Yellow to red.
In the distance, a siren. A second. A third.
The shooter tensed. Taking two steps backward, he bent toward a woman huddled on the sidewalk, never shifting the gun from Ryan’s face. The woman put her head to the pavement and flung both arms over it.
“Don’t kill me. I have a baby.” The woman’s voice was frantic with terror.
The shooter grabbed her by the jacket and dragged her across the cement.
Ryan fired.
The shooter’s body jerked. He dropped the woman and grabbed his right shoulder. Blood mushroomed across his shirt.
Straightening, the shooter raised his Luger and squeezed off four rounds. Bullets pinged the wall above us. Fragments of brick rained down on our heads.
“Oh God. Oh no.” Chantale’s voice was high and quavery.
Ryan fired again.
The woman shrieked as the shooter fell across her. I heard a skull crack pavement, the Luger skitter then drop from the curb, the woman scrabble up the sidewalk.
The woman sobbed. The child cried. Otherwise, silence. No one spoke. No one moved.
The sirens grew louder, built into a screaming chorus. Cruisers converged from every direction, tires screeching, lights flashing, radios crackling.
Ryan rose, gun pointed at the sky. I watched him reach for his badge.
Beside me, I heard Chantale draw a series of unsteady breaths. I looked over. Her chin quivered and both cheeks glistened. I reached out and stroked her hair.
“It’s over.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. “You’re fine.”
Chantale looked up. Only two tattoo tears remained on her face.
“Am I?”
I put my arm around her. She collapsed into me and wept silently.
22
AS ON THE MORNING AFTER THE ATTACK IN SOLOLA, I AWOKE with an ill-formed feeling of dread. In an instant the scene flooded back to me. I relived the explosion of Nordstern’s chest. Heard the crack of Ryan’s gun. Saw the shooter’s inert body, his blood oozing across the pavement. Though I’d been given no official word, I was certain both men were dead.
I rubbed my hands up and down on my face, then closed my eyes and pulled the blanket over my head. Would there be no end to the killing?
In my mind’s eye I saw Chantale, cheeks streaked with tears, body rigid with terror. A shiver ran through me as I thought of how close she and I had come to being injured or killed. How could I ever have told her mother?
I imagined how devastated Katy would be should someone deliver news of my death. Thank God that would not be necessary.
I remembered Nordstern in Guatemala City, and in the bar at Jillian’s minutes before his death. I felt a wave of remorse. I had disliked the man, had not been kind to him. But I’d never imagined him dead.
Dead.
Jesus! What had Nordstern discovered? What was so big that it had gotten him blasted on a Montreal street?
My thoughts circled back to Chantale. What impact would these events have on her? There were so many directions a troubled adolescent could take. Repentance? Flight? Escape through drugs?
Though tough on the outside, I suspected Chantale had an interior as fragile as a butterfly wing. Vowing I would stand by her, appreciated or not, I flung back the covers and headed for the shower.
The summer that had dropped in so unexpectedly had bolted during the night. I exited my garage to a steady drizzle and temperatures in the forties.
The morning staff meeting was mercifully short and produced no anthropology cases. I spent the next hour cutting segments of eraser to proper lengths and gluing them to Susanne’s replica of the Paraiso skull. Except for some shine and subtle layering, her model looked exactly like the real thing.
By 10 A.M. I was seated at a monitor in
“What’s sticking out all over that skull?”
“Tissue depth markers.”
“Of course.”
“Each marker shows how much flesh there was at a specific point on the face or skull,’’ Lucien piped up. “Dr. Brennan cut them using standards for a Mongoloid female. Right?”
I nodded.
