Takeover (8 page)

“Hang in there, baby.”

Hopelessness flooded her, trying to seep into her bones, and she snapped the Nextel shut. Her cousin’s calling her anything other than her name could not be a good sign. All might be calm for the moment, but they had a long way to go.

10:23
A.M
.

Theresa grabbed a coffee, for once not for the caffeine but for the heat. She’d gone from sweltering to shivering in a flat ten minutes, the silk blouse having cooled to a wet shroud.

Don sat in front of a computer terminal, explaining the images to Jason. “Of the prints we got from the car, seven fingers and the palm match Robert Moyers. Ten other prints don’t match anyone in our database.”

“There’s ten other people on this car?”

“No, it could be ten fingers from one person or, more likely, ten fingers from two or three other people. There’s no way to tell for sure.”

“That doesn’t help much,” Theresa admitted. “Moyers owns the Benz—Wait a minute. Why is he in the database?”

“Armed robbery.”

“So that could be him in there.” Theresa sipped, letting the scalding liquid aggravate an already fluttering stomach. She had begun to think these crooks were smart, but who would use their
own car for a burglary? “Is there still no one at his house? Do we have a work address or anything?”

“CPD just called Jason about that. The address is old—the woman living there bought it last spring. Doesn’t know anything else about him, not even what he looks like. CPD checked her out, and she’s, like, Snow White: a fashion designer, two kids. Not the type to be an armed robber’s moll.”

“So where’s he been since last spring? He sure hasn’t been living in that Benz, unless he’s a neat freak of the highest order. It’s
clean.
”

“You keep saying that,” Jason said.

“We see a lot of cars,” Theresa explained. “Most are filthy. Some have their own supply of cockroaches.”

Jason made a face. “I see. This is the Ohio state database that these prints turned up in?”

“You betcha. And before you ask, we can’t search the country unless we send it to the FBI and wait four or five weeks.”

“Wonderful.”

“It’s not like TV,” Don explained gently. “Moving right along. I superglued the Advil bottle, the Tic Tac container, the Kleenex package, and even that little piece of foil but didn’t get any fingerprints of value. The fumes only brought up a smudge here or there. I used mag powder on the owner’s manual and the envelope and the receipt, since the pulverized metal is better on porous surfaces. And tell Paul,” he added to Theresa, “I hope he appreciates it, because I hate that black powder crap.”

“Duly noted.”

“I got nothing with the mag powder either. CPD called Conrad’s about the receipt, but it had been paid with cash by Robert
Moyers, with the same address, the one he sold to the fashion designer. No one at Conrad’s remembers anything about one sale four years ago. And no one at Sirius will tell me anything about the satellite radio account either, so the cops are running that down.”

“Have you called about the meter on that envelope?”

“The what?”

“Where is it?”

Don moved to a counter and picked up the number ten envelope, now sooty from the mag powder used to process it. “It’s blank. Nothing but the forty-two-cent imprint.”

Theresa peered through the plastic at the inked red markings. “Postage meters are closely regulated. You have to lease them from a dealer authorized by the United States Postal Service. This is a Pitney Bowes; if we call them with this serial number, they should be able to give us the name of the company that metered this envelope.”

Jason listened attentively. “That easy, huh?”

“Not really—they’ll want faxes on letterhead and a few other forms of identification before they’ll release the information. I’ll take the envelope back with me and get some police VIP to call.”

Don thrust a printed form and a pen at Theresa. Chain-of-custody procedures had to be maintained, even under extenuating circumstances, up to and including Armageddon. “Sign here and it’s all yours. Now, follow me.”

She led them into one of the back rooms, pausing at the door.

“That looks—” Theresa stopped.

Don nodded. “Yep.”

“Like
Leo.
At a microscope.”

“Yep.”

“It’s like he’s
working.
”

“You betcha.”

“I can hear you, you know.” Her boss spoke without moving his lean face from the ocular lenses of an old polarized light microscope. “I can also hear the percentage of your cost-of-living increase dropping like a sow’s litter.”

Theresa approached with caution, as if a heavy tread could shatter the tableau. “What are you doing?”

“Pollen.”

“What?”

