Thyme to Live: A We Sisters Three Mystery (14 page)

I
flagged
down a police officer near the fountain and started to rattle off an explanation. I got as far as “ambushed the undercover officers” when he barked, “Stay here.” He pulled out his radio and raced toward the church.

I waited until he was out of sight and then made my way back across the street. I wasn’t planning to do anything heroic or stupid, but it did occur to me that Janie would presumably come wandering back, laden with cheese. I didn’t want her to walk into a gun battle. I paced back and forth at the corner for a few moments, dying to know what was happening inside the building.

Two black and white police cruisers sped up with their lights on, but no sirens. They screeched to a halt. Officer Yee exited the passenger side of the closer one.

“Ms. Field, status inside?” Her gun was already drawn.

“There were four undercover caterers. Your two guys, and two working for Gabriel Vasquez. The bad guys must have overpowered your guys. They stripped them of their guns and handcuffed them, then stuffed them in a basement closet.”

Her partner came around from the other side of the car, followed by two officers from the second vehicle. I went on, “They were speaking Portuguese, but I heard the name Gabriel. I don’t know if they’re waiting for him or were just talking about him or what.”

“Hostage count?” One of the officers from the second car asked.

“Um, there’s Victor, Cate Whittier-Clay and her husband, two other women, and Officers Jennings and Thompson inside. I don’t know if there are any caretakers or priests or anyone like that in the building.”

“What about the kid?” Officer Yee wanted to know.

“I got her out. She’s in the school next door visiting a preschool class.”

That bit of information earned me an approving look.

“Okay. We’ll take it from here. Clear the area, please, Ms. Field. You shouldn’t be hanging around out here,” she told me.

“Oh, wait. I forgot about Janie.”

“Who’s Janie?”

“She’s the little girl’s nanny. Ms. Whittier-Clay sent her to the cheese shop. But she’s going to come walking back any minute, with no idea about what’s happening in there.”

“Cheese shop?” one of the officers muttered, as if he might have misheard me.

“Dude, Murray’s is just around the corner. Have you tried their fresh burrata?” Yee’s partner answered.

“Enough about the cheese already. You have this Janie’s cell number?” Yee asked.

I shook my head no.

“Fergus, Oldman, you two close off the corner. Nobody comes onto to Carmine from Bleeker. Got it?”

Either Fergus or Oldman opened his mouth to argue, but the other one shut him down before he got started. “Yes, ma’am. Come on,” the guy said over his shoulder as he turned and walked toward Bleeker.

“Mulgrave, you’re with me.”

Her partner nodded.

“Now, beat it, Thyme. I mean it.” Yee gave me a stern look.

“I’ll just go check on Audra,” I said as I drifted toward the school building.

A
udra was just fine
, the school receptionist assured me. She’d called down to Sister Anastasia’s classroom to check and told me Audra was currently playing in the pretend kitchen area with three other children. She didn’t tell me to get lost, but she didn’t have to. There was yet another police officer posted in front of the school, who eyeballed me hard until I left.

Maybe I should just go home
, I thought miserably as I stepped back out onto the sidewalk.
Or call one of my sisters to pass the time. This waiting business was for the birds. Maybe the local news crew would have an update.

As soon as that thought formed in my mind, a second thought followed on its heels:
Where was that cameraman, anyway? He couldn’t have left. He didn’t get a shot of Cate.

My heart jumped in my chest.
Unless what he wanted wasn’t a shot of Cate.
I craned my neck and scanned up and down the street. No cameraman in sight. What if Gabriel had decided to pose as a cameraman in order to get close to the church?

Your blood sugar must be low,
I told myself. The idea was laughable. I might even have laughed aloud had I not, at that very moment, spotted the cameraman in the white jacket with the logo that I couldn’t read, army crawling on his elbows through the courtyard between the school building and the church.

I ran back to into the school. The officer who’d been posted at the door just minutes ago was gone.

“Are you freaking
kidding
me?” I muttered to a statue of the Virgin Mary. Then I froze.
Was that a sin?
“Um, sorry, Mary.”

I raced into the office and skidded to a stop in front of the receptionist. “Where’s the police officer who was just outside?”

The woman looked at me in confusion. “I don’t … know? Making the rounds? Seems he’s been walking around the building every hour or so, checking the locks.”

I bolted back outside and raced around to the side of the building in search of the uniformed officer. The alley was empty, except for some fast food wrappers that fluttered on the ground when I ran by and, of course, the ubiquitous rats. I mean, I didn’t see any, but I knew they were there.

I eased open the gate and sneaked into the courtyard. I could see the cameraman in the distance, still edging forward on his elbows, slow, marking his slow tedious progress in inches. In just another minute or two—three, at the most—he’d reach the cement path that led to the stairs into the basement. I didn’t see the police officer anywhere. I didn’t have time for him to show up, anyway.

