Authors: Donna Andrews
The reporter was staring at Officer Wilt and scribbling in her notebook.
“I think he’s got a microphone in his lapel,” she said.
“Yes, he’s miked for sound,” I said. “See the coiled wire thingy going up to his ear?”
“Just like the Secret Service wear,” Kate said.
“Lordy,” Randall said, shaking his head again. “Well, time’s a-wastin’. Lead on, Mr. Reilly.”
“That’s Officer Reilly,” the young man said, but he did start toward the door.
Randall stuck his hands in his pockets and ambled behind our escort in a display of folksy charm that mocked the paramilitary precision of the guards. At least that’s how it looked to me, and from the way the reporter was scribbling as she glanced back and forth between Randall and Officer Wilt, I suspect she was getting the same impression. A little bit ridiculous, those guards.
And maybe also a little bit scary. I hoped she got that part, too.
Randall had only taken a few steps when a series of quick reports rang out inside the building.
Were those gunshots?
Chapter 6
“Get down!” Randall shouted.
Reilly didn’t bother glancing around to check on us civilians. He drew his gun and flattened himself against the wall on the right side of the door.
Kate and her photographer were busily snapping and scribbling away. They seemed startled when Randall shoved them down behind the pillar to the right of the door. Randall took up a position on the other side of the pillar, where he could see what was going on and still have some cover. I followed his example on the left, then pulled out my cell phone and dialed 911. I saw Randall glance at me, nod approvingly, and shove his own cell phone back in his pocket.
Officer Wilt raced over to flatten himself against the wall to the left of the door. Like Reilly, he didn’t even glance at us.
“Go!” he snapped. Reilly sprang into the doorway, head and gun moving rapidly left and right as he scanned the courthouse lobby.
“Clear!” he said.
He and Wilt darted into the lobby. Kate leaped up and began inching closer to the door to peer in.
“I’d stay back if I were you,” Randall said. But he looked as if he were on the verge of ignoring his own advice.
Debbie Anne, the police dispatcher, answered.
“Meg, what’s going on! My lines are lighting up like a Christmas tree. If this isn’t urgent—”
“Someone just fired five or six shots inside the courthouse,” I said. “Two armed guards from the lender’s security service have gone inside to investigate. Randall Shiffley and I are here on the veranda, along with two reporters.”
“And I’m going in to investigate,” Randall said. “Tell Chief Burke to get over here with everything he’s got.” With that, he launched himself from behind the pillar and ran through the courthouse door. Kate followed.
Rob was in the courthouse. I almost said it aloud.
“Randall and the reporter are going in,” I said instead. “Randall says—”
“Yes, I heard him,” Debbie Anne said. “Already happening.”
“I’m going to follow, at a distance,” I said.
“Stay safe,” Debbie Anne replied. “Help is on the way.”
In fact, help, in the form of Deputy Sammy Wendell, was already loping up the street toward the courthouse. I took a tentative step toward the door.
The photographer, who’d been peering warily through the doorway, stepped inside.
Randall had served in the Marines and Kate was a reporter, which to me meant that neither of them was a good role model for a sane person to follow in a dangerous situation. But the photographer had looked a great deal less gung-ho when the shooting started, so if he thought the courthouse lobby was safe to enter, I could at least peek through the door.
Inside, I could see half a dozen of the armed guards milling around the lobby.
“—go upstairs and protect the corporate offices,” Wilt was saying. Two of the guards saluted and began running up the curved marble stairway that led to the upper levels. Another two stood by the elevators.
“But the shots came from the basement,” one of the guards racing up the stairway called back over his shoulder. It spoke volumes about their discipline that he didn’t let this protest slow him down.
The basement? Wasn’t Rob still in the basement?
“Reilly and I will check the basement,” Wilt replied.
“If I were you,” Randall put in, “I’d just stay put until the police get here.”
Nobody even looked his way. The elevator arrived, and two more guards leaped in, weapons drawn, as if storming an enemy position.
“We’re capable of handling the situation, thank you,” Wilt said. He strode over to a small doorway, flung it open, and dashed in, followed by Reilly and the reporter.
“What’s going on?” Deputy Sammy stumbled into the lobby, a little winded from all the stairs.
