style="font-size:15px;"> He came back shaking his head. “That woman is ninety if she’s a day. She called me ‘sonny.’”
His chagrin improved her mood. “You probably look like a kid to her.”
He held the license as though it were poison ivy. “Can you believe she still has one?” he said, passing it to her. “Doesn’t she have kids or grandkids to ride herd on her?”
“Would you let yours tell you what to do?” Nell asked, picking up the microphone.
Grandma—or Great-Grandma—turned out to have a dozen unpaid traffic tickets and outstanding warrants. Out of curiosity, Nell strolled back with Hugh to get a look at the feisty eighty-eight-year-old. So tiny she could barely see over the dashboard, she had delicate skin crumpled like tissue paper and vague blue eyes that sharpened when given the news that she wouldn’t be driving away from this stop.
“I drive just fine!” she snapped. “That light was yellow when I started across the intersection. You’re the one who needs your eyes examined, sonny.”
Hugh beat an undignified retreat, Nell hiding a grin as she followed. In the car, they waited for a patrol unit to arrive and finally handed her over with intense gratitude.
“I can’t throw a woman her age in jail,” the patrol officer was whining as they waved and pulled away.
Hugh’s hands relaxed on the steering wheel. “I need more sleep to cope with senile old ladies.”
“I feel sorry for her,” Nell admitted. “She’ll lose her license this time for sure.”
He gave her an incredulous stare. “She’s a menace with that damn boat of a car.”
“But that car is her freedom.” Nell caught his gaze and interpreted it correctly. “Of course we have to take her license. I’m not arguing! I’m just saying I sympathize with her. Who wants to wake up one day and say, ‘Gosh, I’d better not get myself to the store or the doctor anymore. I’ll just depend on other people’s kindness from now on.’”
Hugh squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Can’t we just make a traffic stop without delving into the life problems of everyone we ticket?”
She opened her mouth, closed it. Opened it again. “I’m just saying…”
“I know what you’re saying,” he snapped. “I heard you.”
They drove the five blocks to the Joplin Building in thick silence.
“Oh, hell,” said Hugh again, as it came in sight. The sidewalk was thick was reporters who surged toward the police car before it came to a stop.
“Were you on the SWAT team that first went in yesterday?” reporters yelled. A forest of microphones surrounded Hugh and Nell as they moved grimly toward the front steps. “Can you describe the scene?”
“Was there one killer? Can you confirm rumors that he’s dead?”
“We’re working a crime scene,” Hugh said. “I’m sorry, we can’t comment.”
They broke out of the crowd and gratefully ducked under yellow tape, Nell a little shaken by the shoving bodies, the heavy TV cameras and the urgency of the demands. Port Dare had catapulted into the national news.
The instant they walked into the lobby, Captain Fisher stalked toward them. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Old lady ran a red light right in front of us,” Hugh said expressionlessly. “Sir.”
“Goddamn it, you’re not on patrol!”
Hugh said nothing; of course they couldn’t have let a serious violation like that slide.
He scowled, looking more than ever like a bulldog. “Get the hell upstairs for your assignment!”
They were able to ride one of the elevators; the second was still disabled until the evidence techs were done with it. Alone with him, Nell stared straight ahead as if she were enclosed with a stranger and meeting his gaze was bad manners if not dangerous. But when the doors began to open, she hesitated, not in any hurry to offer her memory banks a second glimpse of the horrors she’d gotten drunk to forget.
It seemed to her that Hugh hesitated as well. His back looked rigid when he went ahead of her. Nell took a deep breath and made herself buck up—she was a police officer. Which didn’t prevent a wash of relief when she saw that the receptionist’s body no longer slumped over her broad desk.
A bagged body on a gurney was waiting to be wheeled onto the elevator.
“What’s the count?” Hugh asked a lieutenant, nodding at the gurney.
“Twelve.” His mouth twisted. “Another one died this morning at Mercy.”
Nell let out a breath. To have miraculously survived the carnage and then die on an operating table or in a hospital bed seemed unbearably cruel.
“Three others are in critical condition.”
“All for what?” Hugh asked. He made a sound in his throat. “Let’s get busy.”
They spent the next hours running tape measures, sketching rooms and hallways and the angles at which bodies had fallen or weaponry had been abandoned. No mysteries in the blood spatter patterns—all were consistent with the victims having been shot with automatic fire at close range.
Nell remembered to call Kim—via the boyfriend’s cell phone—to inform her that she wouldn’t be home for dinner.
“Is Colin taking you out?” she asked.
“Mrs. Cooper said I could have dinner with them,” Kim told her. “We’ll be chaperoned, Mom.”
Nell ignored the sarcasm. “Be sure and thank her.”
“Mo-ther.”
She sighed. “Sorry.”
Her daughter’s voice became tentative. “Are you at the Joplin Building?”
Hugh, waiting a few feet away, watched her, which made Nell edgy.
“Unfortunately.”
“Is it…is it really gross?”
Nell’s gaze was inexorably pulled to the dark stain down the hall. She stripped her voice of emotion. “That’s one way to put it.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “I’ve got to go, Kim. I won’t be in until late tonight. I assume we’ll be back on regular shifts tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Kim said, sounding subdued. “I love you, Mom.”
Tears stung her eyes. “I love you, too.”
Hugh’s astonishingly blue eyes met Nell’s as she stowed her cell phone. “Your kid?”
“Daughter. Kim’s sixteen.”
“Do you have others?”
