A Maiden's Grave Page 10

  This news depressed Potter immeasurably. Curiously, with this act of spontaneous generosity, Handy had put them on the defensive. It was tactically brilliant. Potter was now indebted to him and he felt again a shift in the balance of power between predator and prey.

  "I want you to understand that I ain't all bad."

  "Well, Lou, I appreciate that. Is it Beverly? The sick girl?"

  "Uh-uh."

  Potter and the other cops craned forward to look outside. They could see a slight splinter of light as the door opened. Then a blur of white.

  Keep his mind off the hostages, Potter thought. "You done any more thinking about what you folks're interested in? It's time to get down to some serious horse trading, Lou. What do you say--"

  The phone clicked into dull static.

  The door to the van suddenly swung open. Dean Stillwell's head poked in. The sheriff said, "They're releasing one of them."

  "We know."

  Stillwell disappeared outside again.

  Potter spun about in the swivel chair. He couldn't see clearly. The clouds were very dense now and the fields dim, as if an eclipse had suddenly dipped the earth into shadow.

  "Let's try the video, Tobe."

  A video screen burst to life, showing in crisp black-and-white the front of the slaughterhouse. The door was open. They had all five lamps burning, it seemed.

  Tobe adjusted the sensitivity and the picture settled.

  "Who, Henry?"

  "It's the older girl, Susan Phillips. Seventeen."

  Budd laughed. "Hey, looks like it may be easier than we thought. If he's just gonna give 'em away."

  On the screen Susan looked back into the doorway. A hand pushed her forward. Then the door closed.

  "This is great," LeBow said enthusiastically, looking out the window, his head close to Potter's. "Seventeen. And she's a top student. She'll tell us a truckload of stuff about the inside."

  The girl walked in a straight line away from the building. Through the glasses Potter could see how grim her face was. Her hands were tied behind her but she didn't seem to have suffered from the brief captivity.

  "Dean," Potter said into the radio microphone, "send one of your men to meet her."

  "Yessir." The sheriff was now speaking in a normal tone into his throat mike; he'd finally gotten the hang of the gear.

  A state trooper in body armor and helmet slipped from behind a squad car and cautiously started in a crouch toward the girl, who'd made her way fifty feet from the slaughterhouse.

  The gasp came from deep in Arthur Potter's throat.

  As if his whole body'd been submerged in ice water he shuddered, understanding perfectly what was happening.

  It was intuition probably, a feeling gleaned from the hundreds of barricades he'd negotiated. The fact that no taker had ever spontaneously released a hostage this early. The fact that Handy was a killer without remorse.

  He couldn't say for sure what tipped him but the absolute horror of what was about to occur gripped his heart. "No!" The negotiator leapt to his feet, knocking the chair over with a huge crash.

  LeBow glanced at him. "Oh, no! Oh, Christ, no."

  Charlie Budd's head swiveled back and forth. He whispered, "What's wrong? What's going on?"

  "He's going to kill her," LeBow whispered.

  Potter tore the door open and ran outside, his heart slugging away in his chest. Snatching a flak jacket from the ground, he slipped between two cars and, gasping, ran straight toward the girl, passing the man Dean Stillwell had sent to meet her. His urgency made the troopers in the field uneasy but some of them smiled at the sight of the pudgy man running, holding the heavy flak jacket in one hand and waving a white Kleenex in the other.

  Susan was forty feet from him, walking steadily over the grass. She adjusted her course slightly so they would meet.

  "Get down, drop down!" Potter cried. He released the tissue, which floated ahead of him on the fast breeze, and he gestured madly at the ground. "Down! Get down!"

  But she couldn't hear, of course, and merely frowned.

  Several of the troopers had heard Potter and stepped away from the cars they were using as cover. Reaching tentatively for their guns. Potter's shouts were joined by others. One woman trooper waved madly. "No, no, honey! Get down, for the love of God!"

  Susan never heard a word of it. She'd stopped and was looking carefully at the ground, perhaps thinking that he was warning her about a hidden well or wire she might trip over.

  Gasping, his middle-aged heart in agony, Potter narrowed the gap to fifteen feet.

