Run the Risk (32 page)

“How much time is left?” I asked.

He glanced at his watch.

“Twenty minutes.”

I tried to refocus on the details, to think about anything other than how we had been Gabriel's partner in his deception.

“We don't have time to disarm all of these, do we?”

Harrison looked into my eyes and shook his head.

“No.”

Thinking you understand something and then hearing it said are two different things. I looked down at the vest, but all I could see was a clock running out of time.

“So, we . . .”

I began to lose my way. It was all too much. The weight of the vest was beginning to suffocate me. I wanted my daughter back. I wanted to hear her voice and hold her and never let go. I wanted not to know that I had released the man who was going to kill her.

“So we what?”

I looked at Harrison, hoping he could find a way out of the abyss I was slipping into.

“Some of these are just meant to delay, so we only worry about the trigger he's going to use. The only way he can do this is remotely,” Harrison said.

He reached up, opened a pocket of the vest just above the explosives and gently slid the phone out. His eyes recognized something that mine didn't.

“This isn't right,” Harrison said in a near-whisper.

I looked into his eyes, trying to read the level of fear, but if it was there, he had long ago found the ability to mask it, probably the same way he had found to hide from love since his wife's murder.

“What isn't right?”

He took out a small knife, pried open the back of the phone, and stared at the circuit boards.

“There's nothing here. It's just a phone.”

“Meaning?”

He stared at the vest for a moment, then reached out and sliced open one of the pockets containing the nails, which poured out onto the gravel like entrails.

“There is no goddamned remote trigger,” he said, flushed with anger.

He sliced open the rest of the pockets containing the shrapnel.

“I've wasted time.”

“What are you saying, Harrison?”

He looked into my eyes. “Don't you see it?”

I shook my head.

“I shouldn't have been able to remove the shrapnel like that, not if his intention was to kill a lot of people.”

He stared at the pockets containing the explosives, looking for something, following the wires from place to place with his eyes. He carefully opened one of the pockets containing explosives. His fingers traced a wire, his eyes dissecting the meaning behind it.

“Son of a bitch.”

He pulled the brick of explosive out and yanked the detonator out of it, then squeezed the soft material in his fist.

“It's clay.”

He tossed it aside. He quickly opened three more pockets.

“It's just goddamn clay.”

He yanked them out and tossed them aside. I looked down at the one pocket he didn't touch.

“Except that one.”

Harrison nodded. “Yeah.”

“That's for me.”

“And you're the trigger.”

“The motion detector.”

“In the journal, when he talks about you and Lacy dying, I just assumed that because you die on Colorado that others die with you.”

He stared at me for a moment.

“He could kill dozens, but it's just you he wants?” he said.

I thought for a moment. “He doesn't need to kill anyone else other than me.”

“Why?”

“Television. It's how we experience everything now, isn't it? Two hundred million people will have invited him into their living rooms to watch a parade. Two hundred million people will fear him when they watch me die.”

I saw the whole horrible picture.

“Choose,” I whispered.

Harrison looked at me apprehensively.

“He couldn't take the chance that I wouldn't kill others, so he made the choice simpler, one I would make without hesitation. I could listen to my daughter's screams, or . . . stop them.”

I looked out toward the rim of the arroyo, which was lined with people walking to the parade. All of Gabriel's twisted needs suddenly came into focus.

“Serial killers need the act of violence to be intimate. Gabriel's going to kill with words, just words, whispering into my ear like a lover would. There's nothing more intimate than that. And millions of people are going to see it . . . and fear him. What could be more powerful? He gets everything he wants.”

We stared at each other trying to sort out the new landscape.

“Do you know where he took you?”

I shook my head.

“I don't think that's where he has her, though. He would take her to a place that means something to me, that
would demonstrate how much more powerful he is than we are. . . . One more reason for me to do what he wants.”

“But where?”

I looked around at the walls of the arroyo and the houses dotting the hillsides.

“Home,” I whispered, turning to Harrison. “He said he felt like he was part of my family.”

Details were flying past me.

“Was Lacy's garage door opener in her car when we found it?”

He thought for a moment then shook his head.

“I don't remember it in the inventory. But there's an officer there.”

“Give me your phone.”

Harrison gave me his phone and I tried my number. The machine picked up after four rings.
“You've reached Alex and Lacy. Please leave a message.”

The machine beeped, and there was only silence until the tape ran out and I hung up.

