Backfire

by Catherine Coulter

  The last people Eve wanted to see here came running up in the next moment. She walked toward them, away from the elevator, and said quickly, “Emma, Molly, Ramsey’s all right. The doctors took him back to his new room. He wasn’t hurt, I swear. He’s okay.”

  Emma clung to her mother and swallowed, but she couldn’t stop shaking. Neither could Molly. Emma stared at Eve and the drifting dirty smoke, and then she looked toward the elevator. “How can everything be okay, Aunt Eve? I can see the blood.”

  “I’m not lying to you, Emma.”

  Emma still stared into the bloody elevator.

  One very old man called out from a doorway, “Is Judge Dredd dead?”

  Emma turned on him. “Don’t you say such a thing! My daddy’s fine.”

  Eve said, “Some people were hurt, Emma, but not your dad. I promise.”

  They looked up to see Dr. Kardak walking toward them. He said, more to Emma and Molly than to them, “Judge Hunt is well. We’re all a little shaken, but we’ve checked him out thoroughly, and he wasn’t injured. We’re settling him in his new room.” He gestured toward Molly. “I suggest, Mrs. Hunt, that you and Emma stay here a while longer before you come back.

  “As for you, Deputy Barbieri, I understand you were injured. You need to come with me.”

  Once they stood in an empty hospital room, Dr. Kardak said to Eve, “Take off the vest, Deputy Barbieri. Let’s see the damage.”

  When Eve and Dr. Kardak came out a few minutes later, three pairs of eyes fastened on them. The doctor said, “She won’t be having much fun for a couple of days; there’s going to be a lot of bruising from the impacts. I didn’t feel any cracked ribs, and that’s good. We’re going to get an X-ray to be sure.” He pulled a pad out of his coat pocket and wrote a pain prescription for her. A nurse trotted over and handed her a pill. “Take this, it’ll help.” She closed her hand over Eve’s wrist. “Thank you for saving Judge Hunt.”

  San Francisco General Hospital

  Hospital security chief Ron Martinez walked into the small security office off the hospital lobby, where Savich, Sherlock, Harry, and Eve sat in folding chairs waiting for him. He loaded a disk into the office computer and almost immediately paused it and pointed. “We think this is our guy, based on when and where he left, but we can’t be sure. I had the tech start this at the beginning, where we think he came in, because, unfortunately, that’s most of what we got. He walks straight to the two elevators on the right, no hesitation, like he knows exactly where he’s going. Less attention from anyone at the reception desk that way.”

  Martinez reversed the disk and paused it where the camera got a close-up.

  They stared at a man of indeterminate age wearing loose pants, sneakers, a loose navy Windbreaker, dark sunglasses, and a Giants ball cap.

  “Bingo,” Harry said. “He fits the description of the guy we’ve been looking for.”

  “He’s well disguised,” Eve said. “He knows you’re getting him on film. He’s not even trying to avoid the cameras, and I’ll bet he knows where every one of them is. He looks middle-aged to me. What do you think?”

  “Maybe older,” Harry said. “Thin, maybe about five-foot-nine. I can’t see his face or his hair with the sunglasses and the pulled-down cap, but we get a glimpse there of part of his neck—does his neck look saggy to anyone?”

  “An elderly assassin?” Martinez’s eyebrow shot up.

  Savich said quietly, “Listen, it might even be a woman.”

  Martinez’s other thick black eyebrow shot up. “A woman? In a shoot-out like that?”

  Savich said, “Since we’ve got DNA, we’ll soon know everything about him or her, including the time of birth. That is, if he’s in the system.”

  “Or about Sue,” Eve said.

  Chief Martinez pressed the play button again. “Sorry, guys, but we don’t have cameras on the roof of the hospital where he accessed the elevators.” He fast-forwarded. “The next time we have him on camera, he’s exiting the west stairwell into the lobby and waltzing out of the hospital. This is within a couple of minutes of the shooting.” A new camera angle showed the shooter walking quickly out of one of the hospital entrances on the west side.

  “But look at this. He’s holding his arm. That’s got to be where they hit him.”

  Sherlock said, “Yes, and the Windbreaker covers any blood.”

