Robert made a visible swallow. Sara could see a bead of sweat roll down his neck when he answered, "Yeah."
"He came in through the window," Jeffrey began. "He put a gun to Jessie's head." He looked at Jessie for confirmation, and she nodded quickly. "You pushed him off the bed and he shot at you. You got your gun then. Right?" Robert gave a curt nod, but Jeffrey was not finished. "You keep your piece where? The closet? In the drawer?" He waited, but again Robert was reluctant. "Where do you keep your piece?"
Jessie opened her mouth, but closed it when Robert pointed to the closed armoire opposite the bed, saying, "There," before Jeffrey could repeat himself.
"You got your gun," Jeffrey said, opening the armoire door. A shirt fell out and he replaced it on the pile. Over his shoulder, Sara could see there was a plastic-molded gun safe on the top shelf. "You keep your backup in here, too?"
He shook his head. "The living room."
"All right." Jeffrey rested his hand on the open door. "You went for your gun. He shot you then?"
"Yes," Robert nodded, though he did not sound convinced. His voice was stronger when he added, "And then I shot him."
Jeffrey turned back to the scene, nodding his head as if he was having a conversation with himself, working everything out. He walked over to the window again and looked out. Sara watched him do all of this, shocked. Not only had Jeffrey changed the crime scene, now he was helping Robert concoct a plausible story for how this had all happened.
Jessie cleared her throat, and her voice shook when she asked Sara, "Is he going to be okay?"
Sara took a moment to realize Jessie was talking to her. She was still focused on Jeffrey, wondering what he would do next. He'd had a few minutes alone with Robert and Jessie before he called Sara into the house. What had he done during that time? What had they worked out?
"Sara?" Jessie prompted.
Sara made herself concentrate on what she could control, asking Robert, "Can I look?"
He moved his hand away from the bullet wound and Sara resumed the examination. His shirt had smeared the blood, but she thought she could make out a V-shaped sear pattern just below the opening.
She tried to wipe away the blood, but Robert put his hand back over the wound, saying, "I'm all right."
"I should check -"
He interrupted her. "I'm fine."
Sara tried to hold his gaze, but he looked away. She said, "Maybe you should sit down until the ambulance gets here."
Jeffrey asked, "Is it bad?"
"It's okay," Robert answered for her, leaning back against the wall again. He told Sara, "Thank you."
"Sara?" Jeffrey asked.
She shrugged, not knowing what to say. In the distance, she heard the wail of a siren. Jessie crossed her arms over her chest with a shudder. Sara wanted to see that shirt, wanted to see if the material was burned in the same pattern as Robert's skin, but he held it tightly in his fist, pressing it into the wound.
Sara had been a coroner for only two years, but the type of marking she thought she had seen was textbook quality. Even a rookie cop two days on the job would know what it meant.
The gun had been fired at contact range.
Chapter Seven
11:45 A.M.
Lena stood in the front of Burgess's Cleaners, looking across Main Street at the police station. The tinted glass door was too dark to see anything inside, but still she stared as if she could see into the building, knew exactly what was happening. Another shot had been fired thirty minutes ago. Of the two cops missing at the start of this, only Mike Dugdale had checked in. Marilyn Edwards was still missing and Frank said he thought the attractive young police officer had been in the squad room at the start of the attack. Everyone from the Grant force was walking around like the living dead. All Lena could think was that if she had gone into work a few minutes earlier, she might have been able to do something. She might have been able to save Jeffrey. Right now, she wanted to be in that building so bad that she could taste it.
She turned around, watching Nick and Frank talking by the map table. The GBI agents were milling around the coffee machine, voices low as they waited for orders. Pat Morris talked with Molly Stoddard, and Lena wondered if Pat had been one of Sara's patients. He was young enough.
"The hell you say," Frank told Nick, his voice loud enough to be heard over the activity. Everyone in the room looked up.
Nick indicated old man Burgess's office. "In here."
They both went into the small, windowless room, shutting the door behind them. The tension they stirred up was still in the room, and a few people went to the back of the cleaners, probably to go outside to smoke and talk about the outburst.
Lena took out her cell phone and waited for it to power up. It chirped twice, indicating she had messages waiting. She debated who to call, Nan or Ethan. Her uncle Hank briefly entered her mind, but considering their conversation that morning during which he practically begged her to lean on his shoulder, calling him now seemed like giving in, and Lena was not about to do that. She hated the thought of needing people almost as much as she hated having to reach out to them. In the end, she turned off the phone and tucked it back into her pocket, wondering why she had turned the damn thing on in the first place.
Frank came up beside her. His breath was sour when he asked, "Tactical's on the roof?"
Lena pointed at the building by the station. "Two up there that I can see," she said, indicating the black-clad men lying on their stomachs with high-powered rifles.
"Twenty more people from Nick's office just showed up," he told her.
"What for?"
"Stand around with their thumbs up their asses, from what I can see."
"Frank," Lena began, feeling a lump rise in her throat. "Are you sure?"
"What?"
"Jeffrey," she said, the word sticking.
"I saw it with my own eyes," Frank said, obviously upset by the memory. He wiped his nose with his hand as he crossed his arms over his chest. "He just went down. Sara crawled over to him and…" He shook his head. "Next thing I know, the shooter's putting a gun to her head, telling her to move away."
Lena chewed her lip, feeling a surprising shock of sympathy for Sara Linton.
"Nick seems to know what he's doing," Frank said. "They just cut the power to the whole building."
"Will the phones work without it?"
"There's a straight line to Marla's desk," Frank said. "The Chief put it in when he came here. Never knew why until now."
Lena nodded, trying not to think about it too much. When he had first taken the job as Chief, Jeffrey had done a lot of things that had seemed unusual at the time but ended up making perfect sense.
Frank said, "Phone company's made it so they can't call out unless it's to us."
Lena nodded again, wondering who had known to do all of this. If it was left up to her, they would be storming the building right now, finding the fuckers who had started all of this and finishing it by carrying out their bodies feet-first.
She put her foot on the window ledge, retying her shoe so that Frank would not see the tears welling in her eyes. She hated the fact that she could cry at the drop of a hat now. It made her feel stupid, especially because someone like Frank would take it as a weakness, when the truth was, she was crying because she was a hairsbreadth from full-out rage. How could someone do something like this? How could they come to the station, the last place Lena held as sacred, and do this kind of thing? Jeffrey had been her rudder through all of the shit that had happened to her in the last few years. How could he be taken away from her now, when she was getting her life back?
Frank muttered, "Goddamn media's already trying to get in."
"What?" she asked, hiding a sniff.
"Media," he said. "They're trying to get helicopters down here to film it."
"The station's within the no-fly zone," Lena pointed out, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Fort Grant had been shut down under Reagan, putting thousands of locals out of their jobs and running the city of Madison into the ground. Still, the military's no-fly zone was in force, and that should keep the news stations from letting their helicopters hover over the area.