She jumped ahead to the date Marvin Cole had been arrested. It took her a few minutes to thumb through the files, but she finally found the incident report she was looking for. She read it through quickly, not sure what she was searching for.
The report read pretty much like the story Marvin had told her, except for the part about the kidnap victim being a twelve-year-old kid and that the kidnapper—Marvin—had beaten the hell out of the kid’s babysitter to get the kid away from her.
Gage’s report said they’d tracked Marvin to an old hotel, where Senior Corporal Zane Kendrick, one of the SWAT team’s negotiators, had tried to talk Marvin into giving himself up. Marvin had apparently threatened the kid’s life, which had sent Gage and another senior corporal on the team, Trey Duncan, into the hotel room. It was impossible to tell because Gage’s words lacked any emotion, but Mac wondered if he’d been concerned about going up against a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound criminal with only two officers.
The report provided the precise time the two-man team had kicked in the door, then only a simple three-sentence description of the ensuing arrest of the suspect and rescue of the hostage.
Senior Corporal Duncan kicked in the door and covered me as I moved across the room to secure the suspect. The suspect resisted, which required me to pin him against the wall of the room for a short period of time while Corporal Duncan got the hostage to safety. My pinning technique resulted in scratches to the suspect’s chest, which were treated by the EMTs on scene.
She was just flipping to the back of the report, which included pictures of Marvin and the familiar scratches on his chest, when she heard the thump of heavy boots on the stairs.
Crap.
Mac shoved the folder back in the filing cabinet and closed the drawer as softly as she could. Then she darted out the door and into the main office. Could she make it to the front door before whomever it was entered the room?
She decided against it and instead threw her butt into one of the office chairs and grabbed the first thing to read that she could find on the adjacent desk—a magazine about handguns. She’d just crossed her legs and opened the magazine to a page advertising Real Bleeding Zombies! Available for Target Practice Now! when Gage walked into the room.
“I thought you’d be watching TV.”
She looked up slowly, acting as if she was mesmerized by the magazine. “Oh yeah, I was going to, but then I saw this magazine and I got interested in it. I didn’t realize I’d been sitting here that long until you came down.”
“Really?” Gage casually made his way toward the filing room. “I never would have pegged you as someone to read a gun magazine.”
Mac almost gasped out loud as he walked in the room and looked around. Oh, God. Had she left the drawer open on one of the filing cabinets?
“Hey,” she practically shouted. “Did you know they make zombie targets that bleed?”
Gage looked around the filing room, then reached over and switched off the light. “Yeah, I’ve seen them. Unfortunately, they’re not suitable for real training.”
“Really?” She hadn’t expected him to do more than laugh at how silly bleeding zombies were, not respond seriously to her question. But now he’d gone and made her curious. “Why not?”
He came around and plunked himself down in the chair beside her. “For one thing, they’re too damn expensive. For another, it encourages bad shooting habits. Everyone wants to shoot the zombie in the head instead of the center of the chest.”
She couldn’t help but laugh as she envisioned the SWAT team being pelted with bad press because they were caught preparing for the coming zombie apocalypse. “I guess I see your point. It could turn into a PR nightmare.”
Gage chuckled. “Not nearly as bad as the trouble we got into when Xander brought in the fiberglass clown he found. He thought it’d be a great idea to use it as the bad guy in a live-fire hostage training scenario. The company that owns the burger franchise that uses the clown as a mascot didn’t agree.”
Mac laughed. “I wonder why?”
“I know, right?”
She tossed the magazine on the desk, glad she’d been able to successfully distract Gage from looking too closely at the file room. She was sure she didn’t leave any of the drawers open, but she needed to be more careful. She’d have a hard time finding anything on these guys if she ended up getting caught and tossed out of the compound.
Not that she was going to learn anything worthwhile by reading through the files. The only thing she’d gained by going in there was to verify that Gage had been the one who’d pinned Marvin up against the wall and put those scratches on him. He’d come right out and confessed to it in his report. Then had the EMTs take pictures of the scratches for the police records.