  Chief Martinez told them the security people, SFPD officers, and deputy marshals were showing hard copies of the photos of the shooter to everyone who might have seen him, questioning the garage attendants, even people on the street. It was plain to see no one held out much hope of that happening, but on the other hand, it was worth a try.

  They left Martinez singing a happier tune about what the DNA might show, and all returned to Ramsey’s room. They passed a deputy marshal and an SFPD officer sitting on each side of the door, talking about Deputy Marshal Allen Milton’s head wound. “The bullet slicked along the side of his head. Allen’s blaming his head, said if it wasn’t so big he could have tucked it inside his vest where it belonged.”

  The big corner room—the Taj—looked north toward the city. It was blessedly quiet now, with only six people and Ramsey. Molly and Emma were standing on either side of Ramsey’s bed, not speaking, merely holding his hands, staring down at him. Two deputy marshals had positions by the windows, and Dr. Kardak and a nurse were speaking in low voices, reviewing Ramsey’s chart.

  Ramsey’s eyes were closed. He knew his wife and his daughter were standing next to him, but his brain seemed to be operating on a twenty-watt. He decided that was okay for the moment, a fair trade-off for the pain in his chest being magically gone, thanks to a shot of morphine. He opened his eyes as they approached and said in a slurred voice, “Eve?”

  Eve, still hurting despite the pain pill, made herself walk upright and not hobble to his bed. He looked shell-shocked, she thought, as if the wild shoot-out in the elevator couldn’t really have happened. She understood completely. She placed her fingers on his forearm and smiled down at him. “I’m here, Ramsey. No need to worry about me. I might look on the scruffy side, but all my working parts are operating fine. Looks like you’re okay, too.

  “We have some news for you, if you haven’t already heard. We shot him, Ramsey, and we found his blood in the elevator shaft, and that means we’ll have his DNA. There’s a really good chance we’ll identify him.” Eve looked over at Dr. Kardak, and raised a questioning eyebrow. The doctor nodded his consent for her to keep talking to Ramsey.

  “Was it this Sue person?”

  “We don’t know yet, but it’s possible. On the security video, he looks like maybe an older guy, but that could have been a disguise. I’m just glad we were all so lucky.”

  Molly touched Eve’s arm. “I will owe you forever.”

  “Me too, Aunt Eve,” Emma said, swallowing down tears.

  Marshal Carney Maynard came running through the door, Virginia Trolley on his heels. Maynard studied Ramsey, then, satisfied, said, “There’s a media frenzy downstairs. My guys and hospital security have cordoned off the elevators, and we’re putting security stations around the floor. We’ll hope it works to keep them out. And I called Cheney Stone. He’ll be here any minute. Maybe we can talk him into making a statement.”

  Better him than me, Savich thought.

  Virginia Trolley said, shaking her head, “Our police commissioner will probably beat him to it. She’s always eager to be the face of law enforcement in the city.”

  Savich said, “Ramsey.”

  When Ramsey focused on Savich’s face, Savich continued, “I know you’re close to floating up on the ceiling, but you’re the one who had the unusual visual perspective, looking up. Can you tell us what you saw?”

  Ramsey wondered for a moment—had someone said something to him? He looked at all of them, then f
ocused again on Savich. Yes, Savich had asked him to speak. He had to think about that. He willed away some of the mental confusion, and everything became clear, too clear, really. “Eve had her hand on my arm, Eddie was talking about the Forty-niners, and then I saw the roof hatch lift and I caught a glimpse of a face staring down at me, but only for a split second, right before all the smoke and gunfire—” He lost himself in the words, but that was all right, because in the next second the rest of him was lost as well.

  Marshal Maynard said, “Your forensic team has five slugs from the Kevlar vests, all of them from a Kel Tec PF-9, chambered for the nine-millimeter Luger cartridge. As you know, it’s the lightest and flattest nine-millimeter ever made and has a single stack holding seven rounds. That means he had three or four magazines with him and he was fast changing them out.”

  Eve looked at her boss. “If you hadn’t insisted on Kevlar vests for everyone—” She stopped, which was okay, because everyone in the room knew what she meant.

