by Chuck Logan
Broker’s heart kept pace with the runaway cop radio rap.
“One hundred, two twelve is twenty-five on scene. Confirm ten seventy-two: Victim is DOA. Stop EMS. We want to keep the scene as clean as possible.”
“Ten-four, all units copy—victim is dead. Use caution. Two twelve, one hundred. What about the neighbor?”
“He’s got a lump on the head, but he’s ambulatory; after questioning we’ll run him to Lakeview emergency.
“Ten-four.”
Mouse pushed the Crown Vic through a grid of residential blocks, toward the sound of sirens. He held his radio handset in his left hand. His right hand tapped on the computer keyboard.
“One hundred, one oh six, en route.”
“Ten-four.”
“Two twelve. One hundred. What’s your status?”
“We got another one like the priest.”
“Calm down out there.”
Now they could hear the wolf pack sirens starting to gather in on the neighborhood. Mouse shook his head, tapped on his computer keys. “The only thing missing is a full moon,” he said.
Broker noticed the display on Mouse’s MDT screen flicker, bringing up a screen full of different color type. White lines of type blipped to blue lines. “What’s going on?”
“This is the duty roster. White is off duty; blue is on duty. Guys are piling on.” Mouse tapped one of the blue lines. “See, seven niner just logged in blue. That’s Lymon. He’s in ahead of us.”
Cross streets named after trees: Linden, Laurel, Maple. Broker turned onto Beech. An ambulance from Lakeview. Six squads: two from Stillwater, two county, Oak Park Heights, and Bayport. Cops with flashlights working the lawn, the fence line. Light and movement and sound coming in from the adjoining streets, where more cops were cordoning the neighborhood. Stopping cars. Asking questions.
A Stillwater cop was standing on the front lawn of the address. He waved at Broker and Mouse. “In the back. In the back.” They parked and ran to the back of the house.
Badge number two twelve, the Stillwater sergeant who was commanding the scene, leaned over a street map unfolded on the hood of a squad. A county deputy held a flashlight on the map.
The sergeant nodded to Mouse and Broker as they walked up. “You hear? We got another one,” he said. “And this time it’s out in plain view. Still in her mouth.” Then he opened the gate and pointed toward a well-lit solarium porch.
Carol Lennon lay sprawled on her back in front of a futon couch, starkly naked in the askew orange kimono.
The sergeant went on, “The neighbor found her facedown, he was talking to nine-one-one, he turned her over to try CPR.”
Her eyes were stuck open, exaggerated by blood from the wound in her face that had pooled in the eye sockets. The elbow and the wrist of one arm were twisted at an unnatural angle of stress. Shards of shattered wineglass sparkled on the floor.
Broker could see a long swirl of dark hair soaking in a wide pool of blood on the terra-cotta tiles. A tall snake plant was tipped over, the hairy roots exposed, the long green blades bordered with blood.
The sergeant pointed to the stocky man in shorts and a lime tank top who was holding a gauze pad to his forehead. “He’s the next-door neighbor. Charlie Ash. He was out watering his lawn and heard shots and breaking glass. So he came to investigate and the shooter whacked him in the head when he came through the gate.”
The guy nodded. “I went to check Carol, like the nine-one-one operator told me, and I turned her over to, you know, clear the airway, and she had this thing in her mouth.”
“We heard,” Mouse said.
“Where do you want us?” Broker asked.
The sergeant drew a semicircle on the map with his finger encompassing the area west of their present location. “We’re clamping off everything to the west and stopping anyone moving on the streets or driving out of the cordon.” He turned to the neighbor. “You’re sure this was a female?”
The guy nodded wearily. “Even with blood in my eye, I noticed she was pretty built from behind. Definitely a female.”
“So we’re looking for a female, dark shorts, dark sports top,” the sergeant said.
A county deputy approached with a big black-and-tan shepherd on a leash.
