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the range he spent keeping tuned up had paid off. He’d often questioned his need for carrying a gun and keeping in practice; he was a photographer now and that was what put bread on the table. But he’d spent a lifetime carrying a gun, and he felt incomplete without one. Lucky for him today he’d had one.
    Miller was damn good. Some kind of spec ops shooter before, the detective had said. Charley wondered. It would be good to talk to somebody with the same history. Maybe he should take Miller up on that cup of coffee. The younger man’s cockiness and self-assuredness put him off a little bit. Maybe he was feeling his age, and the younger man prickled his vanity, which he had to admit was considerable.
    Charley laughed and ran his fingers through his thinning hair, flecked with gray. Hell, he should buy Dale Miller a cup of coffee or a beer—after all, the young shooter had covered this old gray dog’s ass today, and done it well.
    And maybe he’d loan him a pistol.

MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE,
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
    Patrice Nordby had been a medical examiner in Minneapolis for ten years. In the hundreds of autopsies she’d performed, she’d seen the entire range of abuse that human beings could mete out on one another. But this was her first mass killing. She looked over the long row of bodies, stiff and cold on their gurneys, waiting for her attention in the City Morgue. She snapped the cuffs of her surgical gloves and got ready to work.
    “I’ll start with the boss,” she told her assistant. “Bring him on in.”
    The small chubby man, his face distorted from bullet wounds, his dental work shattered, was wheeled in and transferred to the autopsy table. Patrice reached up and adjusted the microphone above the table and began her initial examination. She measured the man and found him to be five feet, eight inches tall. He weighed one hundred ninety pounds. Something nagged at her when she had the height and weight.
    She called to her assistant. “Jerry? This one had the passport on him?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Did we get a copy of it?”
    “Right here.”
    Her assistant handed her a Xerox copy of the inside front page of the passport. The man in the picture looked like the man on the table, as battered as his face was. But the passport said the man was six feet, one inch tall, and weighed two hundred ten pounds. Something was wrong here.
    “Jerry? Get me the lead detective, will you?”

    Patrice went over her autopsy notes with the lead detective, Rocco Rococelli.
    “This isn’t the guy in the passport,” she said. “The passport says six feet one inch, this guy is five feet eight. The passport says two hundred ten pounds, this guy is one hundred ninety. He might have lost the weight, but you don’t lose five inches in height. The face looks the same, mangled as it is, but this is the kicker—he’s had plastic surgery.”
    “Plastic surgery?” Rocco said.
    “Yep,” Patrice said. “On his face. Expensive, too. Altered his looks and I’m betting it’s to make him look like the guy in the passport. If there is a Rhaman Uday, which is a funny name for a Honduran, it’s not this guy.”
    Rocco sighed. “Bad enough I got a mass shooting, I got to have a John Doe mystery, too. You sure on all this, Patrice?”
    “You know me. I’d go to court with what I’ve got.”
    “All right. Thanks.”
    Rocco slapped the covers of his notebook together and stuffed it back into the inside pocket of his wrinkled sport coat.
    “Damn it,” he said. “So just who do I have here?”

TORTURE REHABILITATION CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF
MINNESOTA CAMPUS, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
    Dr. Rowan Green looked out the window at the rolling green lawn, and the trees that hid a direct view of the river. She felt a tug to be outside in the summer warmth, but turned her attention back to her patient. Rhaman Uday sat across from her, his tall frame bent into an overstuffed chair beside a long couch. He plucked over and over again at a