'Jules, pull the trigger!'
Jules pulled, and for the second time, the gun exploded a foot from Kate's head, sending her sprawling on the weedy ground, her shoulders feeling as if they had been ripped from their sockets. She got to her feet and stumbled over to Kimbal, fighting to unbuckle her belt with her sprained and trembling arms. With the remnants of the handcuffs riding her wrists like a pair of punk bracelets, she wrapped the length of fake white patent leather around the man's arm, putting on pressure and watching the pulse of blood slow. She hoped it was because of the tourniquet rather than the approach of death - not that he would be any true loss to the world, but the girl did not deserve to see it.
'Someone's coming,' said Jules.
'About time,' she muttered. Indeed they were coming, car after governmental car. It had seemed longer, but within four minutes of the shot, the tide of men began to spill out of the cars and wash over them, taking over the care of the wounded man and transforming the remote shack into a bustling center of forensic activity.
Sometime later, after Kimbal had been taken away but before the animal-control officer had arrived with the dog tranquilizers, someone thought to slap some bandages on Kate's scraped knees and the parts of her hands that had been singed by the shotgun blast. She sat on the edge of her car's backseat, brushed clear of glass crumbles, and looked elsewhere while the medic swabbed and taped. He finished, she thanked him, and when she looked up, Jules was in the door of the shack, wrapped in a blanket and cradled in the shelter of Al Hawkin's arm. She was pale with shock and red-eyed, and she looked at Kate with an unreadable expression on her face. Kate got to her feet.
'I'm okay, Jules. Marsh Kimbal's going to be okay. You're safe.'
Jules did not answer, but in a minute she turned to Al and allowed him to fold his arms around her. He held her, looking over her head at Kate with a face nearly as devastated with relief as his stepdaughter's.
'Kate, I…' he began, and choked up. She stumped over to where they stood and draped her own arms painfully around the two of them. They stood that way, oblivious of the activity and noises, until the aches in Kate's arms began to turn into shooting pain, and she reluctantly stood back. Al blew his nose, Kate reached into her pocket for a Kleenex and blew her own nose, and finally Jules looked up and said in a small voice, 'Can I borrow that?'
Kate began to laugh, and in an instant the three of them were dissolving again, this time in tears of laughter.
'Kate —' he started again, when he could speak, but she interrupted him.
'Take her home, Al. Jani's waiting.'
He hesitated, then nodded, and with his arm still around Jules's shoulders, he began to guide her toward the cars. When they had taken a few steps, Jules stopped and eased her head out to look at Kate.
'I knew you'd come,' she said. 'I knew it.'
Laurie R. King
Homicide detectives Kate Martinelli and Al Hawkin first appeared in
Reluctant to take on another high-profile case, Kate is too intrigued to walk away. As she begins to untangle the web of secrecy Erasmus has woven around his former life, she starts to doubt his guilt. But Erasmus will say nothing to point the investigation away from himself, and Kate must not only prove one man's innocence, she must also nail the real killer.
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ISBN
Laurie R. King
Kate Martinelli, a newly promoted Homicide detective with a secret to conceal, and Alonzo Hawkin, a world- weary cop trying to make a new life in San Francisco, could not be more different, but are thrown together to solve a brutal crime - the murders of three young girls.
As Martinelli and Hawkin get nearer to a solution, they realize the crimes may not be the sexually motivated killings they had seemed, and that there is a coldly calculating and tortuous mind at work which they must outmanoeuvre if they are to prevent both further carnage and the destruction of a shining talent…
'If there is a new P.D. James… I would put my money on Laurie R. King'
