Third Degree Part 21

He frowned and picked up the sheets. "I need some food. We all do."

"I'll cook something," Laurel offered. "Breakfast would be easiest."

He nodded.

She looked at Beth lying on the banquette. "Would you like an egg with a hat on it?"

Beth actually sat up at this suggestion. "And grits and biscuits? And grape jelly!"

"Tell you what," Warren said to Laurel, "you do the work with the sheets. Leave Beth with me. I'm going to shut all the blinds, then start the food."

Laurel hesitated, then nodded in agreement. She took the sheets and went down the hall with Danny's messages running through her mind. She hadn't thought to check the time stamps, but he obviously hadn't followed her advice to leave town. Running simply wasn't in him. So where was he now? He must have driven by the house at least once, she thought. Or else that was his plane I heard before. He knows I'm here with Warren. And that, combined with me not showing up in the clearing, started him worrying. But what can he do? Danny sometimes flew the Sheriff's Department helicopter and so was fairly tight with the sheriff. If he'd heard the report of a shooting out here, Laurel was sure he would find a way to get himself into the loop. Once that happened, it would only be a matter of time before someone came to save her and Beth. Danny would have a tricky job trying to explain his concerns without betraying their affair, but she felt sure he could do it.

She looked down at Kyle's body. His eyes were still open, but the opaque irises held no life. The dead face already looked more like a wax figure of Kyle than the man himself. Pity rose in her, but she knew that her duty was to the living, not the dead. She thought of texting Danny that Kyle had been shot, but Warren might be watching from the end of the hall.

Unfolding one of the sheets, she laid it gently over Kyle's corpse, then with considerable effort rolled the body over. Then she stood and dragged it to the guest room door. With the sheet under him, Kyle slid fairly easily on the polished hardwood. Getting him over the threshold was harder, but she turned away from him, grabbed his ankles under her arms as though hitching a cart to a mule, and in three great heaves dragged him onto the carpet and clear of the door.

With the walls of the guest room around her, an almost irresistible compulsion to call Danny took hold of her. As she reached out to close the door, Warren appeared there with Beth in his arms.

"Good enough," he said, keeping Beth's head turned away. "We miss you."

She swallowed hard, then followed Warren back to the kitchen. Danny knows I need help, she told herself. He knows everything he needs to know. I've got to keep the phone secret, no matter what. It might make the difference between life and death.

"You take over," Warren said, pointing at the iron skillet heating on the stove. An egg carton and a can of Pillsbury biscuits lay beside it. "I'm going to check the computer."

The computer. As it had been from the beginning, her laptop remained the greatest danger to her. At any moment, the Merlin's Magic program could give Warren access to hundreds of messages from Danny: love letters, embedded digital photos, all the stuff she'd been insane ever to put on her hard drive. All the things someone in love can't live without. "No worries," she said brightly. "Beth and I have got it under control."

Warren seemed about to take Beth with him to the great room, but then he walked away alone. "All the doors are bolted," he reminded her. "And I took out the keys."

"Thanks for that information," Laurel replied in a tone that said, Stop upsetting our daughter.

"Don't open the blinds," he added. "And tap the skillet with a fork while I'm down there."

"Just go already!"

He vanished into the great room.

She clanked the skillet a couple of times, then lifted Beth onto the counter beside the Viking cooktop. Laurel felt almost drunk with adrenaline. A new plan had come to her, and she had no time for second thoughts. There was risk, yes, but she was almost certain that she and Beth would survive it. She cracked four eggs open and dumped them into the skillet with her right hand while holding Beth's hand with her left. "Daddy's not right in the head now, punkin," she whispered. "Can you tell that?"

Beth nodded with wide eyes and whispered, "Daddy lied to that policeman on the phone."

"Yes, he did. I need you to do one thing for me, darling. One easy thing, and then we can go outside where Grant and the nice policemen are. Will you do that for me?"

Beth nodded again.

"Do you remember where my laptop is? Down on the coffee table?"

"Uh-huh. Where Daddy is."