“I don’t trust those clowns,” Randall said. “Follow me.”
Maybe he was talking to Sammy, but I decided to assume he meant me, too. And even if he didn’t mean me—my baby brother could be down there in that basement.
I glanced at Sammy and saw him suddenly topple over, clutching his leg.
“Sammy! Are you hit?” I hadn’t heard a shot, but as I scrambled to his side I quickly scanned the lobby for danger.
“Leg cramp,” he gasped. “Heat does it to me. I’ll be fine in a second. Get outside where it’s safe.”
I ignored him and dashed off to follow Randall.
The narrow stairs to the basement looked as if they belonged to a castle dungeon. Both walls and treads were made of local stone, and the stairs curved around in a full circle twice. The lobby was actually on the second floor, in order to make room for all those impressive marble stairs outside, so you had to go down two flights to the basement. Two centuries of use had worn the treads slick and carved a little depression in the middle of each one.
In happier times, a visiting genealogist or history buff who wanted to consult the town records would march up the sweeping marble steps, wander around the lobby until he found the discreet sign for the archives, and then climb down the two circular flights to the basement. Savvy locals would skip the front steps to come through the back door of the courthouse and then venture through the furnace room to take the back stairs to the basement, which were only one flight, and retrofitted with a stair lift to make them handicapped accessible. The two stairways were at each end of one of the long walls of the antechamber, and the door to the archives was in the center of the opposite wall.
I suddenly remembered climbing down this same stairway on past Halloweens, when the town had used the large room at the bottom to set up a haunted house to raise money for charity. We’d creep down slowly and carefully to the tune of “Night on Bald Mountain” and other classical Halloween favorites. In the basement, we’d follow a tangled path past an assortment of ghosts and ghouls, dodging rubber bats and enormous fake spiderwebs. The door to the archive, which we passed halfway through the haunted house, was always blocked with a faux iron gate, but inside Mr. Throckmorton would arrange an over-the-top tableau of vampires or zombies—one of the high points of the evening. And at the end of the path, we’d finally reach the second spiral stone staircase at the other side of the antechamber and stumble up to the furnace room, where the elderly Shiffley cousin who served as the town engineer served out punch and cookies.
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.
“I don’t think he’s armed anymore,” one of the guards said. “I think I’ve found the weapon.”
He was pointing at the barrier. We all crowded closer, and I saw, to my relief, that Mr. Throckmorton had covered the inside with sheets of plywood. So as long as that was in place, the guards weren’t going to spot Rob on the wrong side of the barricade.
We all peered down into the space between the Evil Lender’s outer barrier and Mr. Throckmorton’s inner one. Near the floor, caught in the rather pointless tangle of razor wire the lender had recently added, was a pistol. The matte black metal of its barrel gleamed slightly, while the handgrip seemed to be made of some material that absorbed light.
We all stared for a few moments as if spellbound, then one of the junior guards reached down as if to retrieve the pistol.
“Leave that alone!” Randall and Wilt snapped out their orders almost in unison and then glared at each other.
“The mayor’s right,” Wilt said.
“Moving the gun would be disturbing a crime scene,” Randall said. “We leave it there for the police to examine.”
“Pretty obvious what happened,” another guard said. “He shot her and then tried to throw it out.”
“Out or in,” Randall said. “We’ll let the police decide. They’re on their way, and so is the ambulance, so let’s clear this crime scene.”
“We’ll be taking charge of the crime scene,” Wilt said.
“No, you won’t,” Randall said. “Since—”
“This building is the property of First Progressive Financial!” Wilt was actually clutching and unclutching the butt of his gun, as if considering whether or not to shoot Randall for trespassing. Was it just my imagination or did the gun, at least what I could see of it, look exactly like the one discarded in the barricade?
Randall’s eyes flicked down briefly to those fidgeting fingers and then back to Wilt’s face. Either he didn’t think the guy was a real risk or he was one very cool actor.
“That’s as may be,” Randall said. “But you and your men are private security—not law enforcement. And right now this building is a Caerphilly County crime scene. Our sheriff has jurisdiction. So unless you fancy having you and your men locked up for interfering with a crime scene and obstructing a police officer in the commission of his duty, I’d suggest you get the hell out of here.”