Val couldn’t reach Jan by phone, so she ran up two flights of stairs to the WAVE HQ office. She interrupted Jan’s senior staff meeting with Petroni and Shannon O’Reilly, none of whom had yet heard the news.
“How the hell can you run so fast after the beating you took last night?” Jan huffed and puffed as she struggled to keep up with Val on the way to the car. “Hey, don’t look so surprised. You have cuts and bruises all over your face. I can only imagine what the rest of you looks like.”
“I don’t feel a thing right now,” Val said over her shoulder. “Must be the adrenaline.” She jumped into the driver’s seat and buckled in.
“I’ll grant Simpson one thing.” Jan got in the other side. “Mass shooters tend not to repeat this soon. Maybe it is a copycat, after all.”
“If so, it’s a damned good copy. Same MO, down to the source of the threats 24 hours before.”
“How about, unlike Simpson, we keep an open mind?” Jan said. “At least until we get some hard evidence.”
“My gut tells me it’s the same guy,” Val said, “but okay.”
Planned Parenthood’s facility wasn’t far. With sirens blaring, Val sped through the city streets at well above the posted 25 miles-per-hour limit, swerving around cars and bicyclists too slow to pull over to the side. She got so focused on getting there fast that, a few blocks from the facility, she needed to swerve to avoid hitting a pedestrian.
“That guy looks familiar,” Jan said. “Is he the guy we interviewed at your dojo?”
Val risked a glance back over her shoulder, getting a better look at the athletic, short-haired man. “That kind of looks like Tank. Hard to tell with that hat on. What the hell would he be doing here?”
“I’ll call it in and get him picked up. You keep driving.”
Moments later, Val skidded to a stop about fifty feet from the driveway to the Planned Parenthood parking lot. A pair of uniformed cops were stringing yellow crime scene tape, blocking the street on either side of the building.
The scene brought back a mental image—one that her therapist insisted on calling a “reconstructed memory.” One she hadn’t witnessed in person, but saw on television, in newspapers, and in her then-thirteen-year-old imagination dozens of times.
A shopping center, cordoned off with crime scene tape. Chaos on the ground, with cops and medics and ordinary people running in every direction, shouting. Inside the structure, bodies and blood, and the last breath her uncle Valentin took.
Jan, already standing on the street with the passenger door open, ducked her head inside the car. “You coming, or are you going to investigate from inside the car?”
“Sorry.” Val shook off the memory, but not the feeling of sadness and loss—and imminent danger. She got out of the cruiser and scanned the scene again with fresh eyes. It looked nothing like a shopping center. Just a busy city street lined with two- and three-story buildings, which happened to house a major crime scene.
She recognized one of the cops emerging from the parking lot in the rear of the building—her old partner. “Rico! What’s the sitch?”
Rico Lopez shaded his eyes to see who’d called him and waved Val over. As she approached, the sound of a woman screaming grew louder. She spotted the woman lying on the ground near the building’s rear entry doors, clutching her leg, bleeding.
“Three victims, none fatal,” Rico said. “That’s one. We moved two others with more serious injuries inside for safety. Ambulance is on the way.”
“Who’s in charge?” Jan said, hustling up behind Val.
“Simpson will be, if he ever gets here,” Rico said. “Right now it’s all uniforms. This only happened twenty minutes ago.”
“I’m the senior detective on the scene for now, then,” Jan said. “Anyone get sight of the shooter?”
Rico pointed to a uniformed cop, surrounded by a cluster of civilians at the edge of the crime scene. “Um, maybe one of those guys did. Go on, I’ve got to finish establishing the perimeter.” He shuffled off with his partner, stringing tape and wrapping it around fence posts, bike racks, and any other suitable objects they could find.
Val and Jan approached the cluster of witnesses. They didn’t quite make it before another police cruiser lurched to a screeching halt in the middle of the parking lot, siren blaring. An angry Ed Simpson emerged from the car, still carrying his blue tackle box, yelling at them. “What are you two idiots doing here? Get the fuck off my crime scene!”
“As I tried to explain a few minutes ago,” Val said, “we’re assigned to coordinate efforts on this case with the WAVE Squad.”
“You got a problem with that, take it up with Chief McMahon,” Jan said. “Otherwise, get out of our way and let us do our jobs.”
Simpson glared at them a moment, then let his shoulders droop. “Fine, then. Don’t forget, your job is to assist in the investigation. Which means you do what I say. Go get me some fucking coffee and donuts.”
“How does that help with coordination?” Val said, seething.
Simpson responded with a haughty laugh. “Stay out of the way. That’ll help the rest of us stay coordinated. If you need to report back, I suggest you take good notes.”
“I took good notes, connecting Friday’s shooting with another case. You refused to listen to them,” Val shot back. “Now we have another mass shooting, similar to Friday’s—”
“That’s where you’re wrong, rookie.” Simpson slipped an unlit cigarette between his lips. “A mass shooting is four or more victims. Here we’ve only got three, and no DBs.”
DBs. Dead Bodies. How heartless. Val opened her mouth to object to the cold characterization, but Simpson rolled on. “Got any other ‘expertise’ to share, ladies?”
Again Val started to speak up. Jan caught her eye, shaking her head. She was right: this was no time to start a war, especially over semantics.
“Detective?” Rico appeared between them. “The EMTs need assistance inside with the victims. Perhaps these two fine officers can help in there?”
