Certain prey

'That's the Baily we know and love,' Lucas said.

The emergency room was a warm four-minute fast walk from City Hall. A cop was shot, hurt bad, but life went on. The sidewalks were crowded with shoppers, the streets clogged with cars, and Sloan, intent on making it to the hospital, nearly got hit in an intersection – Lucas had to hook his arm and pull him back.

'You're too ugly to be a hood ornament,' Lucas grunted.

The emergency room was oddly quiet, Lucas thought. Usually, after a cop shooting, thirty people would be milling around, no matter who the cop was.

Here, there were three other cops, a couple of nurses and a doc, all standing around in the alcohol-scented reception area. Nobody seemed to be doing much.

'Place is empty,' Sloan said, picking up the thought.

'Word hasn't got out yet,' Lucas said. One of the three other cops was talking on the phone, while a second, a uniform sergeant, talked into his ear. Swanson, a bland-faced, overweight homicide detective in a grey suit, was leaning on a fluids-proof counter-top talking to a nurse, a notebook open on the counter. He saw Lucas, with Sloan a step behind, and lifted a hand.

'Where's Baily?' Lucas asked.

'He's about to go in,' Swanson said, meaning surgery. 'They already got the sedative going, so they can plug in the airway shit. He won't be talking. The surgeon's down the hall scrubbing up, if you wanna talk to him.'

'Anybody tell Baily's wife?'

'We're looking for the chaplain,' Swanson said. 'He's at a church thing up on the north side, some kind of yard sale. Dick's on hold for him now.' He nodded at the cop on the phone. 'We'll get him in the next couple of minutes.'

Lucas turned to Sloan: 'Get the chaplain going, send a car. Lights and sirens.'

Sloan nodded and headed for the cop on the phone. Lucas turned back to Swanson.

'What's going on at the scene?'

'Goddamndest thing. Woman was executed, I think.'

'Executed?'

'She took at least four or five in the head with a small-caliber pistol, short range: you can see the tattooing on her scalp,' Swanson said. 'Nobody heard a thing, which might mean a silencer. Everything in that stairwell echoes like crazy, off that concrete, and Baily told me he couldn't remember hearing the gun. Baily saw the shooter, but all he remembered was that it was a woman, and she was a redhead. Nothing else. No age, no weight, nothing. We figure the shooter was white, if she was a redhead, but shit, there're probably five thousand redheads downtown everyday.'

'Who's working it?'

'Sherrill and Black. I heard about it, first call, and ran over, took a quick look at the dead woman and then came over here with Baily and the paramedics.'

'So the dead woman's still over there.'

Swanson nodded. 'Yeah. She was way-dead. We didn't even think about bringing her in.'

'Okay… you say the doc's scrubbing?'

'Dan Wong, right down the hall. By the way, Baily says he was only shot once, but the docs say he's got two slugs in him.'

'So much for eyewitnesses,' Lucas said.

'Yeah. But it means that this chick is fast and accurate. The holes are a half inch apart. Of course, she missed his heart.'

'If she was shooting for it. If it was a. 22…'

'… that's what it looked like…'

'… then she might have been worried about punching through his breastbone.'

Swanson shook his head. 'Nobody's that good.'

'I hope not,' Lucas said.

Lucas brushed past a nurse who made a desultory effort to slow him down, and found Wong up to his elbows in green soap. Wong turned and said, 'Uh-oh, the cops.'

'How bad is it?' Lucas asked.

'Not too bad,' Wong said, going to work on his fingernails. 'He's gonna hurt for a while, but I've seen a hell of a lot worse. Two slugs – in the pictures, they look pretty deformed, so they were probably hollow-points. They went in at his right nipple, lodged under the right scapula. Two little holes, he hardly bled at all, though his body fat makes it a little hard to tell what's going on. His blood pressure's good. Looks like some goddamn gang-banger with a piece-of-crap. 22.'

'So he's gonna be okay?' Lucas could feel the tension backing off.

'Unless he has a heart attack or a stroke,' Wong said. 'He's way too fat and he was panicking when they brought him in. The surgery, I could do with my toes.'

