Keeping Caroline. Vickie Taylor

“No. That isn’t it.”

      Caroline hadn’t taken his son. God had.

      Matt propped his elbows on his knees and dropped his head into his hands. “Death is awfully final, you know James?”

      Were the kids hearing this conversation? Were they scared?

      Sure they were. Hampton was using the speakerphone in his ex-wife’s home office. The kids could hear every word, just as Matt could hear their frightened whimpers. They knew the score—and the stakes of the game.

      Hampton sniffed. “No more final than what she’s done. Moved half across the country, where we can’t even try to work things out. You know what that does to a man?”

      “It’s tough.”

      The H.T. sniffed, mollified. “Your wife run off on you, too?”

      Matt shrugged, knowing Hampton couldn’t see him. Caroline hadn’t so much run off as he’d driven her away. “She moved back home. She’s got a little farm just outside a small town a few hours west of here. Sweet Gum. Ever heard of it?”

      “Naw, naw. I’m from Iowa, remember?”

      “I remember.” Even if he hadn’t, the dossier the intel officers had already put together on Hampton would have reminded him.

      “At least she’s close enough you can go see her. Talk to her. You should go talk to her, man.”

      “Yeah, maybe I will,” Matt said noncommittally. “After all this is over.”

      “My wife don’t want to talk to me. She took my kids away.” The H.T.’s sniffing grew more ragged. “Took them where I can’t see them again, ever. I just couldn’t let that happen, you know?”

      Matt knew. He would do anything to see his son again. Anything. Squeezing his eyes shut, he pushed Brad’s image from his mind. More than miles separated him from his son.

      “I just wanna ask her why she did it,” Hampton continued. His sniffles broke down into sobs. “Please, can I just talk to my wife.”

      Matt opened his eyes. “That’s not so easy, you know? There are regulations—”

      “The hell with regulations!” The H.T. let out a high-pitched groan, like wrenching metal. “Get the bitch here now!”

      Jasmine wailed—a pitiful, keening cry.

      “Shut up! Shut up, Jazzie.”

      The more the H.T. yelled, the louder the girl cried. The older brother shouted in the background.

      “James? Talk to me, man! Come on, I want to help you.”

      No answer. Matt’s gaze landed hard on the hostages’s pictures pinned on the negotiation room wall. The girl, Jasmine, eight years old and her brother, James Junior, sixteen.

      Just a few years older than Brad would have been now, if he’d lived.

      Matt severed the thought in one brutal mental swipe. He didn’t have time for personal baggage right now. If he didn’t get this H.T. out soon, the guy was going to hurt those kids. When he did, there wouldn’t be any more negotiating. The tactical team would take over. All hell would break loose. Who knew who would get caught in the cross fire.

      Matt couldn’t let that happen.

      “James, I got an idea. An idea how you can talk to your wife.”

      “Send her in here.”

      “She’s not on scene,” he lied. “But I got an idea how you can talk to her. Let me run it by command and see if we can set it up, all right?”

      “You’re stalling again!”

      “These things take time, James. There’s logistics. Give me a few minutes to set something up.”

      “Five minutes,” the H.T. yelled into his ear. “That’s it.”

      “Might take a little longer, but I’ll try. You’re going to wait for me, right? Stay right there and do not do anything until you hear back from me?”

      Three choppy breaths sawed across the line. “I’ll wait.”

      Matt pointed at his backup negotiator, indicating Todd Thurman should stay on the line, stall.

      Throwing his own headset aside, Matt headed for the door. The commander met him in the intelligence area, where two uniformed officers manned computers, gathering all the data there was to be had on one James Hampton.

      “What the hell are you doing, Burkett, promising him he can talk to his wife?” his captain accused without preamble.

      “He’s dug in, Cap. No other way to get him out.”

      “You know better than to bring in a third party. Especially an ex-wife. She’s liable to push him right over the edge.”

      “I can make it work.”

      “No way.”

      Matt turned to the officer decked out in black fatigues behind the captain. “What’s the tactical situation?”

      The tactical liaison shrugged. “There isn’t one. He’s holed up in a back room with the hostages. No windows, only one access—down a long, narrow hall.”

      Matt stared hard at his captain, the on-scene commander. He didn’t have to state the futility of sending a tactical team into a setup like that.

      Castro, one of the intelligence officers, swiveled around in his chair. “We’ve located the H.T.’s doctor from Iowa. Medical records don’t look good. Man’s got an anger management problem. His shrink says he could definitely go through with it.”

      “Hell,” the captain muttered.

      “He got a history of family violence?” Matt asked.

      Castro turned back to his computer and tapped a few keys. “He’s slapped the wife around a few times.”

      “Anything on the kids?”

      Castro leaned closer to his screen. “Nope. Just the wife.”

      Matt nodded. “Good. I can use that. He doesn’t really want to hurt those kids.”

      The captain pinched the bridge of his nose. “All right, what’s this idea of yours?”

      “We get the wife on video. We can rehearse her. Keep it short and control every word, every expression. Send in a tape.”

      “What’ll that do, besides maybe set him off like a roman candle?”

      “I can trade the tape for one of the kids.”

      “Still leaves him with a hostage.”

      “One less than he had.”

      The captain’s frown said he wasn’t buying it. Matt couldn’t blame him. But this H.T. was dangerously close to flaming out already, and as it stood, they had no alternatives if that happened.

      Matt looked at Castro. “How many VCRs in the house?”

      The intelligence officer reached for a phone. After a brief conversation, he looked up, grim. “One. In the front room.”

      Matt glanced at the house on the overhead video monitor. The front room had lots of nice big windows for the snipers. And the blinds were open in all of them.

      His stomach did a neat tuck-and-roll.

      Sometimes it was necessary for the negotiator to set up the tactical solution, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. He’d been working crisis scenes for ten years and never lost a hostage—or a hostage taker—yet. He didn’t plan to start today.

      “Do it,” the captain said, then nodded at the tactical liaison. “Tell your team to get ready.”

      “Cap.” Matt spoke