"After Daddy comes back up here, I want you to take your gla.s.s of water down to the great room like you're going to play. Then I want you to unplug the computer and dump your water into my keyboard."

Beth opened her mouth in shock. "What?"

"Pour it right into the keys, where the letters are. But be sure you unplug it first. And don't touch the computer with your hands afterward. That's important. Just dump the water into the keyboard from high above it. Far away. No touching."

Beth blinked several times, processing Laurel's request. "I can do that. But won't Daddy be mad?"

"He's going to be mad at me, not you. But that's what we have to do to make all this stop. Okay?"

Beth smiled. "Okay."

"Unplug the computer first. And don't touch it with your hands."

"I know. Electricity, right?"

Laurel smiled with satisfaction, then retrieved Beth's gla.s.s from the table by the banquette. She knew from experience that it would take a couple of seconds for the water to penetrate the Sony's keyboard, and unplugging the computer from the wall socket would step it down to battery power rather than the 110 volts coming from the mains. The danger of lethal voltage arcing back to Beth was almost nonexistent, but the probability of frying the computer itself was high. As Warren came back to the kitchen, Laurel said, "Any luck with your computer program?"

"It's coming along," he said without looking at her. "A seven-s.p.a.ce pa.s.sword has seventy-eight billion possible combinations. Even more, really, depending on how many characters you choose from."

"How interesting."

He looked at her oddly. Stay cool, she told herself. Don't get c.o.c.ky. He's going to go ballistic in about two minutes- "Where are you going?" he asked Beth, who had been spinning in circles like a ballerina on Warren's side of the island, but now was walking toward the hall.

"Nowhere!" she said breathlessly. "I'm tired of sitting around."

"Well, we have to sit around awhile longer."

Laurel saw that Beth didn't have the water gla.s.s in her hand, but it was nowhere in sight either. She had stashed it somewhere, like a good little conspirator. Probably on the floor.

Laurel needed Warren to move to her side of the island. She rotated the burner control beneath the eggs to HIGH, then turned toward the sink and began loudly washing the bowl she'd used to hold the broken eggsh.e.l.ls.

"Hey," Warren said. "Hey! You're burning them!"

"What?"

"You're burning the eggs!"

She spun from the sink and let her anger show. "Is your b.u.t.t nailed to that stool?"

He got up and stalked around the island. Laurel went back to rinsing the bowl. She was turning off the water when a cracking sound came from the great room, followed by a screech.

"What the-?" Warren looked around anxiously. "Elizabeth?"

He scanned every corner of the kitchen and den, then ran for the great room. Laurel scrambled around the island and went after him.

"Where are you?" Warren shouted. "What are you doing?"

Laurel heard a primal scream of fury just before she reached the great room. The acrid stink of burned plastic filled her nostrils. Beth was cowering by the arm of the sofa, the empty water gla.s.s still in her hand, her eyes on to her enraged father.

Warren stood over the silent Vaio, staring down with mute incomprehension on his face. When he looked down at Beth, she bolted toward Laurel, tossing the gla.s.s aside as she ran. She leaped into her mother's arms, and Laurel backed slowly toward the arch behind her.

"Elizabeth?" Warren snapped. "Did your mother tell you to do that?"

"No!" Beth shouted, stunning Laurel. "I hate that computer! It's making you crazy!"

Warren glared at his daughter like a sea captain staring down a mutinous member of his crew.

"Of course I told her to do it," Laurel said with a calm she did not feel. "It had to be done. I'm sure you can hire a lawyer to get those e-mails from the company, and that's probably what you should do. But this nightmare has to end. It has ended. I'm not playing this game anymore."

He opened his mouth but did not reply. Then he squeezed his hands into fists, which he pressed hard against his temples. Laurel was starting to believe that she had actually won when he closed the s.p.a.ce between them in four quick bounds and backhanded her to the floor.

Beth screamed as they fell.

Chapter 15.