  The agent was so close that when the single bullet struck her squarely in the back, and a flower of dark red blossomed over her right breast, he heard the nauseating sound of the impact, followed by an unworldly groan from deep within a throat unaccustomed to speaking.

  She stopped abruptly then spiraled to the ground.

  No, no, no . . .

  Potter ran to the girl and propped the flak jacket around her head. The trooper ran up, crouching, muttering, "My God, my God," over and over. He aimed his pistol toward the window.

  "Don't shoot," Potter commanded.

  "But--"

  "No!" Potter lifted his gaze from Susan's dull eyes to the slaughterhouse. He saw in the window just to the left of the door the lean face of Lou Handy. And through the right, perhaps thirty feet inside the dim interior, the negotiator could make out the stunned face of the young teacher, the blond one, who'd sent him the cryptic message earlier and whose name he could not now recall.

  You feel sounds.

  Sound is merely a disturbance of air, a vibration, and it laps upon our bodies like waves, it touches our brows like a lover's hand, it stings and it can make us cry.

  Within her chest she still felt the sound of the gunshot.

  No, Melanie thought. No. This isn't possible.

  It can't be . . . .

  But she knew what she'd seen. She didn't trust voices but her eyes were rarely wrong.

  Susan, Deaf of Deaf.

  Susan, braver than I could ever be.

  Susan, who had the world of the Deaf and the world of the Others at her feet.

  The girl had stepped into the horrible Outside and it had killed her. She was gone forever. A tiny hole opening in her back, kicking aside her dark hair. The abrupt halt as she walked the route that Melanie had shamefully prayed that she herself would be walking.

  Melanie's breath grew shallow and the edges of her vision crumbled to blackness. The room tilted and sweat appeared in sheets on her face and neck. She turned slowly and looked at Brutus, who was slipping the still-smoking pistol into his waistband. What she saw filled her with hopelessness. For she could see no satisfaction, no lust, no malice. She saw only that he'd done what he planned to--and had already forgotten about the girl's death.

  He clicked on the TV again and glanced toward the killing room, in whose doorway the seven girls stood or sat in a ragged line, some staring at Melanie, some staring at Mrs. Harstrawn, who had collapsed on the floor, sobbing, gripping her hair, her face contorted like a hideous red mask. The teacher had apparently seen the gunshot and understood what it meant. The other girls had not. Jocylyn wiped from her face a sheet of her dark hair, unfortunately self-cut. She lifted her hands, signing repeatedly, "What happened? What happened? What happened?"

  I have to tell them, Melanie thought.

  But I can't.

  Beverly, the next oldest after Susan, understood something terrible had occurred but didn't quite know--or admit--what. She took Jocylyn's pudgy hand and gazed at Melanie. She sucked air deep into her damaged lungs and put her other arm around the inseparable twins.

  Melanie did not spell the name Susan. She couldn't, for some reason. She used the impersonal "she," accompanied by a gesture toward the field.

  "She . . ."

  How do I say it? Oh, God, I have absolutely no idea. It took her a moment to remember the word for "killed." The word was constructed by moving the extended index
finger of the right hand up under the left hand, held cupped, palm down.

  Exactly like a bullet entering the body, she thought.

  She couldn't say it. Saw Susan's hair pop up under the impact. Saw her ease to the ground.

  "She's dead," Melanie finally signed. "Dead" was a different gesture, turning over the flattened, palm-up right hand so that it was palm down; simultaneously doing the opposite with the left. It was at her right hand that Melanie stared, thinking how the gesture of this hand mimicked scooping earth onto a grave.

  The girls' reactions were different but really all the same: the tears, the silent gasps, the eyes filling with horror.

  Her hands trembling, Melanie turned back to the window. De l'Epee had picked up Susan's body and was walking back to the police line with it. Melanie watched her friend's dangling arms, the cascade of black hair, the feet--one shoe on, one shoe off.

  Beautiful Susan.

  Susan, the person I would be if I could be anybody.

