John touches his fingertip to the figure of a brunette woman exiting through the automatic doors. “Look how tall she is compared to this other woman.” His finger slides onto a blonde frozen in the entrance door; she looks almost a foot shorter than the brunette. Then his finger slides back. “I think this is Gaines.”
Baxter crouches before the screen and squints. “Damn it. You’re right. He shaved, put on a wig and coat, picked up a handbag, and walked right past our people.”
“Probably brought a battery-powered shaver with him,” says Lenz.
Baxter straightens up and turns to the security chief. “Let everybody go.”
The man nods and hurries away to quell the incipient rebellion.
“He’s been gone fifteen minutes, minimum,” says John. “He could be anywhere.”
“We’re less than a mile from the international airport,” Baxter thinks aloud. He lifts the radio to his mouth. “Liebe, your whole detail is going to the airport. Come back here first.”
“Yes, sir.”
Baxter touches Gaines’s image on the screen and looks at the tech. “Can you give me a print of this ‘woman’?”
“No problem.”
“Print twenty. And twenty of him the way he looked in the hardware aisle. An Agent Liebe will be back here to get them.” Baxter looks at John. “Back to the office?”
John walks over to the gray wall, then back, as though pacing will give him some insight into the situation. “We should leave somebody in the parking lot. In about a minute, a customer is going to start yelling that his car was stolen while he was trapped in here. Once we know the make, we can put everything we have in the air.”
A muted ring sounds in the room. John pulls his cell phone from his jacket. “Kaiser here… Just now?… Put him through.” He looks at Baxter. “Roger Wheaton just called the office and asked them to page me. He said it was an emergency.”
“Wheaton?” says Lenz.
“Hello?” John covers his open ear and turns away from us to concentrate. “Yes, sir, John Kaiser… Can you get out of the building?… I understand. Can you get them out?…Listen to me, Mr. Wheaton. If you can’t get them out, get yourself out. They’re not your responsibility… We’re on the way. Get to safety and wait for us to arrive.”
John whirls to face us. “Gaines just sandbagged Roger Wheaton in his office at the Woldenberg Art Center. Gaines claimed he’s being framed by the FBI and that he needs money to get out of the country.”
“Is he armed?” asks Baxter.
John nods. “Wheaton told Gaines he would drive him to the bank and get him money, but that his wallet and keys were down in the gallery where he was painting. Gaines told Wheaton if he wasn’t back in two minutes, he’d take students hostage and start killing them. There are fifty to seventy students spread through the building, and they have no idea what’s happening. Wheaton ran down to another office and called us.”
“Why not the police?” asks Lenz. “And why ask for you?”
“He said he didn’t want Gaines shot out of hand. He’s actually worried about that son of a bitch.”
“I don’t want him shot either,” I say sharply. “He may be the only person in the world who knows where the women are.”
Baxter takes out his cell phone and hits a speed-dial button. “This is Baxter. Give me SAC Bowles, right now.” He looks at John. “We need a chopper out here – Patrick? Leon Gaines is at the art center at Tulane, and he probably has hostages. We need SWAT out there ASAP… How many choppers do you have in the air?… Send them both to the Kenner Wal-Mart parking lot. And you’d better alert the task force. Be sure they know who’s running the scene at Tulane… I’ll keep you posted.” Baxter waves away a sheaf of photo prints the tech holds up to him and looks at John. “We’ll have two choppers outside in three minutes. Let’s move.”
Hurtling over New Orleans at a hundred knots, you can see why people call it the Crescent City. The older sections sit in a great bend in the Mississippi River, the main streets either fanning into the bend or running with it. Today the river flows the color of slate, thanks to a gray overcast, but a broad shaft of sunlight to the south shows a patch of familiar reddish brown.
John and Baxter ride the lead chopper, Dr. Lenz and I the one behind. Below us, Audubon Park stretches north from the river to St. Charles Avenue; north of St. Charles begins the rectangular garden that is Tulane University. As the lead chopper swings over a golf course and drops toward Tulane, an overwhelming sense of deja vu brings sweat to my face and hands. I’ve descended into many cities this way, clinging to a spar with my cameras around my neck: Sarajevo, Maputo, Karachi, Baghdad, San Salvador, Managua, Panama City. The list is endless, but the city below me now is the one in which I began my career, and it strikes me that the symmetry of my ending it here might be quite a temptation for the fates. If so, I accept the risk. The placid green island below harbors a desperate situation, but in the resolution of it lies the answer to the mystery that has haunted me for more than a year.
The cockpit radio spits and crackles as a deskbound FBI agent with a university map guides the pilots toward their LZ. The helicopter drops fast enough to make my stomach roll, and I wonder if John and Baxter are flashing back to Vietnam as we auger in. Parked at the center of one grassy quadrangle are two police cars with their lights flashing, while beside them an olive-drab Huey helicopter sits like a harbinger of battle, its main rotor slowly turning. I saw several Hueys on the National Guard base contiguous to the FBI field office lot; the FBI SWAT team has probably deployed from that chopper.
As I search the quad for armed men, we dip forward and bore in, at the last second flaring and coming to rest thirty yards from the lead chopper. John jumps out of his cockpit and runs toward us, while Baxter moves toward the waiting NOPD cops.
“It’s not good!” John yells as I get out and run in a crouch beneath our rotor. “Gaines has a male hostage in a third-floor office. He’s come to the window to show he has a gun to the guy’s head. SWAT has set up a command post under the trees in front of the building.”
Baxter runs over from the squad car. “Let’s get over there, John!”
“Who’s the negotiator?” Dr. Lenz asks, appearing suddenly.
“Ed Davis,” John replies. “He’s good.”
“This isn’t a normal situation,” Lenz says, directing his words to Baxter. “This isn’t a distraught husband or a suicidal cop. This is a probable serial murderer. You know-”
“I know what you want, Arthur,” Baxter says brusquely. “We’ll discuss it with the SWAT commander.”
“Talk to Bowles,” says Lenz. “It’s his call.”
Baxter starts running toward a large building on the north edge of the quad that I now recognize as the Woldenberg Art Center. John and I follow, with Lenz puffing after us. I should have recognized the building from the air, with its three massive skylights over the gallery where Roger Wheaton’s room-sized painting awaits its first public showing. From this angle, the building appears as two three-story brick boxes separated by a one-story section fronted with arches. If I remember correctly, the classical boxes house classrooms, studios, and offices, while the long section houses the art gallery. Gaines must be inside one of the two end sections.
The closer we get to the building, the harder it is to see. Massive spreading oaks line the road in front of it, obscuring most of the windows. Beneath one of the oaks, a knot of men in black body armor with “FBI” stenciled in yellow crouch around what looks like a map. John reaches them first, and immediately begins talking to one of the men on the ground. Baxter takes out his cell phone and dials a number, and Dr. Lenz hovers beside him. I edge in to listen to the SWAT leader briefing John. He’s a tall man in his thirties with a black mustache, and a patch on his flak vest reads “Burnette.”
“Gaines is still on the third floor,” says Burnette. “He’s keeping his gun to the hostage’s head when we can see him, but most of the time, our view is obscured by Venetian blinds. There’s no high ground for snipers, so we’re going to put a man up in the Huey and have the pilot hold a hover. That’s not a good solution, but until we get some scaffolding out here, it’s the only way to get a bead on that office. We also have two men on the roof with rappelling gear. They can drop and crash the window, but that’s not my call. We’ve rescued about forty students and faculty so far, but there may be twenty or so still on the floor with Gaines, some in small private studios. He’s barricaded the main access door. Those kids could be completely ignorant of the danger or completely under
