Takeover - Lisa Black [64]
“So she’s more likely to cooperate, to try and keep things calm,” Cavanaugh said.
“Unless they’re going to hurt someone,” Don insisted. “Then she’ll rip the guy’s heart out.”
“I guess we’ve just seen evidence of that. Thank you. I’m going to hang up now. Jason’s got Oliver on the other line.”
“Espero que usted sea tan bueno como dicen,” Don warned. I hope you’re as good as they say you are.
“I’m better,” Cavanaugh told him, and hit a button on the phone. “Is this Oliver?”
“Who wants to know?”
Patrick leaned over the microphone. “Oliver, this is Patrick from Homicide. Did you talk to Theresa today?”
“Yeah.”
“What about?”
“Now what’s going on?”
“What did she say?”
Patrick didn’t care for the appraising look Cavanaugh gave him, perhaps considering if Patrick would need to be evicted from the command center as well.
“I told her the dirt from the floor mat of that car was oxidized soil. Red clay, if you will.” After another moment he added, “I assume from your silence that means about as much to you as it did to me.”
“Like from the southern states,” Patrick said. “Georgia.”
“Sure, could be.”
“Anything else?” Cavanaugh asked.
“Yeah. About forty-five minutes ago, I called her back with the smear that was on your dead guy’s shoulder this morning. She collected it from…let me see—”
“His suit coat,” Patrick supplied.
“Yeah. And I told her it was cyclotrimethylene trinitramine.” Not even the hollow sound of the speakerphone could disguise the disdain in his voice. “Now I assume from your silence that you have no idea what I just said.”
“Is that C-4?” Cavanaugh asked.
“RDX, actually, but you’ve got the general idea.”
“Plastic explosives?” Patrick sat down. “Can this get any worse?”
Oliver pointed out with unseemly haste, “Things can always get worse.”
“Where would they get RDX?” Patrick mused. “Maybe Lucas was in the military. Bobby sure wasn’t.”
Oliver spoke again. “Considering the liberal use of Vaseline as a plasticizer, they probably made it themselves. All you really need is bleach and potassium chloride.”
“What are they going to do with that?” Patrick wondered. “And where is it? It’s not in the car.”
Cavanaugh stared at the monitor. “They could have it strapped to themselves, but I can’t see it. The jackets hang open, and there doesn’t seem to be anything on or under the T-shirts.”
“It’s hard to tell,” Jason offered, “with dark colors against dark colors on a black-and-white monitor.”
“That leaves the duffel bags. Oliver, how stable is this stuff?”
“It all depends on the skill of your amateur terrorist, how thoroughly he filtered the crystals out, et cetera. If it hasn’t gone off yet, that’s your best indication.” The toxicologist paused for a split second, then added, “It’s…um, not near Theresa, is it?”
“It’s about ten feet away,” Patrick told him. “I assume from your silence that this situation is less than ideal.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself, Detective.”
Patrick eyed the monitor. “I’m going over there.”
The air hung still, without even a fishy breeze from the lake to lift the sand-colored strands of hair from Patrick’s forehead. He took the long way around, down East Third and up Rockwell to the rear of the Federal Reserve building. Beyond the sawhorses blocking the roads, Clevelanders were going about their daily business, working, eating lunch, ducking out of the heat and back into the air-conditioning before their ties wrinkled and their makeup ran. He passed the corner where Pat Joyce’s Tavern used to sit and found himself wishing for his younger years, when whether or not to write out a parking ticket would be the toughest decision he had to make the whole day.
Unless he wanted to walk all the way around the Hampton Inn to the Superior entrance, Patrick needed to enter the building via a plunging vehicle ramp overseen by a guard turret encased in glass, which Patrick assumed to be bulletproof—and air-conditioned, or the poor guy in it would have passed out by now.
His badge got him inside without getting shot. One of the many