A Maiden's Grave (18 page)

Turncoat Peter Henderson was administratively drawn and quartered. The man who'd once gotten a tap into syndicate boss Mario Lacosta's Clayton, Missouri, private den was sent packing to the state in which the geographic center of the country could be found and that was indeed known mostly for pilferings at McConnell Air Force Base and internecine battles with Indian Affairs and BATF. The career of the thirty-nine-year-old agent was at a complete standstill.

"Risks?" Potter asked LeBow. "He going to get in our way?"

"He's not in any position to do anything," the intelligence officer said. "Not officially."

"He's desperate."

"I'm sure he is. I said 'not officially.' We still have to keep our eyes on him."

Potter chuckled. "So, we've got an assistant attorney general ready to hand himself over to the takers and a SAC who wants to hand
me
over to them."

We have met the enemy…

He turned back to the window, thinking of Melanie, recalling what Jocylyn had said.
She just closes her eyes. Doesn't do anything
. What does that mean? he wondered.

Tobe broke into Potter's musings. "Handy's expecting a chopper in an hour, five minutes."

"Thank you, Tobe," Potter responded.

He looked out over the slaughterhouse and thought: A key, a magic sword, five stones, and a raven in a cage.

"Officer."

Charlie Budd was walking back to the van from his own unmarked car, where he'd just typed in a computer request for 211s in a four-county area. The only robberies today had been a convenience store, a gas station, and a Methodist church. The booty in none of them matched the weapons, TV, and tools that the HTs had brought with them.

"Come over here, Officer," the man's low voice said.

Oh, brother. What now?

Roland Marks leaned against the side of a supply van, smoking a cigarette. Budd thought he'd be ten miles away by now but there was purpose in his eyes and he looked like he was here to stay.

"You witnessed that little travesty," Marks announced. Budd had been in the corner of the van as Potter read the riot act. Budd looked around then wandered through the grass to the dark-featured man and stood upwind of the smoke. He said nothing.

"I love summer afternoons, Captain. Remind me of growing up. I played baseball every day. Did you? You look like could run like the wind."

"Track and field. Four-forty and eight-eighty mostly."

"All right." Marks's voice dropped again, softer than Budd thought it possibly could and still be audible. "We had the luxury, you and I'd dance around a bit like we were on a dinner cruise and you'd get my meaning and then go off and do what you ought to. But there's no time for that."

I was
never
cut out to be an officer, Budd thought, and replayed for the hundredth time the bullet cutting down seventeen-year-old Susan Phillips. He choked suddenly and turned it into an odd-sounding cough. "Say, I'm real busy right now, sir. I have to -"

"Answer me yes or no. Did I see something in your eyes in the van?"

"Don't know what you mean, sir."

"Sure, maybe what I did was out of line. I wasn't thinking too clearly. But you weren't completely sure
Potter
was right either. And – no, hold up there. I think if we took a vote more people in that van'd come down on my side than his."

Budd summoned his courage from somewhere and said, "It's not a popularity contest, sir."

"Oh, no, it's not. That's exactly right. It's a question about whether those girls live, and I think Potter doesn't care if they do or not."

"Noooo. That's not true. Not by a long shot. He cares a lot."

"What'm I seeing in your face, Officer? Just what I saw in the van, right? You're scared shitless for those little things in that slaughterhouse."

Our number-one priority isn't getting those girls out alive…

Marks continued, "Come on now, Officer. Admit it."

"He's a good man," Budd said.

"I know he's a good man. What the fuck does that have to do with anything?"

"He's doing the best -"

"There is no way in hell," Marks said slowly, "I'm letting those girls in there die. Which is something he's willing to do… and that's been eating at you all day. Am I right?"

"Well -"

Marks's hand dug into his suit jacket and he pulled out a wallet, flipped it open. For a crazy moment Budd though he was going to display his AG's office ID. But what Budd found himself looking at had far more impact on him. Three photos in glossy sleeves of young girls. One had knitted eyebrows and slightly distorted features. The handicapped daughter.

