meet you for a long time. Don't keep a friend waiting.'
She knelt, silent, hoped he would search the other offices, turn his back so she could make a run for it. Her heart felt like it was ready to burst through her blouse, she could feel sweat dripping down her sides.
'Henry and me, we bonded the other day.' She heard footsteps, looked up, saw he was moving through the office. 'Like brothers from different mothers, we might have been. Every yin needs a yang, every bad penny needs a good one to even things out. He's my bad penny.'
The footsteps grew closer and Amanda dropped back to the ground. She scuttled behind her desk, crawled underneath and curled her knees to her chest. She bit her lip to keep it from trembling. She was too scared to cry.
Roberts moved closer. She heard a squeak as the doorknob turned. Suddenly she heard a bump come from the other office, and the knob stopped turning. The footsteps grew fainter.
Amanda crawled back to the door, looked up just in time to see Roberts disappear into the conference room.
'Where's Amanda?' she heard him say. There came a wheezy response from a male voice-she recognized Phil, the intern. Poor Phil had only been here a week. She hoped he was making a killer stipend.
Amanda brought her hand up to the doorknob, slowly it turned until it stopped. Looking up, she saw that the adjacent office was empty. Slowly she eased the door open just enough to fit her slim body through. She eased the door shut. The stairwell was less than twenty feet away. She could make it. There were still noises coming from the other room. Now or never.
She crawled along the wall, keeping her eyes on the other office where Roberts had entered. Saw William's black shoes pointing away from the door. She took it a step at a time, taking deep, slow breaths to slow her heart rate. Twenty feet.
Eighteen. Fifteen. She was past the door, closer to the exit than Roberts. She slowly stood up. Took one more step.
Peeked around, braced herself, planted her feet to sprint away.
Just as she took her first step, she felt a sharp pain as a hand gripped her hair and spun her around.
Her breath caught in her throat as Amanda looked into the grinning face and wild eyes of William Roberts.
She couldn't fight back. His hand was on her neck. The
Winchester was slung over his neck. And in his other hand was a knife nearly half a foot long, a streak of glistening red blood on the blade.
'Miss Davies,' he said, his voice metallic and calm. 'If you'll please join me.'
'Wh…what do you mean? Where?'
'Somewhere a little, oh, scenic. The last girl, Mya, sad to say she's probably going to make it.' He smiled at her. Then he said, 'Problem is, I didn't drop her from nearly high enough. That's a mistake that won't happen again.'
56
I shared a cab with Jack. My legs were jittery as I kept redialing Amanda's number on my cell phone. It went right to voice mail every time. I called 911. Tried to figure out what the hell was going on. I got the feeling from the exasperated woman on the other end that I wasn't nearly the first to call it in. I hung up without learning anything.
I called Curt Sheffield, praying there was some sort of mistake. His voice instantly told me the situation was worse than I imagined.
'Dude, 911 got about a hundred calls in a three-minute span,' he said, his voice breathless and uneven. 'All from newspapers and television stations. The NYPD has a freaking battalion on our way down there, but man, they're going to be a few minutes, the choppers say there's already a few dozen reporters at the scene. Somehow you guys at the news desks got wind of this before the cops did. Listen, Carruthers is on the rampage. I'll call you soon as I know anything.'
Curt hung up.
'What'd he say?' Jack asked. His voice was scared, his breath slightly sour.
'Nothing we don't know,' I said. 'But it seems like the news crews got tipped off somehow before the NYPD. There might be a few reporters down there already.'
The cab rounded the corner, arrived at 199 Water Street.
Or at least got as close as it could. Because when we saw the crowd in front of the building, both of our jaws dropped.
Jack said, 'I have a small quibble with your definition of the word 'few.''
Surrounding the building's entrance were at least a hundred reporters and a dozen news vans. They lined the street like a cattle drive stuck in Neutral.
'What the…' Jack said.
'Hell…' I finished.
Dozens of sports-jacketed journos were in the middle of writing copy while news correspondents were already being primped for their on-camera reporting. Cameramen were pushing and shoving, jockeying for the best lighting to both hide their stars' blemishes and capture the best angle of the building behind them. It was an unmitigated madhouse.
And there wasn't a cop in sight.
'This has to be a mistake,' Jack said. 'I've never seen anything like this.'
'No way,' I said. 'This is no mistake.'
Looking at the building, I could see several confused people staring out their office windows down at the gathering outside, oblivious to what was going on just a few floors above or below them. And in the time I took to assess the situation, three more news vans pulled up, five more nattily dressed reporters piled out, followed by several burly not-asnattily-dressed cameramen. They all joined the horde and began applying makeup.
There were no cops anywhere to be seen.
Roberts.
He couldn't have taken the office more than twenty minutes ago. That's when I spoke to Amanda. That's the last I heard from her.
'Crazy son of a bitch,' I said. 'Roberts tipped off the press before hitting Water Street. Only a sick fuck would call the press prior to a crime he intended to commit. He called the press so they'd show up before the cops. He wanted it like this.'
'This isn't just one newspaper,' Jack said. 'I think everyone who's ever held a press badge is here. Informing a thousand reporters about a hostage situation in New York is like throwing a slab of rancid meat into an ant farm.'
Roberts wanted the press to have the kind of unimpeded access cops would normally prevent. Right now, the news crews were free to roam. There was no yellow tape, nobody holding the crowd back, no gruff detectives or crisis management teams giving inconvenient 'no comments.'
This was the very definition of a free press.
A reporter wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit and fiberglass hair walked up to the main entrance, cupped his hands and peered inside. He cocked his head, turned back and shouted, 'Jesus, I think I see someone lying down behind the security desk. I think I see blood, I think the security guard is dead.' He turned to the cameraman. 'You think we should go inside?'
His cameraman, six-four with a body that looked like it was fueled at the local Krispy Kreme, carried the camera over to him. He glared inside.
'Why not? Let me get a light reading, make sure this thing will transmit.'
Suddenly I was sprinting over to the entrance. I shoved fiberglass hair against the side of the building and pressed my forearm into his chest.