Simpson shrugged. “Fine. Keep them out of my sight.” He stalked off, barking orders at some other imagined screw-up.
“The victims are all women,” Lopez said, walking with them toward the front entrance. “One white female in her thirties, a Black female in her mid-twenties, and an Asian female, forties or fifties. That’s the one that needs help, and her daughter is losing her shit. The first responders want us to interview her, see if she knows anything—mostly to babysit her and get her out of their hair.”
“So, women’s work,” Val muttered. “You fucking guys.”
“At least we’ll be helping,” Jan said. “Thanks, Rico. We’ll do it.”
Val followed Jan into the building and nearly lost it when she spotted the young Asian woman crying into the arms of a white, bearded Emergency Medical Technician in blue scrubs. No longer as hysterical as Rico had described, the woman’s clothes, hands, and face were covered in blood. On a stretcher next to her lay another Asian woman with similar features, a generation older. A white bandage wrapped around her midsection showed a large splotch of blood, and more blood stained the older woman’s pants and shirt.
However, it wasn’t the blood that spooked Val. It was the identity of the younger woman, whom Val recognized in an instant.
“Maya!” Val rushed over to her.
Hearing her name, Maya released the EMT and opened her arms to hug Val.
Given the circumstances, Val set aside her discomfort with the embrace and returned it, patting Maya’s shoulders. “Are you hurt?” she asked.
Maya shook her head, her entire body shaking. “My mom…got shot. We heard gunfire and she…she knocked me down and covered me with her b-body. She’s lost so much blood!”
Flashing lights and another siren outside signaled the emergency transport had arrived. “Let’s get her into the ambulance,” the male EMT said to his partner, a young Black woman also in blue scrubs. They lifted the stretcher onto a gurney, which rose to about waist height with the press of a lever, and pushed it toward the door.
“Where are you taking her?” Maya said. “I want to go with her!”
“That’s fine.” The female EMT turned to Val. “You want to come too? You can help keep her calm and maybe debrief her on the way.”
Jan nodded to Val. “Do it. I’ll check on the other victim and then I’ll swing by Mercy Hospital to bring you back here.”
Maya sat next to the stretcher in the back of the ambulance, holding her mother’s hand. Val sat next to Maya. The female EMT monitored Maya’s mother’s condition while the other EMT drove like a madman down Clayton’s bumpy streets toward the hospital.
“We’re less than ten minutes away,” the EMT said with a smile to Maya. “Your mother’s pulse is stable and the bleeding is slowing. She’s going to be fine. You’ll see.”
“They were shooting at me.” Maya squeezed Val’s hand, crying. “My mother—we could’ve been killed!”
“Did you see the shooter?” Val asked.
Maya shook her head, then let go of Val’s hand to blow her nose. “It happened too fast. My mom must have, though, because she shielded me from him.”
Val glanced at Maya’s mother, her face covered with an oxygen mask, unconscious. She’d taken a bullet for her daughter. Incredible. Who would do this to them?
The image of seeing Tank flee the scene a few minutes before flooded back to her. “Maya, did you mention your plans to come here this morning to Tank?”
Maya’s eyes went wide, then a puzzled expression occupied her face. “Tank? No. I…said nothing about any of this.”
“And so far as you know, no one else told him?”
“I can’t think of anyone,” Maya said. “You’re the only person I told, other than my mom and my doctor.”
“So he had no reason to be here today?”
Maya shook her head again, her lips tight, tears again burgeoning in her eyes.
Val’s mind raced. At that hour on a Thursday morning, Tank should have been opening the dojo, preparing for the walk-in class.
Instead, he appeared to be fleeing the scene of an attempted murder.
Stafford cursed for the twentieth time that morning, hammering the wheel of his delivery truck. So much went wrong with this mission. So many things.
Little things, mostly. But little things added up.
And one big thing.
The big thing: his shooting. He knew, without having to hear it again and again on the radio, that he’d missed. Not completely. But bad. Two flat-out misses, the second one because the target moved. Three shots struck their targets.
Yet not with fatal results. One, the Asian woman that protected her daughter or friend, might bleed out if left unattended. The other two hits appeared superficial. A leg and a shoulder. They’d live.
No hearts, no heads, no lungs, no spinal cords. A horrible day of shooting. His worst ever.
He wanted to blame it on lack of sleep—less than four hours the night before. Yet even he didn’t buy that. Nor would anyone else. Sniper training included shoots during periods of extreme fatigue, thirst, and hunger. He wouldn’t call his condition anything close to extreme.
The second problem: in his haste to escape, he’d left behind a shell casing. A stupid mistake, although perhaps not a fatal one. The cops would find nothing on it, not even a fingerprint. Ballistics might trace the shell back to his weapon. However, that would lead to a dead end. According to official records, the Army destroyed it a decade before. The registration belonged to a man who lay buried hundreds of miles away with no documented connection to Stafford Allen Ray. The beauty of dark web commerce.
But it showed he’d gotten careless. That, he couldn’t afford.
Third: he’d looked right into that damned security camera. They’d have a full-frontal image of his face.
Would his disguise, hat, and sunglasses hide his identity? Would the modified license plate and truck lettering throw them off enough? Would it matter, if they couldn’t tell the real numbers and company name anyway?
Uncertainty reigned.
Uncertainty was not his friend.