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Moving even more slowly, they checked a bathroom, got to the family room, where the television was turned off. Voices were coming from a smaller room from the right. They moved carefully that way, and Rae peeked: “Computer,” she said. “Looks like a two-person TED talk. Good speakers.”
Lucas was at a back door, which was locked. Nothing in the bedrooms but beds, but both had been slept in for some period of time. Then he opened a small door toward the side of the family room, a powder room with a body on the floor. “Ah man! This must be Wong. We should have thought of it sooner. Last night. Who rents houses if you can’t do it yourself? A broker.”
Rae took a look, said, “She’s a mess. Not shot, her skull’s been crushed. These people don’t quit.”
Lucas: “But where’d she go? Catton? Or maybe Scott’s still here…”
“No mountain bike,” Rae said.
“So where’s Catton?”
“Gotta be close. That pot wasn’t hot, but it was pretty warm…”
“Let’s walk over to the…”
He never completed the sentence. From not too far away, church bells began to ring. They looked at each other, and Lucas said, “Oh, no.”
And Rae said, “Run!”
They got outside and started running toward the sound of the bells, and Lucas said, after a few seconds, “Slow down, slow down,” and he took his phone from his pocket and punched up Mellon’snumber. Mellon answered immediately, and Lucas said, the words tumbling out, “Catton was just at the house of a real estate agent named Marilyn Wong and there’s a church near there, its bells are ringing right now and we need all the cops you got to surround the place and not let anybody out. She would have gone in early to contaminate the place and she’s probably going to leave now or she’s already gone, we’re running there, me’n Rae. We’ll try to jam it up, we need cops! And those MPs!”
And he stuffed the phone in his pocket and caught up with Rae, who pointed down a walled lane and said, “That way, I think,” and then, “Shit, it’s a dead end.”
“But that’s the church,” Lucas said, pointing at a box on a rounded roof, where the bells seemed to be. “We jump the walls.”
The walls were five feet high, and they went over them, ran across a yard, jumped the next fence into another yard, then jumped the last fence and came out on the plaza surrounding the church. A dozen stragglers were still going inside, hurrying now, not to be late.
And they saw Catton coming out, the head scarf, the Covid mask.
Sirens started in the background, and Catton turned toward them, and away from Rae and Lucas, didn’t see them coming until Lucas shouted at her.
“Clarice Catton! U.S. Marshals! On the ground! On the ground!”
Catton turned toward them, looked at them steadily, said, “You’re too late,” then stepped among the last few people going into the church. Lucas kept his pistol pointed at her and ran closer, twenty yards.
Catton called, “Are you going to shoot me with all these people around? Risk their lives?”
Lucas shot her.
Rae later told Letty, “She’d watched way too much TV. You know, where the killer guy holds a hostage and cops turn their guns over? She was trying to hide behind a screen of churchgoers. Your old man got sideways to her and popped her exactly between the eyes.”
—
Catton went downand the people outside the church began screaming and seemed about to scatter and Rae fired her gun in the air and shouted, “No! No! Go in the church! Go in the church!”
The panicked churchgoers froze for an instant, looking at the six-foot-tall black woman with a gun, then all turned and ran up the low steps and into the church and slammed the door behind them.
Lucas shouted at Rae: “There’s gotta be another door. Run around back. Don’t let anybody out. Anybody tries…”
“Shoot ’em,” Rae said, and she ran around the corner of the church and out of sight.
The cops began arriving a minute later. When the cops got out of the first car, Lucas shouted, “We can’t let anybody out of the church, and you can’t get close to me. I might be contaminated. There’s another marshal behind the church, tall black woman, also might be. I’ll call your chief on my phone—you guys get around the church. Surround it. Nobody gets out. Anybody tries…”
“What?” shouted one of the officers.
“Order them back inside! If they try to run, man, woman, or child, shoot them!”
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