One Shot Read Free Page B

structure directly facing the KIAs.' A warren, Emerson thought. A damn rat's nest. 'The TV people are here,' the Marine said. Shit, Emerson thought.
    'Are you in uniform?' he asked.
    'Full dress, sir. For the recruiting office.'
    'OK, do your best to keep order until my guys get there.'
     
    'Roger that, sir.'
    Then the line went dead and Emerson heard his despatcher's breathing again. TV people and a crazy man with a rifle, he thought. Shit, shit, shit. Pressure and scrutiny and second guessing, like every other place that ever had TV people and a crazy man with a rifle. He hit the switch that gave him the all-cars radio net.
    'All units, listen up,' he said. 'This was a lone nutcase with a long gun.
    Probably an automatic weapon. Indiscriminate firing in a public place.
    Possibly from the new part of the parking garage. So either he's still in there, or he's already in the wind. If he left, it was either on foot or in a vehicle. So all units that are more than ten blocks out, stop now and lock down a perimeter. Nobody enters or exits, OK? No vehicles, no pedestrians, nobody under any circumstances. All units that are closer than ten blocks, proceed inward with extreme caution. But do not let him get away. Do not miss him. This is a must-win, people. We need this guy today, before CNN gets all over us.'
    The man in the minivan thumbed the button on the remote on the visor and the garage door rumbled upward. He drove inside and thumbed the button again and the door came down after him. He shut the engine off and sat still for a moment. Then he got out of the van and walked through the mud room and on into the kitchen. He patted the dog and turned on the television.
    Paramedics in full body armour went in through the back of the library. Two of them stayed inside to check for injuries among the sheltering crowd. Four of them came out the front and ran crouched through the plaza and ducked behind the wall. They crawled towards the bodies and confirmed they were all DOA.
    Then they stayed right there. Flat on the ground and immobile next to the corpses. No unnecessary exposure until the garage has been searched, Emerson had said.
    Emerson double-parked two blocks from the plaza and told a uniformed sergeant to direct the search of the parking garage, from the top down, from the southwest corner. The uniforms cleared the fourth level, and then the third. Then the second. Then the first. The old part was problematical. It was badly lit and full of parked cars, and every car represented a potential hiding place.
    A guy could be inside one, or under one, or behind one.
    But they didn't find anybody. They had no real problem with the new construction. It wasn't lit at all, but there were no parked cars in that part. The patrolmen simply came down the stairwell and swept each level in turn with flashlight beams.
    Nobody there.
    The sergeant relaxed and called it in.
    'Good work,' Emerson said.
    And it was good work. The fact that they searched from the southwest corner outward left the northeast corner entirely untouched. Nothing was disturbed.
    So by good luck or good judgement the PD had turned in an immaculate performance in the first phase of what would eventually be seen as an immaculate investigation from beginning to end.
    By seven o'clock in the evening it was going dark and Ann Yanni had been on the air eleven times. Three of them network, eight of them local. Personally she was a little disappointed with that ratio. She was sensitive to a little scepticism coming her way from the network editorial offices. If it bleeds, it leads, was any news organization's credo, but this bleeding was way out there, far from New York or LA. It wasn't happening in some manicured suburb of Washington D.C. It had a tinge of weirdo-from-the-heartland about it. There was no real possibility that anyone important would walk through this guy's cross hairs. So it was not really prime time stuff. And in truth Ann didn't have much to offer.
     
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