“He could be out in his squad,” Harrison said.

There was something else, though, lost in the tattered fabric of the last few days.

“The phone machine,” I said to myself.

“What about it?”

“Before Lacy was taken, I had called home and left a message. She said she never got it, and when I checked it, it wasn't there. I think he's already been inside my house. He erased it.”

I looked down at the vest. “How long will it take to disarm the rest of this?”

Harrison shook his head. “Too long.”

“So I just have to be careful.”

He looked at me, the possibilities being played out just under the surface of his eyes. “Very careful.”

I looked up and saw Chavez step up behind Harrison. He tried to find something to say but couldn't manage it. He glanced at the vest, then looked at me, his eyes filled with concern.

“We're running out of time. You want me to delay the parade?”

“You do that, Lacy's dead.”

Surprise, then relief registered on his face.

“She's alive?”

I nodded. He looked at me for a moment, clinging to a certain amount of doubt, not because he didn't want to believe but because doubt's a constant companion after thirty years on the job.

I held the photograph out to him.

“Philippe's not dead. He's Gabriel.”

He stood for a moment like a tourist looking into the Grand Canyon for the first time.

“Gabriel's greatest role wasn't the terrorist, it was the victim,” I said. “We've been chasing a piece of fiction.”

“You saw him?”

“No.”

“This is a hunch then?”

“I agree with her,” Harrison said.

I handed my windbreaker to Chavez.

“I need a female officer to walk out onto Colorado in my windbreaker.”

“No problem.”

“She'll need a phone for instructions and pants the same color as mine.”

He took it and nodded.

“Where's SWAT?”

“They're positioned along Colorado along with everybody else.”

“How many officers are available?”

He studied me for a moment, then it dawned on him what I was talking about.

“You don't think he's at the parade?”

I shook my head. “I think he took her home.”

“You're sure?”

“No, I'm not. And if I'm wrong, I lose my daughter.”

“Alex? We're here, ready. This is our best shot.”

“So there are no officers available, that's what you're saying? Not for a hunch.”

Chavez glanced over his shoulder at Hicks, then took a breath.

“He's going to kill her, Ed. I have to follow this.”

Lacy's big Latino grandfather took a breath as if it were a shot of tequila. If I was wrong and something happened at the parade and he had pulled officers . . . Shit . . . that would be it for him. He would attend the funerals of all the victims. And then watch the finger-pointing as thirty years of work was destroyed. I couldn't ask that. Not for me. Not even for Lacy.

“Harrison and I will check it,” I said.

He shook his head.

“I'm available,” Chavez said.

HARRISON TURNED THE CORNER
on Mariposa and pulled the squad to the curb. Three-quarters of the way up on the left, my house sat atop the sloping grade of ivy and ice plants. On the street in front, the unmarked squad of the officer who hadn't answered the phone was empty.

“He's not sitting in his squad,” Harrison said.

He glanced at me. “And the paper's still on the driveway.”

Chavez scanned the front of the house with binoculars. “Curtains are closed on all the windows.”

“I left them open,” I said.

I stared at the house trying to recognize it as the place where I had conceived a child and then brought her home from the hospital, but it was no longer recognizable as mine. My house couldn't be this one. Not the fake shutters, not the yellow paint, not the pathetic bed of roses I had once planted in a misguided quest to be a normal suburban parent. Everything looked exactly as it had every morning for the last eighteen years. But the sameness only made it more frightening. Inside, the fever dream that hides in every child's nightmare had been let loose from under the bed.

“In two minutes we should hear four F-15s fly over the
length of the parade route,” Chavez said. “Two minutes after that the first band starts around the corner and begins the parade and a hundred thousand people will start to cheer.”

I could feel the momentum begin to gather speed. I wanted to slow it down, to catch my breath, but there was no stopping it.

“Four minutes,” I said, as if I needed to hear the words in order to believe them.

“How do you want to make entry?” the chief asked.

“There's a door on the north side of the garage,” I said. “He won't be able to hear from inside the house. He has her in either my bedroom or hers. Probably hers.”

I glanced down at the motion sensor strapped to my chest.

“How many feet do I need to be clear of everyone else if this . . .” I let it go.

Harrison and Chavez glanced uneasily at each other, then Harrison's eyes moved over the bomb, quickly calculating its destructive force.

