He reached over the table and picked up the Luger, but then moved to the window, peering out from behind faded canvas curtains. “Yes, answer it.”
She pulled out the phone, which showed an unfamiliar number. “Hello?”
“We have to stop meeting like this,” Chris Cavanaugh said. The Cleveland Police Department’s star hostage negotiator, whose star had dimmed only slightly in the months since the bank robbery.
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“How is everyone in there? How’s the baby?”
“Just fine.”
“We’re going to get through this okay, Theresa,” he said with that firm, deep tone of voice that brought to mind his dimples and his utter self-possession, and which would be so terribly comforting to someone on the brink of panic. But somehow it always had the opposite effect on her.
“I know that. Unlike our last encounter, Chris, I am not in any danger here. Drew is not going to harm me or Cara. He just wants to talk.” She enunciated her words carefully, turning her head so the man at the window would be sure to hear her.
“Does he want to talk to me?”
She asked. Drew shook his head. “No, he doesn’t.”
“But it’s okay with him if you stay on the line?”
She inquired. “He says it’s fine.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants Cara removed from Evan Kovacic’s custody.”
“Yeah, your cousin filled me in on your theory. We’ll have to find a compromise.”
“You’re good at that.”
“I hope someday you can speak to me without sneering.”
Tears pricked at her eyes again. Why could she not concede an inch to this man? “I’m-look, I’m-”
“Never mind. One thing, though. Don’t listen to Drew about grief. He’s wrong. It doesn’t have to last the rest of your life.”
Her brief thawing iced over again. “How would
She hung up.
“What’s the matter?” Drew asked, leaving the window. “What did he say?”
“He wants to know what your demands are.” She pondered Cavanaugh’s words. The microphone pen in her pocket-she had forgotten about it. They had been listening to her conversation the whole time, which meant that they knew about Drew’s snowmobile escape route. She had to keep him calm and on the boat. But for how long?
“I heard you tell him. He said no, right?”
“No, he said we’d have to work out a compromise. I’m sure we can get protective custody for Cara. Families with Dependent Children always removes children from a home if there’s a chance of abuse, so it can’t be that hard-”
He sat across from her, the Luger held loosely in one hand. “But they won’t give her to me.”
“Not immediately, of course. She would be cared for by the state until this is settled, which should be only a few days.”
His eyes watched the infant in Theresa’s arms as she stretched in her sleep, one tiny fist protruding from the blanket. “I saw Jillian in her from the first day, when I visited the maternity ward. She has Jillian’s eyes. It’s as if Jillian lives on in her.”
“It always seems like that with parents and children, but it’s only true to a point and sometimes isn’t true at all. I know, I have a daughter. She’s an individual.” How to get out of this? Drew wouldn’t budge unless they took custody away from Evan, but the state had no obligation to remove the child unless the stepfather became a suspect in a crime, and she could not provide probable cause to prompt same, certainly not while holed up in a houseboat over a frozen lake. Catch-22.
“And being so close to her for a few hours like this,” Drew went on as if Theresa hadn’t spoken, “I don’t think I can let her go. I’ve already lost Jillian. I can’t say good-bye to Cara too.”
“But it’s not-”
“If somehow it came about that you had to say good-bye to Paul all over again, could you do it?”
The words pierced, like an ice pick to her gut. No. No, of course not.
Pull yourself together. “Cara is not Jillian, Drew. She’s a baby who needs a lot of attention and-”
The phone rang.
“I’m sorry, Theresa,” Chris told her without preamble. “I never manage to say the right thing to you.”
“One person out of a city of four hundred and fifty thousand isn’t bad, Chris.” Going to be bitchy to the last, aren’t we?
“I need to keep Cara,” Drew said to her, a touch too loudly, as if he wanted Chris Cavanaugh to hear him. “Yes or no?”
“Drew-” she tried.
Chris asked, “What does he mean, keep? Permanently? Another hour? I thought he just wanted her away from Evan.”
“Yes or no!”
“Drew, it isn’t that simple, you know that. You’re not a blood relative-”
“It’s going to be that simple.” He stood up and crossed to an old-fashioned black plastic telephone. “You and I and Cara are leaving. I have to carry this pack with the books, so you’ll have to hang on to her. They won’t shoot at us, not with you and Cara along.”
“Drew, you have to think of what’s best for Cara, and I’m sure that flying over partially frozen ice is not it.” She did not think about the open line in her hand, with Cavanaugh listening at the other end, and apparently Drew didn’t either.
“It’s solid.” He put his hand on the phone.
Theresa thought of the freezing water churning below the stiff surface. Lake Erie was the shallowest of the Great Lakes…it froze fast but thawed fast too. Plunging into the frigid green-“I won’t go. I can’t, Drew, I’m scared. And I won’t let you take the baby over it either.”
“It’s the only way. Cara is all I have now.” He picked up his phone. “And you.”
“Theresa,” Chris said in her ear.
Drew held the receiver to his ear but made no move to dial a number. The expression on his face smoothed to bland shock, an unblinking surprise. “It’s dead.”
They had heard his plan over the microphone and taken the simplest of precautions. They had cut his phone service. He could not contact the friend at the airport.
She allowed herself the tiniest sigh of relief. Drew remained more stunned than angry; he had no way to determine the presence of the microphone, probably assumed that cutting his communication would be standard procedure for the situation, which, of course, it was. “Drew, all you want to do is keep Cara safe. So do we.”
“There is no we, Theresa. They’ll take her away from us and give her back to Evan. They did it once and you can’t give them a reason not to do it again.”
“But-” Words came with difficulty, mostly because she agreed with him.
He picked up the small nylon backpack and strapped it on. “Let’s go.”
All right, she thought. Screw the hostage-negotiation manual. Chris might not be allowed to lie to him, but I can. I can lie through my teeth. “I can get them to put Cara in protective custody and give me a search warrant to examine the factory’s nitrogen tanks. I’ll find the hoses and things he used to pump the gas from the tanks to the plastic hood. He won’t have any way to explain that-”
“Circuit boards,” Drew said, reaching over his head to add a box of 9-millimeter ammunition to the backpack.
“What?”
“The nitrogen hoods are for soldering the circuit boards for the game hardware. Here’s another blanket for Cara. We don’t want her to catch cold.”
Theresa blinked at him.
He zipped the pack shut, and carefully, chillingly, clicked off the safety on the gun. “Soldering in an oxygen
