Indelible

Chapter Seven

11:45 A.M.

Lena stood in the front of Burgess's Cleaners, looking across Main Street at the police station. The tinted glass door was too dark to see anything inside, but still she stared as if she could see into the building, knew exactly what was happening. Another shot had been fired thirty minutes ago. Of the two cops missing at the start of this, only Mike Dugdale had checked in. Marilyn Edwards was still missing and Frank said he thought the attractive young police officer had been in the squad room at the start of the attack. Everyone from the Grant force was walking around like the living dead. All Lena could think was that if she had gone into work a few minutes earlier, she might have been able to do something. She might have been able to save Jeffrey. Right now, she wanted to be in that building so bad that she could taste it.

She turned around, watching Nick and Frank talking by the map table. The GBI agents were milling around the coffee machine, voices low as they waited for orders. Pat Morris talked with Molly Stoddard, and Lena wondered if Pat had been one of Sara's patients. He was young enough.

"The hell you say," Frank told Nick, his voice loud enough to be heard over the activity. Everyone in the room looked up.

Nick indicated old man Burgess's office. "In here."

They both went into the small, windowless room, shutting the door behind them. The tension they stirred up was still in the room, and a few people went to the back of the cleaners, probably to go outside to smoke and talk about the outburst.

Lena took out her cell phone and waited for it to power up. It chirped twice, indicating she had messages waiting. She debated who to call, Nan or Ethan. Her uncle Hank briefly entered her mind, but considering their conversation that morning during which he practically begged her to lean on his shoulder, calling him now seemed like giving in, and Lena was not about to do that. She hated the thought of needing people almost as much as she hated having to reach out to them. In the end, she turned off the phone and tucked it back into her pocket, wondering why she had turned the damn thing on in the first place.

Frank came up beside her. His breath was sour when he asked, "Tactical's on the roof?"

Lena pointed at the building by the station. "Two up there that I can see," she said, indicating the black-clad men lying on their stomachs with high-powered rifles.

"Twenty more people from Nick's office just showed up," he told her.

"What for?"

"Stand around with their thumbs up their asses, from what I can see."

"Frank," Lena began, feeling a lump rise in her throat. "Are you sure?"

"What?"

"Jeffrey," she said, the word sticking.

"I saw it with my own eyes," Frank said, obviously upset by the memory. He wiped his nose with his hand as he crossed his arms over his chest. "He just went down. Sara crawled over to him and…" He shook his head. "Next thing I know, the shooter's putting a gun to her head, telling her to move away."

Lena chewed her lip, feeling a surprising shock of sympathy for Sara Linton.

"Nick seems to know what he's doing," Frank said. "They just cut the power to the whole building."

"Will the phones work without it?"

"There's a straight line to Marla's desk," Frank said. "The Chief put it in when he came here. Never knew why until now."

Lena nodded, trying not to think about it too much. When he had first taken the job as Chief, Jeffrey had done a lot of things that had seemed unusual at the time but ended up making perfect sense.

Frank said, "Phone company's made it so they can't call out unless it's to us."

Lena nodded again, wondering who had known to do all of this. If it was left up to her, they would be storming the building right now, finding the fuckers who had started all of this and finishing it by carrying out their bodies feet-first.

She put her foot on the window ledge, retying her shoe so that Frank would not see the tears welling in her eyes. She hated the fact that she could cry at the drop of a hat now. It made her feel stupid, especially because someone like Frank would take it as a weakness, when the truth was, she was crying because she was a hairsbreadth from full-out rage. How could someone do something like this? How could they come to the station, the last place Lena held as sacred, and do this kind of thing? Jeffrey had been her rudder through all of the shit that had happened to her in the last few years. How could he be taken away from her now, when she was getting her life back?

Frank muttered, "Goddamn media's already trying to get in."

"What?" she asked, hiding a sniff.

"Media," he said. "They're trying to get helicopters down here to film it."

"The station's within the no-fly zone," Lena pointed out, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Fort Grant had been shut down under Reagan, putting thousands of locals out of their jobs and ru

Frank said, "The hospital isn't."

"Fuckers," she said, wondering how anybody could do that job. They were vultures, and the people back home who watched it all live were no better than animals themselves.

Frank lowered his voice, saying, "We gotta keep in control here."

"What does that mean?"

"With Jeffrey gone…" Frank stared out into the street. "We gotta keep our people in charge."

"You mean you?" Lena asked, but she could read on his face that he hadn't meant it that way. She asked, "What's wrong with you? Are you sick?"

He shrugged, wiping his mouth with a dirty-looking handkerchief. "Me and Matt ate something bad last night." She was startled to see tears in his eyes at the mention of Matt. Lena could not imagine what it had been like for him to watch his friend die right in front of his eyes. Frank had been Matt's supervisor when the younger man first came onto the force. Almost twenty years had passed since then and they had spent just about every working day in each other's company.

Frank said, "We know Nick. We know what kind of guy he is. He needs all the support we can give him."

"Is that what you were talking about in the office?" Lena asked. "It didn't seem like you were so hot on supporting him five minutes ago."

"We have a difference of opinion about how this should go down. I don't want some bureaucrat walking in here and fucking things up."

"This isn't a cowboy movie," Lena countered. "If the negotiator knows what he's doing, then we should follow his lead."

"It's not a guy," Frank said. "It's a woman."

Lena gave him a scathing look. Frank had made it clear from Lena's first day that he did not think women belonged in uniform. It must have burned him up knowing that a woman was coming down from Atlanta to take charge.

Frank said, "It ain't about her being a female."

Lena shook her head, pissed off as hell that he was worried about something as stupid as this. "You don't get into the freaking GBI baking cookies."

"Nick trained with this gal when he first joined up. He knows her."

"What'd he tell you?"

"He won't talk about it," Frank said, "but everybody knows what happened."

Lena bristled. "I don't."

"They were holed up in a restaurant outside of Whitfield. Two idiots with guns looking to score off the lunch crowd." He shook his head. "She hesitated. The whole thing went bad in less than a minute. Six people died." He gave her a knowing look. "We got our people in there praying for a savior," he jabbed a finger at the station, "and she ain't got the balls to do it."

Lena stared across the street. They only had six people left in the squad room.