Page 32 of Every Last One
“Don’t tell me you’re taking this lightly?” Kreiger served back.
“Trust me. I take it very seriously.” She made herself a coffee, with everyone watching her, and sat back at her workstation.“When Mickey, we’ll call him that for the lack of something better, got on the walkie-talkie with his accomplice, she fired back with ‘stick to the plan.’ Mickey is going off-plan by taking Maddox. I suspect he was seen as an opportunity.”
“Or as Mickey put it,insurance,” Monica pitched in.
“Exactly. Leveraging Maddox wasn’t today’s goal. It was happenstance, a lucky turn of events for the gunman. He’s unlikely to hurt him.”
Kreiger took a deep breath, inflating his chest. “Unlikely,” he muttered.
“I believe Mickey acted on his own here,” she said.
“So you believe this guy went off-plan? Then what’s to say he won’t go further off the path?” Kreiger raised his eyebrows.
Sandra didn’t want to admit it was possible. Not out loud, especially to Kreiger, who seemed to be itching for a reason to move in.
“Well…” Kreiger prompted her.
“You want me to say something? I’m not a mind reader, never claimed to be. But I am pretty good at detecting underlying indicators. One of these tells me, he won’t shoot Maddox.”
“Agreed. He’s a bargaining chip, as awful as that sounds,” Brice wedged in.
Sandra wanted to get on the phone, but she needed time to consider a strategy before doing so. Luis was also still outside, and he could provide her with direct numbers for the nurses’ stations. She’d use this time to further discuss what had just happened with Mickey. “There is always more that isn’t being said. To start, what are the base emotional drivers at play here? We can dispute it all we want, but humans are emotional creatures. These emotions make us do things, so what made these people—three, that we know of—go into Founders Hospital with guns today?”
“Whatever it was, it required them to be left alone,” Brice suggested. “The infected system, the jammer.”
“They were buying time,” Gibson said.
“Exactly, and I think it was Mickey’s lack of control over that timeline that had him take Maddox asinsurance,” Sandra put in.
“And I sense contention between Mickey and the woman,” Monica said.
Sandra nodded. “She certainly wasn’t pleased by the interruption or Mickey being on the walkie-talkie.”
“She had to know we’d overhear the conversation,” Brice began. “She feared it would jeopardize their goal.”
“Yes, so she’s hyper-focused, but Mickey is making impulsive decisions based on emotion,” Sandra reasoned.
“Just what you want to hear when he’s got Maddox within reach,” Kreiger griped.
“The guy also has a bad sense of humor. Pulling out Mickey Mouse at a time like this. Despicable,” Gibson said while scribbling the name on the markerboard.
“The humor could simply be a deflection,” Monica reasoned. “He might not want to even be involved today.”
“Yet he threatened a man’s life, to a Fed, no less,” Neal said. “It’s too late to unring that bell.”
“Not that we’re disputing this, but we have more to support that Mickey isn’t in charge,” Brice said. “In his exchange with you, I noticed he stuck to the singular pronoun of I.”
Sandra nodded. “I picked up on that too.”
“Either of you want to elaborate?” Neal asked.
Brice gestured for Sandra to do so. “Shot callers generally use plural pronouns such as we, they, and them. Since this guy stuck toI, this tells us he has very little, if any, power over this situation.”
“Hence, taking Maddox hostage would make him feel more powerful and in control,” Neal said.
“Precisely.” Sandra didn’t say anything else because Luis came back into the vehicle.
He had everyone’s attention as he sat back at the table and set his laptop down again. “So I called the donor coordinator…”
