Takeover - Lisa Black [70]
Cavanaugh massaged beads of sweat into his face. “What did he do in the military?”
“Armory clerk.”
“So he knows guns. And at least the basics of explosives.”
“I’d like to know where he got those two.” Patrick nodded at the monitor. “That’s a lot of firepower for a bum just out of jail.”
Cavanaugh asked Jason, “Did Atlanta say he and Bobby were friends?”
“No one there knows. Of the regular guards on their cell block, one is off on a fishing trip and the other one is in the hospital.”
“Prison riot?”
“Heart attack.”
“And Bobby had no visitors.”
“There’s one more thing. Parrish had one other person on his visitor’s list—a Jack Cornell in Tennessee. The guy never visited, but he had him listed. There was a Jack Cornell in his unit in the army.”
“That’s his gun connection, I’ll bet,” Patrick said. “Lucas came here from Atlanta by way of Tennessee.”
Cavanaugh opened the cooler next to Irene and pulled out a dripping bottle of water for Jason. “Here, you deserve it. Get us Cornell on the phone. We definitely need to talk to him.”
“Talk to him.” Patrick perched on the window seat and lit a cigarette. “We need him picked up by the Tennessee cops. He’s the best suspect for providing not only the guns but the plastic explosive as well.”
Cavanaugh swiped at the sweat on his temples with one hand. “If they show up at his door, they could be walking into a literal powder keg. On top of which, he might wind up too preoccupied with his own problems to talk to us about ours. We’ve got two dead people here and a bunch of hostages, and he’s not going to be willing to own up to his part in that. Jason, you silver-tongued devil, get the right cops in Tennessee on the line and tell them everything we’ve got. They’ll have to handle it as they see fit. They might even know the guy.”
Patrick took one more deep puff before tamping the butt on the bottom of his shoe. “I’d send someone to the sister as well. At least she’s got more incentive to help, if she wants her brother to live through the day.”
CHAPTER 20
12:55 P.M.
Theresa gazed at the dead girl. Auburn curls crowned Cherise’s face, in which a slash of red lips and sightless blue eyes stood out against the paled skin. A screwdriver lay a few inches from her right hand. She had been wearing a shiny cream blouse and dove gray slacks; the slacks were spattered with a fine mist of red dots, but the center of the blouse disappeared into a gaping, bloody hole. He must have fired more than once; Theresa did not know how delicate the trigger on such a weapon would be, how easy it would be to blow away a target’s entire rib cage before the index finger could loosen. It looked pretty damn easy.
“You killed her,” Theresa breathed, the words sounding ridiculous even to her own ears.
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“I had hoped—Why the hell did you kill her?”
“She didn’t cooperate.”
Theresa eyed the Craftsman. Did he make Cherise use the screwdriver to pry open the cash boxes, and she pulled it on him? Did he shoot her in a bizarre parody of self-defense?
But what were they doing behind the cages? Tiny dots of high-velocity blood spatter and one neat bullet hole speckled the cabinet doors to the left of the body, so she had been shot right where she lay. “What were you doing back here?”
“What?”
“What did you come back here for? The cash is in the cages, so why come back here?”
“I thought there might be more.”
“That’s why she had the screwdriver in her hand? Because you thought there might be more boxes for her to pry open?” Not self-defense, then.
“What are you doing, Theresa? Investigating?”
I look at scenes like this every day, she wanted to tell him, and this one isn’t adding up. Besides, every moment she kept him occupied gave Jessica Ludlow another moment to return. “I want to know why you killed her. What happened?”
“I walked her up to the teller cages and told her to pry open the cash drawers.” He began to guide Theresa