The 19th Christmas - James Patterson Page 0,68

away.

Loman had shifted his eyes away from us. We were closing in on him when the front doors exploded inward and the reception area filled with a dozen SWAT team commandos, fully armed. Terrified BlackStar employees tried to break around the men in black, but the exit was now blocked.

Conklin and I reached Loman in two strides, and I saw his expression change as his mood went from defiance to defeat. There was no way out alive. He was done.

His gun clattered to the floor. He raised his hands high over his head and shouted at us, “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot!”

We threw him to the floor, and not too gently.

I cuffed him behind his back, and my partner patted him down. Loman was packing a roll of duct tape in a hip pocket and had no wallet or ID, no other weapons.

Conklin and I dragged Loman to his feet, and still high on adrenaline overload, I arrested him on suspicion of murder and read him his rights. Conklin bagged his gun and handed him off to the SWAT commander, Lieutenant Reg Covington, who grinned at us, then marched our prisoner out to the van.

Conklin’s hands were shaking.

I, too, was shaken. And I still had a question.

“Rich, that is Loman, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We got him.”

Chapter 86

Once the feisty man in the blue coveralls was inside a squad car heading to the Hall of Justice, Conklin and I, along with a dozen other cops, searched the four-story building for two men: the silver-haired man wearing a BlackStar jacket and the janitor whose uniform Loman was wearing.

We found a brown-haired man inside a supply closet, tied up with strips of undershirt and gagged with his boxers.

When he was unbound and ungagged, he thanked us and told us his name was Steven Kelly. He was in his mid-forties and had been working at BlackStar in janitorial services for five years. When he was partially dressed in the baggy trousers his captor had left behind, he said, “The guy who made me strip held a gun on Mr. Bavar. He made Mr. Bavar tie me up.”

I said, “Mr. David Bavar? Head of BlackStar?”

“That’s him,” Kelly said. “The boss of bosses. This is his company.”

Kelly walked us to a nearby conference room and pointed out the portrait of David Bavar, founder and CEO of BlackStar VR. That was him, the silver-haired man I’d seen walking between Loman and the tall man wearing the satin baseball jacket.

I called Brady, and this time I got his outgoing message. I left him one of my own, saying that David Bavar, BlackStar’s CEO, may have been kidnapped and that we had a suspect in custody.

“Could be Loman,” I said. “Brady, we need the security footage, especially from the south side entrance to Building Three and everything you can get from inside.”

Conklin drove us to the Hall, and by the time we were back in the squad room, Loman had been booked and the dead man had been identified as Richard Ross Russell of San Francisco.

Russell’s prints were on file because he was in the education system, an adjunct professor at San Francisco State University with advanced degrees in science and math. He was unmarried and had no known criminal associates or a record of any kind.

But we had forensics.

A gun had been found in the shrubbery near Russell’s body. Russell’s prints were on the gun, and GSR was on his right hand. Ballistics had put a rush on the bullet taken from Jacobi’s thigh, and the lab matched that bullet to those fired from Russell’s gun.

I leaned back in my desk chair and stared up at the TV hanging high on the front wall. The airport shooting was still top of the news. There were first-person reports of bystanders and porters, and interviews with Gerald Herz and with airline executives.

A mention of the shooting at BlackStar was just a chyron, type crawling along the bottom of the screen, and there was no mention of David Bavar.

I still couldn’t make sense of what had gone down at BlackStar. What was the point of it all?

Who had shot Russell—and why? What was the connection between Russell, Lomachenko, and David Bavar? Was this, in fact, a kidnapping?

And, most urgent, where was David Bavar now?

If we were very lucky, security footage might have the answers.

Chapter 87

At just after 6:00 p.m., William Lomachenko was wearing an orange jumpsuit and chilling in a holding cell.

Conklin and I were at our desks, eating ham sandwiches for