“Remember pollen? The powdery stuff that busy little bees carry from one plant to another, making most of our food supply possible? Identifying them with polarized light was a big deal in the fifties and sixties, tracking dastardly criminals back to the apple tree behind the crime scene.” He replaced a pair of glasses on his nose, long fingers flicking with excess energy. “It’s a dying art, sadly. No one does it anymore.”

“Yeah, like hair comparisons,” Theresa commiserated. “We have a reference collection for pollen?”

“In the basement. Way back in the corner, behind the piece of fence from that torso in the park and the skull-under-glass thing from those satanic wannabes. I’ve probably breathed in enough dust to give me pleurisy.” Indeed, the one-by-three-inch glass slides scattered around on the countertop appeared dusty, and the mounting media had yellowed. The corners on their hard vinyl case had abraded into powder.

“So what is it?”

“Pine.”

Her shoulders slumped. “That’s all?”

“Nothing exotic, sorry. It’s kind of odd to see so much of it, though.”

He skittered his chair back a few feet as Theresa bent her head to the eyepiece, viewing the pink-stained grains. They seemed to have three sections, a central orb with two kidney-shaped appendages. “Why is the amount odd?”

“It rains regularly here, even in summer. That knocks most of the pollen out of the air.”

“So they might be from some other area?”

“But I thought your guy lived here.”

“His car does. Or did. Where would we expect to find a lot of pine pollen?”

Leo began to fit the glass reference slides back into their kit. “I remembered how to use a polarizing microscope, Theresa. That doesn’t make me a botanist. But I’ll see if someone at the Museum of Natural History can help us.”

Leo, volunteering to make a phone call, hunt up a specialist? Tears pricked the backs of her eyelids.
Don’t start,
she warned herself.
Don’t.

Jason’s remote radio chirped at the same time as Don’s Nextel.

Jason put it to his ear, then held it out so they could hear it. “Chris just called them. The receptionist answered.”

She heard Cavanaugh’s voice, full and deep even on the radio’s tiny speaker. “Can I speak to Lucas?”

Don took his call out of the room.

“Chris.” Lucas’s voice sounded much less real than Cavanaugh’s and had an echo to it. The robber had them on speakerphone, so
that the hostages could hear every word of the process meant to free them. Theresa wondered if that made Paul feel better or worse. “You’re early.”

“I needed to give you the heads-up. First, though, is everyone in there still doing okay?”

“They’re getting tired and thirsty and will probably have to go to the bathroom soon, Chris, so it would be best if we could take our show on the road. What are you telling me? The chief won’t part with four million dollars that’s not even his?”

“No, they’re still talking about the money. It’s the car. They took it to the medical examiner’s office and—”

“What did they do to it?”

“Nothing. It’s fine. It’s just that the flatbed isn’t there to pick it up yet, so I know it isn’t going to be back here to you by the one-hour deadline. There’s no way. And I didn’t want to wait until the last minute to tell you. Things usually go smoother with that policy—I don’t surprise you, you don’t surprise me, okay? Can we agree on that at least?”

“Too late, Chris. I’m already surprised that you’d risk losing a few of these people because the entire police department is at the Winn-Dixie drinking coffee instead of getting a tow-truck driver off his ass. Makes me think there’s some other problem with the car.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the car.”

“You didn’t cut up the interior, did you? Bobby will be really mad if you did. I mean
really.
”

A pause.

“Robert Moyers.” Don spoke from the doorway. “CPD just ran him down. He sold the house because he had to serve eight months
for a parole violation from the armed-robbery charge. He got out on Friday.”

“Is that Bobby Moyers with you?” they heard Chris ask.

“The one and only!” a distant voice shouted. The other robber. “What’d you do to my car?”

“The car’s fine.” Lucas sounded fainter for a moment, as if his head had turned away from the phone. “Chris says so.”

“I don’t believe them,” the faraway voice continued.

“Now, Bobby, if Chris says the car is okay, it’s okay. We’re happy about that, Chris, and we’ll give you another ten minutes to get it on a flatbed. And don’t talk to me about traffic jams, because everyone in town is over at the convention center, so there
isn’t
any traffic. Talk to me about something else—like why I don’t see any money coming up the elevator. What
have
you been doing for the past forty minutes, Chris?”