“Good, we can get a track started,” the sergeant said. The he stuck his head in the squad and keyed his radio. “One hundred, two twelve. Status on the state police helicopter?”
“Trooper nine is airborne. ETA fifteen minutes.”
“Ten-four.”
A squall of voices competed in the static.
“All units not directly involved in perimeter go to alternate channel . . .”
Then out of a jitter of static: “One hundred, seven niner. Woman running north on McKusick, along the lake.” The voice sounded agitated, as if it was spinning in a washing machine.
The radio channel went dead silent.
Mouse said, “Lymon.”
Broker nodded, recognizing the shaken voice.
“Leaving the car. Won’t stop. Told her to halt. Just turned off the path and ducked into trees north end of the lake. Will pursue on foot.”
“Take the mobile, take the mobile,” Mouse said, gritting his teeth.
“What?” Broker asked.
Mouse hunched over the map, tapped his finger, and said, “I know exactly where he’s at. The lake ends here, and then there’s this swamp. He’s chasing her down this wooded finger that runs in between.” Mouse bit his lip. “It gets real fucked in there, broken ground, this woods on the other side of the lake before you get to this single windy street.”
Broker saw the problem. Lymon was chasing someone into a marshy woods in the dark. And it sounded like he didn’t take his mobile radio. Broker also sensed that most of the squads converging on the area, which had started to set up a perimeter, now were bolting toward the lake.
The radio squawked a confirmation: “Gimme a cross street on McKusick . . .”
“Which end of the Lake . . . ?”
The cops were talking at once, stepping on their transmissions. A cluster was taking shape in the night.
The sergeant reached in his car and grabbed his handset. “Units on perimeter, it’s tricky in there, no through streets; you have to swing around east end of lake. Copy?
“Ten-four.”
“I gotta stay here, wait for John,” Mouse said.
The sergeant nodded, barked to the Stillwater cop blocking the gate. “Terry, go in around the other side of the lake and see if you can get ahead of this goddamn footrace.”
The cop nodded and started toward his car.
“You going or staying?” Mouse said to Broker.
Broker pointed to the Stillwater cop, followed him, and piled in his car. Lights, no siren, they raced around the lake. Broker saw in detail the difficult terrain Mouse had warned about. The solitary curving road they drove down had few streetlights. And the houses dissolved into darkness. The street ended in a cul-de-sac.
“I don’t like this,” said Terry, the Stillwater cop. “Only a couple of streets on this side, and they wind all over.”
“Lymon’s in there, no radio,” Broker said, squinting into the darkness. “Person he’s chasing could be armed and maybe just killed somebody.”
They got out of the car and walked between the houses. Immediately the ground slanted downhill in a jumble of treacherous footing.
“I don’t know,” Terry said, slapping his long-handled flashlight against his palm. To turn it on was to give away their position. So he strained to see in the dark. Then he cupped his hands to his ears, listening.
Broker figured there were twenty cops on the scene now, and like him, they were bracing for a melee of shooting in the dark. He and Terry edged to the extreme limit of the yard.
“Now what?” Terry said.
“We wait and listen, maybe—” Broker was cut off by a yell about one hundred yards ahead of them.
“Halt. Police. Halt. Police.”
; A flashlight stabbed the darkness. Immediately, Broker and Terry started into the broken ground, feeling their way toward the commotion.
“No, no.” A gasping hysterical female voice.
“They got her,” Terry said; then he switched on his flashlight and crashed forward into the dark. Broker followed at a much more cautious pace.
The ground was hilly, eroded, and thick with impassable brush. Bits of tense conversation drifted in the night.
“On the ground, facedown.”
“No!” Gasping. “He’s chasing me. Him back there.”
Then Broker heard Lymon yell, “You got her?”
“We got her, but we ain’t got a gun. Must have ditched it.”
A blond-haired woman dressed in running gear thrashed in the flashlight beams as she was being handcuffed. “Ow, shit, what are you doing?” she screamed. “If I have scars . . .”