"You're a father of girls, Budd. Am I right?"

The captain swallowed and tried to look away from the six dark eyes. He couldn't.

"Just imagine
your
little ones in there. And then imagine someone like Potter saying, 'Hell, they're expendable.' Imagine that, Captain."

Budd inhaled long. And finally managed to look away. The wallet snapped closed.

"We have to get him removed."

"What?"

"
He's
signing their death sentences. What did he say about meeting Handy's demands? Come on, Budd. Answer like an officer."

He looked into Marks's eye and ignored the slap, saying, "He said Handy wasn't leaving there except in cuffs or a body bag."

And that if those girls had to die, so be it.

"Is that acceptable to you, Officer?"

"It's not my job to say if it is or isn't."

" 'I was only following orders.' "

"That's about the size of it."

Marks spit the cigarette from his mouth. "For God's sake, Captain, you
can
take a moral position, can't you? Don't you have any higher values than running errands for a fat FBI agent?"

Budd said stiffly, "He's the senior officer. He's federal, and -"

"You just hold on to those words, Captain," Marks railed like a pumped-up evangelist. "Tuck 'em under your arm and bring 'em out at the funerals of those girls. I hope they make you feel better." He reached into Budd's soul and poked with a fingernail. "There's already one girl's blood on our hands."

He means
your
hands.

Budd saw Susan Phillips as she fell to her knees. The impact of that fall made her jaw drop open and distorted her beautiful face for a moment. It became beautiful once more as she died.

"What?" Budd whispered, his eyes on the buggish headlights of the harvesting threshers. "What do you want?" This sounded childish and shamed him but he couldn't stop himself.

"I want Potter out. You or I or somebody state'll take over the negotiations and give those cocksuckers their damn helicopter in exchange for the girls. We'll track 'em down when they land and blow 'em to hell. I've already checked. We can get a chopper here in a half-hour, fitted with a homing device that'll track 'em from a hundred miles away. They'll never know we're following."

"But he says Handy's too dangerous to let out."

"Of course he's dangerous," Marks said. "But once he's out he'll be up against professionals. Men and women who're paid to take risks. Those girls aren't."

Marks had tiny eyes and it seemed to Budd that they were on the verge of tears. He thought of the man's mentally retarded daughter, in and out of hospitals all her short life.

He observed that Marks had said nothing about the effect of Budd's decision on his career. If he had, Budd would have stonewalled. When it came to things like that, cheap shots, the young captain could be a mule. Then it discouraged him immensely to see that Marks had assessed that about him and had pointedly avoided any threats. Budd realized that he was already lying on the mat, shoulders pinned, staring at the ceiling. The count had begun.

Oh, brother.

"But how can we get Potter out?"

He said this to stymie Marks but of course the man was prepared. The small black box appeared in Marks's hand. For an absurd moment Budd actually thought it was a bomb. He stared at the tape recorder. "All I want is for you to get him to say that the hostages are expendable."

"You mean, record him?"

"Exactly."

"And… and then what?"

"I've got some friends at a St. Louis radio station. They'll run the tape on the news. Potter'll have to step down."

"That could be the end of his career."

"And it could be the end of
mine
, doing this. But I'm willing to risk it. For chrissake, I was willing to give myself up in exchange for them. You don't see Potter doing that."

"I just don't know."

"Let's save those nine poor girls in there, Captain. What do you say?" Marks thrust the recorder into Budd's unhappy hands. The officer stared at it then slipped it into his pocket and without a word turned away. His only act of defiance was to offer, "No, you're wrong. There are only eight people inside. He's gotten one out." But Marks was out of earshot when he said it.

Captain Charles R. Budd stood in a gully not far from the command van.

He was delegating, yes, but mostly he was trying to ignore the weight of the tape recorder, a thousand pounds of hot metal, in his hip pocket.

I'll think about that later.

Delegate.

Phil Molto was setting up the press table: a folding fiberboard table, a small portable typewriter, paper and pencils. Budd was no news hog but he supposed this setup would be useless for today's high-tech reporters. Did they even know how to type, those pretty boys and girls? They seemed like spoiled high-school kids.

