47
The apartment building had been quietly evacuated. SWAT leader Sergeant Lou Marcus led half his team down the narrow hall, while a lanky blond man Horn had heard addressed as Newman led more of the team up the fire stairs in back.
Marcus and three other SWAT members had come up in the elevator. It would take Newman longer in back, so their timing had to be right. There was no telling what was inside the Vine apartment, so there was no more communication over the two ways that might be overheard. The working assumption was that no one inside the apartment knew it was just them and the SWAT team in the building. When Newman and his men were positioned at the back door, the door would be taken down and a diversion device would be fired into the apartment.
During this brief suspension of time, Marcus’s part of the team would batter down the front door and stream inside.
When the stun grenade went off, everyone had precious few seconds to operate in with comparative safety. So all hell would break loose. While SWAT members were invading the apartment from both ends, NYPD uniforms would be entering the building and pounding up the stairs, as reinforcements arrived by car. Five, maybe ten seconds, while the element of surprise applied.
Everything might depend on making the most of those seconds.
Marcus checked behind him. The two men with him were ready with the battering ram that would swing forward on thick leather straps and make short work of the ancient wood door. While the door was still flying open, they would enter with Heckler and Koch MP5 automatic weapons at the ready.
It sure made the mouth dry, Marcus was thinking, when a tremendous roar shook the building. Even here in the hall his ears were ringing. Anyone inside had to be paralyzed with shock.
Marcus waved his right hand and the battering ram slammed into the door, shattering wood and crashing it open on the first attempt. He gulped down his fear and led the way inside, smelling the burned stench left by the grenade.
And within seconds, with mixed emotions of relief and disappointment, he saw through faint smoke that the room he was in was empty.
A dark, bulky figure appeared in the hall. One of Newman’s men.
Quickly the SWAT members moved from room to room, dancing with nerve and purpose, swinging their MP5s in arcs. Shouts of “Clear,”
“Clear,” sounded shortly after each room was entered.
Then: “In here! East bedroom!”
Marcus went.
The small room was suddenly filled with equipment-laden, menacing figures in dark uniforms. They stood leaning forward tensely, guns like extensions of their bodies, alert as prey though they were the hunters.
Their attention was focused on a small, huddled figure wedged between the bed and the wall. A woman in what looked like a faded red robe pulled tightly around her as if for protection, though her bare legs were exposed. Her entire body was shaking so violently that beads of perspiration flew from her wild damp hair.
Guns were trained on her as the bed was pulled farther away from the wall.
Two of the SWAT members gripped her beneath the arms, yanked her upright, then forced her facedown on the bed while handcuffs were snapped around her wrists.
“Cindy Vine?” Marcus asked in a loud voice.
The woman managed to nod.
Cindy Vine couldn’t stop trembling and sobbing while she was informed she was under arrest on suspicion of being an accessory to murder. She began gnawing her lower lip as her rights were read to her.
“Where’s Joseph Vine?” Marcus asked her.
Cindy merely shook her head and continued sobbing. Her hair, which was made even wetter by her tears, was stuck across her eyes. One of the SWAT team gently brushed it aside. She continued to sob.
“Do you know the whereabouts of your husband?” Marcus asked again in a voice neither threatening nor soothing.
But she was sobbing too hard to answer.
They waited patiently until she’d calmed down, then asked again, but she would only tuck in her chin, clench her eyes shut, and remain silent.
Marcus knew that for the time being he’d lost her. Cindy Vine’s stunned psyche had carried her somewhere else. She wasn’t going to talk. He might as well have been questioning a piece of the room’s furniture.
As Horn turned the corner of Vine’s block, he saw half a dozen police cars angled in at the curb, and beyond them a police van. The street was blocked except for one lane that let traffic siphon through. There were knots of pedestrians at each end of the street. Uniforms held everyone back at both ends of the block unless they were residents or police.
Horn showed his shield out the car window, then he parked near one of the cruisers across the street from a rundown stone and brick apartment building that had a skeletal steel framework but no awning over its entrance. A tall uniform was standing directly in front of the entrance with his feet planted wide and his arms crossed.
Horn showed his ID again to the uniform at the door, the large man with the scarred face who’d guarded Anne at the apartment and hospital. The man told him the Vines’ apartment number, on the sixth floor.
A few minutes later, as Horn stepped from the elevator and made his way down the hall toward the open door, he could hear voices, all male, drifting from the Vines’ apartment.
When he entered, there was Rollie Larkin, a plainclothes detective Horn didn’t know, and three dark- uniformed SWAT guys with automatic weapons. Dwarfed by all the good-sized men in the small living room was a thin woman curled in a corner of a sofa with her legs tucked beneath her. Her head was bowed and her lank brown hair was plastered to most of her face, leaving only her nose exposed, reminding Horn of a character left over from
“Cindy Vine,” Larkin said to Horn, and motioned toward the woman.
“No Mr. Vine?”
“ ‘Fraid not. And the missus isn’t talking.”
The plainclothes detective, a middle-aged chunky guy in a better suit than most cops would wear, leaned down so his head was near Cindy Vine’s. He had his shield out of its wallet and pinned carelessly to his suitcoat’s lapel, and when he bent over, its weight tugged at the dark gray material.
“Mrs. Vine?” he said. “Cindy? You do understand you’d be helping your husband if you told us where he is?”
The hair mask moved and it looked like she might have shaken her head no, but she made no sound.
The detective stood up. “She’s been like that, silent. Probably still in shock from when the SWAT team did their thing. Percussion grenade and all.”
“Hell of a thing to have happen in your home,” Horn said. He moved over and stooped down so he could see Cindy Vine’s pretty but haggard, tearstained face beneath all the hair. She continued her empty staring at the carpet. “Mrs. Vine, has anyone apologized to you for breaking in the way they did?”
She raised her head slightly and glanced at him, then looked back at the floor, or maybe at his shoes.
“Would you accept my apology?”
She sat up suddenly so her back and cuffed wrists were pressed against the sofa, then threw her head back so she didn’t have to look at him and was staring at the ceiling. She closed her eyes.
He took that for a no.
Horn straightened up, feeling it in his knees and hearing cartilage crack.
“We’re getting old,” Larkin said behind him. “Fucking shame.” Then to the detective with the dangling badge, “Take her in. Do her a favor and call Legal Aid.”
Cindy Vine moved like a zombie as she was led from the apartment.