'So what'U I tell the press? Wong is doing surgery with his toes?'

Wong shrugged as he rinsed: 'He's in surgery now, listed in guarded condition but he's expected to recover, barring complications.'

'You gonna talk to them afterwards?'

'I got a two o'clock tee-time at Wayzata,' Wong said. He flicked water off his hands and stepped away from the sink.

'You might have to skip it,' Lucas said.

'Bullshit. I don't get invited all that often.'

'Danny..'

'I'll give them a few minutes,' Wong said. 'Now, if you'll get your germ infested ass out of here, I'll go to work.'

Randall Thorn, the newly-promoted deputy chief for patrol, showed up ten minutes later. Fifteen cops stood around the emergency area now. The crowd was beginning to gather. 'I was all the way down by the goddamn airport,' he told Lucas. His uniform showed sweat rings under his armpits. 'How is he?'

Lucas briefed him quickly, then Sloan came over and said 'The chaplain's on his way to Baily's house. He oughta notify the old lady in the next five minutes or so.'

Lucas nodded and looked back at Thorn: 'Can you hold the fort here? I ran over because Rose Marie is gone and I knew you and Lester were out of the house. But he's sort of your guy.'

Thorn nodded: 'I'll take it. You going over to the scene?'

'For a minute or two,' Lucas said. 'I want to get a picture in my head.'

Thorn nodded and said, 'You know what picture I can't get in my head? Baily

Dobbs getting shot. Last goddamn…'

'Guy in the world,' Lucas finished for him.

If the emergency room had seemed unnaturally calm, the Sixth Street parking ramp looked like a law-enforcement convention: a dozen homicide and uniform cops, medical examiner's personnel, a deputy mayor, the parking-garage manager and two possible witnesses were standing in the skyway-level elevator lobby and the stairwell above it.

Lucas nodded at one of the uniform cops controlling the traffic and he and Sloan poked their heads into the stairwell. Marcy Sherrill and Tom Black were going through the victim's purse. The victim herself was lying on the stairs, at their feet. Her skirt was pulled up over her ample thighs, showing nude panty hose. One hand bent awkwardly away from her face -she might have broken her arm when she landed, Lucas thought – and her eyes were frozen half-open. A pool of blood coagulated under her still-perfect hair-do. Her face was vaguely familiar; she looked like she might have been a nice lady.

Sherrill turned and saw Lucas and said, shyly, 'Hi.'

'Hey,' Lucas said, nodding. He and Sherrill had ended a six-week romance: or as

Sherrill put it, Forty Days and Forty Nights of Sex amp; Disputation. They were now in the awkward phase of no longer seeing each other while they were still working together. 'Looks nasty,' he added. The stairwell smelled of damp concrete overlaid with the coppery odor of blood and human intestinal gas, which was leaking out of the body.

Sherrill glanced down at the body and said, 'Gonna be a strange one.'

'Swanson said she was executed,' Sloan said.

'She was, big-time,' said Black. They all looked down at the body, arranged around their feet like a puddle. 'I can see seven entry wounds, but no exits.

You don't need to be no forensic scientist to see that the gun was close – maybe an inch away.'

'Who is she?' Lucas said.

'Barbara Paine Allen. She's got a notify card in her purse, looks like her husband's a lawyer.'

'I know her face from somewhere, and the name rings a bell,' Lucas said. 'I think she might be somebody'

Sherrill and Black both nodded and Sherrill muttered, 'Great.'

Lucas squatted next to the dead woman for a moment, looking at her head. The bullet wounds were small and tidy, as though she'd been repeatedly stabbed with a pencil. There were two wounds high on the back of her head, and a cluster of five in her temple. Her heart had kept pumping for a while after she landed; a thin stream of drying blood ran down from each of the holes. The seven thin streams were neatly defined, which meant that she hadn't moved after she hit the stairs. Professional, and very tidy, Lucas thought. He stood up and asked the other two, 'You got witnesses? Besides Baily?'