“We’ve been working on the money, too. The problem is, the robots never place money in the passenger elevators, only the freight elevators. To get them to move money to a new place, the Fed engineers have to write a whole new program.”

“You’re telling me the tech geeks can’t handle that?”

“They’ve begun to work on it. When you”—Cavanaugh paused here, no doubt trying to think of a less offensive word than “invaded”—“took over the lobby, we evacuated the building. Nearly three hundred people work in that building, Lucas, and they couldn’t all hang out at the Hampton Inn. We sent them home. Everyone’s getting a paid day off because of you, so you’re a fairly popular man among the staff right now.”

Theresa snorted.

Jason told her gently, “I know he’s laying it on a little thick, but
if you can get them feeling good about themselves, for any reason, they’ll look at the hostages that much more generously.”

“So you don’t have any programmers?” Lucas pressed.

“Oh, yeah, we got hold of two. One has arrived, I’ve been told, and the other is stuck in the convention-center traffic.”

Lucas said nothing. Theresa asked Jason, “Is he lying?”

“Chris? No. He meant what he said about not lying to them.”

“I’d lie to them.” Leo sat with one ear cocked toward the radio, as if listening with all his might.

“He can’t. As bizarre as it sounds, the whole thing works on trust. If he says the pop machine doesn’t carry Diet Coke and they know it does, it’s all over. If they can’t trust him, we’ll never get them to give up.”

The radio sprang to life with Lucas’s voice. “Here’s a thought: Why don’t the programmers just pick up the damn money and throw it into the elevator themselves? Bypass the robots.”

“Only the robots enter those rooms. It’s designed that way.”

“Are we standing on procedure now?”

“The rooms are made to keep people out. If any body of matter other than a robot enters, the alarm system trips and all hell breaks loose.”

“I don’t mind if the alarm rings. My ears are tough.”

“It also closes the doors and locks them for twelve hours. It’s a fail-safe thing. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing anyone can do about this. We are all at the mercy of modern technology, my friend.”

Then Lucas said, “I am not your friend,” so that the words coursed through Theresa like a river of ice.
We’re not going to make it through this. Paul is going to die.

Then Lucas added, “More than that, Chris, I’m beginning to doubt your commitment to this endeavor.”

“Don’t doubt me yet, Lucas. I might have a solution. There’s a shipment of cash scheduled to arrive this morning. It’s only three million, but at least we mere human beings can touch it without triggering a mechanical lockdown.”

“You trying to haggle with me, Chris? This is priceless. Someone over there decided that these people aren’t worth four million, only three? Or that you only want three-quarters of them back, is that it? Then I might as well kill the last quarter of the group, if I’m not going to get paid for them anyway.”

“Come on,” Theresa said to Jason. “Let’s get that car down there so at least that will be in place.”

“But the tow—”

“We don’t need a tow. I’ll just drive the damn thing.”

“But—”

She stopped as Cavanaugh spoke, dying to move but afraid to miss a word.

“It’s not the money, Lucas. You can empty every last cent out of that building as long as you don’t hurt anybody.
We don’t care.
If you want four million instead of three, I’m sure we can scrape together the last million for you—that’s not a problem. The problem is, the three million on the truck isn’t going to arrive until two. It’s on 80, just passing State College.”

Another pause. “Clever. Very clever. Hang on a sec, Chris. I just need to talk this over with Bobby.”

Jason scratched his chin with the radio antenna, staring at nothing. “That’s not good.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you—it’s just that we had Bobby pegged as a follower, not an equal. Negotiations are more complicated when you have more than one person on the other side, because you have to get a consensus. When you go to buy a car, the salesman wants you to come in by yourself, but he’ll have the floor manager and the finance guy on his side. It means he has an excuse to slow down, whereas you don’t. What we need,” he went on as the radio remained silent, “is for the hostage taker to make decisions. If these two have to discuss everything first, it will drag on that much longer. That’s why sometimes a lone gunman is easier than a takeover.”

She stared at him.

“A single robber instead of a group of two or more,” he clarified.

“He sounds so calm,” Don said.

“They usually do. That’s something I’ve never been able to figure out either. Even the psychotic ones are often calm. They’re focused, I guess.”