“Calm down.”
“Not me, you moron. This black guy just chased me through the fucking woods. Call the fucking cops!”
The cops exchanged looks by flashlight.
Someone said, “Uh-oh.”
Chapter Thirty-six
She heard the sirens, the neighborhood dogs barking in their yards, and realized the cops could have dogs too. Angel ran in a blind panic for half a block, then ducked, panting, behind a parked car to think.
Get yourself straightened out. Get a plan . . .
First she’d have to get off the streets and get under cover. The cops would own the streets.
A swarm of sirens was building in the night. Most of them up ahead, in the direction she’d been running. Instinctively she got up and moved in the opposite direction, away from the sirens. Off the street now, she picked her way through the dark yards . . . weaving around hedges and fences.
She reached the end of the block and burst into the open to cross the intersection. And nearly collided with some damn kid on a skateboard doing solo routines. The boy immediately grabbed his board and stepped back.
But he’d glimpsed her. The light was not good enough to see her face, but Angel realized she was running with a pistol in one hand and her makeshift silencer in the other.
She ducked back into the yards, praying she didn’t encounter dogs. Twice she had to backtrack when she ran into six-foot fences.
Angel darted across a street and ran toward a trio of houses with dark windows. Three blocks to the west, a circular wind of red flashers lashed at the motionless trees and rooftops. But here it was still dark.
They were concentrating on the direction in which she’d initially run.
But that damn skateboard kid . . .
Okay, right now, hide; catch your breath. She scrambled up a limestone retaining wall into a yard and crouched behind a dwarf lilac hedge. She wiggled the backpack from her shoulders and stuffed the silencer and her latex gloves into it. Put it back on. Her bare knees tickled in the night dew collecting in the grass. She was dizzy. More than fear. The scent of foliage and humid earth made her head swim.
She could hear snatches of staccato disembodied traffic from the cop radios. And still the sirens were coming. They were cordoning the streets, but still to the west.
Then a cop car roared past her in a scream of sirens and whooping red lights and pulled a screeching U-turn almost right in front of her.
Angel’s heart started to count down to implosion in her chest. The cop car stopped. A man jumped out and ran into the shadows about a hundred yards from her. The cop in the car turned on a searchlight. The long beam swung across the facades of the dark houses; it played across the porch behind her.
Her hand closed over the pistol. I won’t be taken alive.
The idea of putting the filthy barrel in her mouth repelled her. Better to put it to the temple.
Won’t be taken.
Won’t.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Angel may not have been invisible anymore, but she was the next best thing: absolutely motionless. Several minutes passed, and the cop car, with its probing light, moved away. She was instantly up, running in a low crouch through the shadows. Then another light barred her path.
She ducked down and made herself small under a wide juniper as the police car searchlight swung back and forth like a white lantern down the street.
She watched the curve of her ankle pulse red as flashers atop police squad cars passed down the next block. Everywhere, she heard the static squawk of the radios.
Time to move.
“Lady, the guy chasing you is a cop.”
Broker and Terry could see them now: two officers, one in Stillwater blue, the other in county tans. They were pulling the handcuffed woman to her feet. She was lean, sun browned, and pissed off in the weaving flashlight beams. She wore black shorts and a green halter that passed for gray in the dark. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her trophy legs were cut and bleeding from thrashing through the brush.
Lymon Greene walked in circles, hands on hips, chest heaving, trying to catch his breath. His left knee was banged up, and a string of blood twisted down his shin.
“Bag . . . her . . . hands,” Lymon said, gulping for air.
“Right,” one of the arresting cops said. Then he jogged toward the street.
“So where’d you throw the gun?” the other cop asked her.
“The gun?” Her eyes widened, flashing white. “Oh you poor, dim fucking moron,” she snarled. “My husband is a lawyer.”
