Keeping the Peace (31 page)

Tim Cully reached out and brushed Mia with his hand. For a second, their eyes met, and then the three siblings went into the hallway. Moments later, John heard the big outside door creak open and click shut.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Y
OU
A
LL
R
IGHT
, C
ULLY
?” John asked.

Cully nodded. “Yes, sir. Are you okay?”

“I can function.”

Becky stood in the doorway. “Jason and Steve will be here in two minutes. Joe Bernard and more state backup are standing by for orders.”

As she finished talking, Jason Patterson and Steve Bruno walked in the door. They said nothing as they took the rifles Tim Cully handed them. John looked at them standing before him, young and brave and unconditionally loyal.

He drew a deep breath and said, “We don’t know what we’re facing. Melanie called in our Mayday code, so I know something bad is going down in that office. I can’t say it’s a hostage situation because I haven’t heard from any hostage takers. I don’t know if anyone’s been hurt. All we do know is that an hour ago, Richard Seeley was in here looking at the tax maps of Melanie’s building. That makes me assume that he must be there, at the office, threatening her in some way.”

“Is Gabriel Strand with her?” Jason asked.

“That’s another thing I can only assume. He’s supposed to be. Let’s just hope he’s still alive.” John wiped his hand over his face. “Becky, you call Woody Patterson. Have him close off the main route through town and redirect it down Route 10. I don’t want any diversions or distractions.”

“Yes, sir.” She was on the phone before he finished his instructions.

He turned again to his officers. “Jason, you go with Cully. You drive in through the elementary school parking lot. You can see the back and north side of Melanie’s building from there, but any time the lights are on, it’s hard to see out through the windows from the inside. Steve, you come with me.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’m not sure how I’m going to find out exactly what’s going on in there. I’ll have to figure it out on the way. Let’s go.” He sighed, slung the rifle under his arm, and led the way out the door.

John drove slowly out of the police parking lot and down the road toward his wife’s office. He drove slowly because he was afraid he might at any moment be overwhelmed with the enormity of the situation. He was afraid he might lose control. As it was, his mind was racing in several directions at once. He had to consciously avoid thinking about exactly what scenario was playing out at the brick house. Any speculation was only speculation. To assume anything only threatened to push his thoughts to panic and undermine the ultimate goal.

Then he thought of the brick house itself. He knew it intimately from when he and Melanie had lived there early in their marriage: four large rooms downstairs, a wide center hall and staircase, and a kitchen wing out the back. The second floor had another four large rooms. Originally, there had been a stairway leading to the widow’s walk on the roof that looked up and down the whole river valley. They had made love on the widow’s walk more than once. Renovations early in their marriage meant access to the roof was now only through a manhole in the ceiling of the bathroom.

These days, the downstairs of the house served as Melanie’s offices for her community newspaper. The upstairs was rented to a small accounting firm, but they’d likely be gone for the day. He thought about neighbors who might be in danger. The Sawyer family was just down the street; their boys would certainly come outside if they saw any commotion. Their home, however, provided the perfect vantage point. John called Becky on the radio.

“Becky, you call Alice Sawyer and tell her to shut off all the lights in her house and tell her and whoever else is in there to stay at the back of the house until they hear otherwise from the police. If she asks, just tell her we have a potential problem at Melanie’s office. No need to say anything further for now.”

“Yes, sir.”

As he made his approach through the darkening winter evening, he confirmed that the accountants’ offices upstairs were all dark, the employees all having left already. The only room in the house that appeared lit was the front office on the south side of the building. Melanie’s office. There were four windows in that office. Two faced the street, and two faced down the valley. Cully and Patterson would not be able to see anything from the schoolyard. He glanced in his rearview mirror. Cully was driving close behind and, as directed, turned into the school parking lot. John pulled into the driveway of Alice Sawyer’s house, down the street and across from Melanie’s building.

He took the binoculars and peered at the brick house, trying to see through the windows.

“What do you see, Chief?” Steve asked.

John’s heart was pounding in his chest, but he said quietly, “I can see people moving around, but I can’t make out who they are. The drapes are in the way. I can’t even tell how many.”

“It’s getting dark real fast. I can sneak up to the porch and try to look inside. At least we’d know who was in there.”

Before John could answer, the radio crackled with Cully’s voice. “Chief?”

“Yeah, Cully, go ahead.”

“Chief, we’ve got a situation. Mike’s car is here in the school parking lot.”

“Mike? Mike who?”

There was a pause before Cully’s reply. “Your son.”

John couldn’t put the pieces together. His mouth was dry. Somewhere, in his fog, he heard Steve Bruno’s voice. “What’s the matter, Chief?”

John shook his head and spoke into the radio. “Cully, where are my children?”

“I don’t know, sir. Mike’s car is parked here, by the fence. There’s nobody around.”

John’s fist came down hard on the dashboard of the Suburban.

“Sir? Chief? You there?”

“Yes, yes, I’m here.”

“What do you want us to do, Chief?”

John started to answer, when the front door of Melanie’s building opened. “Stand by, Cully, we got something going on.” He put the radio back in its cradle.

“Chief?” Steve asked, shifting in his seat.

John held up his hand. “Wait.”

A man and woman ran out the door, and John recognized them as Lisa Wright and Roger Bickley, Melanie’s two employees. They held hands as they ran off the porch, neither of them wearing a coat. John and Steve watched as the two paused for a moment. Lisa seemed to peer through the encroaching darkness. Then she turned to Roger, and the two of them ran the hundred yards up the road to where the chief’s Suburban idled in Alice Sawyer’s driveway.

John cracked his window. “Get in quickly,” he said.

The two fairly dived into the back seat. John could hear Lisa’s teeth chattering.