  SAC Cheney Stone’s office

  Federal Building

  Thirteenth floor

  San Francisco

  Sunday morning

  Five-foot-nothing veteran forensic blood expert Mimi Cutler rushed into the room, her wrinkled lab coat flapping, her short spiked dark hair sticking up at odd angles where she’d run her fingers through it countless times throughout more hours than she wanted to count. But she was smiling, and that made Sherlock’s heart leap. She looked ready to make everyone’s day.

  Cutler caught her breath, smoothed her hair, straightened her coat, and beamed at the people in the office. She waved a sheaf of photos in her hand. “After a wild and hairy all-nighter, here you go, hot off the press.” She fanned herself. “Okay, let me back up. The very first thing we did when we arrived at the scene yesterday was collect all the samples of the shooter’s blood. We processed some of the blood, then ran the DNA through the CODIS and bang!—look at this photo, it just came through my email.” She beamed as she handed each of them a copy. “Here’s our shooter.”

  All of them stared at an eight-by-ten colored police booking photograph of a young bruiser who looked like he’d lost a fight—his face was a mass of blotched purple-and-green bruises, his split swollen lips dark red with dried blood. His head was shaved bald and sat on a neck that looked wider than Sherlock’s waist. The height chart behind him showed he was six foot four inches, and he looked like he had to weigh two hundred and sixty pounds. “His name is Paul, aka Boozer, Gordon. He’s an amateur boxer, has anger management issues. It looks like he lost a fight the night he was booked, doesn’t it? He’s been arrested and jailed for assault three times to date. He lives here in the city, on Clayton.” She beamed at them.

  There was dead silence in Cheney’s office.

  “What? We’ve identified your guy! What’s wrong?”

  Harry said, “Sorry, Mimi, but we don’t think this is our shooter. Our shooter is lots older, lots shorter, weighs maybe half what this guy weighs, and his neck is about as thick of one of this guy’s wrists.”

  “But this is an exact match; the probabilities are off the wall. You’ve got to be wrong.”

  “I guess it’s time to back up again, Mimi,” Sherlock said. “I don’t suppose there’s a chance of a lab error, or a mix-up with the samples?” She added with a smile, “Maybe more than one person’s blood?”

  “Naturally not,” Mimi said, not appeased by the smile. “I collected the blood myself, and we ran samples from three different sites. All the samples matched.”

  Savich said, “Let’s find this guy. Cheney, can you get some people working on his last known address? And Sherlock, get on the phone to the hospital, find out if Paul Boozer Gordon was there this week, maybe as some kind of patient?”

  Mimi grabbed her hair and tugged on it. “A patient? How would a patient’s blood get in the elevator shaft?”

  There was only one possibility, Savich thought, far-fetched, but still. He said slowly, “Mimi, did you happen to test the blood samples for traces of heparin?”

  “Heparin? No, why?”

  Savich said, “There’s lots of blood in a hospital—in the blood bank, in the laboratories, at nursing stations waiting to be picked up. And that includes heparinized blood that wouldn’t clot right away. You wouldn’t be able to tell as easily if the blood was older, that it was planted there, would you?”

  “Are you telling me the shooter brought the blood with him into the elevator shaft? Someone else’s blood, to plant on the scene? That he added heparin to the blood to fool me? Do you realize that would mean this frigging shooter would understand blood analysis? You’re saying he purposefully set out to mislead us? To mislead me?” She paused for a moment, her rocket brain filling in the possibilities. “Goodness, even if he actually managed to get hold of someone else’s blood, think of how careful he had to be to leave blood splattered at the scene in a way that wouldn’t be spotted by the forensic team as looking wrong. All that work, all that study and practice—for what? Nothing, really.”

  Savich said, “Unless this Boozer Gordon was shot in the elevator shaft, how else does this make sense?”

  Harry said, “If that’s true, Savich, the shooter had to know we’d see through the deception sooner rather than later. He couldn’t have hoped to frame someone else for the shooting that way. It reminds me of that newspaper picture of Judge Dredd we found in his backyard. Another way to give us the finger again, not give you the finger, Mimi, but us. He wanted to show us how smart he is, and what tail-chasing loser dogs we are in comparison. Another thing, apparently the shooter wasn’t wounded after all.” Harry cursed under his breath.

