Free Ransom River by Meg Gardiner Page B

would have simply ambled in and laughed at her.
    Noise flowed through the open door. Conversation, phones, television. In walked a woman with a disheveled ponytail the color of Mountain Dew.Her blue blouse was limp and wrinkled. Her badge was clipped to the waistband of her skirt.
    “Aurora Mackenzie?” she said.
    “Call me Rory.”
    “Detective Mindy Xavier.” She looked a rugged forty-five. She gestured Rory to the worn plastic chair at the table. “Sorry it’s taken so long. And for all the rigmarole.”
    Rigmarole. Rory guessed it was the technical term for plastic cuffs and aggressive pat-downs and a locked interrogation room.
    “We had to make sure that there weren’t any bad guys pretending to be hostages. You know, blending in with the rest of you and threatening everybody into keeping silent about it.” Xavier closed the door. “Can I get you anything? Coffee?”
    “I’m fine.” Rory sat down. “What’s the word on Judge Wieland?”
    Xavier dropped a file folder on the table. “I don’t know. Sorry.”
    Xavier scraped her own chair back and sat heavily. She looked frazzled. She examined Rory’s face, seemingly for cracks.
    “You okay?” she said.
    “In one piece. When will I get a chance to clean up?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “When the first gunman was shot, I was close by. I got sprayed…”
    Her voice chipped. She needed to stay calm. She could hardly bear having Nixon’s blood on her clothes and skin. But she wasn’t going to beg, not in a police station. She wasn’t here to seek mercy from the cops.
    Xavier eyed her sweater. She flushed. “Maybe I can find you a T-shirt.”
    “Even a grocery bag. Paper or plastic, I don’t care.”
    Xavier stood, opened the door, and beckoned to a passing colleague. She asked for a clean T-shirt. Then she closed the door and sat down again.
    She shook her head. “Sorry. Demanding day.”
    “Do you know who they were?” Rory said.
    “We’re investigating.”
    “Why did they attack the courtroom?”
    “Investigating.”
    Xavier opened the file folder. Rory’s driver’s license was clipped inside.
    Xavier uncapped a pen. “Tell me what you saw. What you heard. Take it from the top, and take your time. Don’t leave anything out.”
    Get through this,
Rory thought.
Just give them what they want and get home.
    “They came in through the main doors,” she began.
    She went through it. Moment by moment, step by step, trying to recall the choreography and the score. Xavier took only occasional notes. The CCTV camera near the ceiling probably had something to do with that. As Rory described the siege, her heart started to pound. Her leg throbbed, the old ache. The room turned stifling.
    “Could I have a glass of water?” she said.
    “Sure.” Xavier glanced at the mirror. “At what point did the gunmen first indicate resentment of the defendants?”
    The door opened and another detective stepped in, a man with placid Young Republican features and a frat-boy strut. He set a plastic water bottle on the table, pulled up a chair next to Xavier. Set down a laptop.
    “Had you ever seen the gunmen before today?” he said.
    “I don’t know,” Rory said.
    “Really? Two men hold you hostage and you can’t say whether you recognized them?”
    He didn’t offer his hand. Neither had Xavier, but Rory got the sense that if she had put hers out, Xavier would have taken it. This guy didn’t give her that vibe.
    “They wore ski masks,” she said.
    She unscrewed the bottle top, tilted the bottle to her lips, and gulped it down. She felt like her toes and fingers and teeth had curled. And she felt something else: fear.
    Because, on the Ransom River PD’s busiest day in twenty years, with three people dead, a major crime scene to process, and sixty-five witnesses to debrief, the department surely had no manpower to spare. Sending a second detective to deliver water seemed inefficient. And unlikely.
    “The SWAT guys pulled Nixon’s mask off,” she said.