Deputy Carl Sims turned right off of Highway 24 and drove through the wrought-iron gate into Avalon, a subdivision he had only seen through the windows of his patrol cruiser. Carl had grown up in Sandy Bottom, an all-black neighborhood in the river lowlands of Lusahatcha County, well outside the city limits. The only whites who spent any time in Sandy Bottom were the well-checkers who operated the oil wells owned by the white businessmen in Athens Point. When Carl was a boy, pumping units had operated right in people's yards, but few of the residents ever saw a dime of the money that oil generated. Even if they managed to save enough to buy the land their houses stood on, they weren't going to get mineral rights with it. Not in Sandy Bottom.

Carl drove past several six-thousand-square-foot houses set deep in the trees, then turned onto Lyonesse Drive and stopped at a makeshift roadblock. Deputy Willie Jones had parked his cruiser so that it blocked most of Lyonesse, and a sawhorse with orange tape on it blocked the rest. Willie was twenty-six, four years older than Carl, but he always treated Carl as if they were the same age. He walked up to Carl's Jeep Cherokee and grinned broadly.

"What's up, my brother? You off duty, huh?"

"Was. Not anymore."

"This be some s.h.i.t, don't it?" Willie said with nervous excitement. "Dr. Shields all barricaded in his house and s.h.i.t? Don't make no sense to me."

Carl nodded soberly. Warren Shields had been treating both his mother and father for the past six years, and they spoke of him almost reverently. Or they had until Carl's mother had her stroke, which was what had brought Carl back to Athens Point rather than to Atlanta, where his girlfriend lived. Now only Carl's father could praise Dr. Shields in intelligible words. Dr. Shields had spent several hours with Carl and his father over the past year, advising them on how best to care for Eugenia Sims, and Carl had instinctively liked the man. Shields treated his father with the respect due an older man, and he treated Carl just as he would anybody else, no better or worse. Carl liked that. Shields reminded him of doctors he'd known in the service, truly color-blind and focused on their work.

"You don't think they'll tell you to shoot Dr. Shields, do you?" Willie asked, his smile suddenly gone. "I mean, not without trying to talk him out first?"

Carl shook his head. "Let's hope not."

Willie gave an exaggerated nod.

"Is the sheriff here?" Carl asked.

Willie shook his head. "He fishing over in Louisiana. They sent Major Danny up to get him in the helicopter."

Bad luck, Carl thought. "Who's in charge now?"

Willie curled his lips and shook his head. "You know who. They done called out the TRU, ain't they? Old Cowboy Ray hisself. Him and his little brother are up there unloading all their SWAT s.h.i.t. Looks like the FBI at Waco or something."

The Tactical Response Unit was Athens Point's version of a SWAT team. It comprised fifteen officers recruited from both the munic.i.p.al police and the Sheriff's Department. About half had military experience, most in the National Guard. Carl was one of the few who had served in Iraq; he was the team's designated sniper.

"Hey, Willie!" crackled Jones's radio. "Any sign of Carl yet?"

Willie rolled his eyes at the heavy redneck accent coming from his radio. "Deputy Sims just pulled up, sir."

"Well, send him back here. We're setting up the position, and I want to get his input on interlocking angles of fire."

"Jesus," said Carl.

"Uh-huh," Willie agreed.

"Has anybody even talked to Dr. Shields yet?"

Willie shrugged. Then his radio crackled again.

"We've set up the command post in the Shieldses' front yard, under a stand of trees. Tell Carl to get his a.s.s up here, ricky-tick."

"You heard the man," said Willie.

Carl exhaled long and slow, trying to prepare himself for the blast of testosterone he would encounter a few hundred yards up the street.

"I hope the sheriff gets here soon," Willie said.

"You and me both, brother."

