Riker spoke into his cell phone, ‘Repeat that. An officer down?’

Charles was pulling over to allow an emergency vehicle to pass, when the detective yelled, ‘Follow that ambulance!’

Mallory’s revolver preceded her through the door of a small rooftop shed. Her eyes had not yet adjusted to brilliant sunlight when she took aim at the sound of footsteps. And now, in perfect focus, the profile of a young girl’s head was lined up with the muzzle of the gun. The teenager had not yet seen the detective or the weapon, but she was shaking, and her face was a study in dumb surprise as she bolted for the rooftop door.

Mallory rounded the shed to see the back of a man’s bloodstained shirt and jeans. He used Deluthe’s gun to shade his eyes from the overhead sun. There were scratches on his face, the work of Stella Small. The scarecrow’s right arm hung useless at his side, and she guessed that Deluthe had also done some damage before he was taken down.

Only steps away, a smaller man with carrot-red hair was huddled on the tarpaper ground amid a wash of white linen pulled down from a clothes line, perhaps in the belief that wet sheets could protect him from bullets. On the other side of a low brick wall that separated one roof from the next, an elderly woman tended a coop of carrier pigeons. She was deaf to the whimpers of the little man in the sheets and blind to the one with the gun.

At the sound of a nervous giggle, Mallory glanced back over one shoulder to see the children standing behind her, three boys in staggered sizes, and these television babies showed no fear of either weapon.

The scarecrow was facing her now, dazed and weaving. Blood dripped into one eye from a gash in his brow.

A massive head injury – a bonus.

She could hear the children creeping forward to watch the show. None of them had the sense of sheep to get out of harm’s way. Mallory left her back vulnerable when she whirled around and yelled, ‘Get inside!’ Her gun produced no effect on the boys, but her eyes were promising something nasty if they did not move and right now.

They shrank back behind the shelter of a door made of wood, not fire-code metal. Bullets would rip right through it. The smallest child had been left behind. He was walking between the guns.

Thou shalt not get the sheep killed.

That had been Louis Markowitz’s prime rule and Mallory’s hardest lesson, for it tied into a bizarre concept: when she pinned on the badge, she agreed, if need be, to die for the sheep. This had been a difficult pitch to a child of the streets, who possessed an ungodly instinct for survival.

But a deal was a deal.

The scarecrow’s gun hand extended slowly. Mallory’s finger touched lightly on the trigger. She could drop him any time she liked, but fast as she was, he might get off one round. His every movement told her he was not left-handed. The shot would go wild.

One dead sheep.

All the children were targets, the one in the open and the two behind the door. Or he might blow away the pigeon lady, or the little man under the sheets. Mallory lowered her revolver to end the threat that would make him fire.

His gun slowly drifted toward the shed where the children were hidden but not protected. In sidelong vision, Mallory caught the motion of a wind-whipped flowery dress before she saw a terrified woman creeping toward the lone boy in the line of fire. Mother courage. The woman gathered the little boy into her arms, and the scarecrow paid no attention to her running backward with the child. His eyes were fixed on Mallory. His gun hand was on the rise.

She was faster. In a stunning flash, the muzzle of her revolver pointed at his eyes. ‘You really want this bullet, don’t you?’

The threat was meaningless to him. This was not the cornered animal she had anticipated, but something even more dangerous. Perversely, she raised her revolver high to aim at the noonday sun, and then, pushing perversity to the nth degree, she taunted him, saying, ‘I know more about your mother’s death than you do.’

Magic words.

His gun was lowering, buying her time to reassess his injuries. The right arm was certainly broken. All his weight listed to the right leg, and she knew the left was about to fold. One eye was clotted with blood, and one eye was attentive as he awaited the rest of her story.

Just like the old days -just like a whore.

‘And I even know what you did that night.’

The scarecrow’s one clear eye flickered with surprise. His left leg buckled, but he remained standing. He seemed unaware that he was aiming at the shivering pile of wet laundry. The little man in the sheets ceased to cry and laid his head down in a faint.

And the scarecrow was still waiting for his story.

‘You found one of the stalker notes,’ said Mallory. ‘You found it on the floor the night she died.’ She had guessed right. He was nodding. ‘And you had a lot of time to read it – two days and two nights. Flies in your hair, roaches crawling in your clothes. The stove burner was on. The heat was suffocating.’

His gun was getting heavier, and his aim was drifting again. The old woman was his accidental target. He was tired in every part of his body and tired of his very life. Yet Mallory held his attention. ‘You were in the bathroom when he came to kill your mother.’

The pigeon lady was oblivious to the weapon, but her birds were restless, sensing tension in the air as a threatening storm. Their wings batted against the wire doors of the cage, and a shower of downy white feathers drifted from the coop in an eerie August snowfall.

Mallory walked toward him, slow stepping. ‘You heard something.’ She circled around him, drawing his body and his gun away from the old woman. ‘You opened the bathroom door – just a crack. The man was bending over your mother.’ Now she was positive that he had not seen his mother strangled to death. The six-year-old child had believed that his mother was still alive while he watched a man mutilate her and hang her. If a fireman and a doctor could not tell the living from the dead, what chance did a little boy have?

The pigeon lady was on the move again. Mallory kept track of her in peripheral vision. The old woman crossed the roof, walking into the line of fire to pick up a heavy bag of birdseed.

Mallory backed off softly, slowly.

Easy now.

A hand tremor made his gun shake. He was sliding into profound shock and aiming from the hip.

‘You watched him hang her – without a sound, no screams. She never – ’

His head was shaking in denial.

Impossible. Mallory knew she could not be wrong about this part. Yes, she was right. She had simply not pushed this idea far enough. ‘You never made a sound. You -just – watched.’’

The man’s head tilted to one side, as though some supporting string had been cut. His face contorted into a soundless scream, and the blood-clotted eye cried red tears. He was bleeding inside and out.

The birds were screaming, wings in a racket, beating the wire of the coop, frantic to get away.

‘You watched that bastard kill your mother! You let him do it to her!’ Of course he did – only six years old, traumatized and paralyzed, and now she played to the guilt of the innocent child. ‘You never called for help. You never even tried to stop him.’

The doors of the pigeon coop flew open and dozens of birds escaped before the wide eyes of their keeper. In tight formation, they flew across the roof in a roar of wings and cries, diving close to the scarecrow, then veering upward. His eyes were wild, following the flight of birds into the sun.

‘You couldn’t reach her up there on the rope.’ Mallory could see him as a small, shivering boy, crying to his mother, no clue that she was dead. ‘How could you leave her – if she was still alive?’