I raced across the macadam, past the playground, and onto the patch of grass where the garden boxes sat in tidy rows. I grabbed a bright yellow child-sized rake. It was metal but flimsy. I could feel it bending in the breeze as I ran. It wasn’t a weapon that gave me a lot of confidence. But it was what I had.

I charged toward the man, waving the rake and shrieking a wordless war cry. I know, I sound ridiculous. I assure you, I looked equally ludicrous. A fact I know because Sister Mary Margaret’s seventh-grade media class just happened to film me through their second-floor window. “Crazy Rake Lady” was briefly a YouTube sensation—until I was displaced by a video of a tabby cat riding on golden retriever’s back as the dog ran up and down a set of stairs.

As I later saw on the recording, I sprinted toward the man as he neared the edge of the grass and launched myself onto his back, landing with a thud and more or less pancaking him.

“Gabriel Vasquez,” I said in a tone that sounded certain even though inside I was thinking,
Please, please be Gabriel Vasquez.

He strained, twisting his neck to look up at me. But I was on his back with the tines of the rake pressed down into his shoulders, so his range of motion was somewhat limited, to say the least. I could feel the fury rising off him like a wave.

He erupted
,
shouting a string of Portuguese words, the only one of which I recognized was
‘puta’
because it’s also a Spanish curse word.

“That’s no way to talk. You’re at church,” I scolded him, trying to sound tough and implacable, instead of how I felt, which was terrified and stupid.

It occurred to me—some may say belatedly—that I was really not a match for an enraged, possibly psychopathic police officer. The realization hit me with full force when he started to buck in an attempt to throw me off. I dropped the rake and grabbed two fistfuls of his hair, hanging on for all I was worth. If he got me off his back, it was all over.

Sister Mary Margaret’s class was shouting and pounding on the windows. I just had to hold on another minute or two. We’d caused such a commotion, and the grounds were crawling with police officers. One of them would be here soon.

He went limp, but I’m not
that
stupid. I didn’t relax my grip on his hair. He turned again, his features oddly tight and flattened by the fact that I was yanking his scalp back. His eyes were black pinpricks of hate.

“Just tell me,” he spat in accented English, “is that whore really dead?”

My stomach turned, but I was saved from answering when a heavy, black lace up shoe crunched down hard on his right hand.

He yelped and writhed. I tightened my grip and looked up to see my savior. Not Officer Thompson. Not Jennings, and not Yee. None of the uniformed officers. A very unimpressed nun looked back at me. She was about seventy years old, short and boxy, with a lined, weathered face. She was pointing a shotgun at Vasquez’s head, which was also where my hands were. I let go of his hair and jumped to my feet.

“Who are you?” I couldn’t stop the question.

“I’m Mother Superior. I’m the principal at this school. And this behavior is completely unacceptable.”

A
fter the dust settled
, and Gabriel Vasquez and his two thugs had been carted off to Central Booking, I went to fetch Audra from Sister Anastasia’s classroom. She was curled up on a nap map, looking at a picture book with another little girl.

“How is everybody in here?” I asked Sister Anastasia in a low tone.

“Our class members are too short to see out the windows, so we missed the halftime show on the lawn. They know something was going on because we heard the announcements that the doors were locked and everyone was to stay in their fourth period class until further notice, but they don’t know any details. We like to shelter the little ones as best we can from man’s ugliness to man.”

I nodded. “Your Mother Superior is a real pistol.”

A small smile formed on her lips and she wiped it away. “She takes her responsibilities very seriously.” Then she nodded toward Audra. “Audra’s a very kind girl. Her mother should be proud.”

Would Cate be proud to hear that her daughter was kind? Could kindness skip a generation?
I set these unanswerable questions aside to ponder later.

“I’ll be sure to tell her parents. Thank you for keeping her safe during all the . . . chaos.”

“What else would I have done?” she said simply. “But, unlike our students, she has some idea that something very bad happened in the church. She told me about the men with guns. Her parents should talk to her, see their parish priest or whoever they trust for spiritual guidance and counsel,” she suggested.

I nodded.

She walked over to the mat and rubbed Audra’s shoulders. “Look who’s here.”

Audra saw me standing by the door and broke into a grin. She ran toward me, her hair ribbon flying behind her. After a flurry of goodbyes from her new friends and a hug from Sister Anastasia, Audra took my hand, and we walked out of the classroom.

“Mommy and Daddy are okay?”

“Your mommy and daddy are safe and sound inside the church. They can’t wait to hear all about your day. And Janie’s there’s, too. You’ll all go home together in the limo.”

She beamed. Then her face fell. “You know what I was thinking, Thyme?”

“No, what?”

“I kept thinking about how the other veiled ladies are going to miss Helena.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, not really listening. My mind was on Victor and what had happened in the church while I was rolling around on the lawn with Captain Creepy.

Audra started to skip. When she saw her parents standing in front of the church with Janie (who was holding a tote bag with a picture of a wheel of brie on the side), she broke out into a run. Cate bent down and opened her arms then scooped her daughter up into a hug. After a long moment, she passed her to her husband, who gave Audra a big squeeze.