Carl took his foot off the brake and idled up Lyonesse. Nearly two months since the TRU was last called out. In that case, they'd received a report of a man barricaded in his downtown house with his family. What the TRU found when it arrived on the scene was quite different: a local engineer lying in his bathtub with a homemade bomb in his lap and his family safe outside. The TRU didn't have a trained hostage negotiator, so anybody might wind up talking to the subject, depending on circ.u.mstances. In the engineer's case, the sheriff had spent two hours talking to him through the bathroom window, shielded by the wall, a flak jacket, and a bulletproof helmet. Sheriff Ellis had less than two years on the job, and his last law-enforcement experience had been as an MP in Germany twenty years before. He was a G.o.d-fearing man who had a good rapport with people, but it hadn't been enough. The engineer blew himself up while the sheriff prayed for his immortal soul, repainting the bathroom with what had been his insides a millisecond before. Sheriff Ellis was wounded by ricocheting shrapnel that turned out to be a chunk of jawbone.

Carl had watched all this through his 10X Unertl scope, from a deer stand he'd mounted in a tree in a neighbor's yard. He'd wanted to destroy the bomb's works with a bullet, but since the device was clutched in the engineer's lap, he couldn't do it without killing the man. The hand holding the detonator was concealed behind the cast-iron side of the tub, so that option was out. The only other way to stop the bomb from exploding would have been to fire a round through the engineer's brain stem, short-circuiting his nervous system, but the rules for bombers were different in Mississippi than they'd been in Iraq-at least when the only people they threatened were themselves.

Carl put the incident out of his mind as he rolled up Lyonesse, because thinking about it only led him to the incident before that one-the one that had caused friction between him and the sheriff. He didn't need to cloud his mind with that right now.

Ahead, five cruisers sat parked on the street before a big Colonial set fifty meters back from the road. Mixed among them were civilian vehicles that belonged to the off-duty TRU men who'd been called up. Carl knew that his tactical commander was anxious, but he obeyed the speed limit and slowed for the speed b.u.mps. He wanted to give the sheriff every opportunity to arrive before Ray Breen did something ill-advised.

Law enforcement in Athens Point was a curious thing. The police department had jurisdiction over the city, and by tradition the Sheriff's Department took the outlying county. But technically the sheriff had jurisdiction over the city as well. Before 1968, both departments had been 100 percent white, but gradually the police department came to more closely resemble the city itself, which was 55 percent black. The county as a whole had a similar percentage, but geographically blacks tended to congregate in the city, while the outlying county was mostly white. This had somehow resulted in an unbroken line of white sheriffs (Carl figured it was the shape of the voting districts). He would have preferred working for the black police chief, but the pay and benefits were better in the Sheriff's Department, so he'd opted to work in the county.

Most of his fellow TRU deputies were white country boys of a type Carl knew well. The majority were ten to fifteen years older than he, and some were over fifty. In a town with high unemployment, men didn't give up jobs with benefits unless they were pushed out-usually after an election. But despite the age and background of the men, there was an att.i.tude of benign tolerance toward black officers in the unit. Prejudice still existed, but it was an amorphous thing, difficult to point at and impossible to prove, except in a few cases. Even the hard-core, Southern-rock NASCAR types accepted that civil rights reforms were here to stay, and they tried to make the best of it.

Beyond this, Carl was a special case. His military record as a sniper gave him an almost magical immunity to prejudice. In his experience, white country boys were fairly primitive in their social habits, creatures of dominance and submission, like the hunting dogs he'd raised as a boy. Physical prowess meant a lot, the ability to withstand pain meant more, but nothing ranked higher in their estimation than combat experience. If a man had shed blood in the mud and held his nerve under fire, then it didn't make a d.a.m.n bit of difference what color he was-not to most of them, anyway. As a sniper with a near-legendary number of confirmed kills, Carl occupied rarefied air in the redneck firmament. The fact that he was black had put some of those good old boys in the curious position of almost fawning over a guy they might have tried to kick the s.h.i.t out of if he'd wandered into their neighborhood at night.

Carl parked his Cherokee behind the rearmost cruiser and got his rain slicker out of the cargo compartment. He decided to leave his rifle case locked in the vehicle. The slower things moved, the more time there would be for hormones to stabilize and adrenaline to be flushed away.

