The Twelfth Card

long—nodded. Another cop crouched beside him and closed his fingers around the doorknob to see if it was locked.
    Into his mike Haumann whispered, “Five . . . four . . . three . . . ”
    Silence. This was the moment when they should’ve heard the sound of breaking glass and then the explosion of the stun grenade.
    Nothing.
    And something was wrong here too. The officer gripping the knob was shivering fiercely, moaning.
    Jesus, Sachs thought, staring at him. The guy was having a fit or something. A tactical entry officer with epilepsy? Why the hell hadn’t that shown up in his medical?
    “What’s wrong?” Haumann whispered to him.
    The man didn’t reply. The quaking grew worse. His eyes were wide and only the whites showed.
    “B team, report,” the commander called into his radio. “What’s going on, K?”
    “Command, the window’s boarded up,” the B team leader transmitted. “Plywood. We can’t get a grenade in. Status of Alpha, K?”
    The officer at the door had slumped now, his hand frozen on the knob, still shivering. Haumann whispered in a harsh voice, “We’re wasting time! Get him out of the way and take the door out. Now!” Another officer grabbed the seizing one.
    The second one began to shake too.
    The other officers stepped back. One muttered, “What’s going—”
    It was then that the first officer’s hair caught fire.
    “He wired the door!” Haumann was pointing to a metal plate on the floor. You saw these often in old buildings—they were used as cheap patches on hardwood floors. This one, though, had been used by Unsub 109 to make an electric booby trap; high voltage was coursing through both men.
    Fire was sprouting from the first officer’s head, his eyebrows, the backs of his hands, then his collar. The other cop was unconscious now, but still quivering horribly.
    “Jesus,” an officer whispered in Spanish.
    Haumann tossed his H&K machine gun to a nearby officer, took the battering ram and swung it hard at the wrist of the officer gripping the knob. Bones probably shattered, but the ram knocked his fingers loose. The circuit broken, the two men collapsed. Sachs beat out the flames, which were filling the hallway with the revolting smell of burnt hair and flesh.
    Two of the backup officers began CPR on their unconscious colleagues, while an A-team cop grabbed the handles of the battering ram and swung it into the door, which burst open. The team raced inside, guns up. Sachs followed.
    It took only five seconds to learn that the apartment was empty.

Chapter Thirteen
    Bo Haumann called into his radio, “B Team, B team, we’re inside. No sign of the suspect. Get downstairs, sweep the alley. But remember—he waited around at the last scene. He goes for innocents. And he goes for cops.”
    A desk lamp burned and when Sachs touched the seat of the chair she found it was warm. A small closed-circuit TV sat on the desk, the fuzzy screen showing the hallway in front of the door. He’d had a security camera hidden somewhere outside and seen them coming. The killer had gotten away only moments ago. But where? The officers looked around for an escape route. The window by the fire escape was covered with plywood. The other was uncovered but it was thirty feet above the alley. “He was here. How the hell’d he get away?”
    The answer came a moment later.
    “Found this,” an officer called. He’d been looking under the bed. He pulled the cot away from the wall, revealing a hole just big enough for a person to crawl through. It looked like the unsub had cut through the plaster and removed the brick wall between this building and the one next door. When he saw them on the TV monitor he’d simply kicked out the plaster on the other side of the wall and slipped into the adjoining building.
    Haumann sent more officers to check the roof and nearby streets, others to find and cover the entrances into the building next door.
    “Somebody into the hole,” the ESU commander ordered.
    “I’ll go, sir,” a short officer said.
    But with his bulky armor, even he couldn’t fit through the gap.
    “I’ll do it,” Sachs said, by far the slimmest of the officers present. “But I need this room cleared. To save the evidence.”
    “Roger that. We’ll get you inside then pull back.” Haumann ordered the bed moved aside. Sachs knelt down and shone her flashlight through the hole, on the other side of which was a catwalk in a warehouse or factory. To reach it she had a