Page 5 of Save Her Life (Sandra Vos #1)

FOUR

When hostages were involved, the stakes were always high, but a pregnant woman ratcheted up the urgency. Sandra stuck her head inside the command vehicle to have the information officer come out and talk with the man, while she returned to her post in case there was a development with the HT.

A few minutes later, Patrick Mahoney was back and passing on what he’d learned. “His name’s Joshua Cobb. His wife, Megan, is eight months pregnant with their first child.”

Their first… Somehow, that made it even more crucial Sandra find a way to get her out of there. Once she established communication with the hostage taker, she’d do her best to have her sent out first.

Patrick continued. “She had a craving for ice cream, he was watching hockey and wouldn’t go get it. So she did. He caught the incident on the news and hurried over.”

“The guy must be full of regret,” Richie, the scribe, put in.

“Oh, he is.”

“Look!” Ray pointed at the monitor.

The door of the grocery store opened, and one of the hostages came out and grabbed the phone. It all happened quickly.

“Oh, that’s a good sign,” Ray said. “Our guy’s ready to talk.”

“We’ll let some time pass. If he doesn’t call, then I will.” Sandra set the timer on her phone for ten minutes. If the HT hadn’t called by then, she would initiate contact.

“Why wait?” Garrison asked.

“I want to give him the opportunity to feel like he’s in control.”

“He should be feeling nothing but. Let’s face it. We’ve just been hanging around waiting for him to do or say something,” Garrison lamented.

She let his opinion go without response, and instead put her headset on, turned to Ray on her right, then to Richie on her left. “When this timer goes off, I want to call,” she told them. They’d both be listening to every conversation she had with the HT.

Ray quickly ran her through their system and how to make the call. “We’ll be ready when you are,” Ray said, giving her a pressed smile.

She set her cellphone on the worksurface in front of her, watched the timer tick off a few seconds, then glanced away to look at the video screen. No further movement to be seen inside. Back to her phone, the timer was on the last ten seconds. It beeped, and she put the call through.

It rang once. No answer.

A second time. No answer.

A third, the same. But on the fourth, the call was picked up. There was silence on the other end.

She anticipated this possible response, but at least the HT took her call. “This is Sandra.” She was keeping it light. “Just in case we get disconnected, you can always call me back by hitting the Call button. It will patch you right through to me. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Silence.

“I’d like to help you,” she said a few seconds later. “Are you all right in there?”

“Yeah.”

She glanced at Ray and Richie. Both men were smiling. After four hours, the HT had just said his first word. More an utterance that came out mumbled. But it counted.

Ray passed her a note. It sounds like he’s tired.

She gathered the same. Without hearing more, it wasn’t possible to tell if he was affected by drug use or if he’d helped himself to alcohol from the store’s shelves. She also couldn’t distinguish any accent to his voice. “Well, that’s good to hear. You sound tired though.” By saying this she was showing more empathy. The goal was to get him to trust her, and as a result, she’d gain influence. “Since we’re going to become friends, what should I call you?” With his name, they could access his background and dig into his life situation to see if either could explain how things had spiraled to this point. This knowledge could also help determine his motivation and thereby aid where she steered the negotiation.

“No names.”

Two words and still not enough to determine if he was local. “You’re doing all right, but what about everyone who’s with you in there? Are they doing okay?” Megan Cobb wasn’t far from mind but she couldn’t rush the dialogue along.

“Yes.”

“Wonderful.” She let a small smile lighten her tone. “This means you’re in a great place for all of us to walk away from this. Obviously, no one out here wants to see you or anyone hurt. We’re all in this together. What can I do so that we can all go home safe?” She’d intentionally painted a happy picture, then waited. She let the silence stretch some, hoping he was calculating his demands.

The line went dead.

“At least you got him to pick up,” Ray said to her.

“Better than Leon,” Richie put in, while Patrick noted the time on the markerboard.

“It’s not a reflection on Leon. The HT is just ready to talk now.” She wasn’t about to disparage anyone’s reputation. Let alone someone she didn’t even know.

A hulk of a man entered the command vehicle. Buzzcut, tight pants that encased thighs the size of her torso… well, not quite as thick . He wasn’t in SWAT getup, so he must have been Lieutenant Amos Bowen, the team coordinator, and she could feel his testosterone from the door to where she was seated near the other end of the vehicle.

