2
CHAPTER
“WHY AM I always the one in the wrong place at the wrong time?” Kate Conlan muttered to herself.
First day back from what had technically been a vacation—a guilt-forced trip to visit her parents in hell's amusement park (Las Vegas)—she was late for work, had a headache, wanted to strangle a certain sex crimes sergeant for spooking one of her clients—a screw-up
Now this. A twitcher.
No one else seemed to notice him prowling the edge of the spacious atrium of the Hennepin County Government Center like a nervous cat. Kate made the guy for late thirties, no more than a couple of inches past her own five-nine, medium-to-slender build. Wound way too tight. He'd likely suffered some kind of personal or emotional setback recently—lost his job or his girlfriend. He was either divorced or separated; living on his own, but not homeless. His clothes were rumpled, but not castoffs, and his shoes were too good for homeless. He was sweating like a fat man in a sauna, but he kept his coat on as he paced around and around the new piece of sculpture littering the hall—a symbolic piece of pretension fashioned from melted-down handguns. He was muttering to himself, one hand hanging on to the open front of his heavy canvas jacket. A hunter's coat. His inner emotional strain tightened the muscles of his face.
Kate slipped off her loose-heeled shoe and stepped out of the other one, never taking her eyes off the guy. She dug a hand into her purse and came out with her cell phone. At the same instant, the twitcher caught the interest of the woman working the information booth twenty feet away.
Kate straightened slowly, punching the speed-dial button. She couldn't dial security from an outside phone. The nearest guard was across the broad expanse of the atrium, smiling, laughing, engaged in conversation with a mailman. The information lady came toward the twitcher with her head to one side, as if her cotton-candy cone of blond hair were too heavy.
The office phone rang once . . . twice. Kate started moving slowly forward, phone in one hand, shoe in the other.
“Can I help you, sir?” the information woman said, still ten feet away. Blood was going to wreck the hell out of her ivory silk blouse.
The twitcher jerked around.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked again.
. . . fourth ring . . .
A Latina woman with a toddler in tow cut through the distance between Kate and the twitcher. Kate thought she could see the tremors begin—his body fighting to contain the rage or the desperation or whatever was driving him or eating him alive.
. . . fifth ring. “Hennepin County Attorney's Office—”
“Dammit!”
The movement was unmistakable—planting the feet, reaching into the jacket, eyes going wider.
“Get down!” Kate shouted, dropping the phone.
The information woman froze.
“Someone fucking pays!” the twitcher cried, lunging toward the woman, grabbing hold of her arm with his free hand. He jerked her toward him, thrusting his gun out ahead of her. The explosion of the shot was magnified in the towering atrium, deafening all ears to the shrieks of panic it elicited. Everyone noticed him now.
Kate barreled into him from behind, swinging the heel end of her shoe against his temple like a hammer. He expelled a cry of startled shock, then came back hard with his right elbow, catching Kate in the ribs.
The information woman screamed and screamed. Then lost her feet or lost consciousness, and the weight of her falling body jerked down on her assailant. He dropped to one knee, shouting obscenities, firing another round, this one skipping off the hard floor and going God knew where.
Kate fell with him, her left hand clutching the collar of his coat. She couldn't lose him. Whatever beast he'd had trapped inside was free now. If he got away from her, there'd be a hell of a lot more to worry about than stray bullets.
Her nylons giving her no purchase on the slick floor, she scrambled to get her feet under her, to hang on to him as he fought to stand. She swung the shoe again and smacked him in the ear. He twisted around, trying to backhand her with the gun. Kate grabbed his arm and forced it up, too aware as the gun went off again that there were more than twenty stories of offices and courtrooms above.
As they struggled for control of the gun, she hooked a leg around one of his and threw her weight against him, and suddenly they were falling, down and down, tumbling over each other down the biting metal treads of the escalator to the street level—where they were met by half a dozen shouts of “Freeze! Police!”
Kate looked up at the grim faces through the haze of pain and muttered, “Well, it's about damn time.”
“HEY, LOOK!” ONE of the assistant prosecutors called from his office. “It's Dirty Harriet!”
“Very funny, Logan,” Kate said, making her way down the hall to the county attorney's office. “You read that in a book, didn't you?”
“They have to get Rene Russo to play you in the movie.”
“I'll tell them you said so.”
Aches bit into her back and hip. She had refused a ride to the emergency room. Instead, she had limped into the ladies' room, combed her mane of red-gold hair into a ponytail, washed off the blood, ditched her ruined black tights, and gone back to her office. She didn't have any wounds worth an X ray or stitches, and half the morning was gone. The price of being a tough: She would have to make do tonight with Tylenol, cold gin, and a hot bath, instead of real painkillers. She could already tell she was going to be sorry.
The thought occurred to her that she was too old to be tackling lunatics and riding them down escalators, but she stubbornly resisted the idea that forty-two was too old for anything. Besides, she was only five years into what she termed her “second adulthood.” The second career, the second stab at stability and routine.
The only thing she had wished for all the way home from the weirdness of Las Vegas was a return to the nice, normal, relatively sane life she had made for herself. Peace and quiet. The familiar entanglements of her job as a victim/witness advocate. The cooking class she was determined not to fail.
But no, she had to be the one to spot the twitcher. She was always the one who had to spot the twitcher.
Alerted by his secretary, the county attorney opened his office door for her himself. A tall, good-looking man, Ted Sabin had a commanding presence and a shock of gray hair, which he swept back from a prominent widow's peak. A pair of round steel-rimmed glasses perched on his hawkish nose gave him a studious look and helped camouflage the fact that his blue eyes were set too deep and too close together.
While he had once been a crack prosecutor himself, he now took on only the occasional high-profile case. His job as head honcho was largely administrative and political. He oversaw a bustling office of attorneys trying to juggle the ever-increasing workload of the Hennepin County court system. Lunch hours and evenings found him moving among the Minneapolis power elite, currying connections and favor. It was common knowledge he had his eye on a seat in the U.S. Senate.
“Kate, come in,” he invited, the lines of his face etched deep with concern. He rested a big hand on her shoulder and guided her across the office toward a chair. “How are you? I've been brought up to speed about what happened downstairs this morning. My God, you could have been killed! What an astonishing act of bravery!”
“No, it wasn't,” Kate protested, trying to ease away from him. She slipped into the visitor's chair and immediately felt his gaze on her bare thighs as she crossed her legs. She tugged discreetly at the hem of her black skirt, wishing to hell she'd found the spare panty hose she'd thought were in her desk drawer. “I just reacted, that's
