An in-family hostage situation is, in my opinion, the hands-down, no-argument worst kind of situation any police officer will ever face. I learned this a long time ago, when I was fourteen, to be exact. A freebaser named Willie Gonzalez took his family hostage down the street from where Nana Mama and I were living. After Gonzalez shot his pregnant wife, his two young daughters, and then himself, I saw one of the police officers who’d been negotiating with him. The poor cop was sitting in his car crying and drinking from an open pint of Jack Daniel’s.
I’ve had the misfortune to be part of a dozen or so of these kinds of details in my career, a few times as lead negotiator, more often as a psychological consultant. There’s a broad spectrum of things that can happen when you’re a cop: You might have to sharpshoot a terrorist. Or meticulously unravel a kidnapping. Or even outfox a serial killer or two. Any of these situations can mess you up psychologically.
But dealing with someone holding family members hostage is like trying to stop a Mack truck carrying a full load of insanity. Usually the person with the gun-more often than not, it’s an obsessive, substance-abusing male, like Willie Gonzalez-is so far gone he doesn’t give a damn about his hostages, or his future. He blames them for something. He blames himself for something. He can’t get his facts straight or see the truth of his circumstances. It’s a lose-lose situation all the way around.
As for hostage negotiators, well, we are usually smart and well trained, but we rarely pull off the heroics you see in movies. Have I ever seen the abductor listen to the negotiator and then throw down his weapon and come out with his hands up? Sure, about as often as I’ve seen the Redskins win the Super Bowl. Two or three times. It’s in the realm of possibility. But the odds are stacked against it.
We got out of the car and headed toward the police vans where McGoey said officers were trying to reestablish contact with Fowler. Nearly an inch of snow had fallen and the storm was only getting worse. My feet began to freeze again.
“Think they have an extra pair of boots?”
The detective looked at my shoes and said, “I’ve only been here six days.”
“Good point,” I said, thinking that I really did not like cold and snow. “Whose property is this?” I asked, indicating the Georgian brick mansion his car was parked in front of.
“Ambassador from Nigeria. No idea how to pronounce the name.”
“Nice place the ambassador from Nigeria’s got.”
“Yeah, half his country is starving to death, and this dude’s living in six bedrooms in Georgetown. Guess he’s gone for the holidays too.”
“Probably to Lagos. I’ve been there. A real hellhole. Then again, from the look of things, maybe I’d rather be in Lagos tonight myself.”
CHAPTER 5
A good friend of mine, Lieutenant Adam Nu, was the SWAT commander on duty that night. He was the kind of guy who was always thinking ahead. After hearing the weather report earlier, he’d ordered his men to erect tarps and wind blocks behind the two MPD vans. They’d put down outdoor carpet over the snow already on the ground, then run extension cords and put lights up as well. A gas-fired construction heater had been brought in and was blowing two hundred thousand BTUs as members of his team sorted their gear. And he had an extra pair of black tactical boots and wool socks.
“You certainly know how to prepare for a blizzard, Adam,” I said, sitting on a bench inside the makeshift shelter and changing socks.
“Raised in Duluth by a father who loved ice fishing,” Nu said, shrugging.
“You have men already deployed?” I asked.
Nu confirmed that he had several men set up at different distances and places around the Nicholsons’ house. The snow made it impossible to put our people on the roofs of the adjacent homes, the ideal locations. But he had men trying to track down the absentee owners to get permission to enter their homes. That way, the officers could take up window positions, where they might be able to peer inside the Nicholsons’ residence with binoculars or thermal imaging systems.
Nu also had heavily armored SWAT officers constantly circling the house along the perimeter of the property. They each carried a SIG Sauer P226, a high-powered rifle with precision location.
“Shouldn’t those guys be set up to snipe?” McGoey asked.
“I have enough,” Nu said. “And FBI research has shown that moving men keep the perp off balance. Sometimes confuses him into revealing himself.”
“Floor plans?” I asked.
“Ramiro’s got a copy inside,” Nu said, and we entered the van on the left.
Detective Diego Ramiro, another friend, as well as a hostage negotiator with far more experience than me, was one of three people in the van who were speed-dialing the landline inside the Nicholson home and the cell phones belonging to the doctor, his wife, and the wife of Congressman Brandywine.
For all we knew, Fowler had seized all phones. For all we knew, Fowler enjoyed the nonstop ringing. That’s just how variable and bizarre these family hostage situations can be.
Ramiro, a thickly built guy in his early fifties, punched off his own cell, looked at me in extreme frustration, and said, “Alex, we can’t do a goddamned thing if this son of a bitch won’t pick up his phone and talk to us.”
I’d worked with Ramiro before. He wasn’t one to lose his cool. Then again, like me, like everyone there, he wasn’t home on Christmas Eve. We were all stuck in a blizzard, waiting for a lunatic to answer the phone.
I said, “How long have we been calling Fowler?”
Diego flipped through his notepad. “We started almost an hour ago.”
McGoey said, “That’s when Fowler was real chatty about who he had in there and what kinds of guns and ammo he had.”
“Keep talking to him,” I said. “Leave messages. Every single time.”
Ramiro nodded, gave the order to the others. I sat there listening for several moments, wishing to God I had more information on Fowler. What had taken him from a life as a wealthy attorney to this desperate hour?
I’d no sooner asked myself that question when Ramiro waved his finger at me and McGoey, then hit a button on his mobile. It was connected wirelessly to speakers inside the van. We heard a woman’s muffled voice, noises, and then a whimper. We held our breath and stared at the speakers as if they were video monitors.
“Mr. Fowler?” Ramiro began. “Thank you for-”
Gunshots exploded on the other end of the line.
The Christmas horror show had begun-or maybe it had just ended.
CHAPTER 6
Damon stood on tiptoes on a wobbly kitchen chair. He was sweating and trying very hard to hook a delicate antique angel to the top of the Christmas tree.
“I’ll get a stepladder, get up there myself,” Nana Mama said.
“I don’t need a stepladder and I’m certainly not letting my ninety-year-old great-grandmother use one,” Damon shot back.
“You’re just lazy,” Nana Mama declared. “Your father raise you like that, or are you majoring in that subject at that fancy prep school you go to?”
Damon didn’t know whether to be angry or start laughing at the fact that she was busting his chops like this. At last his fingers secured the angel to the tree with a piece of ancient white lace Nana Mama said had belonged to her grandmother.
“There,” he said, jumping off the chair and looking at the old woman. “A little applause?”
“For what?” his great-grandmother asked.
“For getting the angel up there?”
“Oh, that,” she said. “You’d have gotten me that stepladder, I’d have done it myself a lot quicker.”
