False Pretenses - Kathy Herman [68]
“There’s no way out of this.” Pierce went over and stood in front of the window, his arms folded. “Shapiro’s planning to kill us either way. We might as well go to Jude and tell him everything—and hope he can find Shapiro before Shapiro finds us.”
“We all agree you need to tell the sheriff what’s going on,” Ethan said. “But if Shapiro is watching you, you’re putting yourselves in grave danger the minute you walk in and out of the sheriff’s department.”
Zoe sighed. “He said he’d know if we went to the sheriff or told someone else who did. So he must have a way of monitoring our phone calls, too.”
“He’s probably bluffing,” Ethan said. “But why take a chance when there may be a way around it?”
“What way around it?” Pierce came over and stood next to the table.
“We need to throw him off his game.” Ethan pushed his glasses up higher on his nose. “There’s more than one way to go to the sheriff.”
Jude glanced at his watch. How much longer was he willing to tie up all this valuable personnel when trouble was brewing at the medical center?
He saw Police Chief Norman put his cell phone back on his belt clip and walked over to him.
“How long before your officers will be done with the sweep?” Jude asked.
“I’d say within the hour.” Casey stuck a pencil behind his ear. “They just recovered the third .357 shell casing in close proximity to where the others were found at the south end of tennis court A. But they also discovered shoe prints in the damp grass, leading from the tennis court to the parking lot. A man’s size eleven. Might mean something. The sprinklers were on in that area of the park from nine thirty to ten p.m. These would’ve been made after that. The timing’s right.”
“Good work. My teams are finished searching the woods. No sign of the shooter. But we did find beer cans and whisky bottles in a small clearing in the west woods. We’ll dust them for prints. Might yield something. It’s time to make a decision whether we want to maintain the perimeter a while longer or give it up.”
“It’s your call,” Casey said, “but since the containment’s not getting us anywhere, maybe we should put our efforts into maintaining order. What’s happening at the medical center is bound to happen somewhere else, too. We need to be ready. And a number of my officers pulled a double shift and need to go home and get some sleep.”
“I think the two of us could use a little of that ourselves.”
Casey looked pensive and seemed to be lost in thought. “I keep asking myself what kind of heartless loser could use that kind of firepower on unarmed teenagers.”
Jude’s mind flashed back to those terrifying moments after the shooting, when he thought Deshawn Macey was bleeding out. “Since both sets of kids claim they ran into each other by accident, I’m thinking it was one of the teenagers. The odds are pretty slim that someone else just happened to be in the park packing a .357 Magnum and decided to open fire.”
“I agree. So why didn’t at least one of the kids give up the shooter?” Casey said.
“I can only think of two reasons. Either they really didn’t know who did it. Or we didn’t lean on them hard enough.” Jude took off his dark glasses and wiped the sweat off his eyelids with the back of his hand. “The kids we arrested for threatening to hang that African-American kid deny knowing anything about it, even after we offered a deal to the first one who gave us the shooter. Maybe their lawyers will get them to wise up. Being charged with a hate crime is serious, and none of them have any priors.”
Zoe glanced over at Pierce and tried to look past his stony expression. She didn’t dare think about how she had broken his heart or the fact that they had no future together. All she could allow herself to think about was surviving this ordeal.
Did Pierce seem willing to go along with the plan Ethan suggested? What if it backfired? What if Shapiro could somehow track what they were doing? What if he had some sophisticated