Chapter 5 — THE CALL

At six fifty-one that evening I went out to the ambulance bay and made a phone call.

I have to explain this call because a version of it has been repeated back to me by people who were not there.

I spent nine years in the Army. I was a 91C — utilities equipment repairer. Boilers, chillers, water heaters, in Kuwait and then at Fort Riley. I was never in intelligence. I have never owned a satellite phone. The most tactical thing I have ever done is bleed a radiator at three in the morning.

The man I called is Ray Miller. We were in the same shop at Riley. He is now a plumbing contractor in Marlow, twenty minutes north, and he has four employees and a bad knee.

Miller: Vance. It's late.

Mark: Ray. I need the team. Tonight.

Miller: What team.

Mark: You, Delgado, and whoever you can get with a van. My daughter is in St. Jude and I am not leaving this building and there is a woman in my house.

Miller: Confirmed. Give me the address.

Mark: You have the address.

Miller: Target's still there?

Mark: Target's confirmed. She's on the balcony.

That is the call. Three men with a van. Delgado is a paramedic in Ellery and Ray's cousin Tobin drives for a school district.

What they did that night was drive to my house, park at the end of the cul-de-sac, and sit in the van until two in the morning so that a ten-year-old boy inside that house had an adult within a hundred feet of him.

Nobody froze a bank account. Nobody cut the power. I want that on the record, because of what people decided this story was.