“Grab those blankets, Lisa,” he said. “Wrap them around yourselves. You need to tell us what’s going on.”

Lisa reached into the back and took the two wool rescue blankets kept folded there. She and Roger threw them around their shoulders. All the while, she stammered through violent shivers. “I’m not cold, John. I’m not cold. He made us leave. We wouldn’t leave Melanie, and he made us leave.”

John fought down the panic. “Tell me exactly what’s going on in there. Are you two okay? Roger? Can you tell me what’s going on?”

The little man with glasses nodded vigorously, although he, too, was shaking. “I’m fine, John.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s four thirty. He’s been in there for about an hour now.”

John and Steve turned in their seats to face the backseat passengers.

Roger pulled the blanket more securely around his shoulders and leaned forward. “Earlier this afternoon, Mike and Peter dropped Melanie and that Gabriel Stern?” He looked at Lisa. “Is that his name?”

“Strand,” she corrected, her teeth still chattering.

“Anyway, the boys dropped them off. Lisa and I were working on next week’s issue, as usual. Melanie introduced us around, showed Strand what we do, and then they went into her office to have a conference call with his band. I guess they’re up in Hanover. They’re doing some show at Dartmouth over the weekend. She shut the door, and I could hear her put the phone on speaker. I could hear that they were having a conversation, but I couldn’t understand what was being said. They talked for quite a while before I heard the phone hang up, and then I could just hear Melanie and Strand talking to each other. So, Lisa and I were working away, and I know it was three thirty because I glanced up at the clock just as this guy came through the front door. Our door was open, like always. He saw us and came into the room.”

“Just a minute,” Steve Bruno interrupted and thrust out the faxed likeness of Richard Seeley. “Is this the guy?”

Roger examined the picture closely in the half-light. “Yes, that’s him. That’s the guy.” He handed the paper back to Steve. “He came into the room and asked if this was where
The Town Crier
was published. I said yes, and he said he had some news for Melanie Giamo and asked if she was in. I said she was, but she was in a meeting. Then he said he knew who she was in the meeting with and they were waiting for him. He turned and started to cross the hall. Lisa said she would go in and tell Melanie he was here. There was something about the guy. You know, you can just tell when somebody’s not right. I got up and started to follow Lisa. He whirled on us and said don’t bother, it was his business. I spoke up then and told him to come sit down and I would get Melanie. Then he shouted at me, ‘You sit down!’ Then he barged through Melanie’s office door and slammed it behind him. Well, Lisa and I both rushed into the office. Melanie was sitting at her desk, and Strand was on the couch. They looked kind of shocked. The strange guy was blustering about something, I don’t know, and I yelled, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ That’s when he pulled a gun out of his jacket pocket.” Roger stopped and took a deep breath. “A gun,” he repeated.

John felt a cold sweat break on his neck and down his chest, but he kept calm. “What then?”

Roger went on. He was beginning to forget his initial fear, and John could see that he was getting angry. “He waved the gun at all of us and told us to stand against the wall. None of us moved, but I got scared then, and I asked him what he wanted. Lisa spoke up and said there was money in the safe and she would get it for him. He got real angry then and said he didn’t want money. He went over to Strand and put the gun right to his head. He said he wanted Strand. He said he’d already killed somebody else by mistake, and he was sorry about it. He said it was Strand’s fault that it happened. Then Melanie spoke up and said her husband was chief of police here in town and could she call him. She told him that since it was a mistake and he didn’t mean to shoot anybody, he could probably get a manslaughter plea or something, so he didn’t have to make it worse than it was. All the time she was talking, she walked real slow over to Strand and stood kind of between him and this guy.”

John’s stomach flopped like a fish out of water as he thought of his wife in the line of fire. He swallowed hard. “Go on,” he said.

Roger took another deep breath, but he seemed to have run out of steam. He glanced at Lisa.

She cleared her throat and picked up the story. “Well, I was petrified, I’ll tell you. This guy yelled at her and said if the police showed up, he would shoot everyone and himself. Then Melanie said, really nice, please could she call her husband, because if she was late getting home, he’d come looking for her anyway. So the guy let her make a phone call. That’s the call you got, John, about the pie or something. I thought I was going to throw up. Anyway, she got off the phone, and he told us all just to sit down and shut up. ‘Don’t say a word,’ he said. So we just sat on the couch. He was real twitchy, pacing back and forth, and then he went off into this rant, saying that everything in his life that had gone wrong was Gabriel’s fault. He said if Strand hadn’t had the band, he and Marian would be married by now and living a normal life, but Gabriel had elected to break up the family. Is Marian the kid’s girlfriend?”

Steve Bruno said, “She’s Strand’s mother.”

“Oh. Oh, my.” Lisa blinked a few times. “Well, then he kept going on and on about how Strand turned Marian against him and moved away, and then he couldn’t concentrate on his work so he lost his job. He said the losses he incurred had driven him nearly insane, and he had done some stupid things because he’d gotten mixed up with this Marian. He said he had, how did he put it, not been allowed resolution. He claimed no one would listen to him or help him, and he was here to resolve things once and for all. He said a lot more, but none of it made any sense. John, he nearly drove us crazy, talking and yelling on and on like that, but we were afraid of what he would do when he stopped talking.” Lisa fell silent and sat, shivering. John could see that she was emotionally worn out.

He said to Roger, “How did you get out of there?”

“He made us leave, John,” the man answered. “He said Strand was the only one he had business with, and Melanie might come in handy. Those were his words. Then he told us to get out.”

“She was unharmed?”

“Yes, they were both just sitting there.”

Steve had been watching the windows intently and said, “Chief, I’m going to call State Police and have them send up Joe Bernard. He’s a trained sniper. I keep seeing Seeley pass by the windows. He could probably get a shot at him.”