Mercer ran to her and took her up in his arms, turning her so she couldn’t see the stain seeping from the corpse’s head into the tile floor. Over the shrieking fire alarm he told her she was okay…it would be okay…meaningless platitudes, but as so often in the past they did the trick. Jordan soon stopped shuddering and gave him a hard squeeze before straightening out of his embrace.
“That was a hell of a risk to take with my life,” she said, trying to sound tough, but she was obviously rattled and unsure whether to be grateful, angry, or to just give in to her terror.
“By the time I pulled the trigger, I was only about twelve feet away. I could have made that shot at twice the distance.”
“Who are you? Seriously. What geologist can shoot a gun like that?”
“One who spends too much time in dangerous places” was all Mercer had the time to tell her. “Someone must have heard the shot. The police are going to be swarming this building in minutes. Come on.”
They made their way down the hallway. Icy wind blew in from shattered windows, and there was no way to avoid ducking under the streaming sprinkler heads. The water felt like it was just a couple of degrees above freezing. Their leather jackets protected their bodies, but both had water streaming down their faces and under their collars after just a few seconds’ exposure. Mercer withheld telling Jordan that the dousing had washed some of the shooter’s blood and brain from the back of her coat.
Mercer had feared Abe’s office had taken the brunt of the makeshift explosive’s force but was pleased to find that the devastated room just off the hallway seemed to be a receptionist’s office, with banks of three-drawer filing cabinets, a sofa and coffee table, and a large desk that had once been covered in papers. Those files lay sodden and charred like giant confetti all over the antechamber’s floor. The sofa had been blown against the wall and flipped, while the remains of the coffee table were four stainless-steel legs and a metal framework standing in a sea of broken glass. The fire the gunmen had hoped to start never took root. Even without the multiple sprinkler heads pouring a constant rain into the space, the finishes and furnishings were too institutional to burn.
Each of the three doors opposite the entrance was made of solid wood, and one of them remained locked. The other two had been ripped off their hinges by automatic fire, the area around their handles shredded by high-powered rounds until the doors simply fell open. Each office beyond had windows that overlooked a parking lot, and each had been ransacked enough to prove that it hadn’t belonged to Abe Jacobs. In one, Mercer saw the framed diplomas for a Professor Judith Murray. The other office was the work space for Dr. Anthony Wotz. Both rooms had suffered blast damage, ruined windows especially, but it was the gushing sprinklers that had caused the most destruction.
Mercer assumed that his and Jordan’s arrival had stopped the gunmen from accessing the last office, Abe’s no doubt. They must have known his office was located off the reception area but didn’t know the exact suite number, and it was dumb luck they chose the wrong two doors first. A rare piece of misfortune for the gunmen, and Mercer knew well that fortune not only favored the bold but also the prepared.
He loaded another round into the P-38 and held the weapon at an angle at the spot where the lock entered the jam outside of Abe’s office and pulled the trigger. As before, the report was an assault on the ears far beyond even the wail of the alarm. Mercer kicked open the door and stepped into Abe Jacobs’s campus office.
The room was packed floor to ceiling with boxes of papers and books. More paper spilled off a couch onto the floor in a long avalanche of data and notations. Abe’s desk was buried under heaps of scientific journals and spiral-bound notebooks. An ancient computer monitor took up one corner of the desk, with a monstrous CPU sitting on the floor next to it, twenty-year-old tech that would not recover from the shower of water pulsing from the overhead pipes.
Mercer didn’t know what to expect when he’d gotten here. A clue perhaps about what was going on. Instead he faced a mountain of possible clues. Any one of the notebooks, any single article in one of the hundreds of journals, could indicate what had gotten Abe and the others killed. He had first feared there wouldn’t be enough to go on from here. Now he realized there was too much information to sift through in any meaningful time frame. Even if the authorities gave him unfettered access starting at this moment, it would take a month to sort all the boxes and files and tote bags and baskets and piles of paperwork that Abe had surrounded himself with.
There was only one logical move he could make since he and Jordan were out of time. He grabbed the trash can that had sat next to Abe’s office chair. He dumped out about a gallon of water and saw that the can was about half full of random papers and one blackened banana peel. Whatever was in there likely included the last items his mentor was working on before he left for Minnesota. If Mercer was going to catch a quick break, he figured it was in Abe Jacobs’s trash can.
“We’ve got to go.”
“The trash,” Jordan said archly. “That’s all you’re taking?”
“Feel free to load up on old copies of the International Journal of Powder Metallurgy or some of these other outdated rags,” Mercer replied as he retreated back through the reception room and into the corridor. By now he was soaked to the skin and shivering. He looked back. Jordan was right behind him, her hair plastered to her head and her lips white and bloodless. The phrase “drowned rat” came to mind. He imagined he didn’t look any better.
Rather than retrace their steps down to the atrium, they went deeper into the building. Mercer took a moment to hide Abe’s pistol above the ceiling tiles in a classroom at the end of the corridor. He also emptied the trash can and stuffed the sopping contents minus the banana peel under his coat and led Jordan down a set of fire stairs to the main floor. There they found an emergency exit and stepped out into the chaos of a campus on lockdown.
“Keep your hands up and limp like you hurt your leg,” Mercer warned as they started walking toward a parking lot.
“What? Why?”
“So the police don’t shoot us and so we can get a ride out of here before anyone figures out we’re suspects in all this.”
“But we didn’t do anything wrong,” Jordan protested. Then her voice rose to a cry when she tried to lift her arms over her head. “Oh, shit. Ouch.”
“What is it?” Mercer asked, instantly concerned. He turned to see her beautiful dark eyes widening in pain and confusion. She couldn’t raise her left arm above her shoulder.
“I don’t know. My arm. I did something to it. It’s killing me.”
He looked around. In a distant parking lot, police cars were blocking access to the science building, while behind the cordon, ambulances and other emergency vehicles were lining up to treat the unknown number of victims. A uniformed policewoman standing next to her cruiser spotted them and started waving them to her. Her partner covered the building from the other side of the black-and-white with a twelve-gauge pump action up to his shoulder, as if a shotgun would be any use at that range.
Mercer studied Jordan’s arm for a second. There was no outward sign of damage. Her scarlet leather jacket hadn’t been holed by a bullet, nor was it camouflaging any sign of blood. He suspected that when he tackled her upstairs he had bruised or dislocated her shoulder or broken her collarbone. None of these conditions was life threatening. “Ignore it for now,” he said as kindly as he could. “I know it hurts, but we need to get out of here as quickly as we can or we’ll be stuck for days. Okay?”
She bit her lower lip, a gesture Mercer found irresistible in women. Her eyes were brimming with tears, but she nodded bravely. As more adrenaline wore off her pain would only increase.