Backfire

The last people Eve wanted to see here came running up in the next moment. She walked toward them, away from the elevator, and said quickly, “Emma, Molly, Ramsey’s all right. The doctors took him back to his new room. He wasn’t hurt, I swear. He’s okay.”

Emma clung to her mother and swallowed, but she couldn’t stop shaking. Neither could Molly. Emma stared at Eve and the drifting dirty smoke, and then she looked toward the elevator. “How can everything be okay, Aunt Eve? I can see the blood.”

“I’m not lying to you, Emma.”

Emma still stared into the bloody elevator.

One very old man called out from a doorway, “Is Judge Dredd dead?”

Emma turned on him. “Don’t you say such a thing! My daddy’s fine.”

Eve said, “Some people were hurt, Emma, but not your dad. I promise.”

They looked up to see Dr. Kardak walking toward them. He said, more to Emma and Molly than to them, “Judge Hunt is well. We’re all a little shaken, but we’ve checked him out thoroughly, and he wasn’t injured. We’re settling him in his new room.” He gestured toward Molly. “I suggest, Mrs. Hunt, that you and Emma stay here a while longer before you come back.

“As for you, Deputy Barbieri, I understand you were injured. You need to come with me.”

Once they stood in an empty hospital room, Dr. Kardak said to Eve, “Take off the vest, Deputy Barbieri. Let’s see the damage.”

When Eve and Dr. Kardak came out a few minutes later, three pairs of eyes fastened on them. The doctor said, “She won’t be having much fun for a couple of days; there’s going to be a lot of bruising from the impacts. I didn’t feel any cracked ribs, and that’s good. We’re going to get an X-ray to be sure.” He pulled a pad out of his coat pocket and wrote a pain prescription for her. A nurse trotted over and handed her a pill. “Take this, it’ll help.” She closed her hand over Eve’s wrist. “Thank you for saving Judge Hunt.”

San Francisco General Hospital

Hospital security chief Ron Martinez walked into the small security office off the hospital lobby, where Savich, Sherlock, Harry, and Eve sat in folding chairs waiting for him. He loaded a disk into the office computer and almost immediately paused it and pointed. “We think this is our guy, based on when and where he left, but we can’t be sure. I had the tech start this at the beginning, where we think he came in, because, unfortunately, that’s most of what we got. He walks straight to the two elevators on the right, no hesitation, like he knows exactly where he’s going. Less attention from anyone at the reception desk that way.”

Martinez reversed the disk and paused it where the camera got a close-up.

They stared at a man of indeterminate age wearing loose pants, sneakers, a loose navy Windbreaker, dark sunglasses, and a Giants ball cap.

“Bingo,” Harry said. “He fits the description of the guy we’ve been looking for.”

“He’s well disguised,” Eve said. “He knows you’re getting him on film. He’s not even trying to avoid the cameras, and I’ll bet he knows where every one of them is. He looks middle-aged to me. What do you think?”

“Maybe older,” Harry said. “Thin, maybe about five-foot-nine. I can’t see his face or his hair with the sunglasses and the pulled-down cap, but we get a glimpse there of part of his neck—does his neck look saggy to anyone?”

“An elderly assassin?” Martinez’s eyebrow shot up.

Savich said quietly, “Listen, it might even be a woman.”

Martinez’s other thick black eyebrow shot up. “A woman? In a shoot-out like that?”

Savich said, “Since we’ve got DNA, we’ll soon know everything about him or her, including the time of birth. That is, if he’s in the system.”

“Or about Sue,” Eve said.

Chief Martinez pressed the play button again. “Sorry, guys, but we don’t have cameras on the roof of the hospital where he accessed the elevators.” He fast-forwarded. “The next time we have him on camera, he’s exiting the west stairwell into the lobby and waltzing out of the hospital. This is within a couple of minutes of the shooting.” A new camera angle showed the shooter walking quickly out of one of the hospital entrances on the west side.

“But look at this. He’s holding his arm. That’s got to be where they hit him.”

Sherlock said, “Yes, and the Windbreaker covers any blood.”

Chief Martinez told them the security people, SFPD officers, and deputy marshals were showing hard copies of the photos of the shooter to everyone who might have seen him, questioning the garage attendants, even people on the street. It was plain to see no one held out much hope of that happening, but on the other hand, it was worth a try.