Certain Prey Read Online Free PDF

patrol, showed up ten minutes later. Fifteen cops stood around the emergency area now. The crowd was beginning to gather. “I was all the way down by the goddamn airport,” he told Lucas. His uniform showed sweat rings under his armpits. “How is he?”
    Lucas briefed him quickly, then Sloan came over and said, “The chaplain’s on his way to Baily’s house. He oughta notify the old lady in the next five minutes or so.”
    Lucas nodded and looked back at Thorn: “Can you hold the fort here? I ran over because Rose Marie is gone and I knew you and Lester were out of the house. But he’s sort of your guy.”
    Thorn nodded: “I’ll take it. You going over to the scene?”
    “For a minute or two,” Lucas said. “I want to get a picture in my head.”
    Thorn nodded and said, “You know what picture I can’t get in my head? Baily Dobbs getting shot. Last goddamn . . .”
    “Guy in the world,” Lucas finished for him. I F THE EMERGENCY ROOM had seemed unnaturally calm, the Sixth Street parking ramp looked like a law enforcement convention: a dozen homicide and uniform cops, medical examiner’s personnel, a deputy mayor, the parking garage manager and two possible witnesses were standing in the skyway-level elevator lobby and the stairwell above it.
    Lucas nodded at one of the uniform cops controlling the traffic, and he and Sloan poked their heads into the stairwell. Marcy Sherrill and Tom Black were going through the victim’s purse. The victim herself was lying on the stairs, at their feet. Her skirt was pulled up over her ample thighs, showing nude panty hose. One hand bent awkwardly away from her face—she might have broken her arm when she landed, Lucas thought—and her eyes were frozen half open. A pool of blood coagulated under her still-perfect hairdo. Her face was vaguely familiar; she looked like she might have been a nice lady.
    Sherrill turned and saw Lucas and said, shyly, “Hi.” “Hey,” Lucas said, nodding. He and Sherrill had ended a six-week romance: or as Sherrill put it, Forty Days and Forty Nights of Sex & Disputation. They were now in the awkward phase of no longer seeing each other while they were still working together. “Looks nasty,” he added. The stairwell smelled of damp concrete overlaid with the coppery odor of blood and human intestinal gas, which was leaking out of the body.
    Sherrill glanced down at the body and said, “Gonna be a strange one.”
    “Swanson said she was executed,” Sloan said.
    “She was, big-time,” said Black. They all looked down at the body, arranged around their feet like a puddle. “I can see seven entry wounds, but no exits. You don’t need to be no forensic scientist to see that the gun was close—maybe an inch away.”
    “Who is she?” Lucas said.
    “Barbara Paine Allen. She’s got a notify card in her purse, looks like her husband’s a lawyer.”
    “I know her face from somewhere, and the name rings a bell,” Lucas said. “I think she might be somebody. ”
    Sherrill and Black both nodded, and Sherrill muttered, “Great.” L UCAS SQUATTED next to the dead woman for a moment, looking at her head. The bullet wounds were small and tidy, as though she’d been repeatedly stabbed with a pencil. There were two wounds high on the back of her head, and a cluster of five in her temple. Her heart had kept pumping for a while after she landed; a thin stream of drying blood ran down from each of the holes. The seven thin streams were neatly defined, which meant that she hadn’t moved after she hit the stairs. Professional, and very tidy, Lucas thought. He stood up and asked the other two, “You got witnesses? Besides Baily?”
    “Baily said that the shooter was a redheaded woman, and we’ve got two people who say they saw a redheaded woman walking away from the scene close to the time of the shooting. No good description. She was wearing sunglasses, they said. Both of them said she was wiping her nose or sneezing into a