Certain Prey (4 page)

As she stepped away from the body, ready to head down the stairs, a cop came through the door in the stairwell above them. He was in uniform, a heavy guy carrying a manila folder.

Rinker had thought about this possibility, a surprise from
a cop, though she’d never experienced anything like it. Still, she’d rehearsed it in her mind.

“Hey,” the cop said. He put up a hand, and Rinker shot him.

TWO

Baily Dobbs’s 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 backseat 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—to 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.

B
AILY’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 county 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 and cross over to the Hennepin County 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 backward.

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 bloodstain 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 . . .”
S
LOAN
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 highlighter. 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 that 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.
T
HE
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 gray suit, was leaning on a fluids-proof countertop 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?”

“Goddamnedest 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 every day.”

“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 twenty-two . . .”

“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.
L
UCAS
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 hollowpoints. 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 pieceof-crap twenty-two.”

“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’ll 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.”
R
ANDALL
T
HORN,
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.”