“Out in the open, anyone within ten feet would be severely injured. Inside a house, that changes. It becomes more dangerous with objects flying.”

I pictured Dave disappearing in the debris at Sweeny's.

“Glass and doors,” I said.

Harrison had the look you see on people's faces at funerals where finality is for the first time measurable.

“Every object in a house becomes a weapon: a spoon, pen, coffee cup . . . everything.”

I glanced at my watch, which now took on the appearance of a weapon. I quickly began to fumble with the buckle, desperately trying to get it off. Chavez's big, thick hand clamped down gently on my wrist. His eyes met mine with the same assuredness they had held when he told me I was to be the head of Homicide.

“Please, don't do that,” he said softly.

In the distance, the faint roar of the F-15s began to rumble like a gathering storm, threatening to sweep up
everything in its path. I let my fingers slip from the watch and started to reach out for Chavez's hand, but I couldn't touch him.

“Ten feet,” I said silently to myself, pulling my hand away. I was no longer a part of his world, even one as already jaded as a cop's. And nothing anyone could do or say would ever wholly reinstate me in it.

“He'll be calling,” I said.

Chavez watched my hand withdraw and sadly nodded as if sensing the gulf that now existed between us.

“Officer James volunteered to walk out onto Colorado. She'll do whatever I relay to her.”

“As soon as I start talking to him, we go through the door.”

Harrison began driving up the block toward the end of the cul-de-sac. As we passed the third house on the right, the real estate agent my husband had had the affair with walked out in a blue bathrobe and yellow slippers to retrieve her paper. Her face was pale and her eyes strained against the morning light as if she were hungover. She glanced in our direction but quickly looked away when she saw me, as had been her practice since the day I discovered the affair. I like to think it was guilt that fueled her behavior, or even better, shame. But in truth I think she just wanted to pretend it never happened. And if she never looked at me, then it didn't for her.

Nothing of the outside of my house gave any hint of the events that might be taking place within. You could exchange it with any of the other houses on the block. They were all just different enough so that none appeared out of place. A three-bedroom country rambler, next to the four-bedroom, next to the split-level. They were part of a time that seemed so distant now, part of a sense of community that no longer existed for me.

Harrison swung around the cul-de-sac and stopped in front of the second house north of mine. We stepped out, withdrawing our weapons, lowering them casually to our sides, and began to make our way across the ivy and lawns toward the side of the garage.

From the valley below, the sound of the jets making their pass over the parade route built and rose like thunder, until the glass of the windows in my neighbors' houses shook. I stepped across the split-rail fence that marked my property line, one eye on the fence, the other on the quivering liquid inside the motion detector. Four steps across a spit of grass and we were against the wall of the garage.

I was breathing as if I had sprinted a mile. My heart pounded against the brick of explosive strapped to my chest. I took two deep breaths then looked up toward the mountains that were dusted with snow five thousand feet up.

“It was a perfect morning,” I whispered.

Harrison turned to me not understanding.

“It's what they always seem to say about the morning of a disaster.”

Harrison glanced at me for a moment, then looked at some distant point on the horizon.

“Not always. Sometimes it rains,” he said softly.

The thunder of the jets reached its peak then faded into the distance, leaving behind an uneasy silence. There was no birdsong, no cars, no music, not even the collective white noise of nine million lives in the city spread out below. I took out my key and slipped it silently into the lock.

“I go through the door first,” I said.

Chavez shook his head. “No way.”

“If we surprise him and he sees me, he'll hesitate because of the bomb.”

Chavez looked doubtfully at me.

“His nightmare is losing control, one of his victims turning the tables on him.”

“You.”

I nodded.

“There'll be a moment of advantage, but no more. You take care of Lacy.” I glanced at Harrison. “Both of you . . . whatever happens.”

They reluctantly agreed. I reached up and removed the phone from the pocket of the vest as Chavez rang James,
who answered on the first ring. They exchanged several words, then he turned to me.

“Less than a minute to the start.”

My stomach began to tighten into a knot. I tried to take a deep breath but my lungs seemed to actively repel the fresh air. I looked down at the motion detector and the wires wrapped around the vest. Each breath, each step I took felt borrowed. I started to look one more time at the mountains rising above, then noticed a deer standing motionless on a lawn across the street. A dried slash of crimson across its back led to its left rear leg, which appeared broken where it had been hit by a car. Its eyes had a familiar quality to them, one that I would recognize if I looked in a mirror. I closed my eyes and managed to force a breath into my lungs, and when I looked up again, the deer was gone.

