Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
Archer stood very still for exactly three seconds.
Three seconds to look at Vincent Kelly's face, at the small, deadly hole between his eyes, at the single drop of blood that had already stopped moving. Three seconds to understand what he was looking at and what it meant and what came next.
Then he moved.
"Nobody leaves this room," he said. His voice came out quiet. It always came out quiet when things were at their worst. "Ryker. Cameras. Now."
Ryker was already on his phone. "Flynn. Security room. Pull every feed in the building from the last thirty minutes. Start with the dining room and work out. Take Cash with you." He paused. "Yes, now."
The occupants of the dining room had gone very still.
Twenty, maybe twenty-five people, members and staff, standing or sitting in the frozen tableau of people who had just heard something they didn't understand and were waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
Archer looked at them. He read the room the way he always did, quickly and completely, cataloging who was frightened, who was merely confused, who was looking at the body, and who was looking at the door.
Nobody was looking at the door.
Nobody was trying to leave.
That meant whoever had done this was already gone.
"Everyone stays exactly where you are," Archer said.
Still quiet. Still even. "We'll speak to each of you briefly, and then you'll be free to go to your rooms. Please don't discuss what you've seen with each other. In fact, don’t speak at all until we've had a chance to speak with you individually. "
He nodded to two of the security staff who'd appeared in the doorway. They moved to position themselves at the exits without being told.
Ryker was already moving through the room, starting with the table closest to where Kelly had been sitting. Archer followed, working the other side.
The first three people he spoke to had seen nothing.
Heard a sound, looked up, saw Kelly. That was all.
He believed them. The dining room was configured the way all Society dining rooms were configured, privacy first, sight lines deliberately broken by the placement of booths and screens and the careful architecture of a space designed to ensure that what happened at one table stayed at that table.
The fourth person, a woman in her sixties, Cora Delany, with steady eyes and a calm that Archer recognized as the particular calm of someone who had been in difficult situations before, said she thought she'd seen movement. Near the kitchen corridor. Someone moving quickly.
"Moving how?" Archer asked.
"With purpose," she said. "The way staff move when they're in a hurry. I assumed something had spilled in the kitchen."
"Did you see who it was?"
She shook her head. "Just movement. Dark clothing. Could have been anyone."
He thanked her and moved on.
Rush arrived from the other side of the building, four minutes after Ryker's call carrying ear buds. “I checked the main exits. No one is trying to get out.”
Archer pulled them into the corridor outside the dining room.
"Flynn and Cash are in the security room. Help them. I need eyes on every camera in the building for the last forty minutes. I need to know who went through that kitchen corridor and where they went."
“On it,” Ryker said and then took off down the hallway.
"Rush, kitchen staff. All of them. Nobody leaves that kitchen until I've spoken to them." Archer paused. "And find out if anyone came through there who shouldn't have."
Rush nodded and sped toward the exit.
Archer stood in the corridor for a moment. The building was locked. Whatever had happened, whoever had done it, they were still inside. That was the only thing that was working in his favor right now, and he was not going to waste it.
Purposefully, he strode into the kitchen himself.
The kitchen was large and professional and currently contained seven staff members who ranged in demeanor from frightened to stoic.
Rush was already working through them. Archer stood back and watched and waited, and after four conversations that produced nothing useful, a young man in a chef's whites said, quietly and with the look of someone who wasn't sure if he was doing the right thing, that he'd seen Daniela rush through.
Archer looked at him. "Daniela?"
"Yes, sir. She came through the kitchen maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes ago. She had her coat on. She wasn't supposed to be done until eleven. I thought maybe she had a family thing."
"Which way did she go?"
He pointed toward the service corridor at the back of the kitchen.
Archer's jaw tightened. Daniela. Who had brought Tatum up to Kelly's room. She’d been in the building every day and had access to every member. Daniela had been in a position to see and access everything.
His earpiece crackled. Flynn's voice. "Boss. I've got Daniela on camera in the service corridor. She's moving fast. She went past the laundry, past the equipment storage. She was heading toward the medical center."
"The ambulance bay," Archer said.
"Yes, sir. The doors out there aren't on the main lockdown. They're on a separate system."
Archer was already moving. "Ryker. Rush. With me. Flynn, Cash stay on the cameras. Keep us informed." The irony that they were using cameras to track a killer wasn’t lost on him. The cameras were only in the main hallways, but hopefully that would be enough. Davis be damned, cameras were necessary.
They went through the kitchen and into the service corridor, moving quickly and quietly. Through two turns and a set of fire doors, the camera feeds painting a picture of where she'd been twenty minutes ago.
"She's still there," Flynn said over his phone. "She can't get the doors open. She's been trying for the last twelve minutes. She doesn’t have the right access to open the ambulance bay doors."
