The Widow File (5 page)

“This is nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

“I need a SWAT team at Rasmund.” The words caught in her throat, the urge to scream almost overwhelming her. “Rasmund Historical Center, 11623 County Road 23.”

“Ma’am, can you tell me what’s happening?”

The man’s voice on the line was so calm, so low and soothing.

“Guns. Guns. There are people with guns and they’re moving through the workrooms. They’re shooting. They’ve shot… they shot Todd. And Fay. They’re kicking down the doors.”

“Ma’am, I need you to stay calm. Can you stay calm for me?”

“No! Are you kidding me? They’re shooting everybody.”

“What is your name, ma’am?”

“My name? What?” Dani pulled the phone away from her ear for a moment to listen, hearing nothing. “Dani. Danielle. What the fuck does it matter? Send a SWAT team. Send cops. A lot of cops. They’ve got guns.”

“Ma’am,” the low tone of the operator’s voice became maddening when it never lost its soft, low cadence. Dani curled up more tightly into a ball, trying to stay calm. “Listen to me very carefully ma’am. Dani? Can you get to a secure location?”

Dani let out an unfunny laugh. “Secure from guns? No. That’s why I’m calling.”

“Where are you, ma’am? Where exactly in the house are you?”

“I’m in the…”

And that’s when she heard the click. She knew that click. She’d listened in on enough tapped lines to know that click. That was a relay click.

“Ma’am? Where in the house are you? Are you safe?”

The house. Why had he asked about the house? Dani had said workrooms, historical center. Why had the operator asked about the house?

“I’m in the basement.” Dani’s fingers felt like ice and she thought she might drop the phone. “I’m in the basement. Everyone else is dead. Everyone. I’m the last one here.”

“Stay in the basement, ma’am.” The operator’s voice dropped to an even softer, lower tone. “We have a team on the way. Where in the basement are you? Can you tell me where you are? I’ll alert the entry team to watch for you.”

No question about how many people were in the house. No question about where the guns were. The only question the operator wanted to know was where to find her.

“I’m in the basement behind the furnace room. It’s secure. Metal door, metal lined.” A calmness settled over Dani as she lied, a coldness that some part of her knew was hatred. “It’s on the southeast end of the building. The door is hidden behind a fake furnace panel. They won’t find it. I’m safe.”

“Is there anyone else in the building with you?”

Dani listened again for the team moving through the hallway. There was no sound. Even the radios were silent.

“No. They’re all dead. I heard them die. I heard them all die.”

“Ma’am, stay where you are. We’re coming for you. I want you to stay on the line with me until we come for you. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” Dani said, settling down on the floor. “Do you mind if I don’t talk though? I’m afraid they’re going to hear me.”

She heard muffled radio static coming through the phone. “Don’t worry, Dani. We’re coming for you.”

“Thank you,” Dani said softly. “I owe you one.”

She held the phone away from her face, staring at it as if she would see the operator in it. She wanted to see the man’s face. She wanted to know his name because in that moment Dani Britton knew two things. She knew she was going to live and she knew she was going to find this man and make him pay. She didn’t currently have a plan for achieving either of those goals but just seeing them so clearly calmed her like nothing else could.

Her focus returned and the jittery clumsiness dissipated. She couldn’t think more than two steps ahead but two steps was further than she’d gotten so far. She knew whoever they were, they controlled the building. Had they seen her come in? Maybe not. They’d left the fence open in the back, the truck blocking the rear driveway. It didn’t matter now. Now all that mattered was getting out unseen and unheard. Dani pushed the speakerphone button and replaced the handset in the cradle. Before the man on the other end could say anything, Dani pushed the down-volume button to zero, silencing the speaker. She then pushed mute. The operator wouldn’t be able to hear Dani; anyone coming into the room wouldn’t hear the phone. It would look like any other phone in the building.

Dani scoured the room for a place to hide, tamping down panic and frustration at the lack of cabinets and cubbyholes. She and Fay had insisted on open shelving everywhere. They would joke about all the locked doors in Rasmund and how theirs was a knob-free world. It had been funny and easy, since neither was the filing cabinet type. Now all it meant was the room looked like miles and miles of open ground.

