hiding in the shadows by kay hooper

Author:kay hooper
Language: eng
Format: azw
ISBN: 9780553576924
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1971-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

“I’m sorry,” he said, taping the final piece of gauze into place.

“Why? You didn’t shoot me.”

Still holding her arm gently between his hands, he looked up to find her smiling faintly. “I can’t be flip about this, Faith.”

“I see that. Kane, I’m fine. My arm hurts, and I won’t be lingering near any windows for a while, but I’m all right.”

“You must be one of those people who shine in a crisis.”

“You didn’t do so bad yourself.”

He realized he was compulsively smoothing with his thumbs the tape holding the bandage in place, and forced himself to release her and lean back. “Yeah, well, I’ll get the shakes later. And speaking of delayed shock-which do you prefer, whiskey or hot tea?”

“Tea, please.”

When Richardson arrived a few minutes later, Faith answered the detective’s questions with no visible anxiety. Not that there was much she could tell him.

“I saw the cracked mirror first, and thought how odd it was. Then my arm burned suddenly, but it wasn’t until I put my hand over it that I felt the blood.

Even then, I didn’t immediately realize I’d been shot.

I never heard it.”

“The storm was right overhead,” Kane told his friend. “There was so much noise we couldn’t hear the shot or the bullet going through the window and smashing the mirror.”

Richardson went over to examine the mirror. “It’s gone all the way through and into the wall.” He took down the mirror, then produced a penknife and dug into the Sheetrock. Win a very few minutes, he held a misshapen slug.

Even across the room Kane read Richardson’s expression. “I guess ballistics are out? No chance of tracing it to a particular gun?”

“I can’t even tell what caliber it is, and I doubt the lab will be able to either.” He eyed the distance to the window, then went to examine that as well. Like the mirror, the windowpane was marred by a small hole surrounded by a web of cracks.

“Too dark to see much now,” he said. “I can come back tomorrow and take a stab at the trajectory, try to figure out where the shooter was. But if he was standing more than a few feet away, he couldn’t have hoped to hit what he was aiming at, not in this weather.” Kane said, “There’s no fire escape, and we’re on the fifth floor. Unless he was outside on the balcony- which is possible, if doubtful-he couldn’t have been any closer than the apartments on the other side of the courtyard. And that building is a good hundred feet away.”

Richardson studied the distance from the hole in the window to the floor, then compared that with the distance between the hole in the wall and the floor.

“Well, he sure as hell didn’t shoot upward from ground level, or down from a higher spot. Do those apartments across the courtyard have balconies?”

“Yeah. 9@ “Then we’ll look for a vacant or currently unused apartment.

I’m willing to bet we’ll find one matching the trajectory of the shot.

Somebody sat over there watching this place, and when they saw Miss.

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