She listened again. “OK,” she said. “I’m sure the officer would take her to school for me, if you want. Bet Clara knows his son, do you think?”
“I’d be happy to take her, Ma’am,” Rodriguez said gently. Mac could hear him choking up.
“Hold it together, man,” he said softly, barely any voice at all. Whispers carried. He’d learned that in Afghanistan. “You’re doing good.”
Rodriguez took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “She ready to go?” He said. “Make sure she’s got her books. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to run home after my boy’s books.”
Vicki laughed. It was forced, but she did it. “I’ll tell her,” she promised.
She opened the door wider, and a girl came out, holding a pink backpack. Her mother bent down to hug her goodbye, and the sniper across the street took the shot.
Clara screamed, and her mother swept her up and ran down the sidewalk toward Rodriguez. Rodriguez was down on one knee and had his service weapon drawn. Mac stepped up, grabbed the woman and little girl, and pulled them to the ground.
“Shush, now, it’s over,” he said gently, holding them both firmly so they couldn’t get back up. Until someone ascertained the sniper got Cabot Williams, they needed to stay out of the range of fire. “You did a good job, Mrs. Williams,” he said. “A really good job.”
She sobbed, and Clara was hysterical. “Daddy!”
“It’s OK, baby,” Vicki said, choking down the sobs for her daughter’s sake. “It’s OK.”
“Let’s get her out of here,” Mac said, and he started inching backward, slowly moving the two with him. When he could see the ambulance to his left, he gestured to them. An EMT ran in, in a low squat, to help Mac. Another EMT had blankets for the two of them.
“Thank you, Officer,” Vicki Williams said.
Mac looked puzzled, then he grinned. “First time that’s ever happened,” he said. “I’m a cop reporter for the Examiner.”
She looked at him closely. “Oh! You’re the one from last fall!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, then, thank you doubly for helping us,” she said. She shook her head. “I don’t know what came over him.”
Mac wanted to grill her, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it while she was in shock. I have scruples? He thought, amused. Who knew?
He pulled out a business card, and wrote his cell on the back of it. “I’d love to ask you questions,” he admitted. “But it wouldn’t be right, not until you’ve had a chance to get over this a bit. You’re in shock, and these guys can help with that.”
She took the card and looked at. “I don’t think I’m ever going to get over this,” she said shakily. “But I’ll call you later. Least I can do.”
He nodded, and went back to where Rodriguez was standing. “Get him?” he asked.
“Yeah. T-zone shot,” Rodriguez said. “Poor bastard. That loony-tune online set him up for this. And we have no fucking clue as to why.”
Chapter 7
Mac was actually surprised when Vicki Williams called him that afternoon. He was about done for the day, and he offered to buy her coffee.
“I just want to say thank you,” she said as they sat down with their drinks at a café half-way between his home and hers.
“How is Clara?” he asked.
“Hysterical,” she admitted. “I would be too, if I wasn’t so tired. She’s at my parents. She feels safe there. I’ll stay there tonight. I’m not sure when, if ever, I will want to go back to the house. To step over the bloodstains in the entryway.”
Mac opened up his phone, jotted down a name and number, and handed it to her. “They do bloodstain removal,” he said. “Call them and have them take care of it before you even go back.”
She looked at it curiously. “You have a bloodstain removal company in your phone? You need one often?”
He laughed. “More often than you’d think,” he said. He found he liked the woman, which he hadn’t expected. The list of people he liked was pretty short. He had admired her at the house that morning. She knew what she had to do to protect her daughter, and she’d done it. He told her that.
“Thanks,” she said. “There’s this moment in a crisis where you think ‘now, it must be done now.’ And I knew if I didn’t do something right then, he was going to kill one or both of us. What I don’t know is why. Why did he do that?”
He told her what little he’d pieced together.
“He was gone last weekend?” he asked. “Some wilderness survival thing?”
She nodded. “He’s been different since he got involved with guns,” she said. “Going off to play war games in the mountains? That’s not the man I married.”
“Tell me about the man you married then,” he invited. He didn’t ask to tape the conversation, sensing it would make her clam up. But she didn’t seem to object when he pulled out a notebook and took notes. She even smiled at the notebook — a long narrow notebook with the word Reporter on it. The Examiner bought them in bulk.
She’d met Cabot at the bank about 12 years ago. She was a loan officer there. He was in another division so there’d been no conflict of interest. Fell in love, got married, bought a house. Had a daughter. Both sets of grandparents lived within driving distance, and most vacation time was spent with family, or working on the house. Some trips to Neah Bay on the peninsula to go fishing.
“An American success story,” she said in a self-depreciating tone.
“And it changed?”
She nodded. “About three years ago now, I guess. He met some guys at a bar after work. I think he’d known them from online maybe? Anyway, they were into guns. Really into them. And they had this club. There’s a gun range in Arlington. They’d go up there, learn to shoot a certain