She considered risking a run across the hall, maybe hiding in the wiring cabinets in Audio. Pressing her ear to the outer door, she heard an outburst of radio static. The target had been acquired. That’s what it sounded like at least. Dani heard the words “data” and “drives” and someone said “Say again.”

The radio made it sound tinnier but Dani recognized the low voice of the man on the phone. “We’ve found our rabbit. Repeat. We have found our rabbit. Hiding in the southeast basement of the house. Split the team. Team A, retrieve the package and make a final sweep. Give me a head count. Team B, join the boys downstairs to find our rabbit. Hidden panel behind the furnaces. Once head count is confirmed, we are smoke. Understood?”

“Roger that.” The radio went silent once more, muffled commands given, and Dani heard heavy footsteps running toward the front stairwell, away from her. She had bought herself a few minutes and hopefully a less vigorous search. That didn’t help her much though. The best she could hope for was that the team assigned data retrieval would search the Audio room first before heading to Templeton’s office. Templeton kept her cabinets packed, Dani knew. If she was going to hide anywhere, it had to be here.

Fay’s fainting couch wouldn’t hide her well enough. With so little to search, even a careless seeker would think to look under the only solid piece of furniture in the room and Dani didn’t want to bet on this team being careless. She made a quick circuit of the room, dodging under a partition of hanging corkboards now bare of the Swan Technology materials. A big dented cardboard box lay discarded beside the mostly flat denim beanbag chair with a yellow crocheted afghan in which Dani usually sprawled. While technically she could probably fit into the box, as hiding places went, it was stupid enough to border on suicidal.

But it was big enough. She couldn’t hide in the box but if she could fit in it that meant anything her size would also fit into it. Dropping to her knees, Dani flipped the beanbag chair over, searching for the sturdy zipper that always seemed to find a way to the top of the chair and dig into her back when she lay on it. She refused to listen to the little voice in her head screaming to her about how epically stupid this plan was, choosing instead to listen
to the monotonous droning of her inner engineer who had taken to running ratio calculations in her mind. Displacement and area and depth-times-width-times-length—phrases and equations and diagrams flitted through her skull as her fingers worked open the zipper.

She had to get this right. Her odds were bad enough without being careless. Pinching the bag closed, she dumped the opening into the empty box and as carefully as she could with the adrenaline rushing through her, she poured out the foam pellets that filled the bag. A fog of white dust rose up in a burst and Dani fought back a cough. As the chair emptied, getting flatter and flatter, Dani’s faith in her plan flagged. There was no way this was going to work. But as the door to Templeton’s office shattered under heavy boots, Dani knew she was out of options.

Hers was the last room left.

The cardboard box was more than halfway full. It looked like any other shipping box, the crushed pellets like any other shipping protection. The most anyone would do to search it was maybe run a hand through them to see if any objects had been left behind. The voice in the hallway said all data had been retrieved. They weren’t looking for objects; they were looking for people.

Dani dragged the mostly empty beanbag chair, the afghan, and the box closer to the wall. The “there’s no way this will work” chorus grew in volume but fortunately, or unfortunately, so did the sounds of the team next door. She had literally made her bed and now she was going to have to lie in it. She jammed the box into the corner, close enough to distract but not so close anyone would have to move the beanbag to get to it. She threw her purse and the Rasmund pouch into the bag first, not wanting to leave any personal traces behind. It had to look like the room had been vacated.

Cabinet doors in Templeton’s office slammed open and shut. The search continued. Stepping into the beanbag, Dani folded herself down into the dusty fog of pellets. She shook out the afghan over the front of the bag, punching at the denim from within to wrinkle the yellow blanket. There was no way this was going to work. Taking a deep breath, Dani pulled the top of the denim bag over her head and laid down on her side, curling up into what she hoped looked like a lumpy comma. Fay had called her that this morning, a comma. She pulled the neck of her T-shirt
up over her nose to keep out the dust, squeezed her eyes tight, and forced herself to be still.

