Every Kind of Wicked (A Gardiner and Renner Novel Book 6)

Maggie had thought the cold air might make her wound feel better, like putting ice on a sprain, but of course this nonsensical piece of wishful thinking did not come to pass and the frigid air gave her only a small but sharp headache instead of functioning as a balm to her sore chest. At least it kept her alert.

The sky had turned to pitch black without even a moon to brighten the clouds. Heavy, wet snow fell, threatening to turn to ice if the temperature fell even a single digit, which of course it would do as the nighttime arrived in earnest. Riley drove past the cemetery where they’d found Evan, the tires straining for traction every time he turned a corner or changed lanes. The ballpark loomed to the left, a barren, ominous shape in the dark. Even wedged between the two men, Maggie shivered; the heater hadn’t even begun to make a difference in the temperature during the very short trip. “Where are we going and why, again?”

Riley said, “This place Shanaya works is a call center—”

Jack said, “Hospital.”

Riley stopped talking.

Maggie said, “Which is it? A call center or a hospital?”

Jack said, “No, we’re taking you to a hospital, and then we’ll go to the call center.”

Maggie protested that she didn’t need it. Jack said she’d been stabbed. She swore that she was not being funny or quoting a movie and it really was just a flesh wound. There was nothing the hospital could do that she hadn’t already.

Jack said the hospital sat only a block away and they had time and wasn’t that fresh blood peeking through her shirt after her hospital-quality bandaging?

Riley, for once, said nothing.

Jack peered down at her. She noted his expression—dying to get to the next scene, but genuinely worried about her, and suddenly she didn’t feel cold. However, she still didn’t need—

Riley spoke, or rather murmured: “Uh—”

In the street ahead, at the intersection of East Ninth and Bolivar, a man hustled across the pavement, his right hand lifting up the bottom of a stadium coat to reach the gun in his holster. He headed for a two-story building, dark with only a single light burning somewhere on the second floor.

Riley said, “Isn’t that—”

“Stop,” Jack said. To Maggie he said, “Stay here.”

“What’s hap—”

“That’s Shanaya’s babysitter” was all the explanation he had time to give before Riley slid to a shuddering halt, rim scraping the curb, and they bailed out. Two thumps of the doors and she was alone, watching them intercept the other police officer and hold a quick conference. Then all three turned toward the building.

They disappeared into the foyer.

She sat. She waited. She hated it like hell, left to stay safe like some helpless female. But Maggie had tried all her life to not be stupid, and barging in like the standard character in some late-night movie would be stupid. She was helpless, more or less, and being female had nothing to do with it. She was not armed, not trained, didn’t know karate, didn’t even have a flashlight. She should no more try to participate in a police raid than she should try to perform an emergency appendectomy on her neighbor’s child.

Then a loud sound and a blast of light flashed from the dark foyer, and her determination to be sensible went out the door along with her body. She promptly slid on the ice and went to her knees, banging one knee good and hard but catching herself with her gloved hands. Then she was up and running, managing to stay upright long enough to reach the glassed-in cubicle where she knew she would find Jack shot to death, bleeding out too quickly for any help to—

She hit the glass door before even registering what lay beyond it.

At first, nothing made sense. Jack did not lie there in a pool of blood; no one did, not him, not Riley, not the other police officer. The foyer stood vacant, a black hole of nothing, with only a glimmer of less dark black at the center.

She stepped forward and reached out blindly, made brave by the leather gloves, that layer of protection between her skin and whatever she might touch. And when contact occurred, the glimmer wavered.

Her eyes adjusted. The inner doors of the air lock had been painted over, presenting a blank slate. The inner door must have been locked and one of the cops had shot the lock, producing the sounds and muzzle flash she saw. She pushed through it to enter a large and dark—office. A desk, then a large room of cubicles, all dark, all empty. The cops were nowhere in sight.

