Walker did not flinch. He looked past the gun into Delaney’s eyes, the fury behind them thinning by the second, replaced by the flat, unsteady look of a man who has already decided the worst has happened and is only waiting to be told the details.
“I brought her here,” Walker said quietly. “Where is she?”
“Surgery.”
Walker’s voice stayed level. “You’re wasting time on me, Detective. She needs blood, not a standoff.”
Delaney’s finger tightened against the trigger guard. The room held its breath—a dozen barrels aimed at a man who had not raised his hands once.
“Get that gun out of my lobby.”
The voice belonged to an older nurse in coffee-stained scrubs who had pushed her way between Delaney and Walker without so much as a flinch at the weapons around her. She had worked twenty-two years in this emergency room, had buried a husband who wore a badge for nineteen of them, and had long since stopped believing that either side of that line held a monopoly on decency.
“If you want to shoot him, take it outside. We’ve got trauma coming through those doors any minute.”
Delaney’s jaw worked. The adrenaline in him wanted an outlet and had not found one it liked. Slowly he lowered the weapon, though he did not holster it. He turned Walker around, slammed him face-first into the wall, and cuffed him hard enough to leave bruises.
Walker let it happen without a sound.
They put him in the back of a cruiser and drove him to the third floor of a building that smelled of bleach and old coffee and the particular grief that soaks into concrete after enough years of bad news being delivered inside it. The interrogation room had one steel table, two chairs, and a camera blinking red in the corner.
Delaney came in twenty minutes later with a folder and a cup of coffee he never touched. He threw the folder on the table.
“Her name is Claire Whitfield,” he said. “She is twenty-four years old. Eleven months on the street. She’s in surgery right now with a punctured liver, and the surgeon gives her one chance in five of seeing morning.”
Walker looked at the wall behind Delaney’s head. He did not offer sympathy. Coming from him it would only have sounded like an insult.
“You want to explain,” Delaney said, leaning forward, “why a patched member of the Hells Angels with a record longer than my forearm is the one who dragged her out of that ditch?”
“I found her,” Walker said. “Under the Route 9 overpass.”
Delaney gave a short, humorless laugh. “That’s not on her patrol route. And a rookie doesn’t go writing tickets under a dead overpass at three in the morning. Maybe you ought to ask her dispatch why she was out there alone.”
Walker met his eyes. “Or why nobody backed her up.”
Delaney’s jaw tightened, the muscle in his neck standing out against his collar.
“Don’t play detective with me,” he said. “I know your chapter runs freight through the port. I know you’ve got history with the Colton Ridge outfit. Maybe Whitfield rolled up on something she wasn’t supposed to see and your people decided a dead cop was cheaper than a trial.”
Walker leaned forward, the chain of his cuff scraping against the steel table.
“If I’d wanted her dead,” he said, lowering his voice, “she’d still be under that bridge. I wouldn’t have ruined a good belt keeping pressure on her wound. I wouldn’t have carried her through your front doors covered in her blood. I’d have put one more round in her and gone home to bed.”
Delaney sat back, dragging both hands down his face. Every instinct in him wanted to dismiss what he was hearing, to write this biker off as a man deflecting blame onto anyone else in the room. But he had known Claire since she was a rookie fresh out of the academy, and he trusted his own memory of the last time they had spoken three weeks earlier, when she had asked him carefully whether he trusted every name on their own roster. He had laughed it off then. He was not laughing now.
Delaney’s fist came down on the table.
“Then who shot her?”
“I don’t know,” Walker said. “But they knew she was coming.”
Delaney stopped. The anger in his eyes flickered, replaced by something colder and more careful.
“What do you mean?”
“The windshield,” Walker said, speaking slowly now, letting each word land. “Three holes, grouped tight, driver’s side. That’s not a car chase. Whoever did it was standing still. They waited for her, boxed her in, and then they took their time.”
Delaney’s eyes moved, unfocused, chewing on something he did not want to say out loud yet.
“There’s something else,” Walker said. “Her radio wasn’t broken by the crash. Take a look at it yourself. Somebody worked that handset over with a boot after the fact. You don’t do that to a radio that’s already dead.”