hysterical-and her brother, and three other Fed tellers. She’s had no recent changes in her behavior or her habits. She’s been dating the same guy for a year and a half, a production assistant at WMMS. They break up off and on, but he’s been away with a church mission trip for the past ten days, rebuilding homes in New Orleans. Her finances have stayed steady. She deposits her salary and pays her bills. No big purchases. If there’s some dark secret in her life, she’s hidden it well.”
Cavanaugh kept dialing, so Patrick lowered his voice and spoke to Jason. “Lucas, then. Did we ask his sister what Theresa told the sergeant about abuse?”
“I tried her, but the line was busy. Apparently there are still people in this country who don’t have call-waiting. Or a DSL line.”
“Mind if I try?”
“Be my guest.” Jason stood up. “I’ve got to have a bathroom break anyway, or it’s going to get messy in here. Here’s the number.”
Patrick moved out to the center of the building, by the elevators, where the early-afternoon sun slanted through the wall of windows facing the courtyard and the Eastman Reading Garden. Miraculously, Lucas Parrish’s sister answered on the first ring. As soon as he identified himself, she said, “I’m not interested in helping you kill my brother, and besides, I have to be at my post in ten minutes.”
“Ma’am, he’s surrounded by approximately thirty-five cops and security guards. I don’t want anyone to shoot him, because once one bullet flies, you know more will follow, and there’s a lot more people down there besides your brother. So I’m as desperate to keep him alive as you are, understand?”
Slowly she agreed.
“Do you have any idea why your brother is doing this?”
“Why he’s robbing a bank? Because he’s a dreamer without a real job, that’s why.”
“He doesn’t want to work for a living?”
From the tone of her voice, she took no offense at the question. “He’s not lazy-he’s impatient. He wants grand adventures, tons of money, a beautiful woman who will love him forever and ever. He aims too high, I guess you could say.”
“I’ve been told Lucas suffered some abuse as a child. Can you tell me how that happened?” He tried to sound knowledgeable, when in truth he had no idea how Lucas’s friggin’ childhood could help them in this situation. But Theresa had taken some risk to pass along this information, and he would act on it.
“You mean the burns?”
“Uh… yeah.”
“My mother’s husband. Our father, I guess, though I’ve never really been too sure about that.”
“He left when you two were kids?”
“Yeah.” She waited, no doubt wondering what the hell Patrick was getting at. He wondered, too.
Patrick began to pace, then entered the stairwell to move down one floor. “Is that when Lucas began to get in trouble?”
“No. He didn’t go in for petty stuff-he’s never aimed low. I got in more trouble than he did. He liked school, worked part-time here and there. He read a lot. I guess that’s how he got so dreamy-he read books and drew pictures to get through the days at our house. I went out and played football with the boys, climbed fences, anything to be with other people. We all cope in our own ways.”
Patrick couldn’t stand in one place. He escaped the sunlight and slipped between the cool stacks, up to the glass-walled map room. Rachael had her back to him, glued to the monitor, watching the small group of pixels representing her mother.
Patrick asked, “Did he show any violence to other people? Act out against what his father would do?”
“Again, that was me.
Through the glass he could see Rachael’s boyfriend, Craig, offer her a bottle of water, wet with condensation. She took it, and Patrick felt oddly comforted. At least the kid hadn’t gone completely comatose. “What do you mean?”
“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.
