One Scream Away (34 page)

“Oh, Sheridan?” Bankes said. “Let me save you the trouble of a trace. I’m at the Oak Wood Mall, in Clayton. I’ll be leaving through the northeast exit, nearest to the food court Dumpster. Shall I tell you what kind of car I’m driving now that I’ve dumped Mabel’s Lexus? Nah. That would take the sport out of it.”

He was gone.

Copeland fired orders into his phone, sending a team to Clayton to stake out the mall exits, but everyone knew Bankes would be out of there in thirty seconds. Driving some new woman’s car, with her and her daughter tied up in the backseat as hostages.

Or maybe the woman and daughter were already at the park.

Or maybe they were dead.

H
ere come the newest shots from Parks and Recreation,” Brohaugh said, his fingers slapping at the computer keys like frog tongues snapping up bugs. As soon as the crime scene team had swept Mabel Skinner’s kitchen, they’d set up an impromptu command center around her kitchen table. Everyone gathered around the monitor, searching the photos that came up.

Copeland shook his head in slow motion. “Bankes chose well. I’ve lived here half my life and never knew there was a park with so few trees and so much open space.”

It’s what everyone was thinking. Bankes had called back twice, short calls from pay phones, telling Neil exactly where to go. He’d described the sloping valley at the park where he would trade Neil for an unknown woman and child he claimed to currently hold. He’d described the wide-open field where kite-flying and jogging and Frisbee were popular, and a stone culvert that dipped low in the middle of one field.

The culvert was a dead end. Just drainage for the park; it didn’t actually lead anywhere. Just a little stone well where supposedly Neil would find the woman and her little girl.

“That must be it,” Harrison said, pointing at the screen. “Any other shots of that?”

Brohaugh searched, tapped, and fed more pictures onto the screen, each taken from a different angle—surveyors’ photographs—of the culvert.

“Christ,” Copeland muttered. “He can see us coming from three hundred yards.”

“How good’s your best sniper with a long gun?” Neil asked.

“Four hundred yards if you just want him hit. Can hit any button you specify at three hundred.”

“Okay.” A button at three hundred yards was pretty good.

Copeland: “Doesn’t matter anyway. Bankes knew what he was doing. Look at that. Where the hell am I gonna put a sniper who can’t be seen?”

“What about Bankes?” Harrison asked. “A shotgun was missing from Hammond’s, along with three pistols. Bankes coulda nabbed a long-range rifle, too, for all we know. Something that didn’t show up on the inventory.”

“Unless he spent part of the last year belonging to some militia,” Standlin said, “he doesn’t know how to handle rifles. He’s a torture man. Rifles are quick and clean, impersonal.”

“No fun at all,” said Copeland.

“You’re saying he’s only carrying a nice dull knife?” Harrison again.

“The good news is—,” Standlin began.

“There’s good news?” Brohaugh asked.

“Bankes is improvising. This thing with Sheridan isn’t part of what he planned and prepared for. He came to town with antiques, not a G.I. Joe. So either he’s desperate, and we’ve blocked him from doing anything else, or he’s found a reason for a vendetta against Sheridan. Because he’s with Denison, probably.”

Neil thought about that. Bankes hadn’t seemed angry when he spoke about Neil having sex with Beth; he’d sounded almost humored. He was more out of control when Neil accused him of killing his sister.

“Enough. Let’s get going,” Copeland said. “It’s almost five. We have a plan—as foolish as that plan is,” he said, looking at Neil, “but we still have to catch him.”

“You mean kill him,” Neil corrected, and Copeland said, “Sure.”

They were set up less than an hour later on a concrete slab in Ellis Park. They used picnic tables, under a roof that probably leaked when it rained, with two vans filled with electronics and surveillance equipment. Brohaugh’s cords were strung to a generator in the nearest van, in case he ran out of juice somewhere in the course of the standoff. Neil cringed at the idea it might take that long.

Five agents were in on it: Copeland, Brohaugh, Standlin, Harrison, and O’Ryan. And, of course, Neil. Copeland may have wanted Neil out, but
Bankes
wanted him in.

Neil unfastened his holster. A breeze blew his loose shirttail around.

“You okay?” Harrison asked.

“Get away from me,” Neil growled. “You act like I’ve never gone into a hostage situation before.”

“I’m guessing you’ve never gone up against a psycho who’s hurt someone you love.”

Neil gave him a hard look. “Then you don’t know me very well, do you?”

Harrison’s face lost a shade. Neil took pity on him. “I’m okay.”

