Takeover - Lisa Black [51]
“That’s just fascinating, Chris. I guess your cops will have to get their coffee somewhere else, then, which is a pity, because they make pretty good stuff. I still don’t see that car. Who do you want me to shoot next?”
“I just want to know where you’re from, Lucas.”
“Is there a reason you’re wasting my time with this? Please tell me there’s a reason.”
Cavanaugh sighed. Didn’t he ever get tired of these games? Theresa wondered. She could see herself yelling at people: Just spit it out already!
Cavanaugh didn’t yell. “Bear with me here, Lucas.”
Lucas’s sigh could be heard clearly over the speaker. “Okay. Since you ask all polite like, and since I’m obviously supposed to be impressed with your keen grocery-store reasoning here, I’ll just tell you if it will make you feel better: Bobby and I served time together in Atlanta. That’s where we met.”
“Again, telling us stuff,” Frank muttered. “Does this guy even want to get away? Or is he just that stupid?”
“He’s not stupid,” Theresa said, back at the telescope.
Cavanaugh opened his mouth, then stopped. Then he said, “Thank you, Lucas. Give me a second, okay?”
He tapped a button on the phone console and turned to the rest of the sweltering group. “It sounds like he has us on speakerphone. If Bobby can hear what we’re saying, so can the hostages.”
Maybe we could get a message to Paul, Theresa thought. But what would they say? Run for it? Don’t run for it?
“I can’t ask him about Ludlow. Ludlow’s wife is sitting there with a gun to her baby’s head and then hears that her husband has been murdered? She’ll freak out.”
“She’ll be uncooperative.” Theresa shuddered. Lucas hadn’t stopped at an unarmed woman; there was no reason to think he would stop at killing a child.
“Just as well,” Jason said. “I still think he’ll become more desperate if he knows we know about Ludlow’s murder.”
Cavanaugh rubbed his eyes.
“I spoke with Atlanta again,” Jason went on. “Bobby did not have any visitors during his incarceration. He gave exactly one name for his visitors’ list, his mother’s, and they erased that after she died.”
Theresa said, “His brother didn’t even know Bobby had been released.”
Cavanaugh stared at her, and too late she realized they hadn’t told him about Eric Moyers’s being in the building. But he didn’t ask how she knew that, and Jason went on, “They had nine Lucases incarcerated at the same time as Bobby—four in his cell block—who’ve been released in the past six months.”
He paused, his eyes going to the blinking red light indicating that their Lucas was on hold. But Cavanaugh said, “Details.”
Jason rattled off four names, then added, “One white, thirty-two, Arkansas resident, second conviction for selling marijuana within five hundred yards of a school. The other three are black. The first is twenty-one, did four years for assault after nearly killing a guy in a bar fight. No other record. The second is forty, two and a half years for credit-card fraud, first offense. Third is thirty-one, did five years for putting his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend in intensive care. No other record.”
“Military backgrounds?”
“The white guy got kicked out of the National Guard. The last black guy got kicked out of the regular army for medical reasons.”
“What kinds of reasons?”
“They didn’t know. His record just said honorable discharge, medical deferment.”
“None classified as mixed-race,” Cavanaugh mused.
Frank said, “We can’t eliminate by that. He’d be entered as whatever the arresting officer considered him, which depends a lot on the arresting officer.”
The light on the phone went out. Lucas had hung up. Cavanaugh glanced at it but did not seem concerned.
Please don’t make that man angry, Theresa thought. “What’s that last one’s name again?”
Jason checked his notes, but the scribe read first, from hers: “Lucas Winston Parrish.”
“Why him?” Cavanaugh asked.
“We figured this guy’s age at twenty-five or thirty, right? He and the white guy would fit, but the drug dealer doesn’t have a record of violence, and he does. Besides, the bottle of Advil in the car might have been his.