“Eric, what are you doing?” Danielle protested as she scurried back down the aisle toward them.
“Tie his hands with my belt,” he ordered her. “Now, Danielle.”
She obeyed, yanking Eric’s worn leather belt from the loops of his pants, her eyes goggly with fear as she bound Mitch’s hands tightly behind him. As soon as she’d finished, Eric shoved Mitch roughly to the floor. The microcassette recorder tumbled from his jacket pocket. Eric promptly stomped on it hard with his work shoe, then removed the tape and stuffed it in his pocket.
Mitch lay there with his hands bound awkwardly behind him, his shoulders screaming in pain. “You’ll be so much better off if you just turn yourselves in,” he said, squinting up at them in the sunlight that streamed through the church’s windows. “You can’t get away.”
“Yeah, we can,” Eric assured him. “We have a bargaining chip. We have you.” He rummaged in Mitch’s pockets for his cell phone. “What’s Des’s number?”
“Just hit redial.”
Eric did, then held the phone to Mitch’s ear.
Mitch heard her say, “Still kind of busy here.”
To which he said: “I know, I know, and I’m sorry to bother you again. But something slightly urgent has come up…”
CHAPTER 24
Here’s what Des did after she got the call that would change her life forever:
She thanked Andre Forniaux, mobile vet, for his time and she ran like hell for her cruiser, cursing the day she ever met a pigment-challenged New York widower by the name of Mitchell I Am a Big, Fat Fool Berger. From the front seat of her ride she called Soave to scream at him that Eric and Danielle Vickers were holding Mitch hostage inside the Congregational Church and would slit his throat unless they got exactly what they wanted.
Eric had snatched the cell phone from Mitch to tell her what that was: A private jet with enough range to fly them nonstop to “somewhere like the Cayman Islands.” A car to deliver them to that jet, and a briefcase filled with $1 million in cash. Once they arrived at their destination, safe and sound, Mitch would be freed.
“Otherwise, your boyfriend dies,” Eric had promised her, his voice sounding alarmingly high-pitched. “Understand?”
Des had responded, “I’ll have to get back to you, Eric. Just be cool, okay?”
Quickly, she alerted her troop commander of a life-threatening hostage situation. He’d send cruisers to secure the area. Also notify the district commander, who’d bring the state’s high command into the loop. Soave, meanwhile, reached out to Emergency Services for a hostage unit. There would be a negotiator to try to talk them into giving up. There would be a SWAT team. If Eric and Danielle refused to back down then snipers would take them out-assuming they had a clean shot. If they didn’t, the team would have to storm the church with overwhelming force. Although that would be a last resort. This was a house of worship, after all, and these were not hardened gangbangers. Just an organic farmer and his pigtailed wife who happened to have gone nutso.
This was Mitch.
Des floored it down the center of Dorset Street with her siren blaring and her lights flashing, pounding the wheel as she drove. Mitch had promised her he wouldn’t do anything crazy. She should have known better. Should have stopped him while she had him.
The fool. The big, fat fool.
She was the first to arrive on the scene. Immediately ordered the Food Pantry patrons from the area. Answered no questions, told them no lies. Simply said that there was a public safety situation and they would have to leave. She combed the parish offices, which were mostly staffed by volunteers. None were present. The offices were deserted. The hallway door to the church was shut. And no doubt locked from the inside by Eric and Danielle.
She heard the sirens as half a dozen troopers from the West-brook Barracks pulled up. Their job was to close off every intersection within two blocks of the church. While they did that Des undertook her own personal recon by pacing all the way around the outside of the church, stepping quietly on the gravel. She checked out the service driveway around back, where Mitch’s truck was parked next to Eric’s. The back door to the Fellowship Center kitchen. The handicapped ramp, which provided wheelchair access to the old church by way of the Center. There was no other back way into the church. No rear windows. Just a pair of Bilco cellar doors, presently shut.
She circled back around to the front of the church, crossed Dorset Street and stood there on the opposite sidewalk, trying to take it all in as her heart pounded and her knees trembled. She was absolutely frantic. But absolutely no one could know this. Des had to keep it together. Stay focused on what she was looking at:
The stately church faced east from behind a hundred feet of pale winter lawn. Two huge old oaks framed its entrance. Six steps led up to the three double doors. The church’s north and south sides were made up mostly of windows, upstairs and down. The downstairs windows were at least twelve feet up off the ground, so there was no chance of her catching sight of them in there. Maybe from a second-floor window in one of the neighboring houses. The church’s upstairs windows were roughly even with the rooftops of those three-story colonials. Above the sanctuary there appeared to be an attic space-the roof beneath the clock tower was slightly peaked, and there was a fanlight there beneath the two-story-high clock. Atop the clock sat the bell tower, and above that the gracefully tapered steeple that soared some ten stories up into the blue sky, where she could make out a chopper approaching from off in the distance.
A slicktop pulled up out front with a screech and out jumped Soave and Yolie. They immediately marched across the street toward her.
“What did that bozo get himself into now?” Soave demanded angrily.
“The worst kind of trouble, Rico.”
“He means well,” Yolie spoke up in Mitch’s defense.
“He’s a total pain in the ass,” Soave shot back. “And when I see him I’m going to punch him right in the nose.”
“You’ll have to wait your turn,” Des said. “I’ve got dibs.”
Reverend Cyrus Sweet, a calm, red-bearded man in his fifties, showed up next, accompanied by Lem Procter, the gnarled old church custodian. Lem was trembling with fear.
“I’ve known Eric since he was a boy,” Reverend Sweet informed them in his resonant voice. “I could try to talk to him if you’d like.”
“It might come to that,” Soave said. “Right now, we’re still trying to figure out what’s what.”
“They’ve secured the front doors,” Des said. “Also the connecting door to the parish offices. Are there any other ways in?”
“No, ma’am,” Lem replied, his voice quavering.
“Talk to us about that fanlight window. Is there an attic up there?”
“Yeah, that’s how we get at the clock works. The attic stairs are up in the balcony, next to the organ.”
“Is there any other way to reach the attic?” Yolie was thinking the same thing Des was: If they could get up there then that would put them in the balcony. “Back stairs? Fire stairs?”
Reverend Sweet shook his head. “The balcony is our only access.”
“I noticed a set of Bilco cellar doors,” Des said.
“That’s the old coal cellar.” Lem scratched his ear with a wavering finger.
“Does it run all the way under the church?”
“It does, but it’s mostly wiring and pipes. Some storage.”
“Can you access it from inside the church, Lem?”
“Sure can. Cellar door’s in the cloakroom out in the foyer.”
Des shot a glance at Soave and Yolie, her pulse quickening. “Lem, I didn’t see a padlock on those Bilcos. How do you lock them?”
“From the inside. All your Bilcos are that way. I have to go through the cellar from the cloakroom to unlock ’em.”
“We have ourselves a situation here, Lem. Is there any nice, quiet way we can pry those Bilcos open from the outside?”