Some Like It Hawk(17)

I was jolted back to the present by the sounds of someone slipping and falling below, followed by several angry oaths.

“Stay sharp!” I heard Wilt shout from the basement. “The shooter has to be nearby.”

I took the steps a little more slowly so I wouldn’t slip. Emerging into the basement was like leaving the Middle Ages for the Great Depression—either the courthouse hadn’t been redecorated since the 1930s or someone had taken care to replicate the institutional green-painted cinder-block walls and the black-and-white checkerboard linoleum of the era. I decided I liked it a lot better as a haunted house.

I found Randall, the reporter, and Wilt standing in a semicircle just inside the doorway from the stairs. The three rank-and-file guards, with their weapons drawn, were prowling restlessly around the room as if one more search might reveal that the cinder blocks and linoleum were covering a secret hiding place.

Presumably their erratic patrol was intended to protect us if whoever fired those shots returned, but I couldn’t help thinking that I was a lot more likely to get hurt by their overreaction than by anything the original shooter was apt to do.

They seemed to be paying quite a lot of attention to the ugly board-and-barbed-wire barricade on the wall opposite the stairwell, never quite turning their backs on it.

“That’s right,” Randall was saying into his cell phone. “The courthouse basement. And hurry.”

“She’s way past an ambulance,” Reilly said.

“I like to let the pros make that kind of decision,” Randall said.

But he wasn’t trying to do anything. And I knew Randall had had EMT training. If he thought an injury was survivable …

I had been about to circle so I could see what they were looking at, but I paused for a moment, uncertain that I wanted to see someone who was “way past an ambulance.” At that moment the photographer arrived, almost bumping into me as he exited the stairway. He saw which way everyone was looking and circled left. Within seconds I heard the rapid clicking of his camera.

“Have a little respect, man!” Randall snapped.

The clicking stopped, but the photographer had already gotten his pictures.

“Who is she?” Kate asked.

“Name’s Colleen Brown,” Wilt said. “She’s a vice president at First Progressive Financial.”

The reporter was the only person in the group who wasn’t taller than my five feet ten, so I peered over her shoulder.





Chapter 7




Colleen Brown was a slender woman in her late thirties or maybe her early forties. I hadn’t actually met her, but like most people in town, I’d seen her from afar. I remembered her as tall, though it was hard to tell from the awkward way she was sprawled on the linoleum. And I seemed to recall that she was attractive, though that was equally hard to verify right now. Her eyes were open and unseeing, and her mouth had fallen open as if to scream. We hadn’t heard a scream—probably because she’d been shot in the throat. The doctor’s daughter part of me was making the same assessment Randall had. I didn’t think CPR would work on an airway that damaged, and there was way too much blood for anyone to try without some kind of blood barrier.

I wrenched my eyes away from the wound. There was blood all down the front of her clothes and pooled around her on the black-and-white linoleum. Impossible to tell if her blouse had been white or pastel, but she wore a beautifully tailored red suit with a skirt that would be about knee length if it hadn’t ridden up when she fell. One foot still wore an elegant red pump with a higher heel than anything I wore, even on special occasions—and probably a higher price tag than I was used to. The other shoe had fallen off and was lying on its side, half in a pool of blood, with its almost-new sole facing toward us.

I felt a brief, irrational impulse to walk over, twitch her skirt down again, wipe off the missing shoe and put it back on her foot, and then maybe throw something over her to hide her from the long, cold stares of the four guards and the reporter.

Make that five guards. Another one arrived via the back staircase, the one that led down from the ground floor furnace room. I glanced over at the barricade, hoping Rob wouldn’t pick this moment to peer out.

“Shouldn’t we be doing something?” the reporter asked.

“I’m afraid she’s past anything I know how to do,” Randall said. “Her whole windpipe’s just…”

He let his voice trail off and shook his head. Several of the guards shifted uneasily and the reporter’s pen was frozen over her notebook.

“Any sign of the shooter?” Wilt snapped. I glanced over, but he was talking to the microphone on his shoulder.