He saw the mobile command post over the roofs of the cruisers. The camouflage-painted camper trailer had been towed under a small stand of trees and braced with cinder blocks. The steady rumble of a generator echoed over the flat ground, which meant lights in the trailer, if not air-conditioning. Carl reminded himself that he was only a deputy, not the ranking member of an autonomous sniper-scout unit, as he had been in Iraq. His job when he stepped into the trailer would be to take orders, not give them. And any advice he offered was likely to be rejected unless it reinforced what his superiors had already decided.

His biggest worry right now was the Breen brothers, one of whom was the commander of the Tactical Response Unit, subject only to Sheriff Ellis in a situation like this one. The Breen brothers looked to have been cut from the same piece of wood. They had farmer's tans, cracked skin, and slit eyes that betrayed so much meanness it made people take a step back, even when they were out of uniform. Both were lean and gaunt, the younger one, Trace, so much so that Carl wondered if he'd suffered some nutritional disease like rickets as a child. But maybe Trace just stayed so p.i.s.sed off all the time that his anger had begun to consume him. Ray, the elder of the pair, was bulkier and had a more open face than his brother, despite his cowboy mustache. He'd served in the army during the lean years after Vietnam, as an MP, like Sheriff Ellis. He was also a Weekend Warrior like Ellis, but though Ray's unit had been called up for Bosnia, he hadn't seen action there either. He'd worked as a welder for a while, but got fired because he kept getting into fights. Only when he hired on with the Sheriff's Department had he found his calling; he wore the uniform like a suit of armor, and Carl could tell that the power of the job was what got Ray Breen out of bed every morning.

Ray reveled in the high-tech equipment of his Tactical Response Unit. Over the past few years, he had somehow scrounged together an a.r.s.enal that could adequately supply an urban SWAT unit. The TRU had automatic weapons, flash-bang grenades, shaped charges, advanced commo gear, and night-vision devices. In his off hours Ray read Tom Clancy, Dale Brown, and Larry Bond, or played Rainbow Six: Splinter Cell on his son's Xbox 360. If Carl chanced to meet Ray Breen in Wal-Mart or at a high school football game, the commander would squint and give a slight nod, as though to say, We're part of an elite team. These civilians know we're always on the lookout for trouble.

Ray had pulled Carl aside dozens of times to talk shop, asking detailed questions about the capabilities of various sniper rifles, scopes, and night-vision systems. But inevitably, after all the hardware questions had been answered, Breen would circle down to the question he'd really wanted to ask: What's it like to blow some unsuspecting raghead's s.h.i.t away from a thousand yards? Carl always answered the same way: I tried not to think about that side of it, sir. It was a job, and I focused on the mechanics of it. Guys like Ray Breen never grasped the true nature of sniping. It was as much about concealment as it was about shooting. Carl had once spent two days constructing a hide in Baghdad, then another waiting motionless with his scout to take a single shot that a twelve-year-old kid could have made in his backyard in Sandy Bottom. But he didn't blame the TRU commander. The homeboys he'd played ball with at Athens Point High had asked the same question after they got a couple of beers in them. All human beings, Carl had learned, were fascinated with death. Only those who knew death intimately, as he did, understood its essential mystery.

Carl's eyes tracked a thin form slinking out of the CP trailer. Trace Breen. In the vernacular of Carl's father, Trace was a skunk. Lying was mother's milk to him. He had no military experience, and Carl a.s.sumed he'd ridden his brother's coattails onto the TRU, as nominal communications officer. From scuttleb.u.t.t around the department, Carl had gathered that Trace had worked a dozen different jobs before becoming a deputy, none of them productive. He'd been a roustabout at construction sites (where materials tended to disappear at night); he'd sold stereos out of the back of a van (most of those stolen, too); he'd worked as a hunting guide (poaching alligators at night); he'd also run dogfights, and pursued various other fly-by-night enterprises that went nowhere. Even now, Trace had some kind of cell phone scam going, selling disposable phones out of his car. Carl figured a truckload of the things must have been hijacked over in Texas or somewhere.