Page 12 of Save Her Life

“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.

FIVE

“‘They wouldn’t give them to me.’” Sandra repeated Gavin’s words, after listening to the playback of the call. “He’s desperate. For whatever reason, he needs those drugs.”

“Only thing is he’s screwed the pooch on this,” Garrison said. “No way he can expect to just walk away free and clear. I know that’s what you’re promising, but even a village idiot would know he needs to account for what he’s done.”

“I’m not promising that at all. The point is to minimize the punishment, diminish his fears about the outcome of surrendering,” she said.

“Fair enough,” Garrison said. “But I suppose my point is he had to know he couldn’t just walk out of the store with his pills, even if he limited his force to the pharmacist and the clerk there. The store security guard would have stopped him.”

“The store has one?”

“Yep. Norman Brady,” Patrick said, weighing in on the conversation. He’d already filled them in that the assistant manager couldn’t log in to the pharmacy system, so he’d reached out to Lakisha. No ETA there. Patrick flipped through his paperwork. “Brady’s a direct employee of the store, not an outside firm.”

“It could be where Gavin got his gun. That’s if Brady was armed,” Sandra said.

“He was. A Smith & Wesson M&P. I got that information from the assistant manager.”

It might have been nice to have had this information earlier, though it was impossible to know if Gavin had managed to get the gun off the security guard or if he turned up with one of his own. But the main point was Gavin was armed, which she’d been informed about when she arrived.

“The HT could have lied to Agent Vos,” Ray began. “It’s only logical a physical altercation must have taken place between him and the guard. Whether that be during a play to take the guard’s weapon or to have him relinquish it. Someone might be hurt in there.”

“Could be.” The admission was bitter. Just the possibility of it chipped at the early camaraderie she had going with Gavin. He’d most likely lied to her already.

“On another note, was anyone else freaked out by how quiet it was in the background?” Richie asked.

She nodded and turned to Patrick. “What do we know about the lunchroom? Does it lock from the outside?” It was only a theory that’s where the hostages were being held, but she’d treat it as a fact for now.

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