Broker approached Lymon and put a hand on his shoulder. Lymon’s T-shirt was drenched with sweat. But he was grinning. “Man, jogging around the neighborhood doesn’t even start to get you ready for this kind of steeplechase.”
Broker studied him, glad that this chase had ended without bullets finding flesh. “Did Benish get ahold of you?” Broker said.
Lymon shook his head. “No. I was on my way to the grocery store and heard the radio call and came running.”
“You don’t know about Harry?” Broker said.
Lymon shook his head, blinking; distracted, still into the drama of the chase, he watched the two cops who’d cuffed the protesting woman walk her toward the street. Then his grin froze when an urgent voice came over the mobile radio mike clipped to a Stillwater cop’s epaulet.
“All units, we have a problem. She’s going east, toward the river . . .”
“Say again.”
“We got a boy on a skateboard who saw a woman with a gun her hand running east through Everett and Maple.”
“One hundred. All units copy?”
Aw, shit. They piled into cars and converged on the North Hill. Immediately, it all felt wrong to Broker: the cops were road-bound; the suspect was working through the yards in the dark.
“Lemme out,” he yelled. “We gotta comb through the backyards.” He jumped from the rolling cruiser and jogged into the shadows.
Angel held her breath as the cop car shone its light into the yards on either side. The officer stopped two blocks away, got out of his car, took a handheld flashlight, and shone it into the overgrown ravine that abutted the street. Then his radio squawked. He turned off the light, got back in the car, and drove away.
Shaking, she took a fast inventory. Okay. They’d talked to the skateboard kid, figured out she’d doubled back, and now they would start cordoning these streets.
But the cop had given Angel an idea.
She was a Stillwater girl. It was a hill town, and in between the hills lay wooded ravines. She struggled to get her bearings and realized she was two blocks from a ravine that had a storm sewer running down its length. If she could slip into the intake grate at the bottom of the ravine, she could scurry underground and wiggle out on the bluff overlooking Battle Hollow. She’d come out close to her car, parked downtown.
She rose to a crouch and started maneuvering slow and low from shadow to shadow, feeling her way through the dark yards. But she could see people coming out on the street into patches of light, looking toward the red lights, the activity.
> She hunkered along a hedge. There was a driveway partially screened by more lilacs. Then the open space. She looked behind her. A garage was attached to the house. No car in the drive.
Maybe no one was home.
A fence with grapevines ran from the garage to the edge of the ravine. If she could get into the backyard, she could move on the other side of the fence, behind the grapes. No yard lights back there, pitch-black.
She’d have to chance it. She duck-walked up the drive and crouched next to the doorway. Out of sight, hidden. A nice feeling but for how long? Too long. Too long. You have to move.
But it was comforting here in the dark.
She placed her hand against the garage side door. Please be open.
She twisted the knob and the door opened. The garage was empty, no car. She pushed the door open and rushed through, tripping on empty cardboard boxes, squinting in the dark. Found the back door, came out on a deck. The rolling backyard was hemmed in with lilacs, grapevines, and tall arborvitae. The obligatory pile of kid’s plastic junk.
Even better, the flower bed on the other side of the fence was thick with grapevines and eight-foot sunflowers that screened her from the street.
And the light was almost gone. Really getting dark now. She eased in along the lilac hedge and began to cross the yard. That’s when the dog in the wire pen in the next yard started going crazy.
On reflex, Broker moved in a crouch and pulled out the .45 as he tried to adjust his night vision. His shoes slid on the damp grass under his feet; mosquitoes buzzed in close, blowing little pincushion kisses.
Through breaks in the foliage and bushes he caught glimpses of police cars in the distance, people starting to congregate under streetlights.
This was bad. No radio. No coordination. Going mobile in the dark with guns was always bad. He’d operated at night in wartime, before night-vision goggles. Murphy’s Law. Accident waiting to happen. He kept jogging, weaving around shrubs, avoiding fences; she’d be avoiding them too, not hiding, moving fast to get out of the area. He was sure of that.