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.”
“But since local law enforcement are not yet on the scene—” Wilt began.
“Yes, we are.”
We all turned to see Sammy Wendell standing at the foot of the stairway, looking tall and stern, with one hand resting firmly on his own holstered gun.
I realized my mouth had fallen open at the sight of the normally gawky and tongue-tied Sammy suddenly turned into John Wayne. I wiped the surprised look off my face. Randall managed to keep his astonishment to a brief flicker that Wilt probably didn’t even notice.
“There you are,” Randall said. “And I got a bit of law enforcement experience myself when I was in the service, so I think I can assist the deputy if he needs it. How about if you assemble your troops in the big tent right next to my office? Ah, there’s Deputy Morris. She can escort you.”
Aida Morris was a tall, coffee-skinned woman who competed in Ironman competitions in her free time. She took up a position on one side of the door to the stairs. She put her hands on her hips, although I noticed that the right one wasn’t quite touching—just hovering near her gun. Sammy took up the same position on the other side.
Wilt opened his mouth, probably to argue some more, but he took a good look at Randall and the two deputies and demonstrated more common sense than I’d have given him credit for.
“All personnel evacuate the building and report to me at assembly point Alpha Tango,” he snapped at his left shoulder, where the microphone was. Then he looked up at the four guards in the room with us. They were all tall—well over six feet—with the bulked-up, twitchy look of hardened gym rats who’d done too many steroids for way too long. What kind of security company would put loaded weapons in the hands of men like these? I wished Fisher, the Evil Lender’s sensible staffer, would show up. He’d been on the steps a few minutes ago—surely he couldn’t have gone far.
“You, too,” Wilt said, with a wave of his hand. “Alpha Tango, on the double.”
One by one the guards holstered their guns, backed away from the body, and retreated up the stairs. I was actually impressed. I’d once seen a dog trainer order three half-grown Dobermans to stop chasing a cat. They’d obeyed, visibly fighting to overcome their natural instinct to give chase. The guards gave me the same uneasy impression of barely controlled ferocity.
“You, too, ma’am,” Randall said to Kate, the reporter. Her photographer had already followed the guards. “Meg, can you stay here a minute to help me with something?”
The reporter left, looking back over her shoulder until she was out of sight. Aida Morris nodded to Randall and brought up the rear. I had no doubt that the Flying Monkeys would be waiting in the tent when Chief Burke went to see them. Unless he hurried, Aida would have already taken down all their names and addresses and lined them up in alphabetical order.
Sammy, Randall, and I all looked at each other and breathed audible sighs of relief when they were gone. Sammy also slumped, and wiped his palms on his uniform trousers.
“Holy cow,” he said.
“You did good,” Randall said.
“Sorry I took so long,” he replied. “Leg cramp.”
“It’s the heat,” Randall said. “Happens to me, too. Keep a watch over that back stairway.” Sammy nodded. He walked a few paces close
r to the stairway, still limping slightly, and began staring fixedly at it. I supposed it beat looking at Colleen Brown. “Meg and I will stay here with the body until the chief gets here. If that’s okay with you,” he added, turning to me.
“I’m fine,” I said. Actually, fine wasn’t entirely accurate, but I figured I could handle being there if Sammy could. And my curiosity was kicking in.
“Who is she, anyway?” Sammy asked over his shoulder. “The bo— the deceased.”
“One of the lender’s people,” Randall said. “Name of Colleen Brown. The only other sensible one apart from Fisher. For that matter, I thought she was even more promising than Fisher. Didn’t seem to be on board with most of the crap they’ve been pulling. Which means if they wanted to frame poor Phinny Throckmorton, she’d be the perfect victim. Get rid of two thorns in their side in one move.”
“You think they did this to frame Mr. Throckmorton?” I asked.
He pointed to the barricades and then to the body.
“Looks like she was facing the barricade and fell back when she was shot,” he said. “I’ll leave it to the chief to figure out for sure, but on the surface it’s certainly supposed to look as if she was shot from down in the cellar. By someone who then tried to throw the gun outside and botched it, leaving the gun between the two barriers.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “Mr. Throckmorton would never have done anything like that.”
“That’s the point,” Randall said. “It’s a frame. We know that for damn sure. Proving it’s going to be another thing entirely.” He had moved a little closer to the body and was examining it as closely as he could without touching anything.
Just then my cell phone rang. Rob.
Chapter 8
“Meg, what’s going on out there?” he asked. The connection was faint and fragmented.
“Out there? Are you still in the cellar?”
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