And he was. At least now he was finally
doing
something. Neil was happy to replace Beth as a target.
Come ahead, you son of a bitch
, he’d thought.
Come after me.

And Bankes had. Unfortunately, a mother and daughter had been his tools. Neil hadn’t been sure whether or not to believe him after the first call, which had indeed been traced to the Oak Wood Mall. But when Bankes called a second time, Neil heard the woman’s horrified sobs in the background.

“I wanna talk to her,” Neil had said. “And she better be able to talk.”

“Talk, bitch. Tell the man what’s happening.”

A voice, shaking and terrified: “He h-has my daughter and m-me.” Horror drenched her words. “He’s going to k-kill us.”

And then Bankes was back. “So you come, bastard. Come get the woman and kid.”

He’d hung up. Been on the phone too long and knew all about tracing calls.

Neil looked at his watch—almost six-thirty. The woman and her child had likely been taken around two, as best they could figure. They still didn’t know their identities; no one had reported a woman or child missing. Someone still thought they were spending the day at the mall.

Neil punched in Suarez’s number, needing the touch-stone of knowing Beth was safe.

Suarez answered in a quiet tone. “I just checked on her, man; she’s out. Fell asleep about an hour ago. Do what you gotta do.”

Copeland and Neil walked to the back of the second van where O’Ryan handled the magic of television newscasting on her headset. “You got the cameras under control?” Copeland asked.

“Yeah,” she answered. “We moved them all out about twenty minutes ago. Except for that smart-ass who was fired from Channel Two last year, Corey Dunwoody. He freelances now and gave me a hard time. I threatened to arrest him for obstruction.”

Copeland rubbed his chin. “I remember him from the assassination attempt on the governor last year. No scruples, no morals, and would sell his mother’s tits to the devil to get something big on film.”

“Yeah,” said O’Ryan. “Your standard reporter.”

Bankes walked a few yards behind Heinz and the dark-haired girl named Samantha. They circled through a sprawling neighborhood that backed up to Foster’s land: a dad and his kid, out walking a dog. Samantha and Heinz made his best disguise yet. They cut through the backyard of a house that appeared empty.

The Fosters had maybe forty acres. None of it was fenced, and the landscape surrounding their property was lightly wooded and sloped, open for a few scenic acres around the house and gallery, and bordered on the sides by a neighborhood, a highway, and suburban-type woods. The perimeter had been heavily guarded for the past few days; today Chevy thought it would be lighter. The FBI was at Ellis Park and setting up for Hannah Blake’s funeral.

He smiled at the way it was working out, and how Neil Sheridan’s death would play right into his plans for Beth. No matter how well Chevy had planned for these events, he couldn’t have predicted that a man would hurt Jenny and be the very same man who was screwing Beth. Double duty for this murder, he thought.

Heinz pulled eagerly at his leash, and Samantha almost went down.

“Hold on to him,” Chevy said. “Don’t let him go until I tell you to.”

“I’m trying,” she said, almost whimpering. She was a simpering little thing. He’d be glad to be rid of her.

“Try harder.” He nudged the .22 in his pocket, making sure she saw its shape. “Turn left, through those trees. We gotta move faster now.”

G
otta move,” Neil said. An early evening chill nipped the air, and the sun sank lower in the sky. “It’s six-thirty.”

“City cops are still getting the last of the people out of the park,” Copeland said. “Giving a story about a poison gas leak through a viaduct.”

“That oughta do it,” Harrison muttered. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet. Everyone was. It had been five hours since Bankes had called about Mabel Skinner’s house. Since then, they’d found her body, found the G.I. Joe, and set up at the park. Moving fast now, no stopping ’til it was over.

As per Bankes’s instructions, Neil had removed his tie, gun, and holster, and unbuttoned his shirt so it was obvious he wore no bulletproof vest. Like hanging raw meat around his neck then walking into a lion’s den.

“Here,” Copeland said. “You can’t go in wearing that big forty-five, but no way he’ll notice this in your pocket with your shirttail hanging out. Take it. Anything suspicious moves in the culvert, shoot it.”

Neil thought about it, recalled Bankes’s warnings to walk to the culvert unarmed and alone. He slipped the .22 into his pocket anyway.

“Listen, son,” Copeland said, “you walk in slow, straight down that path. There’s a sniper just over that rise and another in that big-ass oak tree.”

Neil bit back a grim smile. “Gonna shoot me? I’m the only thing he’ll be able to see.”

Copeland cursed. “Goddamn it, Sheridan.”

