Takeover - Lisa Black [5]
“The situation is stable at the moment, and they’re calling in the negotiator. If everyone stays calm, it might be all right. In the meantime I need you to work, Tess.”
“Work?” He might as well have suggested that she paint her nails. How could she possibly work at a time like this?
“The car. I’m having it brought out to you.”
She’d crushed the phone to her head so hard that it hurt, and she switched ears. Don’s arm slid from her shoulders, but he stayed in the seat beside her. “I’ll come there.”
“No—”
“You’d have to flatbed it here, to avoid losing any evidence, and how are you going to get a wrecker in there? You probably have the streets full of cop cars, don’t you?”
He didn’t have an immediate answer, and she knew she would win. “It would be much faster for me to come there. We don’t have time to argue about it.”
He sighed, surely knowing her argument for the BS it was. “No, I guess we don’t. Come on out—at the moment this car is all we’ve got. I’d like to know if these two are responsible for Ludlow. I’d like to know if they’re high, if one is diabetic, if they left their cell phone in the glove compartment, or if the registered owner has been stuffed into the trunk. Look at this car, Tess, and tell me everything you can about these guys.”
“I’ll be right there.”
She took the DNA analyst with her, for both extra help and moral support. They had been through bad times before and understood that the way to keep going when only a heartbeat from disaster was to act as if it were just another day on the job. Don Delgado—younger, the third son of a black mother and a Cuban father, who grew up in the DMZ near East Ninety-third and Quincy—and Theresa had little in common besides attitude, and both could not have cared less.
Now they surveyed the 1994 Mercedes-Benz parked on the grassy mall between the public library and the convention center. She could see the Federal Reserve building, stately and aloof, its pink granite gleaming in the sun. Metal barricades and red NO ACCESS tape closed off East Sixth Street from Rockwell to Superior. The sports coupe had a pearlescent paint job that appeared a pale peach from one angle and a warm caramel from another. “As getaway cars go,” Theresa said, “they could have chosen a less conspicuous one.”
She barely heard her own words, her mind occupied with Paul’s fate. Was he crouched on the floor with his hands on his head? What if his jacket fell open and the badge showed? Would they shoot him? Had they already shot him?
“Maybe that’s the idea. Who robs banks in a Mercedes?” Don turned to a uniformed female officer, leaning against her marked unit. “Who is the car registered to?”
She stopped staring at his many physical attributes long enough to admit, “I don’t know.”
“Find out.”
“SRT is probably doing that.” She meant the Special Response Team, a catchall phrase for cops who respond to out-of-the-ordinary calls.
“There’s no reason you can’t do it, too.”
Theresa saw the young woman’s admiration of the handsome Don turn to a scowl. Perhaps all her friends were around the corner at the standoff or at least on the field trip providing extra security for the secretary of state’s visit, and here she was, sweating next to an old German car, taking orders from a hottie with no wedding ring and an all-work, no-play approach.
“Now would be good,” Don added, smiling sweetly. “We need that information.”
The woman walked out of earshot, with her radio and a notebook. Don continued to click photos of the car, front and back, driver’s side, passenger side. “At least the owner isn’t in the trunk, right?”
“Yeah, they checked.”
“They didn’t wait for us?”
“If someone had been inside, they’d need medical attention, from the heat if nothing else.” In some ways Theresa had been right not to inspect the car at the medical examiner’s office. Their only garage had lousy lighting; at least the grassy mall blazed with