Past Crimes Read Free Page A

looked at Guerin. “I need to follow him to Harborview.”
    He thought about it. I knew he was going to check out my story from stem to stern and back again before he crossed me off as his primary suspect. If he ever did.
    “Do you have a cell phone?” Guerin said. I gave him the number. I saw that the phone had one of my fingerprints on it, in Dono’s blood, from when I’d started to dial 911.
    “Who called for help?” I said.
    Kanellis nodded. “A neighbor heard a gunshot. They called 911.” He was careful to avoid mentioning the sex of the neighbor. Which meant it was probably a woman.
    “But I didn’t hear the shot,” I said. “Even though I parked and walked almost halfway up the block to get to the house. So the shooting happened at least a couple of minutes before I came through the door.”
    Guerin considered it. “All right,” he said.
    I glanced at the open back door. “The guy was still inside when I came in. Why stay in the house that long? What was he doing?”
    “Tossing the place?” Kanellis said. “Looking for cash? Or something to sell?”
    I didn’t answer. Guerin didn’t either. Maybe he was thinking the same thing I was. The shooter would have to be batshit crazy if he were searching the house after shooting Dono, with the front door still wide open. Or he was one ice-veined son of a bitch.
    “I’ll be at Harborview,” I said.
    “We’ll meet you there,” said Guerin, “after our team is finished with the scene.”
    “Don’t leave town,” Kanellis said. His partner exhaled, almost a sigh.
    The lab rats had taped off the front room. One was taking photographs, and the rest were spreading fingerprint dust on everything. I grabbed an old barn jacket from a hook in the foyer and walked out.
    Out on the street, clumps of people stood around the cluster of police cruisers and unmarked vehicles. Neighbors, holding their coffees. Early-morning joggers, pausing to watch the show.
    “Hey!” one of them yelled as I ran back to the Charger. “What’s going on?”
    I wished to hell I knew.

CHAPTER THREE
    T HE WORST INJURIES IN Seattle, and usually the western half of the state, headed straight for Harborview’s trauma center. If Harborview couldn’t help you, the next option was the morgue.
    The admitting-desk receptionist told me Dono was in surgery. No, there wasn’t any news of his condition. He was Patient ID 918. She said they’d let the doctors know I was there, once they came out.
    The waiting room had a few dozen black-and-gray plastic chairs, arranged around low tables with stacks of donated magazines. People had pulled the chairs together to huddle in close groups, like prayer circles. Nobody was reading the magazines. There was a flat-screen monitor on the wall that told where patients were. I waited until the display cycled through to read “918—Surgery Begun.”
    I claimed a chair and sat. And stared at the cream-colored wall.
    I’d spent a lot of time in hospitals. Twice from my own bad spins of the wheel. The first had been at Walter Reed when I was twenty years old, after my face had been redecorated. The second bought me that desk duty during the last two months, when my forearm caught a whirring piece of shrapnel right as our platoon was being lifted out of the extraction point in Kandahar.
    In between those two visits, I’d logged a few hundred hours in waitingrooms, while buddies or my own men were under the knife. Sitting silently with the rest of our unit, none of us daring to tempt fate by saying it was going to be okay. Those hours were a hell of a lot worse than being in a hospital bed myself.
    The very worst time, the reigning King of Bad, was the one I hardly remembered. I was six years old. I didn’t know how I’d come to be there, in the ER. I stood in a room a lot like this one while people I didn’t know whispered and cried around me. And then my grandfather was standing there.
    I had only met him a few times. He was always a little scary. He