“She got through,” Garrison informed the man. “This is FBI Special Agent Sandra Vos.” Then to her he said, “This is Lieutenant Bowen.”

The team coordinator looked down at her, not just due to his towering height but in a clear move to intimidate. His hard gaze leveled judgment as if to say, So you’re who they sent.

He was about to be disappointed if he expected a reaction. She wasn’t one to cower, especially to the likes of him. She’d been dealing with inflated male egos since she became FBI. Law enforcement was still very much a man’s world.

“‘She got through…’ Based on that enthusiastic recap, I’m to guess he wasn’t too talkative.”

She peacocked her body posture at his sarcastic assumption. “We established contact. That’s a good start.”

“I know you just arrived,” Bowen said, “but the rest of us have been here for nearly five hours. Tell me you at least got his name.”

Technically, four hours and forty minutes… “Oh, I got more than that.”

Bowen smiled. “That’s a no on the name, then?”

She shrugged, letting it be clear he wasn’t getting to her.

“All right, I’ll bite. What did ya get?” Bowen crossed his arms, and his biceps popped like melons. It looked painful. There was muscular, but then there was this. His life outside of work had to be spent in a gym lifting weights.

She almost wished he didn’t ask. The fact the HT wasn’t willing to discuss going home safely may suggest he didn’t have intentions of walking away. But that was far from being conclusive this early on. She’d give Bowen one offering, and then ricochet an inquiry back to him. “He said no one’s hurt, but I suspect you have experience with hostage situations. I’m sure you’ve made your own observations thus far.” The compliment and invitation for him to share his wisdom was tactical empathy at work. The hope was it would spark reciprocity while helping him see he could benefit from the team around him.

Bowen didn’t bite this time. “If that’s all you got from your ten-second interaction with the HT, you didn’t get much. When Garrison wanted to call in the FBI, I didn’t understand the need. Now even more so. You haven’t gotten any further than us.”

Ray and Richie shifted in their chairs. She saw them look at each other. Both were curious how she was going to handle this man. Patrick was avoiding eye contact.

She nudged out her chin. “I sense you’re a man who likes to hear it how it is. Well, contact was just made, so as far as getting started, that clock just began ticking. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to discuss the call further with the team and listen to the nine-one-one call. That is, unless there is something else you need, Lieutenant?”

Bowen clenched his jaw and left.

“I think that’s the first time he’s ever been speechless. Impressive,” Ray put in.

She was just standing her ground so Bowen would know he couldn’t tromp on her. With people like that it was best to make your position clear up front. “Could you play that nine-one-one call?” She directed this at Patrick.

“Sure.” Patrick brought up the recording and hit play.

“Nine-one-one, what’s your emerg ? —”

“He’s got a gun… He’s— Oh my ? —”

Crying and people shouting in the background.

“What are you doing?” a man said, and the caller cried out.

Then the call ended.

Everyone was looking at her. She gathered her thoughts and shared her observations. “It’s brief, and the HT is clearly distressed. I don’t think he planned for this to happen, or he would have thought ahead to confiscate everyone’s phones. But at the same time, he did decide to hold people before law enforcement arrived.”

“So he was backed into it, but wasn’t?” Ray asked, his brow wrinkling up.

“Something like that. There’s just so little to go on yet,” she said.

“I just keep asking what turns an outing for groceries into this?” Garrison weighed in.

Without even having so much as the HT’s identity, the question was purely rhetorical. It wasn’t even certain what brought him here. Any response would be best guess. “I’m going to try calling him back, see if he answers.” She got situated again, as did Ray and Richie.

Her call was answered on the second ring. “Leave me alone.”

Aggressive words, but he hadn’t hung up. “I would if I could, my friend, but that’s a bit hard for me to do until I hear that everyone is safe in there.” She was after more than his earlier yeah .

“Everyone’s safe,” he said firmly.

“Can I talk to them?”

“There’s no need for that.”

A lilt to his voice was now distinguishable and disclosed a Virginia accent. He was from the area. “All right. Will you tell me how many people are in there with you?”

“Dunno. Thirty or forty.”

Sandra noted that he hadn’t taken the time to count them, which potentially wasn’t a good thing. To him, they weren’t people and that would make them dispensable. “You’re sure, thirty or forty?” Repeating his words showed she was listening to him.

“Yeah.”