Neil slapped him on the shoulder. Copeland was a thousand percent against this idea, and they’d traded a number of savage words over it. “I don’t belong to you,” Neil had said. “If I go out there and get my ass shot, you tell everyone what a fool I was, and that I broke ten direct orders doing it. If it works, I’ll make sure you get the credit for setting it up.” Suddenly Copeland had looked a hundred years old, and it took Neil a second to realize why. It wasn’t the FBI’s reputation or getting credit he was worried about. It was Neil.

He couldn’t think about that now. “So I walk down that path with the Bureau’s best sniper ready to shoot whatever peeks out of a culvert,” Neil said. “Does he know it might be a woman or a child?”

“He knows. And Sheridan, if Bankes actually does give you the woman and kid, don’t be a hero and sit down in their place. Get the hell out of there with them. We’ll move in and cover you as soon as the hostages are out.”

Neil was silent. Harrison, Standlin, and Brohaugh were silent, too. Everyone knew that wasn’t going to happen. Bankes
had
chosen this location carefully. There was no way for him to escape from the park, and there hadn’t been since ten minutes after Bankes had named it.

That’s why they knew Bankes wasn’t here.

“We could be wrong, Sheridan,” said Copeland. “Bankes may have decided to call it quits. He might be sitting in that culvert waiting to take you with him when he goes.”

“We aren’t wrong,” Neil said. “Bankes isn’t there. The best we can hope for is that he actually did leave the woman and her kid there. Alive.”

But no one really expected it. They expected bodies. Dolls.

Copeland’s handset burped and he answered, then buzzed the snipers. “Time to go.”

Neil walked toward the culvert as casually as a man could with his heart drumming like a fist. Nothing moved around him. There wasn’t anything to move. ChemLawn grass, a sky going slowly from blue to pink, the soft chatter of birds. A pretty evening if you weren’t walking into a grave site. Or a trap.

Fifty yards from the FBI’s picnic tables, sixty. Still within range of the sniper, not yet in the range of the pistols Bankes had stolen from Hammond. A hundred yards out, Neil slowed his steps. He could see the entrance to the culvert now—a stone arch about three feet high, not quite that wide. When it rained, it emptied into a little pool around the arc, draining the park’s playgrounds and kite-flying slopes. It had rained yesterday, not enough for any pools to gather, but enough that there’d be mud or spongy swamp. Enough that if a woman and her child were in there, they’d be wet, cold.

Neil took slow, deep breaths.
You could be wrong. Bankes might be sitting in that culvert waiting to take you with him when he goes.

Neil knew he wasn’t.

But someone was. Shit, something moved. He was closer now, thirty yards from the culvert. If Bankes was going to shoot him, he’d do it soon. If Bankes had left the woman and the child dead, there would be no noises creeping up from the culvert. If only a doll lay in the mud, there’d be no movement at the entrance.

“Sheridan.” The voice of the sniper whispered in Neil’s earpiece. The sniper had a scope that could make a beetle the size of a monster. “Step to the right. Something’s moving in there.”

Neil saw it, heard it, too. The sounds—sobs or whimpers, like a wounded animal. The movements—tremors, like fear rattling bones.

He shortened his steps, inched from the center of the path to the right to give the sniper clearance—God, don’t let him be quick on the trigger if a hostage is alive—walking more slowly now. The new angle made the sun a gold disk in Neil’s eyes, glowing behind the culvert and darkening his view to silhouettes.

Neil slid a hand into his pocket, handling the .22. It felt like a toy compared to the 10 mm he’d used with the FBI, or the .45 he carried these days. With hands the size of bear paws, Neil had always liked the bigger guns. Then again, in a bind, a .22 could make a hole, too.

He considered this a bind.

The sniper was in his ear: “A little more, Sheridan; move right.” The sun flared behind the culvert as Neil moved closer, closer, and he thought about the sniper watching through a scope that didn’t matter, and the photojournalists straining to get a shot they could put on the news, and the possibility that the sounds he was hearing were the sniffles of a little girl who might be hurting. And he thought of Beth and Abby needing him, and Bankes maybe surprising him, sitting in there with a gun at someone’s temple, and he remembered the G.I. Joe and wondered why, if Bankes
was
there, he hadn’t shot Neil yet. And then Neil came closer to the edge of the culvert, the whimpers still coming, and he palmed the .22 and took a deep breath, stepped out fast and aimed directly into the culvert, and in the last second he saw the other gun and thought,
Oh, Jesus, no
.