She heard the familiar squeak of the door hinges and footsteps sounded close by. Dani wished she’d thought of a way to place the zipper or her head so that she could peer out, maybe through the holes in the afghan, but she knew it was better this way. If they saw her, if they recognized the shape of a human body underneath all that rumpled denim, they probably wouldn’t give her any warning. They would probably just shoot her again and again, hopefully killing her quickly enough that she wouldn’t have to know how stupid she looked.

She hoped Fay had died quickly, that she hadn’t been too frightened. She hoped she hadn’t seen it coming, that the screams hadn’t been Fay’s. It was selfish, she knew. Who else would she hope had died screaming? Nobody. But not as much as she hoped Fay hadn’t.

Dani almost sighed but caught herself. The urge to scream and kick and pray to just get it over with was stronger than she might have imagined. Not that she had ever imagined herself hiding inside a beanbag chair. But she’d hidden lots of times before in smaller spaces than this. Like in her dad’s rig. Dani thought of the little spot she used to snuggle up in on the floor of her father’s truck, behind his seat, beneath the seat cot he used to sleep on. He used to call it her rabbit hole.

Now she was in another rabbit hole. Now she really was a rabbit. Wasn’t that what the operator had called her? The rabbit? Curled up like a bunny, frightened and hiding, waiting to be shot without ever seeing her killer’s face. She curled her fingers tight against her chest, refusing to give in to the suicidal urge to scream. Water slipped out from beneath her lashes and she didn’t know if she was crying or it was from squeezing her eyes so tightly shut but she felt little foam pellets clinging to the wetness. She breathed through her nose and thought she could smell Ben on her T-shirt.

A doorknob clicked and more hinges complained. The door to the hallway had been opened. A radio crackled and a male voice spoke.

“All clear. Team A has the package and we are on our way down. The only one we’re missing from our head count is our rabbit.”

Dani couldn’t move even as she heard him shut the door behind him.

CHAPTER THREE

She sneezed. Loudly. There was no stopping it. She froze after the spasm, feeling wetness on her T-shirt, but no heavy boots kicked down the door. The only sounds she could hear over her ragged breathing were the footsteps growing fainter. They were gone. She was alive.

They were going downstairs to look for her. She wouldn’t fool them long.

Kicking her way out of the dusty chair, Dani grabbed her bags and hurried into the hallway. She had become so certain she wouldn’t survive her hiding place she hadn’t bothered to think even one step further. Now she had minutes at best before the invaders realized there was no hidden room behind any furnace panels. She felt certain their next sweep would be thorough to a fault. She had to see if anyone else had survived.

She threw herself through the door into Choo-Choo’s Audio room and her feet slid through something wet.

She wouldn’t look down; she couldn’t. Her eyes locked on the wide strip of windows above a rack of equipment, straining only to see the yellowing leaves on the trees beyond, telling herself that the splashes of red she spied on the edges were the fiery red of sugar maples or a flickering glimpse of cardinals.

It couldn’t be what she knew it had to be—blood. Arterial blood spatter. She knew the phrase even as she refused to say it to herself. She’d studied it before on jobs. (Dixon again—how she wished she’d never worked that Dixon case.)

A squat metal equipment rack lay on its side on the floor by the door. That must have been what she heard crashing. A gap in the racks on the far wall showed where it had come from, where someone had grabbed it to throw it, someone hoping to stop the invaders with guns. Her eyes slid down the wall, past jumbles of cables and wires and bits of chrome. A receiver of some sort stayed plugged into the wall, dangling from an unseen hook, its wires and filaments trailing out of it like intestines. Those wires and filaments snaked across the floor, joining up with a dark ribbon that looked like chocolate sauce but Dani knew it wasn’t. She knew what it was and even if she wanted to fool herself into thinking it was anything else, the ribbon spilled under the upturned heel of a canary yellow pump (ladies’ size eleven, she knew) and that told her everything she didn’t want to know.