Indelible (13 page)

“How lovely for you,” Wagner said, turning back to Nick. “Who else?”

Nick continued walking and they followed. “Sara Linton, town pediatrician and coroner.”

Her lip curled in a smile. “That's novel.”

“She was married to our Chief of Police,” Nick said. “Jeffrey Tolliver.”

“Just give me the names of the living.”

He stopped at the open cleaners' door, where Hemming and her fellow patrolman still stood guard. “There's three kids in there, around ten years old and freaked the fuck out.”

“The pediatrician's probably helping. How many children were killed?”

“None,” Nick answered. “One of them's in the hospital, might lose his foot. School's in the process of tracking down parents. A lot of them commute to Macon for work, but we've identified all the kids.” He paused to regroup. “There's another officer inside. Barry Fordham. He was shot pretty bad from what Frank could see.”

“We have to assume he's dead,” Wagner said matter-of-factly as she walked into the cleaners. Inside, the crowd of officers and agents cleared a path for her. Wagner glanced around the room, her gaze assessing everyone from the four GBI agents Nick had brought to Molly Stoddard, Sara's nurse. She finally turned her sights back on Lena, saying, “Would you get me some coffee, dear? Black, two sugars.”

Lena felt a flicker of anger, but she walked over to the coffeemaker to do as she was told. Pat Morris tried to catch her eye, but she ignored him.

Wagner leaned against the edge of the folding table, addressing the group. “First is the initial assault. You've got—what—five bodies in there?”

Lena bit back her pride and provided, “There's
another patrol cop missing,” as she dumped two packs of sugar into a paper cup.

“Six bodies, then,” Wagner said. “The whole town's lit up with this. There's only one reason he's not checking in.”

“Marilyn,” Nick corrected. “The missing cop is a woman.”

“That's the two extra shots you heard. They're going to take out the ones most likely to resist. The uniforms will be big bull's-eyes. Perhaps your shaky one”—she walked over to Lena and poured the coffee herself—“doesn't seem threatening enough. That's saved your Brad his life. For now.”

Wagner checked her watch before asking, “Do we have a ventilation plan for the station?”

Frank said, “All the plans are at the town hall. We've already got two people searching.”

“That's our priority.” Wagner told one of her men, “James, be so kind as to go with Nicky to help speed the search along.” Before they could leave, she added, “Let's see about cutting the water while you're at it.”

Frank asked, “What's the next step?”

Wagner sipped her coffee before answering. “They'll secure the area. Put all the prisoners in one place so they can control them. Step three, they make sure no one can get in. They'll barricade the doors, and since the shooter who is obviously in charge was smart enough to bring a friend, one will always stay on point to make sure no surprises come through the front door.”

She took another sip of coffee as she seemed to calculate variables in her head. “They've had ample
time to do all of this, which means they'll soon be moving on to step four, which is to make their demands. That's where the negotiations come in. First, they're going to want the water and power back, then food. What
we
want is a chance to get inside that place.” She saw Lena open her mouth to volunteer and Wagner held up a finger, saying, “We'll get to that when we come to it.”

Frank said, “We got parents want to talk to their kids.”

“That won't happen,” Wagner told him. “The goal from our end is to keep as much emotion out of this as possible. We're not going to have crying parents pleading for their children's lives. Our shooters already know how valuable the hostages are without us reinforcing the fact.”

“What else?” Lena asked. “What happens next?”

“They'll get hungry or want to see themselves on TV. Eventually, we'll get to the point where we've traded everything we can and they'll want out of there. We need to anticipate what they'll want at that point besides money. They always want money—unmarked and small denominations.” She paused. “We need to find their car. They didn't sprout wings and fly here, and they're certainly not planning on leaving that way.”

Lena said, “There's a lake behind the college.”

“Private?”

“Semi,” she said. “It's hard to get a boat in without people seeing, but you can if you want to badly enough.”

Wagner picked out one of Nick's people. “That'll be you, okay? Take a couple of men and search the
shore for boats. We're talking walking distance from the scene. They didn't plan a leisurely hike as part of their getaway.” She asked Frank, “I suppose any reports filed on missing boats in the last week are inside the station?”

“Yeah.”

“You've rerouted 9-1-1 calls?”

“Yeah,” Frank repeated. “To the fire station up the street.”

“Could you please see if anyone reported a missing boat this morning?”

Frank picked up one of the telephones on the counter to make the call.

Wagner looked at the two remaining men on her team. “We'll get the children out first for food and water.” She asked Lena, “Is there a water cooler in there?”

“In the back by the jails.”

“How many toilets?”

Lena did not understand the question, but she answered, “One.”

She saw Lena's confusion and explained, “Drinking water. There's around a gallon and a half of water in the tank. They'll use that between themselves.”

Frank hung up the phone. “No missing boats,” he said. “I put out a feeler on the radio to see if anyone remembers taking a report.”

“Good man,” Wagner said. Then, to her team, “We'll try to get the old woman or the patrolman out after the children. They won't care about hanging onto them; the cop is still iffy and they'll see the old woman as dead weight. My guess is they'll want
to keep the pediatrician.” She asked Frank and Lena, “She's attractive?”

Lena began, “I wouldn't say—” just as Frank answered, “Yes.”

“I imagine she's fairly confident,” Wagner said. “Women don't get through medical school being demure.” She frowned. “They won't like that.”

Molly said, “I'm her nurse at the clinic. Sara's the most levelheaded person I know. She wouldn't do anything to compromise the situation, especially with children there.”

Wagner looked at her crew. “What do you think, boys?”

The one who held the cell phone to his ear said, “No doubt they'll have a problem with her.”

The other added, “They'll need to get rid of that adrenaline soon.” He started to nod. “I'll go with them keeping the woman.”

