Welles didn't even hear her. "It just discharged," the woman said in a hollow voice. "I didn't want it to. I didn't want to kill anybody."
"Linda?" Sachs said. "You can take an LOA. A week, ten days."
"I can?"
"Talk to your supervisor."
"Sure. Yeah. I could do that." Welles rose and wandered over to the medic treating her partner, who had a nasty bruise on his neck but who otherwise seemed all right.
The CS team set up shop outside the door to the corridor where the shooting had occurred, opening the suitcases and arranging evidence collection equipment, friction ridge supplies and video and still cameras. Sachs dressed in the white Tyvek suit and accessorized with rubber bands around her feet.
She fitted the microphone over her head and asked for a radio patch to Lincoln Rhyme's phone. Ripping down the police tape, she opened the door, thinking: A slit in the skin to hide lock picks and cuff keys? Of all the perps she and Lincoln had been up against, the Conjurer was--
"Oh, goddamn," she spat out.
"Hello to you too, Sachs," Rhyme said acerbically through her headset. "At least I think it's you. Hell of a lot of static."
"I don't believe it, Rhyme. The M.E. took the body before I could process it." Sachs was looking into the corridor, bloody but empty.
"What?" he snapped. "Who approved that?"
The rule in crime scene work was that emergency medical personnel could enter a scene to save an injured person but, in the case of homicide, the body had to remain untouched by everyone, including the tour doctor from the Medical Examiner's office, until it'd been processed by someone from forensics. This was fundamental police work and the career of whoever'd released the Conjurer's corpse was now in jeopardy.
"There a problem, Amelia?" one of the techs called from the doorway.
"Look," she said angrily, nodding into the corridor. "The M.E. got the body before we processed it. What happened?"
The crew cut young tech frowned. He glanced at his partner then said, "Uhm, well, the tour doc's outside. He was the guy we were talking to when you showed up. The one feeding the pigeons. He was waiting to move the body till we were finished."
"What's going on?" Rhyme growled. "I hear voices, Sachs."
To him she said, "There's a crew from the M.E.'s office outside, Rhyme. Sounds like they haven't picked up the body. What's--"
"Oh, Jesus Christ. No!"
The chill went straight to her soul. "Rhyme, you don't think--?"
He barked out, "What do you see, Sachs? What's the blood spatter look like?"
She ran to where the shooting had happened and studied the bloodstain on the wall. "Oh, no. It doesn't look normal for a gunshot, Rhyme."
"Brain matter, bone?"
"Gray matter, yeah. But it doesn't look right either. There is some bone. Not much, though, for a close-range shot."
"Do a presumptive blood test. That'll be dispositive."
She sped back to the doorway.
"What's going . . . ?" one of the techs asked but he fell silent as he watched her dig frantically through the suitcases.
Sachs grabbed the Kastle-Meyer catalytic blood kit then returned to the corridor and took a swab from the wall. She treated this with phenolphthalein and a moment later she had the answer. "I don't know what it is but it's definitely not blood." She glanced down at the ruddy smears on the floor. This, however, looked real. She tested a sample and it showed positive. Then she noticed a bloody razor knife blade in the corner. "Christ, Rhyme he faked the shooting. Cut himself somewhere to bleed for real and fool the guards."
"Call security."
Sachs yelled, "It's an escape--have the exits sealed!"
The detective jogged into the hallway and stared at the floor. Linda Welles joined him, her eyes wide. The momentary relief that she hadn't in fact been involved in a man's death faded fast as she realized the far-worse implications of what had happened. "No! He was there. His eyes were open. He looked dead." Her voice was high, frantic. "I mean, his head . . . it was all bloody. I could see . . . I could see the wound!"