Catherine Coulter - Backfire

Ramsey’s eyes were closed. He knew his wife and his daughter were standing next to him, but his brain seemed to be operating on a twenty-watt. He decided that was okay for the moment, a fair trade-off for the pain in his chest being magically gone, thanks to a shot of morphine. He opened his eyes as they approached and said in a slurred voice, “Eve?”

Eve, still hurting despite the pain pill, made herself walk upright and not hobble to his bed. He looked shell-shocked, she thought, as if the wild shoot-out in the elevator couldn’t really have happened. She understood completely. She placed her fingers on his forearm and smiled down at him. “I’m here, Ramsey. No need to worry about me. I might look on the scruffy side, but all my working parts are operating fine. Looks like you’re okay, too.

“We have some news for you, if you haven’t already heard. We shot him, Ramsey, and we found his blood in the elevator shaft, and that means we’ll have his DNA. There’s a really good chance we’ll identify him.” Eve looked over at Dr. Kardak, and raised a questioning eyebrow. The doctor nodded his consent for her to keep talking to Ramsey.

“Was it this Sue person?”

“We don’t know yet, but it’s possible. On the security video, he looks like maybe an older guy, but that could have been a disguise. I’m just glad we were all so lucky.”

Molly touched Eve’s arm. “I will owe you forever.”

“Me too, Aunt Eve,” Emma said, swallowing down tears.

Marshal Carney Maynard came running through the door, Virginia Trolley on his heels. Maynard studied Ramsey, then, satisfied, said, “There’s a media frenzy downstairs. My guys and hospital security have cordoned off the elevators, and we’re putting security stations around the floor. We’ll hope it works to keep them out. And I called Cheney Stone. He’ll be here any minute. Maybe we can talk him into making a statement.”

Better him than me, Savich thought.

Virginia Trolley said, shaking her head, “Our police commissioner will probably beat him to it. She’s always eager to be the face of law enforcement in the city.”

Savich said, “Ramsey.”

When Ramsey focused on Savich’s face, Savich continued, “I know you’re close to floating up on the ceiling, but you’re the one who had the unusual visual perspective, looking up. Can you tell us what you saw?”

Ramsey wondered for a moment-had someone said something to him? He looked at all of them, then focused again on Savich. Yes, Savich had asked him to speak. He had to think about that. He willed away some of the mental confusion, and everything became clear, too clear, really. “Eve had her hand on my arm, Eddie was talking about the Forty-niners, and then I saw the roof hatch lift and I caught a glimpse of a face staring down at me, but only for a split second, right before all the smoke and gunfire-” He lost himself in the words, but that was all right, because in the next second the rest of him was lost as well.

Marshal Maynard said, “Your forensic team has five slugs from the Kevlar vests, all of them from a Kel Tec PF-9, chambered for the nine-millimeter Luger cartridge. As you know, it’s the lightest and flattest nine-millimeter ever made and has a single stack holding seven rounds. That means he had three or four magazines with him and he was fast changing them out.”

Eve looked at her boss. “If you hadn’t insisted on Kevlar vests for everyone-” She stopped, which was okay, because everyone in the room knew what she meant.

SAC Cheney Stone’s office

Federal Building

Thirteenth floor

San Francisco

Sunday morning

Five-foot-nothing veteran forensic blood expert Mimi Cutler rushed into the room, her wrinkled lab coat flapping, her short spiked dark hair sticking up at odd angles where she’d run her fingers through it countless times throughout more hours than she wanted to count. But she was smiling, and that made Sherlock’s heart leap. She looked ready to make everyone’s day.

Cutler caught her breath, smoothed her hair, straightened her coat, and beamed at the people in the office. She waved a sheaf of photos in her hand. “After a wild and hairy all-nighter, here you go, hot off the press.” She fanned herself. “Okay, let me back up. The very first thing we did when we arrived at the scene yesterday was collect all the samples of the shooter’s blood. We processed some of the blood, then ran the DNA through the CODIS and bang!-look at this photo, it just came through my email.” She beamed as she handed each of them a copy. “Here’s our shooter.”

All of them stared at an eight-by-ten colored police booking photograph of a young bruiser who looked like he’d lost a fight-his face was a mass of blotched purple-and-green bruises, his split swollen lips dark red with dried blood. His head was shaved bald and sat on a neck that looked wider than Sherlock’s waist. The height chart behind him showed he was six foot four inches, and he looked like he had to weigh two hundred and sixty pounds. “His name is Paul, aka Boozer, Gordon. He’s an amateur boxer, has anger management issues. It looks like he lost a fight the night he was booked, doesn’t it? He’s been arrested and jailed for assault three times to date. He lives here in the city, on Clayton.” She beamed at them.

There was dead silence in Cheney’s office.

“What? We’ve identified your guy! What’s wrong?”

Harry said, “Sorry, Mimi, but we don’t think this is our shooter. Our shooter is lots older, lots shorter, weighs maybe half what this guy weighs, and his neck is about as thick of one of this guy’s wrists.”

“But this is an exact match; the probabilities are off the wall. You’ve got to be wrong.”

“I guess it’s time to back up again, Mimi,” Sherlock said. “I don’t suppose there’s a chance of a lab error, or a mix-up with the samples?” She added with a smile, “Maybe more than one person’s blood?”

“Naturally not,” Mimi said, not appeased by the smile. “I collected the blood myself, and we ran samples from three different sites. All the samples matched.”

Savich said, “Let’s find this guy. Cheney, can you get some people working on his last known address? And Sherlock, get on the phone to the hospital, find out if Paul Boozer Gordon was there this week, maybe as some kind of patient?”

Mimi grabbed her hair and tugged on it. “A patient? How would a patient’s blood get in the elevator shaft?”

There was only one possibility, Savich thought, far-fetched, but still. He said slowly, “Mimi, did you happen to test the blood samples for traces of heparin?”

“Heparin? No, why?”

Savich said, “There’s lots of blood in a hospital-in the blood bank, in the laboratories, at nursing stations waiting to be picked up. And that includes heparinized blood that wouldn’t clot right away. You wouldn’t be able to tell as easily if the blood was older, that it was planted there, would you?”

“Are you telling me the shooter brought the blood with him into the elevator shaft? Someone else’s blood, to plant on the scene? That he added heparin to the blood to fool me? Do you realize that would mean this frigging shooter would understand blood analysis ? You’re saying he purposefully set out to mislead us? To mislead me ?” She paused for a moment, her rocket brain filling in the possibilities. “Goodness, even if he actually managed to get hold of someone else’s blood, think of how careful he had to be to leave blood splattered at the scene in a way that wouldn’t be spotted by the forensic team as looking wrong. All that work, all that study and practice-for what? Nothing, really.”