“I concur,” Wagner said, and Lena felt her blood run cold.

Molly said, “You don't think they'll . . .”

Wagner's incredulous tone was sharp as a tack. “They've killed four police officers and shot at children, severely wounding one of them. Do you think they'll draw the line at sexual assault?” She turned her attention toward Frank. “You were in there, Detective. What did they come for? What else will they want?”

He shrugged, and Lena could feel his anger and confusion. “I don't know.”

Wagner started to interrogate him. “What's the first thing they did?”

“They shot Matt. They shot up the station.”

“Would you say that their primary goal was to shoot Detective Hogan?”

Even though Lena had heard Nick giving someone details over the phone, she was surprised the woman knew Matt's name.

Wagner prompted, “Detective Wallace?”

Frank shrugged again. “I don't know.”

“You know more than we do, Detective. You were there. What did they say?”

“I don't know. They were yelling. Well, one of them was yelling. He started slapping Marla around. I went to the back of the station to call Nick.”

Lena chewed the tip of her tongue. She had never liked Marla, but there was something horrific about beating up an old lady. Considering all they had done, Lena should not have been surprised, but still, hearing about Marla took her anger up yet another notch.

“Wait a minute,” Frank said. Judging by his look, a lightbulb had gone off in his head. “He asked for the Chief. The one who said his name was Smith. He told Marla he wanted to see the Chief. She told me, and I found Jeffrey and . . .” He had spoken in a rush until he got to Jeffrey's name.

Somehow, Wagner made sense of what he was trying to say. “They asked for Chief Tolliver but they shot Detective Hogan?”

“I . . .” Frank shrugged. “I guess.”

She looked around the room, finding Pat Morris over by Lena. “You're Morris?”

He nodded, obviously uncomfortable with being singled out. “Yes, ma'am.”

She gave him a disarming smile, as if they were old friends. “You were there from the beginning?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And what did you see?”

“Same as Frank.”

Her smile thinned slightly. “Which was?”

“I was at my desk typing up a report,” Morris began. “The Chief came into the room and I asked him a question about how to get to the D-15 screen. I'm not that great with computers.”

“That's fine,” Wagner soothed. “And then?”

Lena could see Morris swallow hard. “And then Matt came in the front door. Marla said something to him, like ‘There you are,' then Dr. Linton screamed.”

“Just screamed?”

“No, ma'am. She said, ‘Jeffrey,' like she was warning him.”

Wagner took a breath, then let it go. She pressed her lips together and Lena noticed her lipstick had smeared a bit. “So, we could have a case of mistaken identity.”

Frank said, “How's that?”

“The shooter thought Detective Hogan was your Chief.” Wagner looked around the room. “I know this is a silly question, but is there a particular perp your Chief put away who might be capable of doing something like this?”

Lena racked her brain for cases, wondering why she had not done this before. There were plenty of people she could think of who were angry enough to want to kill Jeffrey, but none of them had the balls to do it. Besides, it was never the big talkers
who acted on their threats. It was the quiet ones, the ones who let their anger burn in the pit of their stomachs until it exploded, who actually showed up with a gun.

“It was worth a shot.” Wagner addressed the group again. “Either way, mission accomplished for our two shooters. They came to kill Tolliver and as far as they know that was done in the first two minutes. Their escape was blocked by our helpful dry cleaner here, who ran into the street with his shotgun. I would guess their primary goal right now would be to get out of the building without being killed.”

“Amanda?” Nick said. He walked through the room holding a rolled-up blueprint in his hand. “Ventilation plan.”

“Good,” she told him, spreading the schematic out on the table. She studied the layout of the ventilation system for a moment, tracing a shaft along a section of the back wall. “This looks like the best spot,” she decided. “We can go through the drop ceiling in the conference room to access the duct and slide a Minicam through to get a bird's-eye of what's going on.”

Frank said, “Why can't we just go through the ceiling?”

“The tiles break too easily. We don't want dust falling down and alerting them to—”

“No,” he interrupted her, his voice excited. “The drop ceiling goes the whole length of the station. You could just climb over that back wall and drop down and—”

“End up killing everyone in there,” Wagner finished. “We're far from last resorts at this point,
Detective Wallace. What we want now is video and sound coming out of that room. Our first step toward controlling the situation is knowing what they're up to.”

Wagner motioned her team closer, and they bent over the map, planning their point of entry. Lena watched them for a few minutes, trying to follow their jargon as they ran down the supplies they would need. She noticed Nick standing to the side, a hard look on his face. How he had left this kind of action was beyond her. There had to be more to the story of the Whitfield hostage situation than Frank knew. There was always a darker truth behind those sorts of rumors. God knows what kind of shit people had made up about Lena when she left the force.

Beside her, Pat Morris shifted against the table holding the coffee machine. He whispered to Lena, “You following anything they're saying?”

She shook her head.

“They seem to know what they're doing,” Morris told her, and though Lena agreed, she did not comment.

“It's so weird,” Morris continued, his voice still low. “The shooters, they can't be much older than my little brother, and he's still in high school.”

She turned to him, warning bells going off in her head. “You're serious?” she asked. “How young? How young did they look?”

He shrugged. “They gotta be older, but they looked eighteen at the most.”

“Why do they have to be older?” Lena asked. She noticed that Wagner and her team had grown quiet, but she didn't care. “Slight builds? Androgynous?”

Morris shifted uncomfortably under the pressure. “I don't know, Lena. It happened so fast.”

Wagner broke in. “What are you thinking, Detective Adams?”

“The last case I worked on before I left,” Lena said, the lump rising in her throat making it hard for her to speak.

Nick slammed his fist into the table, saying, “Goddammit,” and Lena imagined the horror on his face mirrored her own. He had worked the case, too, and seen the damage firsthand.