Ransom River (10 page)

“No,” she said.

Nixon did a double take. “What did you just say?”

She was gambling. Coin toss on her life. She was convinced they wanted her—and they wanted her alive.

“What if I refuse to go?” she said.

At that, people roused. A woman cried, “Shut up!” A man on the floor called out, “Be quiet. You’ve been chosen.”

She stared at Nixon. If her refusal drove him to threaten somebody else,
she could still accede. But she was calculating that he wouldn’t do that. Besides, letting others decide what happens to you is never a good choice. Fight it if you can.

Nixon stared back. Beneath the balaclava, the skin around his eyes was pale. Below his left eye was a scar. It was deep and ran vertically, like a tear track. One that had dried into gnarled white tissue, dead and hard.

The man on the floor reacted badly to Rory ignoring him. “They picked you. You have to go. If you resist they’ll just choose somebody else instead.”

She barely heard him; heard mostly the whine and panic in his voice.
Not fair.
She felt loose at the knees and forced herself to stand still.

Nixon’s lips parted. His aftershave wafted in the air. “No back talk. You’re going.”

“Why?”

She tried to put a demand into her voice. Nixon almost seemed to shake himself, to verify he wasn’t imagining her obstinacy. Reagan was across the room, headed toward the door to the judge’s chambers.

It was perfectly possible for him to grab somebody else, somebody more pliable, somebody as tall and fast, somebody who would shield them as they escaped, without asking questions. But she didn’t think that was going to happen.

“Why?” she said, stronger.

Beneath the balaclava, Nixon’s eyes were flat. He crossed the space between them in three strides.

He grabbed her arm and yanked her away from the window. He pulled her against him. He was hot, sweaty, his body odor mixing with the cologne. He grimaced. His teeth were chipped.

“Why? Because—”

The mist and dust and
crack
landed all at once. Nixon’s head snapped to one side and he dropped in front of her.

The air in front of Rory was all at once empty—she could see straight across the room to the main doors—and blurred with something hot and sticky.

People screamed. She looked down. Nixon had collapsed in a heap. The side of his balaclava had shredded. His skull had shredded. A pool of dark blood spread across the stone floor. He had been shot in the head.

She backed up a step. People screamed and crawled away from Nixon, leaving an empty circle around her. She raised her hands. They were clean, but she felt wetness on her face. She touched her cheek. Her fingers came away stippled with blood.

The screams got louder. The blood pool spread toward her, as if drawn magnetically. She stumbled back another step. In the window a fractured hole had blossomed at eye level, surrounded by cracks and white crazed lines. A bullet hole, exactly where she’d been standing.

Nixon’s head had been twelve inches from hers. They’d shot him, long range, right past her. She put a hand to her mouth and gagged.

Reagan stared at the sight of Nixon dead on the floor. He was framed against the door to the judge’s chambers, gun in his hands, mouth open. He gaped at Nixon and, slowly, at the window.

He was still staring at the window when the door behind him burst open.

The door to chambers shattered, wood splitting. Behind it was darkness, but Rory saw shadowed forms and a battering ram in their arms. Then she heard a clatter and saw a small cylindrical object roll into the courtroom.

Before she could do anything, it blew.

The noise, the flat, overwhelming
bang,
filled her ears, her head, deafened her. The light ignited everything, white. She found herself smacked back against the wall.

Her ears rang. She didn’t hear the next shots.

T
he room seemed to billow and shake. A high-pitched whine filled Rory’s ears. Through fizzing white smoke she saw the thread-line light of red lasers. They sliced past her and lit on Reagan.

His jacket flayed, a burst of fabric and blood. His head jerked back and he dropped.

SWAT surged into the courtroom.

Figures in black tactical gear flowed through the smoke, guns drawn. Through the bathtub dullness in her ears, Rory heard voices.

“
Police! Don’t move.
”

A SWAT officer in a helmet and goggles and body armor came toward her, rifle raised, finger on the trigger. “
On your knees. Hands behind your head.
”

She went down and stayed there like a penitent.

“Officer,” she said.

He turned. She nodded with her chin.

“Judge Wieland’s been shot.”

The officer glanced across the room. Got on his radio.

One by one the other hostages dropped back to the floor. Across the room, Frankie Ortega knelt, coughing. Lucy Elmendorf sat on the floor hugging her husband.

A SWAT officer checked Nixon for signs of life. Drew a slash mark across his throat with his thumb. Pulled off Nixon’s balaclava. The dark
pool of blood beneath the gunman’s head seemed to crown him. Looked like his thoughts poured out, gone.

No back talk. You’re going. Because…

His face was rough. A man in his forties, his features worn and creased. His eyes stared sightlessly. Rory looked away.

By Judge Wieland’s side an officer knelt on one knee. He was holding the judge’s hand and talking into a radio. Rory began to shake. Her vision blurred. She realized she was crying.

A cop shouted for the hostages to stand up. He told them to lock their hands behind their heads and walk out single file. By the time they got to the Department of Corrections buses outside, they’d been searched and cuffed with zip ties. The sun seemed too bright. Rory’s knees felt like Silly Putty.

Helen Ellis tried to climb aboard the bus but wobbled. A cop gestured to the steps and said, “Please keep moving, ma’am.”

Helen looked ready to crumble. “But we’re not criminals.”

“It’s just procedure. Take care but get on board, please.”