He guessed, though, that this arrangement had less to do with journalism than with politics. How did Potter know how to handle all these things? Maybe living in the nation's capital helped. Politics one way or another. The earnest young captain felt totally incompetent.

Shame too. The tape recorder melted into fiery plastic and ran down his leg.

Forget about it. Fifty minutes to five – fifty minutes to the deadline. He kept a meaningless smile on his face but he couldn't sweep from his mind the image of the teenage girl falling to ground, dying.

He somehow knew in his heart more blood would be spilled. Marks was right. In the van he
had
sided with the assistant attorney general.

Forty-nine minutes…

"Okay," he told his lieutenant. "Guess that'll do. You ride herd on 'em, Phil. Make sure they sit tight. They can wander around a little behind the lines and take notes on whatever they want -"

Was that okay? he wondered. What would Potter say?

"- but suit 'em up in flak jackets and make sure they keep their heads down."

Quiet Phil Molto nodded.

The first car arrived a minute later, containing two men. They climbed out, flashed press credentials, and as they looked around hungrily the older of them said, "I'm Joe Silbert, KFAL. This is Ted Biggins."

Budd got a kick out of their dress – dark suits that didn't fit very well and black running shoes. He pictured them racing down the hall of a TV station, shouting, "Exclusive, exclusive!" while papers spun in their wakes.

Silbert looked at the press table and laughed. Budd introduced himself and Molto and said, "Best we could do."

"It's fine, Officer. Only I hope you don't mind if we use our own stone tablet to write on?"

Biggins hefted a large portable computer onto the table.

"Long as we see what you write before you send it." For so Potter had instructed him.

"File it," Silbert said. "We say 'file it,' not 'send it.' " Budd couldn't tell if he was making a joke.

Biggins poked at the typewriter. "What exactly is this?"

The men laughed. Budd told them the ground rules. Where they could go and where they couldn't. "We've got a couple troopers you can talk to if you want. Phil here'll send 'em over."

"They hostage rescue?"

"No. They're from Troop K, up the road."

"Can we talk to some hostage rescue boys?"

When Budd grinned Silbert smiled too, like a co-conspirator, and the reporter realized he wasn't going to catch the captain in any slipups about whether or not HRT was on the scene.

"We're going to want to talk to Potter sometime soon," Silbert groused. "He planning on avoiding us?"

"I'll let him know you're here," Budd said cheerfully, the Switzerland of law enforcers. "Meanwhile Phil here'll bring you up to date. He's got profiles of the escapees and pictures of them. And he'll get you suited up in body armor. Oh, and I was thinking you might want to get the human-interest angle from some troopers. What it's like to be on a barricade. That sort of thing."

The reporters' faces were solemn masks but Budd wondered again if they were laughing at him. Silbert said, "Fact is, we're mostly interested in the hostages. That's where the story is. Anybody here we can talk to about them?"

"I'm just here to set up the press table. Agent Potter'll be by to give you the information he thinks you oughta have." Is that the right way to put it? Budd wondered. "Now I got some things need looking after so I'll leave you be."

"But I won't," said Molto, cracking a rare smile.

"I'm sure you won't, Officer." Their computer whirred to life.

What Melanie had smelled in the air of the killing room, what had forced her from her music room: mud, fish, water, diesel fuel, methane, decaying leaves, wet tree bark.

The river.

The fishy breeze had been strong enough to start the lamp swaying. That told her that somewhere near the back of the slaughterhouse was an open doorway. It occurred to her that maybe De l'Epée had already sent his men around the slaughterhouse looking for places where the girls might get out. Maybe some were even cutting their way in right now to rescue them.

She thought back to their arrival at the slaughterhouse this morning. She remembered seeing groves of trees on either side of the building, a muddy slope down to the river, which glistened gray and cold in the overcast afternoon light, black wood pilings, dotted with tar and creosote, a dock leaning precariously over the water, dangling rotten tires for ship bumpers.

