A Maidens Grave

Henry LeBow listened, listened, listened.
    “He took a bad hit when the pork belly market went to heck and gone last spring.”
    “Pork belly?” the woman trooper asked incredulously.
    “Just tumbled.” Stillwell missed, or ignored, the mockery. “So what happens but the bank calls his loans and he kind of cracks up. Always been a little bit of a nut case but this time he goes off the deep end and holes up in hisbarn with a shotgun and the knife he used for dressing the pigs he kept for his own table.”
    “Cooked up that pork belly, did he?” a trooper asked.
    “Oh, not just bacon,” Stillwell explained earnestly. “That’s the thing about pigs. You know that expression, don’t you? ‘You can use everything but the squeal.’ ”
    Two troopers lost it at this point. The negotiator smiled encouragingly.
    “Anyway, I get a call that something’s going on out at his farm and go out there and find Emma in front of the barn. His wife of ten years. He’d slit her from groin to breastbone with that knife and cut her hands off. Abe had his two sons in there, saying he was going to do the same to them. That’d be Brian, age eight, and Stuart, age four. Sweet youngsters, both of ’em.”
    The troopers’ smiles were gone.
    “Was about to cut off little Stu’s fingers one by one just as I got there.”
    “Jesus,” the woman trooper whispered.
    “What’d you do, Sheriff?”
    The lanky shoulders shrugged. “Nothing fancy. In fact, I didn’t really know what to do. I just talked him up. I got close but not too close ’cause I’ve been hunting with Abe and he’s a heck of a shot. Hunkered down behind a slop trough. And we just talked. Saw him inside of the barn there, not but fifty feet in front of me. Just sitting there, holding the knife and his boy.”
    “How long did you talk for?”
    “A spell.”
    “How long a spell?”
    “Must’ve been close to eighteen, twenty hours. We both got hoarse from shouting, so I had one of my boys go out and get a couple of those cellular phones.” He laughed. “I had to read the instructions to figure out mine. See, I didn’t want to drive the cruiser up and use the radio or a bullhorn. I figured the less he saw of cops, the better.”
    “You stayed with it the whole time?”
    “Sure. In for a penny, in for a pound, is what I say. Well, twice I stepped away for, you know, natural functions. And once to fetch a cup of coffee. Always kept my head down.”
    “What happened?”
    Another shrug. “He came out. Gave himself up.”
    Potter asked, “The boys?”
    “They were okay. Aside from seeing their mother that way, course. But there wasn’t much we could do about that.”
    “Let me ask you one question, Sheriff. Did you ever think of exchanging yourself for the boys?”
    Stillwell looked perplexed. “Nope. Never did.”
    “Why not?”
    “Seemed to me that’d draw his attention to the youngsters. I wanted him to forget about them and concentrate just on him and me.”
    “And you never tried to shoot him? Didn’t you have a clear target?”
    “Sure I did. Dozens of times. But, I don’t know, I just felt that was the last thing I wanted to have happen—anybody to get hurt. Him, or me, or the boys.”
    “Correct answers, Sheriff. You’re my containment officer. Is that all right with you?”
    “Well, yessir, whatever I can do to help, I’d be proud to.”
    Potter glanced at the displeased state commanders. “You and your officers will report to the sheriff here.”
    “Say, hold up here, sir,” Budd began, but didn’t quite know where to take it from there. “The sheriff’s a fine man. We’re friends and everything. We’ve gone hunting too. But . . . well, it’s like a technical thing. See, he’s local, municipal, you know. These’re mostly state troopers. You can’t put them under his command. That’d need, I don’t know, authorization or something.”
    “Well, I’m authorizing it. You can consider Sheriff Stillwell federal now,” Potter said reasonably. “He’s been deputized.”
    LeBow looked quizzically at Potter, who shrugged. There was no procedure that either of them knew about for field-deputizing federal agents.
    Peter Henderson’s face, alone among the crowd at the briefing, was still smiling. Potter said to him, “You too, Pete. I want any agents not involved in intelligence gathering, forensics, or liaising with HRT under Sheriff Stillwell’s direction.”
    Henderson nodded slowly, then said, “Could I talk