Takeover

they have to know they’re going to go to jail?”

“Mostly it’s about listening. You have to be a good listener. I’ll bet you would be good at it.”

“Not me.” She shuddered. “I don’t want live people depending on me.”

Cavanaugh laughed. “Dead ones are okay?”

“Precisely. I could fail to solve their case, to get justice for them, but I can’t make them any more dead.” She finished the water. “That probably sounds wimpy, but I don’t care.”

“It sounds sensible.”

“You, on the other hand-do you ever have to decide who lives and who dies?”

“Not in this case,” he said, neatly sideswiping the question. “The hostages are all together, and that simplifies matters. In domestics, particularly, you can have them scattered around in different rooms, so that at any given moment some are safe, some are not. We adjust our thinking accordingly.”

If it came down to Paul, who had chosen to be in the line of fire by virtue of his profession, and a civilian, he would adjust his thinking accordingly. She needed to stay with Cavanaugh, to be sure that did not happen.

She let out what had been weighing on her mind for the past hour. “Can’t we give them their damn car and let them move on?”

“Not in light of his parting statements. They take any person with them out of that bank, that person’s dead. Otherwise I’d be happy to let them have the car and all the money they want, and I don’t even care if they get away. That’s someone else’s problem. But I can’t give them a hostage.” He glanced at her face. “Don’t look like that. It’s not hopeless. I’m going to try to trade the car for leaving all the hostages behind.”

“They’ll never go for that. They have to know that once they poke their heads out that door without a hostage in front of their face, they’re dead.”

“That’s why it makes more sense to give themselves up. You have to let them reason through the scenarios themselves. Eventually they’ll get a grip on what is and is not a realistic option.” He glanced at her face again. “I just said it isn’t hopeless. I didn’t say it’ll be easy.”

Kessler stood to throw out his coffee cup. “But why kill Mark Ludlow? And if they’ve already killed once, doesn’t that make them more likely to… um…”

“We’re not completely sure they had anything to do with Ludlow,” Cavanaugh said. “We’re not even reasonably sure. But if they did, they don’t know that his body has been found or that we suspect he’s connected to this robbery. They want to have the option to walk away from this without anyone getting hurt, because they’re certain to get a lighter sentence that way. If we let them know that we’re waiting to hang a murder charge on them-”

“They have nothing to lose,” Theresa finished.

“Exactly. We need to keep them believing that it’s in their best interest to avoid hurting anyone.” Cavanaugh moved one hand to pick up the phone, then hesitated, long fingers stroking the receiver. “Tell me about your fiance, Theresa.”

Would this man ever stop startling her? “Paul?”

Well, duh. How many other fiances did she have? She took another deep breath. “He’s been a cop for seventeen years. He’s currently a detective in Homicide. He’s a good cop.”

Cavanaugh waited as she tossed her empty bottle into the wastebasket. “I’m sure he’s a great cop, Theresa, but I’m not writing a brochure for the department. Tell me what he’s like.”

Not a word came to mind, and she stared at him in confusion. Glass slides and databases were her bailiwick, not psychology. “I don’t know what you want.”

“It’s an open-ended question, I know. This is why I ask: He’s a cop in their midst, but he’s in plainclothes and he’s not tied up with the security guards, so our two guys in there clearly do not know that he’s a police officer. That means they haven’t searched him, haven’t found his gun, so now he’s ten feet away from these guys and he’s armed. What is he going to do?”

She glanced at the TV screen again; she had trouble looking away from it for more than a few seconds. Not much had changed in her absence. Paul still sat second from the end of the row of hostages, fidgeting now and then but obviously unhurt. “All he’ll care about is protecting those people. Frank says he’s a Boy Scout.”

“What do you think?”

It took her a while to answer. “I think he cares about doing the right thing. That’s why I want to marry him. My ex-husband never cared about the right thing. Paul is more like-”

“Your father?”

She gave a tiny jump, glared at him, and then looked away. She would never admit that; it made her sound like a neurotic little girl. No matter how true it might be.

Cavanaugh, mercifully, moved on. “Where did he propose to you?”

“What?”

“I’m just trying to gather information here, Theresa. Where did he propose?”

She smiled, unable to help it. “In an alley. In the rain. We had just cleared a triple homicide at a bowling alley, with about fifteen shots fired over three rooms-”

Cavanaugh’s dimples were showing, but his eyes seemed deadly serious. “So he’s kind of impulsive? You hadn’t expected a proposal?”

Her mouth formed a no, but that would be a lie. She had expected a proposal from their first kiss. “It wasn’t a complete surprise, but yes, a diamond popping out of nowhere sort of threw me.”

“Ah, he had the ring already. So he’s not that impulsive.”

“No, no. He’d had dinner reservations at Pier W, champagne on ice, the whole scenario, but then the pagers went off.” Apparently impulsivity was not a desired trait during hostage negotiations, which made sense. But what about the hostage takers’ impulses? “What did Lucas mean about having an idea to get the money?”

“I wish I knew. I called back, but he made Missy answer. She said Lucas does not wish to speak to me at this time, and neither does Bobby.”

She nibbled a fingernail, a habit she thought she’d broken in high school. “It would help if we could communicate with Paul. Can’t we text-message the Nextel?”

“It would beep. I already asked his partner that. We can’t risk drawing their attention to him.”

“No,” she agreed fervently. “We can’t. Where is Frank- Officer Patrick?”

“Trying to find someone in this city who knows Bobby Moyers. Supposedly he’s got a brother who works for Continental Airlines, and Patrick went to run him down.”

Jason returned, finishing a sandwich. “They have food in the conference area, you know.”

“Good,” Cavanaugh said. “Can you grab me something on rye?”

Jason tossed a cellophane-wrapped square at him. “I anticipate your every need, boss.”

“Glad to hear it. Now tell me who Lucas is.”

“I just got off the phone with Corrections. There are no known associates under that name in Moyers’s file for the original armed-robbery charge. No cellmates by that name at Mansfield. He only served eight months for that, due to a combination of prison overcrowding, good behavior, and a shaky ID on the ‘armed’ part of the armed robbery.” The young man paused to swig Cherry Coke. “Theresa? You want a sandwich?”

Even the idea of food made her want to retch. “No thanks. I’m fine.”

“Then he got picked up for violating probation.”

“What’d he do?” Cavanaugh asked, breathing a puff of rye-scented breath in Theresa’s direction.

“Bought some cocaine from a gangbanger in the Flats. He used up all his luck on the first charge and had none left for the violation. He not only got six months, he wound up in a test group for prison reform. The theory goes thus: Prison isn’t rehabilitating anyone because they wind up in prison with the same old people operating in the same old gangs and then get out and commit crimes with the same old people in the same old gangs. Send the cons far away where they don’t know anyone and they’re forced to function on their own, so when they get out, they’re better able to resist falling back into their old habits.”

“That almost makes sense.”

“As with all great social experiments, only time will tell.”

“And that’s where he met Lucas.”

Jason shrugged. “Either that or Lucas isn’t his name at all.”

“Where is this far-off reformatory?”

Theresa rubbed the back of her neck again, trying to keep the stiffness there from spreading to her brain. “I bet