The tires… That's what had given her the idea. When she was a girl, every summer in the early evening she and Danny would race down to Seversen Corner on the farm, run over the tractor ruts and through a fog of wheat down to the pond. It was nearly an acre, surrounded by willows and grass and stiff reeds filled with cores like Styrofoam. She ran like the Kansas wind so that she'd be the first one to the hill overlooking the pond, where she'd leap into space, grab the tire swing hanging over the water and sail out above the mirrorlike surface.

Then let go and tumble into the sky and clouds reflected below her.

She and her brother had spent long hours at the pond – even now, that glassy water was often her first thought when she stepped outside into a warm summer evening. Danny had taught her to swim twice. The first time when she was six and he'd taken her hands and eased her into the water of the still but deep pond. The second time was far harder – after she'd lost her hearing and grown afraid of so many things. She was twelve then. But the lanky, blond boy, five years older, refused to let her dodge the swimming hole any longer and, using the sign language he alone in the Charrol family had learned, talked her into letting go her grip on the bald Goodyear. And he calmly trod water, supported her and kept her from panicking while she finally remembered the strokes she'd learned years before.

Swimming. The first thing she'd done that gave her back a splinter of self-confidence after her plunge into deafness.

Thank you, Danny, she thought. For then, and for now. Because it was this memory that she believed was going to save some, if not all, of her students.

The river was wide here. The surface was choppy and the current fast but she remembered a tangle of branches and garbage washed up against a fallen tree that hung into the choppy water maybe a hundred feet downstream. Melanie pictured the girls moving silently through the back corridors of the slaughterhouse, over the dockside, into the water, then drifting with the current to the tree, scrambling out through the branches. Running to safety…

"Never underestimate a body of water," Danny had told her. "Even the calm ones can be dangerous."

Well, there was nothing calm about the Arkansas. Could they manage it? Donna Harstrawn can swim. Kielle and Shannon – superheroes that they are – can swim like otters. (Melanie pictures Kielle's compact body cannonballing off the diving board, while Shannon's willowy frame leisurely completes her laps.) The twins love to play in the water. But they can't swim. Beverly knows how but with her asthma she can't. Melanie doesn't know about pretty Emily; the girl refuses to put her face underwater and always stands demurely in the shallow end of the pool when they go swimming.

She'll have to find something for the ones who can't swim, a paddle-board, a float. But what?

And how do I get them to the back of the slaughterhouse?

She thought of Danny. But Danny wasn't here to help. Panic edged in.

De l'Epée?

She sent her thoughts out to him but all he did was whisper his reassurance that there'll be police to find the girls that escape into the river. (They'll be there, won't they? Yes, she has to believe they will.)

Crap, Melanie thinks. I'm on my own here.

Then, suddenly, the smell changes.

Her eyes open and she finds herself staring into the face of Brutus, a few feet away from her. She no longer smells the river but rather meat and stale breath and sweat. He's so close that she sees, with horror, that the marks on his neck – what she thought were freckles – must be the blood from the woman with the purse, the woman he killed this afternoon. Melanie recoiled in disgust.

"Sit tight, missie," Handy said.

Melanie wondered again, Why can I understand him?
Sit tight
. A phrase almost impossible to lip-read, and yet she knows without a doubt that this is what he said. Brutus took her hands. She tried to resist him but she couldn't. "You were sitting there with your eyes closed… hands were twitching like a shot 'coon's paws. Talking to yourself? That what you doing?"

There was movement in the corner. Kielle had sat up and was staring at him. The little girl had an eerily adult look in her face. Her jaw was set. "I'm Jubilee!" Kielle signed. Her favorite X-Man character. "I'm going to kill him!" Melanie dared not sign but her eyes implored the girl to sit down.

Brutus glanced at the little girl, laughed then stepped into the main room of the slaughterhouse, motioning Bear after him. When he returned a moment later he was carrying a large can of gasoline.

Kielle's face went still as she stared at the red can.