Rory said, “Procedure doesn’t have to be spelled
asshole.
”

The cop eyed her coolly. “You’ve been restrained for your own safety. This will all be over soon.”

Not soon enough. Not by a long, rocky mile. She helped Helen up the stairs.

The door to the interrogation room finally opened at 7:42 p.m. Rory checked her watch. They’d let her keep the watch. They’d even let her keep her belt. In this room she couldn’t have killed herself for fun or money. If she’d taken off her boots and tried to beat herself to death with them, the cops behind the two-way mirror would have simply ambled in and laughed at her.

Noise flowed through the open door. Conversation, phones, television. In walked a woman with a disheveled ponytail the color of Mountain Dew.
Her blue blouse was limp and wrinkled. Her badge was clipped to the waistband of her skirt.

“Aurora Mackenzie?” she said.

“Call me Rory.”

“Detective Mindy Xavier.” She looked a rugged forty-five. She gestured Rory to the worn plastic chair at the table. “Sorry it’s taken so long. And for all the rigmarole.”

Rigmarole. Rory guessed it was the technical term for plastic cuffs and aggressive pat-downs and a locked interrogation room.

“We had to make sure that there weren’t any bad guys pretending to be hostages. You know, blending in with the rest of you and threatening everybody into keeping silent about it.” Xavier closed the door. “Can I get you anything? Coffee?”

“I’m fine.” Rory sat down. “What’s the word on Judge Wieland?”

Xavier dropped a file folder on the table. “I don’t know. Sorry.”

Xavier scraped her own chair back and sat heavily. She looked frazzled. She examined Rory’s face, seemingly for cracks.

“You okay?” she said.

“In one piece. When will I get a chance to clean up?”

“Excuse me?”

“When the first gunman was shot, I was close by. I got sprayed…”

Her voice chipped. She needed to stay calm. She could hardly bear having Nixon’s blood on her clothes and skin. But she wasn’t going to beg, not in a police station. She wasn’t here to seek mercy from the cops.

Xavier eyed her sweater. She flushed. “Maybe I can find you a T-shirt.”

“Even a grocery bag. Paper or plastic, I don’t care.”

Xavier stood, opened the door, and beckoned to a passing colleague. She asked for a clean T-shirt. Then she closed the door and sat down again.

She shook her head. “Sorry. Demanding day.”

“Do you know who they were?” Rory said.

“We’re investigating.”

“Why did they attack the courtroom?”

“Investigating.”

Xavier opened the file folder. Rory’s driver’s license was clipped inside.

Xavier uncapped a pen. “Tell me what you saw. What you heard. Take it from the top, and take your time. Don’t leave anything out.”

Get through this,
Rory thought.
Just give them what they want and get home.

“They came in through the main doors,” she began.

She went through it. Moment by moment, step by step, trying to recall the choreography and the score. Xavier took only occasional notes. The CCTV camera near the ceiling probably had something to do with that. As Rory described the siege, her heart started to pound. Her leg throbbed, the old ache. The room turned stifling.

“Could I have a glass of water?” she said.

“Sure.” Xavier glanced at the mirror. “At what point did the gunmen first indicate resentment of the defendants?”

The door opened and another detective stepped in, a man with placid Young Republican features and a frat-boy strut. He set a plastic water bottle on the table, pulled up a chair next to Xavier. Set down a laptop.

“Had you ever seen the gunmen before today?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Rory said.

“Really? Two men hold you hostage and you can’t say whether you recognized them?”

He didn’t offer his hand. Neither had Xavier, but Rory got the sense that if she had put hers out, Xavier would have taken it. This guy didn’t give her that vibe.

“They wore ski masks,” she said.

She unscrewed the bottle top, tilted the bottle to her lips, and gulped it down. She felt like her toes and fingers and teeth had curled. And she felt something else: fear.

Because, on the Ransom River PD’s busiest day in twenty years, with three people dead, a major crime scene to process, and sixty-five witnesses to debrief, the department surely had no manpower to spare. Sending a second detective to deliver water seemed inefficient. And unlikely.

“The SWAT guys pulled Nixon’s mask off,” she said. “That’s the only time I saw his face. And he was dead, with a gunshot wound to the head.” A huge, gaping wound. “I don’t know how he looked when—”

“Nixon?” he said.

“The gunman who was shot by the sniper through the window. That was what his accomplice called him. They referred to each other as Nixon and Reagan.”

“And the only time you saw his face was when SWAT removed his mask.”

“Yes.”
And I’d been talking to him at the moment he turned dead.
She pressed her hand to her forehead.

“You all right?” Xavier said.

“Headache.”

She drank some more water. The bottle had a chemical tang. She put it down. Her hands had developed a tremor. She clenched them to stop it.

Xavier gave her a sympathetic look. “I know it’s been a hard day. But we want to get your recollections while they’re fresh.”

“I understand.”

The man said, “At what point did the gunmen first mention their demands?”

She took a second. “I’m sorry—should I call you Detective Number Two?”

“Zelinski.” He folded a stick of gum into his mouth. “When did the gunmen first make their demands?”

“When Sergeant Nguyen tried to engage with them.”

“Not before?”

“Until Sergeant Nguyen came on the bullhorn the only thing they demanded was for four of us to stand up and head toward the door.”

“Any guesses why they did that?”

“Guesses?” Rory looked back and forth between them. “Yeah, actually. I think they had an outside agenda. And I don’t think they were working alone.”