  Cheney was off his cell first. “DMV still has Boozer Gordon’s address on Clayton Street. Now, you’re saying our shooter somehow got some of Boozer’s blood, enough of it to create believable blood splatter?”

  Savich nodded. “Only explanation I can think of.”

  Sherlock closed her cell. “Medical records has Boozer Gordon discharged from the hospital late Friday morning, the day before Ramsey was attacked in the elevator. He came in through the ER, apparently looking beat up as badly as in that mug shot. I spoke to an ER nurse. She was not very happy with my question. She said no one had ever walked in and stolen blood from them, for heaven’s sake, that it simply couldn’t happen. Then Miss Manners got huffier, told me it was ridiculous to think someone could simply waltz in there or into a patient’s room and draw his blood. Couldn’t happen, never in this lifetime. But I agree with Dillon. I think that’s exactly what happened, I’d bet my hair rollers on it.”

  “No,” Savich said, “not the hair rollers.”

  Harry said, “So our guy put on a white coat, walked in, and drew Mr. Gordon’s blood?”

  Sherlock thought for a moment. “However he got it was an elaborate pretense, especially with the huge risk he took in that elevator shaft. I’m thinking that even if he’d planned Ramsey’s murder for a long time, there was very little planning in that attack on the elevator, since of course he couldn’t know he needed to play it.

  “Would a professional take on an armed guard like that? We’re working on the assumption that Sue is a professional, but, you know, this really feels like it’s personal.”

  “Personal, or maybe desperate,” Savich said. “An act of rage, or delusion.”

  Harry nodded. “And he didn’t leave that blood behind on the fly, since he added heparin to make us think it was fresh. It’s like some kind of crazy what-if scenario that he’d played through in his mind, maybe even read about and practiced. That would have taken time, and that could be the key here, he had to have time on his hands. Sherlock’s right, why would Sue the master spy go to all this trouble?”

  Sherlock’s eyes locked with Savich’s.

  He said matter-of-factly, “You mean the shooter was in prison.”

 
Harry said, “Until recently, I suspect. If Sue the spy has nothing to do with this, then we may be talking about a guy who came out of prison knowing exactly what he wanted to do, everything all laid out.”

  Cheney said, “And, bottom line, what he wants to do is to kill Judge Hunt.”

  “A guy,” Harry said. “I’d just gotten my brain wrapped around this Sue. Doesn’t matter, if he was in jail, we can find him.”

  Mimi Cutler, who’d been standing by the door, began pulling on her hair again. “Do you guys know I had to cancel a date last night—my first date in four and a half months—and the guy is hot. I didn’t tell him what I do for a living, since he’d probably freak. He’s a stockbroker and only sees blood if he nicks himself shaving. I gave him a lame excuse about a sick mother, and would you look at this—it turns out I couldn’t even find my mom.”

  She shook Boozer Gordon’s photo and ripped it in two.

  Sherlock said, “Mimi, tell your guy you do blood analysis for DNA, that you were working on the Judge Hunt incident at the hospital yesterday—it’s all over the news. He’ll be so impressed and excited to know someone in the thick of things, he’ll be camping out on your front porch. Trust me on this.”

  Mimi stopped pulling on her spikes of hair. “You think?”

  At Sherlock’s solemn nod, Mimi smoothed down her hair. “You don’t mind if I tell him about Judge Hunt? Give him the gory details?”

  “Like I said,” Sherlock added, “it’s all over the news, so why not cash in?”

  Mimi left, fluffing her hair and humming “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

  Harry stared after Mimi, shaking his head, marveling at how you could be in the pits one second and laughing out loud the next.

  Near Nicasio, California

  Sunday morning

  He was glad for the drizzling rain, cold and wet on his neck. It made shoveling dirt over Mickey O’Rourke nice and easy. Finally he stepped back, studied the mound he’d made. Not good, too high, too easy to find. He began pounding the back of the shovel on the wet dirt, flattening it down, scraping some of it away. Once he had the dirt as flat as he wanted it, he dragged branches over to cover it.