"Don't nobody move." Brutus looked into Melanie's eyes as he said this. Then he set a heavy metal canister, a small rendering vat maybe, on top of a shelf above the girls and poured the gasoline into it. Melanie felt the thud as he pitched the gas can into the corner of the room. Then he tied a wire to the edge of the canister and ran it to the other room. Eerie shadows danced on the floor and wall as the light from the other room grew brighter and brighter and Brutus returned suddenly, swinging another of the lights. He unscrewed the cage and tied the unprotected fixture and bulb to a bolt in the floor, directly below the canister of gas.

Bear surveyed the workmanship with approval.

Kielle stepped toward Brutus.

"No," Melanie signed. "Get back!"

Brutus suddenly dropped to his knees and took Kielle by the shoulders. He put his face inches from hers and he spoke slowly.

"Here now, little bird… hassles from you… or somebody tries to save you, I'll pull that wire and burn you up."

He pushed hard and Kielle fell over one of the blood grooves in the floor.

"What one should I pick?" Brutus asked Bear. The fat man looked them over. His eyes lingered longest on Emily, her flat chest, her white stockings, her black-strapped shoes.

Bear gestured at Shannon. "… kicked me. Pick her, man."

Brutus looked down at the girl, tossing her long, dark hair. Like Kielle, she gazed back defiantly. But after a moment she looked down, tears filling her eyes. And Melanie could see the real difference between the girls. Shannon Boyle was one hell of an artist but she wasn't Jubilee or any other kind of hero. She was an eight-year-old tomboy, scared to death.

"You're a kicker, are you?" Brutus asked. "Okay, let's go." They led her out.

What were they going to do with her? Release her, like Jocylyn? Melanie scooted toward the doorway of the killing room – as far as she dared. She looked out and saw Shannon in the greasy window in the front of the slaughterhouse. Brutus took his pistol from his back pocket. Rested the muzzle against the girl's head. No! Oh, no…

Melanie started to rise. Bear's bulbous head swiveled toward her quickly and he raised the shotgun. She sank down to the cold floor and stared hopelessly at her student. Shannon closed her eyes and wrapped her fingers around the pink-and-blue-string friendship bracelet she'd tied on her wrist a month ago. The girl had promised to make a matching bracelet for her, Melanie now recalled, choking back tears, but had never gotten around to it.

Angie Scapello paused on her way back to the van from the rear staging area.

"Hey, Captain."

If he hadn't known it for a fact, Charlie Budd would never have guessed she was a federal agent. "Hi," he said.

She paused and fell into step beside him.

"You worked with Arthur much?" he asked suddenly, flustered. Just trying to make conversation.

"About thirty or forty barricades. Maybe a few more, I guess."

"Hey, you must've started out young."

"I'm older than I look."

He didn't think "older" was a word that applied to her at all.

"This isn't a line – I'm married." Budd awkwardly held up his glistening ring, which happened to match his wife's. "But you ever do any modeling? I only ask 'cause Meg, that's my wife, she gets these magazines. You know,
Vogue
and
Harper's Bazaar
. Like that. I was thinking maybe I saw you in an ad or two?"

"Could've been. I put myself through school doing print ads. Was a few years ago. Undergrad." She laughed. "I was usually cast as a bride for some reason. Don't ask me why."

"Good hair for a veil," Budd suggested, and then went red because the comment sounded like a flirt.

"And I've been in one movie."

"No kiddin'?"

"I was a double for Isabella Rossellini. I stood outside in the snow for long angles."

"I was thinking you looked like her." Though Budd said this uneasily, having no idea who the actress was, and hoped that she wasn't some unknown who'd never appeared in a movie shown in America.

"You're kind of a celebrity in your own right, aren't you?" she asked.

"Me?" Budd laughed.

"They say you came up through the ranks real fast."

"They do?"

"Well, you're a captain and you're a young man."

"I'm older than
I
look," he joked. "And before today's over I'm going to be older still by a long shot." He looked at his watch. "I better be getting inside. Not long till the first deadline. How do you manage to stay calm?"