Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(74)

Lucas talked to Chase again, but she was also on the way, from farther out, and hadn’t yet gotten to the school when they arrived. Lucas called Elmer Henderson, who was on his way to his office, and told him. Henderson made loud and meaningless noises and then told Lucas he would call Porter Smalls.

When they got to the school they found the playground taped off, students leaving down a funnel of rifle-armed local cops, to be picked up by a line of cars driven by panicked parents. The cops didn’t care about late-arriving marshals and directed Lucas to park a block away, in a dirt turnout next to a six-foot-wide creek.

When they got back to the school, nobody had time to talk. Lucas couldn’t even discover who was in charge, if anyone was, and Lucas got on the phone to Chase again. She was still twenty minutes out. Lucas said, “Call somebody here. Tell them to talk to me, for Christ’s sakes. They won’t even talk to us.”

“One minute,” she said.

One minute later, an FBI agent hustled up and asked, “Who’s Davenport?”

Lucas raised a hand and the agent said, “I’m temporarily the number-two guy here. I got people crawling out of my ass: what do you want?”

Lucas: “You got the shooter? Got any leads?”

“No and no.”

“Where’d the shot come from?”

“Not the parking structure.” He pointed. “That’s where the Secret Service guys grabbed the shooter yesterday. They were up there again, but never even heard the shot. They didn’t know anyone at the school had been shot until they were called and told about it.”

“So you have no idea where the shot came from?”

The agent waved impatiently across a wide arc of low hills and shrugged. “The kid was hit in the chest with an exit wound through his spine right between his shoulder blades. We don’t know how he was standing. He was in a circle of kids who were talking, moving around, changing positions. We’ll figure it out when we find where the bullet hit, probably in the ground behind him, but you know what that’s like. It’s gonna take a while. We got metal detectors on it, and so far we’ve found three pennies and a dime.”

“Hospital window?” Rae asked.

The agent looked toward the long row of windows on the hospital, as if nobody had even thought of it. “Can you get the windows open?” he asked.

Rae said, “I don’t know, but there are a heck of a lot of places in a hospital where you could hide a gun. With all the crap that comes in and out of those places, day and night . . .”

“I’ll ask,” the agent said. He took a long look at Rae, creator of this new and difficult possibility, then said, “I gotta get back.”

“Let’s go look,” Lucas said to Bob and Rae.

They drafted on the FBI agent’s urgency, staying close in a convoy, and nobody asked who they were or tried to stop them. Behind the school, the body was covered with a black plastic tarp, the kind only used to cover dead bodies. There were agents all over the place, but nobody was looking at it, except the three of them and the body was like a black puddle in the grass and seemed isolated and lonely.

Bob said quietly, “Bullet didn’t come from the hospital,” he said. “The guy would have to be crazy.”

“The guy is crazy,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, but . . .” Bob scratched his head. He and Lucas were both looking past the hospital, at the top of a hill well behind the hospital.

“The hill,” Lucas said. “Too far?”

“It’d be a hell of a shot,” Bob said. “Must be at least four or five hundred yards. Maybe longer.”

“Could explain why he shot the wrong kid,” Lucas said.

“And these guys are gun nuts,” Rae said. “Boone’s place yesterday—that was like a shooting school. He might be a hell of a shot.”



* * *



—

AT THAT MOMENT, a short blond woman in jeans and a raspberry blouse struggled round the corner of the school where she could see the black tarp and she screamed, “Jamie! Jamie!”

She was struggling because a female FBI agent had her by the arm, but the woman slashed at the agent with her fingernails and wrenched free and sprinted across the grassy swale between her and the tarp. An agent tried to get in her way but she eluded him and got to the tarp and snatched it away and Lucas could see the boy’s face: he lay faceup, pale, rigid, sightless, eyes half-open, lips bloodless, and the woman shrieked and went to her knees, hands in the air, a long vibrating aaiiiieeee . . .

Lucas took a step toward her but Rae caught his arm and whispered, “No!” and then the female agent caught up with the woman and went to her knees as well and wrapped an arm around the woman’s shoulders as the woman continued the echoing wail and some agents seemed unable to look away, and others seemed not to be able to look at all.

Lucas was caught by the sight of the kid’s paper-white face. Rae asked, “Lucas . . . you okay?”

Lucas mumbled, “He looks like my boy. He looks like Sam.”

Rae tugged at him: “Lucas, c’mon. C’mon.”

Lucas turned away and said to Bob and Rae, “There’s nothing here for us.”

“And I can’t look anymore,” Rae said; tears were running down her face, and behind them, the mother’s wail continued to vibrate around the schoolyard.