A Maidens Grave

took her a moment to remember the word for “killed.” The word was constructed by moving the extended index finger of the right hand up under the left hand, held cupped, palm down.
    Exactly like a bullet entering the body, she thought.
    She couldn’t say it. Saw Susan’s hair pop up under the impact. Saw her ease to the ground.
    “She’s dead,” Melanie finally signed. “Dead” was a different gesture, turning over the flattened, palm-up right hand so that it was palm down; simultaneously doing the opposite with the left. It was at her right hand that Melanie stared, thinking how the gesture of this hand mimicked scooping earth onto a grave.
    The girls’ reactions were different but really all the same: the tears, the silent gasps, the eyes filling with horror.
    Her hands trembling, Melanie turned back to the window. De l’Epée had picked up Susan’s body and was walking back to the police line with it. Melanie watched her friend’s dangling arms, the cascade of black hair, the feet—one shoe on, one shoe off.
    Beautiful Susan.
    Susan, the person I would be if I could be anybody.
    As she watched de l’Epée disappear behind a police car, part of Melanie’s silent world grew slightly more silent. And that was something she could scarcely afford.
     
    “I’m resigning, sir,” Charlie Budd said softly.
    Potter stepped into the john of the van to put on the fresh shirt that had somehow appeared in the hands of one of Dean Stillwell’s officers. He dropped his own bloodstained shirt into a wastebasket and pulled on the new one; the bullet that had killed Susan had spattered him copiously.
    “What’s that, Charlie?” Potter asked absently, stepping back to the desk. Tobe and Derek sat silently at their consoles. Even Henry LeBow had stopped typing and stared out the window, which from the angle at which he sat revealed nothing but distant wheat fields, distorted and tinted ocher by the thick grass.
    Through the window on the other side of the van the ambulance lights flashed as they took the girl’s body away.
    “I’m quitting,” Budd continued. “This assignment and the force too.” His voice was steady. “That was my fault. It was because of that shot a half-hour ago. When I didn’t tell the snipers to unchamber. I’ll call Topeka and get a replacement in here.”
    Potter turned back, tucking the crisp shirt in. “Stick around, Charlie. I need you.”
    “Nosir. I made a mistake and I’ll shoulder the consequences.”
    “You may have plenty of opportunity to take responsibility for your screwups before this night is through,” Potter told him evenly. “But that sniper shot wasn’t one of them. What Handy just did had nothing to do with you.”
    “Then why? Why in God’s name would he do that?”
    “Because he’s putting his cards on the table. He’s telling us he’s serious. We can’t buy him out of there cheap.”
    “By shooting a hostage in cold blood?”
    LeBow said, “This’s the hardest kind of negotiation there is, Charlie. After a killing up front, usually the only way to save any hostage is a flat-out assault.”
    “High stakes,” Derek Elb muttered.
    Extreme stakes, Arthur Potter thought. Then: Jesus, what a day this’s going to be.
    “Downlink,” Tobe said, and a moment later the phone buzzed. The tape recorder began turning automatically.
    Potter picked up the receiver. “Lou?” he said evenly.
    “There’s something you gotta understand ’bout me, Art. I don’t care about these girls. They’re just little birds to me that I used to shoot off my back porch at home. I aim to get outta here and if it means I gotta shoot ninemore of ’em dead as posts then that’s the way it’s gonna be. You hear me?”
    Potter said, “I do hear you, Lou. But we’ve got to get one other thing straight. I’m the only man in this universe can get you out of there alive. There’s nobody else. So I’m the one to reckon with. Now do you hear me ?”
    “I’ll call you back with our demands.”

1:25 P.M.
    This was tricky, this was dangerous, this was not about re-election.
    This was about decency and life.
    So Daniel Tremain told himself as he walked into the governor’s mansion.
    Standing upright as a birch rod, he headed through the surprisingly modest home into a large den.
    Decency and life.
    “Officer.”
    “Governor.”
    The Right Honorable Governor of the state of Kansas, A. R. Stepps, was looking at the faint horizon—fields of grain identical to those