  As she watched de l'Epee disappear behind a police car, part of Melanie's silent world grew slightly more silent. And that was something she could scarcely afford.

  "I'm resigning, sir," Charlie Budd said softly.

  Potter stepped into the john of the van to put on the fresh shirt that had somehow appeared in the hands of one of Dean Stillwell's officers. He dropped his own bloodstained shirt into a wastebasket and pulled on the new one; the bullet that had killed Susan had spattered him copiously.

  "What's that, Charlie?" Potter asked absently, stepping back to the desk. Tobe and Derek sat silently at their consoles. Even Henry LeBow had stopped typing and stared out the window, which from the angle at which he sat revealed nothing but distant wheat fields, distorted and tinted ocher by the thick grass.

  Through the window on the other side of the van the ambulance lights flashed as they took the girl's body away.

  "I'm quitting," Budd continued. "This assignment and the force too." His voice was steady. "That was my fault. It was because of that shot a half-hour ago. When I didn't tell the snipers to unchamber. I'll call Topeka and get a replacement in here."

  Potter turned back, tucking the crisp shirt in. "Stick around, Charlie. I need you."

  "Nosir. I made a mistake and I'll shoulder the consequences."

  "You may have plenty of opportunity to take responsibility for your screwups before this night is through," Potter told him evenly. "But that sniper shot wasn't one of them. What Handy just did had nothing to do with you."

  "Then why? Why in God's name would he do that?"

  "Because he's putting his cards on the table. He's telling us he's serious. We can't buy him out of there cheap."

  "By shooting a hostage in cold blood?"

  LeBow said, "This's the hardest kind of negotiation there is, Charlie. After a killing up front, usually the only way to save any hostage is a flat-out assault."

  "High stakes," Derek Elb muttered.

  Extreme stakes, Arthur Potter thought. Then: Jesus, what a day this's going to be.

  "Downlink," Tobe said, and a moment later the phone buzzed. The tape recorder began turning automatically.

  Potter picked up the receiver. "Lou?" he said evenly.

  "There's something you gotta understand 'bout me, Art. I don't care about these girls. They're just little birds to me that I used to shoot off my back porch at home. I aim to get outta here and if it means I gotta shoot nine more of 'em dead as posts then that's the way it's gonna be. You hear me?"

  Potter said, "I do hear you, Lou. But we've got to get one other thing straight. I'm the only man in this universe can get you out of there alive. There's nobody else. So I'm the one to reckon with. Now do you hear me?"

  "I'll call you back with our demands."

  1:25 P.M.

  This was tricky, this was dangerous, this was not about re-election.

  This was about decency and life.

  So Daniel Tremain told himself as he walked into the governor's mansion.

  Standing upright as a birch rod, he headed through the surprisingly modest home into a large den.

  Decency and life.

  "Officer."

  "Governor."

  The Right Honorable Governor of the state of Kansas, A. R. Stepps, was looking at the faint horizon--fields of grain identical to those that had funded his father's insurance company, which had in turn allowed Stepps to be a public servant. Tremain believed Stepps was the perfect governor: connected, distrustful of Washington, infuriated about crime in Topeka and the felons that Missouri sloughed off into his Kansas City but able to live with it all, his eye no further than the low star of a retirement spent teaching in Lawrence and cruising Scandia Lines routes with the wife.

  But now there was Crow Ridge.

  The governor's eyes lifted from a fax he'd been reading and scanned Tremain.

  Look me over if you want. Go right ahead. His blue-and-black operations gear certainly looked incongruous here among the framed prints of shot ducks, the Lemon-Pledged mahogany antiques. Most frequently Stepps's eyes dipped to the large automatic pistol, which the trooper adjusted as he sat in the irritatingly scrolly chair.

  "He's killed one?"

  Tremain nodded his head, which was covered with a thinning crew cut. He noted that the governor had a tiny hole in the elbow of his baby-blue cardigan and that he was absolutely terrified.

  "What happened?"

  "Premeditated, looks like. I'm getting a full report but it looks like there was no reason for it. Sent her out like he was giving her up and shot her in the back."

  "Oh, dear God. How young was she?"