That was close enough to that’s right . Such a response would unconsciously embed in his subconscious that she was on the same page as him. “We have a husband out here, Joshua, who is really concerned about his wife, Megan. She just had a craving for ice cream.” By using names, relationship, and something so basic as why Megan was at the store, it would encourage the HT to see his hostages as real people like himself. If he viewed them that way, he’d be less likely to hurt anyone. “Could I talk to her, at least?”

He didn’t respond, and there was no background noise whatsoever. Not even the sound of anyone crying. He must be in another room from the hostages. But then how was he keeping them there? She continued. “Megan’s thirty-three, and she and her husband are expecting their first baby.”

He sniffled. Allergies, a cold, or emotion? It was hard to tell, but it was a break she needed.

“But she is okay, so I can tell Joshua, her husband, that?” she prompted.

“She’s just fine. I swear I didn’t hurt her.” He thrust the last sentence out with a note of disgust, as if injuring her would have been detestable.

Ray wrote, Detect empathy .

She did too, and that was a breakthrough. Sharing Megan’s story had worked. “You didn’t hurt her?” She intentionally parroted his words, serving them back in a curious tone. By repeating him, it confirmed she was listening when he spoke, and it was a tactic that would encourage him to elaborate. In this case, she wanted to ensure there wasn’t anything between the lines of what he’d said.

“No. She’s just fine.”

“That’s great news…” She left room for him to volunteer his name, which he didn’t. She wasn’t going to push it when he was still talking. “I’ll let her husband, Joshua, know that she’s okay, that she isn’t hurt.”

“Whatever. Everyone’s good,” he reiterated.

“You sound like you’re tired and could use some rest.”

He laughed, dry and full of irony. “The feds are here for me. I’m not going anywhere!”

“Sandra. I’m the only fed here, and I’m on your side, like everyone else here. All this can end peacefully now, no one gets hurt, including you, and you can go home and get some sleep. You haven’t done anything you can’t walk away from.”

“Nah, I saw them out there… The men dressed in Kevlar, carrying big guns. No way they are going to let that happen.” He sniffled again, and Sandra sensed desperation. And that bred impulsive action.

“Nah, we’ve been talking. I’ll let them know you just want to end this peacefully.”

There were several seconds of silence.

She spoke again. “Please, just let me do this for you. It’s the least I can do, but I’d really like to know what I should call you.”

“Gavin.”

Richie wrote this down with a fast hand.

“Gavin, we can do this now. As I said, you can still walk away from this. Do you want me to arrange for you to come out, all safe and sound? Then you can put all this behind you and get some rest.”

“No, I’m not doing that.”

While she’d wished for a more positive answer, she hadn’t expected one. “All right. I’m still here for you, and as long as you continue to keep the hostages safe, we can keep talking. Is there something I can do for you? Anything that might make you feel more comfortable?”

“I just wanted the drugs,” he burst out. “That’s all, but they wouldn’t give them to me. I had no choice but to…”

Richie, ever the dutiful scribe, was furiously writing.

Ray gave her a note that read, Felt backed into a corner… Prescription?

“No choice but to what, Gavin?” She had to know what he was referring to. Taking hostages? Hurting someone and lying about it?

“Locking things down.”

“Okay. Tell me what drug you need, Gavin, and I’ll get it for you. Was it a prescription?”

Gavin hung up.

“At least the guy’s predictable. You ask a question he finds uncomfortable, he ends the call,” Patrick said.

“Seems so,” Richie put in.

“I say at least he’s talking. Even if it’s piecemeal,” Ray added.

She took some comfort in that. “At least we have his name now.”

“Well, there’s no Gavin attached to the vehicle registrations,” Patrick said.

“I still don’t think we’re without resources,” she began. “I’d put money on this drug being prescribed. Could you ask the assistant manager if she has any way of getting into the pharmacy system from the outside?”

“I’ll get on that right now,” Patrick said.

“And if she can’t get in, call Lakisha Hester. She’s with the Science and Technology Branch at FBI headquarters.”

“Her number?”

Sandra brought up Lakisha’s contact card in her phone. “I’ll shoot you over her info. Your number?”

Patrick rattled it off, and Sandra forwarded it along. She then texted Lakisha a quick heads-up that she might be getting a call from Patrick Mahoney with the PWCPD and added, connected to ID’ing HT in live incident.

Within a few seconds, she had a response.

I’ll do my best.

All I can ask.

“Okay, she knows you might be calling,” Sandra told Patrick.

The intelligence officer nodded with his phone to his ear.