“Our window is going to be very short,” I said, pressing the point. “As soon as James begins to run and there's no explosion, he'll kill her.”

As if on cue, the phone in my hand began to ring.

“To hell with him,” I whispered.

I waited until the sixth ring, then answered.

“Are you ready, Lieutenant?” Gabriel said.

I took hold of the key in the door and slowly disengaged the lock.

“I'm there.”

“Can you hear the music?”

“The music?”

Chavez asked James if she heard the music, then looked at me and nodded.

“It's just beginning,” I said.

I eased the door open and looked into the garage. All the familiar odors were there—the sweetness of the gardening tools, the sharpness of the trash. But there was something else, something new, something that carried death with it.

“There's been gunfire,” I whispered.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then I saw the Armed Response patrol car parked in Lacy's space. I swept the garage with my weapon—nothing.

“I want to speak to Lacy.”

“You will.”

On the opposite side of the garage, the door to the house was ajar several inches, sending a slice of light like a blade into the darkness. I moved around the patrol car to the door as Harrison and Chavez took positions on the other side. From inside the house I could hear the sound of television from a distant room.

“What song are they playing, Lieutenant?” he asked, testing me.

I knew from memory that it was the same every year.

“ ‘The Marine Corps Hymn.' ”

“Hold the phone out. Let me hear it.”

I covered the mouthpiece.

“Tell James to hold the phone out toward the music.”

Chavez gave her the instructions, then held his phone out toward me. I could hear the tiny strains of the band music. I pressed my phone against the other earpiece just long enough for him to hear it, but not so long that he would understand that something was wrong.

“Satisfied?”

There was silence on the other end.

“What else do you want?” I asked.

Still nothing. I looked at Chavez and shook my head. “I don't know if he's buying it.”

I put my hand on the door to the kitchen to push it open, then noticed a thin line of blood, no wider than a pencil, streaming out from inside, gathering in a small pool against the threshold and dripping down onto the first step. My heart was in my throat. It can't be, it can't. I quickly pushed it open, but it jammed halfway into the room. I raised my weapon, waiting for a response from the other side, but there was none.

“What do you want me to do?” I said into the phone.

Nothing came back but the faint sound of the band music from the television.

I eased around the door and into my kitchen and saw the sole of a boot blocking the door. The young uniformed
officer who had not answered the phone was lying on his back, one leg bent awkwardly beneath him, his lidded eyes staring up at the ceiling. A hole smaller than a dime penetrated his skull just above the right eyebrow. There was no need to check for a pulse. I doubt he ever saw the face of his killer. Bored, and upset about guarding an empty house, he would have heard the garage door open and casually walked out to investigate. A burst of light from the muzzle flash might have registered, and then nothing. Not the sound of the shot that killed him, no understanding of what just happened. I recognized him as the young officer named Baker, who had taken the call at Breem's flower shop. A kid who liked to talk like a TV cop.

Chavez stepped in behind me and stared in disbelief at the fallen. He had lost only one other cop in his tenure as chief, and now, seeing a second one, the heartbreak registered in his eyes instantly. His shoulders slumped and he closed his eyes and crossed himself.

I looked away and noticed that one of the burners on the stovetop was on, its blue flame glowing in the half-light, warming nothing, the hiss of the gas sounding like the warning of a snake coiled to strike.

I stared at it for a moment, then looked out through the passageway toward the dining and living rooms. I stepped past the body and moved to the edge of the tiled kitchen floor. The only light in the living room came from a faint glow through the curtains. Instead of the warmth of the morning light I had always felt in this room, violence had transformed it into something grotesque. The light seemed designed to draw me farther in, the furniture in the room, props to disguise the house's real purpose. Harrison stepped up beside me. His eyes were wide with adrenaline. His temple damp with sweat.

“I don't like this,” he said.

I looked into the living room, past the high-back reading chairs and the mission couch toward the dark hallway at the other end, where I could hear the faint sound of the TV.
I knew everything there was to know about the room, but it was as if I had never been in it before.

“What you don't like is that this feels like a trap,” I whispered.

I'd seen it in other houses, other living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms. I'd seen it in the eyes of battered women whose homes had become a nightmare to escape from.

“Walk out onto Colorado,” Gabriel said.