  "The oldest. A teenager. But still . . ."

  The governor nodded toward a silver service. "Coffee? Tea? . . . No? You've never been here before, have you?"

  "The governor's mansion? No." Though it wasn't a mansion; it was just a nice house, a house that rang with the sounds of family.

  "I need some help here, Officer. Some of your expertise."

  "I'll do whatever I can, sir."

  "An odd situation. These prisoners escaped from a federal penitentiary . . . . What is it, Captain?"

  "With all respect, sir, that prison at Callana's like it's got a revolving door in it." Tremain recalled four breakouts in the last five years. His own men had captured a number of the escapees, a record better than that of the U.S. marshals, who in Tremain's opinion were overpaid baby-sitters.

  The governor began cautiously, like a man stepping onto November ice. "So they're technically federal escapees but they also're lined up for state sentences. Won't be till the year three thousand maybe but the fact is they're state felons too."

  "But the FBI's in charge of the barricade." Tremain had been told specifically by the assistant attorney general that his services would not be required in this matter. The trooper was no expert on the hierarchy of state government but even schoolchildren knew that the AG and his underlings worked for the governor. Executive branch. "We have to defer to them, of course. And maybe it's for the best."

  The governor said, "This Potter's a fine man . . . ." His voice seemed not to stop but to deflate until it became a dwelling question mark.

  Dan Tremain was a career law enforcer and had learned never to say anything that could be quoted back against him even before he'd learned how to cover two opposing doors when diving through a barricade window. "Pride of the FBI, I'm told," the trooper said, assuming that a tape recorder was running somewhere nearby, though it probably wasn't.

  "But?" The governor raised an eyebrow.

  "I understand he's taking a hard line."

  "Which means what?"

  Outside the window, threshers moved back and forth.

  "It means that he's going to try to wear Handy down and get him to surrender."

  "Will Potter attack eventually? If he has to?"

  "He's just a negotiator. A federal hostage rescue team's being assembled. They should be here by early evening."

  "And if Handy doesn't surren
der they'll go in and . . ."

  "Neutralize him."

  The round face smiled. The governor looked nostalgically at an ashtray and then back to Tremain. "How soon after they get there will they attack?"

  "The rule is that you don't assault except as a last resort. Rand Corporation did a study a few years ago and found that ninety percent of the hostages killed in a barricade are killed when the situation goes hot--when there's an assault. I was going to say something else, sir."

  "Please. Speak frankly."

  The corner of a sheet of paper peeked out from under the governor's repulsively blue sweater. Tremain recognized it as his own resume. He was proud of his record with the state police though he wondered if he wasn't here now because the governor had read the brief paragraph referring to a "consulting" career, which had taken Tremain to Africa and Guatemala after his discharge from the Marines.

  "The Rand Corporation study is pretty accurate as far as it goes. But there's something else that bears on this situation, sir. That if there's a killing early in the barricade, negotiations rarely work. The HT--the hostage taker--has little to lose. Sometimes there's a psychological thing that happens and the taker feels so powerful that he'll just keep upping his demands so that they can't be met, just so he'll have an excuse to kill the hostages."

  The governor nodded.

  "What's your assessment of Handy?"

  "I read the file on the way over here and I came up with a profile."

  "Which is?"

  "He's not psychotic. But he's certainly amoral."

  The governor's thin lips twitched into a momentary smile. Because, Tremain thought, I'm a mercenary thug who used the word amoral?

  "I think," Tremain continued slowly, "that he's going to kill more of the girls. Maybe all of them ultimately. If he goes mobile and gets away from us I think he'll kill them just for the symmetry of it."

  Symmetry. How do you like that, sir? Check out the education portion of my resume. I was cum laude from Lawrence. Top of my class at OCS.

  "One other thing we have to consider," the captain continued. "He didn't try very hard to escape from that trooper who found them this afternoon."

  "No?"

  "There was just that one officer and the three takers, with guns and hostages. It was like Handy's goal wasn't so much to get away but to spend some time . . ."

  "Some time what?"

  "With the hostages. If you get what I'm saying. They are all female."