eyes and thought of Irene looking down on the plaza, seeing the evacuation. He felt sure that she had done so. She looked out windows, and not only because she was claustrophobic. She was an astute observer. They both worked in professions where one survived by observing others.
So Irene looks out on the plaza and sees the evacuation. A clerk tells her to stay where she is. And Irene — Irene stays put?
“She didn’t stay in that office,” he said aloud.
Reed and Pete exchanged a look.
I know Irene, he thought. What did she do next?
His thoughts were interrupted by the barking of a dog — a German shepherd wearing an orange vest bounded over to greet him.
“Hello, Bingle,” he said. “Am I ever glad to see you.”
“He’s glad to see you, too,” Ben Sheridan said as he caught up with his dog. He was wearing orange coveralls with “SAR” printed on the back. “Bingle wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t let him say hello before we got started.”
“Anna here, too?” Frank asked. Ben’s girlfriend was also a dog handler.
“Our whole search-and-rescue dog team is here.” He paused, then said, “They’ve just briefed us.”
Frank looked up but didn’t see the look of sympathy that Pete and Reed wore now. Did Ben know?
“Yes, I know,” Ben said. “Actually, this little greeting ceremony has another purpose.” He smiled. “I told the team that you and Bingle are old friends. I stretched the truth a bit and said that you had already worked with Bingle on a search and that I wanted you to search with us again.”
Frank felt a rush of gratitude so overwhelming, he couldn’t speak for a moment. He finally managed, “Thanks, Ben.”
“Before you thank me, make sure you want to do it. Aside from the fact that it’s dangerous to be crawling around in a structurally damaged building, this work can be grim — even for a homicide detective. We aren’t expecting many victims, thanks to the evacuation. But many is not zero, and we may not make any live finds. And a person found alive may not make it — it takes time to get them out and the injuries tend to be severe.”
Frank nodded.
“Allow me to be ruthless, Frank. Whether the people they find are dead, alive, crushed, or mutilated, these dogs do this work because it’s a game to them — so I’ll have to respond to Bingle’s finds in a positive way, praising him, playing with him — and you have to get the hell away from him if you think you might start to give him any other kind of response. I don’t want you to deck me if I’m playing Frisbee with my dog a few feet away from your wife’s body. That’s one reason we don’t usually bring relatives along for these searches — it’s asking a lot of