The medical center was at the far end of the building's ground floor, tucked away from the member-facing spaces.
The ambulance bay was a small covered area accessible through heavy, reinforced doors that could be opened from either side under normal circumstances.
While in lockdown, they required an override code that only four people in the building possessed.
Daniela was not one of them.
Archer pushed through the final set of doors into the medical center's rear corridor and stopped.
Her back was to the ambulance bay doors, and she faced them, a palm pistol clutched between her hands, aimed at Archer’s chest.
It was small. Almost absurdly small. And it didn’t even look like a gun. The size and shape of something that had been designed to be exactly what it was, compact, concealable, printable, undetectable by the scanners at the Society's entrance.
Her hands were shaking.
She was twenty-four years old. He knew this because he knew the ages of all his staff. She had been with the Society for two years. Her employment record was clean. Her background check had been thorough.
He looked at her and felt the cold anger that had been building since he'd looked at Kelly's face settle into something focused.
"Daniela," he said, keeping his voice quiet.
"Stay back." Her voice was high and tight. "Stay back or I'll shoot."
"You won't," Archer said. Not a challenge. A statement.
"I will. I swear I will."
"No," he said gently. "You won't. Because you're not a killer, Daniela.
What happened in that dining room…that wasn't you.
Someone told you to do it, and you did it because you were frightened, or you needed something, or they offered you something and it seemed worth it.
And now you're standing here realizing it wasn't."
Her eyes were wet. The gun was still up, but her arms were trembling with the effort of holding it.
Ryker and Rush were positioned on either side of Archer, still and patient and ready. Archer kept his eyes on Daniela.
"Who sent you?" he asked.
She shook her head. "I can't tell you that."
"You can," he said. "I can help you. Whatever they told you about what happens if you talk to me, I promise you my resources are considerably larger than theirs, and I will use every single one of them to keep you safe."
"You don't know who they are."
"I have a good idea," he said. "I just need you to confirm it."
"You don't know," she said again, and the certainty in her voice was the most frightening thing. "You think you do. You don't."
"Then tell me," Archer said. "Help me understand."
She was crying now, tears running silently down her face, the gun still up. She looked desperately young. She looked like someone who had made a decision at some point that had seemed survivable and had discovered too late that it wasn't.
"They'll kill my family," she said. "My mother. My sister. They said if I talked to anyone, they'd know. They'd know within the hour. I…I took their money. To tell them things. I took the money. I wanted to start a life with my fiancé. I needed money to do it. Now they own me."
"I can protect your family," Archer said. "Right now. I can have people with them almost immediately. You have my word."
Something moved across her face. Hope, maybe, or the ghost of it. She looked at him, and he could see her considering it, weighing it, wanting to believe it.
"Daniela," he said quietly. "Put the gun down. Tell me who sent you. Let me help you."
The trembling in her arms got worse, and she blinked rapidly, as if trying to clear the tears.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
He saw it before he could stop it. The shift in her eyes. Her decision made. The gun turning.
"No—"
The sound was small. Much smaller than the one that had killed Vincent Kelly. Barely more than a crack in the silence of the ambulance bay.
Daniela slid down the door and didn't move again.
The silence that followed was complete and absolute.
Archer stood in it for a long moment. Ryker swore quietly beside him. Rush turned away.
Archer looked at the gun on the floor and at the young woman who had been on his staff for two years and had been someone's instrument right up until the moment she'd decided to be nobody's.
He crouched down. He didn't touch anything. He just looked at her face, which was young and still and completely without the terror that had been in it thirty seconds ago.
What a waste.
What an absolute criminal waste.
He stood.
"Get Dr. Reeves," he said. He forced calm into his voice, calm he wasn’t actually feeling. "And get me Flynn."
Ryker was already on the phone.
Archer stood in the ambulance bay and looked at the locked doors and thought about the Curator, who had sent a twenty-four-year-old girl to put a bullet between a frightened man's eyes and then put another one in her own head rather than give up a name.
That was not the work of Austin Davis.
That was not the work of Lou Anderson or Gil Bennett or any of the people he'd been building cases against.
That was the work of someone who inspired that level of fear and desperation.
Someone with reach that went all the way down to a twenty-four-year-old dining room server trying to protect her family.
He needed to find Tatum.
The thought arrived with an urgency that had nothing to do with the case and everything to do with the fact that the building was locked down and he had not checked on her since he'd left her sleeping before dawn.
Everything that had happened in the last forty minutes told him that whoever the Curator was, they were capable of anything.
He pulled out his phone.
He called her.
It rang. And rang.
And rang.
And went to voicemail.
The cold in his chest became something else entirely.
"Ryker," he said.
Ryker looked at him.
"Find Tatum," Archer said. "Now."