Certain prey

Chapter Two

Baily Dobbs' first day on patrol had taught him that police work was more complicated than he'd thought – and more dangerous than he'd expected. Baily had seen police work as a way to achieve a certain authority, a status. He hadn't thought about fighting people bigger than he was, about drunks vomiting in the back seat of the squad, about freezing his ass off outside the Target Center when the Wolves were playing. So Baily resolved to keep his head down, to volunteer for nothing, to show up late for trouble calls, and to get off the street as fast as he could.

He was inside in less than two years.

One Halloween, responding – late? Eto a domestic, he'd walked up a dark sidewalk, stepped on the back axle of a tricycle, flipped into the air, and twisted his knee. He was never exactly disabled, but it became clear that if he couldn't run, he couldn't work the streets. His hobbling progress around a gymnasium track baffled the docs and amused his former partners. The phrase,

'I'm gonna baily on that,' came into the vocabulary of the Minneapolis Police

Department.

Baily went inside and stayed there. He still wore a uniform, carried a gun and got paid for being a cop, but he was a clerk and happy with it. Which is why he didn't respond as quickly as he might have, when he saw Rinker execute Barbara Allen. His cop reflexes were gone.

Baily's lunch started at eleven o'clock, but on this day he'd taken some under time. He snuck out through the basement of City Hall, into the country government building, carrying a manila folder that contained a few sheets of paper addressed to a court bailiff- his cover-your-ass file, if he was spotted by his supervisor.

Once in the government building, he took a quick look around, then dodged into the skyway that went over to the Sixth Street parking garage. From there, he planned to take the stairs to the street level, cross over to the Hennepin

Country Medical Center, which had a nice discreet cafeteria rarely visited by cops. He'd eat a cheeseburger and fries, enjoy a few cups of coffee, read the newspapers, then amble back to City Hall, just in time for lunch.

That perfectly good plan fell apart when he stepped into the stairwell.

Two women were in the stairwell below him, and one of them, a redhead, appeared to be sticking something in the ear of the other, who was lying on the stairs.

'Hey,' he said.

The redhead looked up at him, and in the next quarter-second, Baily realized that what she had in her hand was a pistol. The pistol came up and Baily put a hand out, and the redhead shot him. There wasn't much noise, but he felt something hit his chest, and he fell down backwards.

He fell in the doorway, which saved his life: Rinker, standing below him on the stairs, looking over the sights of her pistol, couldn't see anything but the bottoms of his feet. Baily groaned as he fell, and he dimly heard a man's voice call, 'Are you all right?'

Rinker had taken two quick steps toward him, to finish him, when she heard the new voice. Complications were increasing. Quick as a blink, she decided: down was safe. She went down, not running, but moving fast.

Baily struggled to sit upright, to crawl away from the stairwell; and heard a door bang closed in the stairwell below. His chest hurt, and so did his hand. He looked at his hand, and it was all scuffed up, apparently from the fall. Then he discovered the growing blood stain on the pocket of his white uniform shirt.

'Oh, man,' he said.

The other voice called again, 'Hey, you okay?'

'Oh, Jesus, oh, God, Jesus God,' said Baily, who was not a religious man. He tried to push himself up again, noticed his hand was slippery with blood, and started to cry. 'Oh, Jesus…' He looked up the ramp, where a man carrying a briefcase was looking down at him. A woman was beyond him, also coming toward them; he could sense her reluctance.

'Help me…' Baily cried. 'Help me, I've been shot…'

Sloan banged into Lucas Davenport's office and said, 'Baily Dobbs's been shot.'

He looked at his watch. 'Twelve minutes ago.'

Lucas was peering glumly into a six-hundred-page report with a blue cover and white label, which said, 'Mayor's Select Commission on Cultural Diversity,

Alternative Lifestyles and Other-Abledness in the Minneapolis Police Department:

A Preliminary Approach to Divergent Modalities [Executive Summary],' which he'd been marking with a fluorescent-yellow high-lighter. He was on page seven.

He put down the report and said, incredulously, 'Our Baily Dobbs?'

'How many Baily Dobbs are there?' Sloan asked.

Lucas stood up and reached for a navy-blue silk jacket which hung from a government-issue coat tree. 'Is he dead?'

'No.'

'An accident? He shoot himself?'

Sloan shook his head. Sloan was a thin man, hatchet-faced, dressed in shades of brown and tan. A homicide investigator, the best interrogator on the force, an old friend. 'Looks like he walked in on a shooting, over in the Sixth Street parking garage,' he told Lucas. 'The shooter killed a woman, and then shot

Baily. I figured since Rose Marie and Lester are out of town, and nobody can find Thorn, you better haul your ass over to the hospital.'

Lucas grunted and he pulled on the jacket. Rose Marie Roux was the chief of police; Lester, Thorn and Lucas were deputy chiefs. 'Anything on the shooter?'

'No. Well, Baily said something about it being a woman. The shooter was. The woman she shot is dead, and Baily took two rounds in the right tit.'

'Last goddamn guy in the world,' Lucas said.

Lucas was tall, lean but not thin, broad-shouldered and dark-complected. A scar sliced across one eyebrow onto his cheek, and showed as a pale line through his summer tan, like a vagrant strand of white thread. Another scar showed on the front of his neck, over his windpipe, just above the V of his royal-blue golf shirt. He took a. 45 in a clip-rig out of his desk drawer, and clipped it inside his pants, under the jacket. He did it unconsciously, as another man might put a wallet in his back pocket. 'How bad is he?'

'He's going into surgery,' Sloan said. 'Swanson's over there, but that's all I know'

'Let's go,' Lucas said. 'Does anybody know what Dobbs was doing in the stairwell?'

'The other people in the office say he was probably sneaking over to Hennepin

Medical for a cheeseburger. He'd pretend he was going to the government center, then he'd sneak over to the hospital and drink coffee and read the papers.'

'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?'

'Baily said the shooter was a red-headed woman, and we've got two people who say they saw a redheaded woman walking away from the scene close to the time of the shooting. No good description. She was wearing sunglasses, they said. Both of them said she was wiping her nose or sneezing into a handkerchief.'

'Covering her face,' Lucas said.

'I don't believe this shit,' Sloan said, looking down at Barbara Allen. 'People don't get hit.'

'Not in Minneapolis,' Sherrill said.

'Not by a pro,' said Black.

Lucas scratched his chin and said, 'But she did. I wonder why?'

'Are you buyin' in?' Sherrill asked. 'Could be an interesting trip.'

'Don't have the time,' Lucas said. 'I have the Otherness Commission.'

'Maybe if we find the shooter, we could get her to kill the commission.'

'They're not killable,' Lucas said gloomily. 'They come straight from hell.'

'We'll keep you updated,' Sherrill said.

'Do that.' Lucas shook his head, and looked back down at the cooling body. And he said, aloud, again, 'I wonder why?'