Well, she thought. What would be the not-stupid, sensible thing to do now? As far as she could tell, no one needed her to call an ambulance, and she remained untrained and unarmed.

She couldn’t hear the cops barking orders to suspects or moving through the place searching room to room. Three grown men shouldn’t be that quiet, right?

So she stood still, and listened.

Then someone grabbed her arm.

* * *

Jack shot the lock to gain entry. He remembered the door only too well and knew no amount of human-battering-ram action would break it. If this turned out to be another of Shanaya’s games and he had to pay for damage to commercial property, so be it.

The dim interior appeared vacant, the noisy, crowded cubicles now empty and dark. From the girl’s description it sounded as if the place went full blast all day, but perhaps they closed up once people in the farthest time zone stopped answering their phones.

“Take this floor,” he said in a quiet voice to West, the cop assigned to watch Shanaya Thomas.

“Everyone poured out of this place like ants from a smashed mound about fifteen minutes ago, right after your girl called nine-one-one with a hang-up. It took Dispatch that long to associate the number and get hold of me.”

“She didn’t come out with the crowd?”

“I didn’t see her. It’s possible I missed her, but I don’t think so. There weren’t that many women. And the GPS in the phone says it’s still here.”

“Got it.”

Jack hoped Jeffers would be in the boss’s office on the second floor, where he and Riley had been. He and his partner climbed the steps, guns drawn. Whoever was there must have heard their less-than-subtle entry but knew better than to come running. Jack heard no whispers, footsteps, grinding clicks of magazines as they were jammed into pistols. What he did hear sounded strangely like a child’s laugh.

At the top of the stairs they turned up the corridor, finding one lit doorway. With Riley behind him, Jack approached along the wall, then hazarded a glance through the glass in the upper door frame.

The day care room, with two children in it. A boy of about five, with a mop of unruly hair, building a cityscape out of square wooden blocks and apparently explaining every detail of the construction to another child of perhaps three, who rocked on the floor with a battered stuffed dog and did not appear to be listening. No one else in sight.

The hell, Jack thought. He peered around to the corners of the room, as much as he could. The solid metal door had only one square window at his eye level, perhaps ten inches square. No adult in sight. He debated—call Dispatch and tell them to send a child’s advocate over to possibly take custody, or wait to see what the situation turned in to. Again, this could still be some feint of Shanaya’s, and he and Riley would find nothing more on the premises than a lonely bookkeeper working late. And Jack would have to pay for a door lock. But if the situation turned much more ominous then he didn’t want to have children present.

He turned to Riley, already texting Dispatch to have a child’s advocate on standby. They moved silently past the door. The children took no notice.

The second floor appeared like the first—empty, dark, and silent, the row of inner offices unlit except for the one at the very end, where Jack and Riley had interviewed Mark Hawking.

If this wasn’t some feint of Shanaya’s—

Jack gestured around the room at large. Riley nodded and slunk off to the outer wall, examining the perimeter while Jack moved directly to the open office door. The cubicles appeared empty, surfaces gleaming slightly in the small amount of ambient light and what penetrated from the streetlights outside, but there were many barriers and desks and if he were the bad guys, he would have scattered into their depths when they heard the door downstairs splinter open.

He continued along the inner wall, ambush-ready dark cubicles to his right, ambush-ready dark offices to his left. At the doorway there remained nothing to do but show himself. He couldn’t see inside and calling out would simply forewarn them. The chances were good that he would accomplish nothing other than getting himself shot and really wished he had stopped to put on a vest first, but either way, better him than Riley.

Or he could peek around the corner like a girl in kindergarten, quickly enough to keep whoever waited inside from sighting and firing in time, and then at least he’d know what or who awaited him. Not dignified, but perhaps wise.

He peeked like a girl in kindergarten.

Only two people present, standing behind the desk: Shanaya Thomas, and Dr. Sidney Jeffers, currently holding a gun to Shanaya Thomas’s head.

“Come on in, Detective,” the doctor called.