I walked up as their driver was ushering them all into the back seat of the limo.

“I don’t know how to thank you, Thyme,” Cate said.

I shook my head. “You don’t need to. The nuns said to tell you Audra’s a very kind girl.”

In a moment of perfect self-awareness, Cate looked directly at me and said, “She gets that from her father.” Then she folded herself into the car and the driver closed the door.

I stood on the sidewalk and watched them drive away. I felt someone walking down the steps from the church and turned to see Victor. He looked to be unharmed. He walked up to me, took me by my upper arms, and peered down into my face.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I have a few grass stains on my knees and some gross Gabriel germs under my fingernails, but I’m fine.”

He laughed and pulled me close to his chest in a tight hug. I listened to his heart beating under my ear until he released me.

“What happened in there?” I asked, jerking my thumb toward the front doors of the church.

He gestured to the wide steps. “Let’s cop a squat. It’s a long story.”

He waited until we were settled on the cool stone steps. Then he reached for my hand. “After you let the police out of the closet, they sneaked upstairs without those caterer dudes hearing them. They got Officer Thompson’s attention, and he went out to the hallway to talk to them. He uncuffed them using his key, then the three of them and Officer Jennings ushered us into that little room where the altar servers get ready.”

“The sacristy,” I supplied.

“Sure, whatever. They told us there were two armed men in the basement and Gabriel was on his way. They didn’t have any details on Gabriel because the caterers started speaking in Portuguese after they jumped the undercover guys.”

That was consistent with what I’d overheard in the basement. “Okay, so then what? Did they just leave you there?”

“Thompson and Jennings had a hell of a fight because he wanted her to stay with us and she wanted to be where the action was. Finally, Cate threatened to sue the department if they left us alone, so Officer Thompson stayed to babysit.”

I could picture that mini-drama as clear as day. It was comforting to see that everyone behaved consistently in a crisis.

“Was it awful?”

He shrugged. “It was mainly boring. The cop you found in the square showed up and Jennings made him sit with us. Then more police poured into the church. Given the numbers, I guess they took down Gabriel’s men pretty easily. The two undercovers got to do the honors of cuffing them. They were still pretty pissed. It was all over in a few minutes. Jennings and Thompson came and got me to translate the Miranda warning for the Portuguese guys. They demanded lawyers, so that was that.”

“So what took so long?” I felt like I’d been out running around the building for a decent amount of time.

“They wanted to hunker down and wait for Gabriel to show up. Jennings insisted it wasn’t safe to let us out of the sacristy until Gabriel was in custody.”

“What did you guys do?”

“Well, Mia filled me in on the suicide note, for starters.”

I wrinkled my brow. “Mia?”

“That’s right, you disappeared before I could introduce you. Mia Kim, Helena’s therapist, heard about the vigil on Cate’s channel. She came to tell me that Helena didn’t kill herself.”

“I’m confused.”

“Mia wrote the note. While Lynn was mixing up the stage blood, Helena went into the bathroom and called Mia. She told her that Gabriel had found her apartment and she was going to go on the run. She asked Mia to make sure I didn’t try to find her. She was terrified that Gabriel would latch on to me if we crossed paths and decide I was a close enough substitute to take his revenge on.”

I thought about the gunshots shattering the rear window of the sedan and how we’d cowered under the table in that Hell’s Kitchen restaurant.

“Well, she was right about that,” I ventured.

His cheek twitched. “She might have been right about his intentions, but she was wrong to try to shut me down. What was she thinking? That I’d just walk away?”

I didn’t really have a substantive response to that, so I went with a question. “So she wrote the note to dissuade you?”

“Actually, she said she tried to word it in a way that would at least hint that Helena hadn’t written it and that she wasn’t actually dead.”

“That worked,” I pointed out.

“I guess so,” he said grudgingly. “I still think Mia should have told me what was going on, but she just kept yammering about doctor-patient confidentiality.”

We sat in silence for a minute. Then he went on, “Anyway, Mia explained what happened. Cate was getting antsy even though the police had told her you’d taken Audra over to the school where she’d be safe. Officer Yee’s backup radioed that Janie was safe and accounted for. So we were just cooling our heels. I was getting worried about you because the receptionist from the school called over and said you were looking for a police officer.”

“And then?”

“And then, the next thing that happened was a very angry nun with a gun showed up dragging Gabriel by his ear.”

I laughed. He joined me, and it felt really good to laugh. But after a moment his face clouded and he dropped his eyes to the ground.

“What?”

“We did all this, risked all these people’s lives, but we still don’t know where Helena is.”

My smile faded. “Well, we did make it safe for her to come back. Gabriel’s never going to bother her again.”

“Sure. If she ever finds out. But wherever she is, she must not be watching the news. The coverage of her own funeral didn’t make her pop her head up. And she didn’t tell Mia where she was going. I might never see her again.” He put his head in his hands.