the bag, along with a pair of Swarovski 8x25 binoculars.
By 7:30, he was ambling down the street at the top of the cemetery, hands in his jacket pockets, camera bag hanging off one shoulder. It occurred to him then that a dog would have been an excellent decoy and possible alibi . . . but he didn’t have a dog.
As he came up to the graveyard, he checked around—there were houses across the street, but no activity. In the two-block walk, he’d been passed by only one car. With one last check, he stepped through the cemetery gate and immediately moved back behind a screen of brushy trees, toward the slope overlooking the hospital and the cemetery.
He walked quickly to his shooting position next to the cottonwood, and sat down in the grass, but without the rifle. Glanced at his iPhone: 7:40. The morning was cool and damp, with dew glittering in the grass; he was wearing a wool sweater under the barn jacket and was warm enough, but he could feel the stress building in his chest. He got the Canon out of his camera bag, perched the bag atop a ground-level limestone grave marker that said, in eroded letters, “George Janson, 1864–1929.”
He put the camera atop the bag, turned it on, framed a few shots, made them, switched lenses to the 70-200 zoom, made a few more shots, went back to the first lens, then used the binoculars to scan the school grounds. There was only one kid on the playing area, and he was too tall to be McGovern.
He put the binoculars on the camera bag, then half stood, and looked back toward the street. He’d heard a couple of more cars pass by, but hadn’t yet seen an actual human being on foot.
Three more kids showed up on the playground, two girls and a boy. A few cars trickled into the hospital parking ramp below him.
The first kid was still shooting baskets, the other three were standing in a huddle, looking at cell phones. With a last look around, Dunn duckwalked thirty yards to the empty tool shed, pulled the concrete block loose, reached through the hole under the shed, caught the end of the gun case, and dragged it out. He removed the rifle and the magazine tucked in next to it, and duckwalked and crawled back to the shooting site. He propped the rifle on the camera bag and scanned the playground. A dozen kids now. The binoculars were excellent, the sharpest available. He couldn’t quite make out faces, though. He could see hair color and complexion and height and dress. Should be good enough: nobody he could see looked like the photo of McGovern.
Below him, a white pickup turned into the parking ramp, disappeared inside.
The kids were now walking into the playing grounds in a steady stream, and four or five were shooting around with the basketball; most of the rest were looking at cell phones or talking, and Dunn thought that one particular huddle of girls might be passing a cigarette.
“ON THE GROUND! GET DOWN ON THE GROUND! LET ME SEE YOUR HANDS. LET ME SEE YOUR HANDS!”
* * *
—
DUNN FLINCHED AND DUCKED behind the camera bag, looked over his shoulder, toward the street, saw nothing. Men were shouting, had to be cops . . . but they weren’t shouting at him. He’d seen no sign of police cars.
More shouting and a car’s engine howled in the parking structure and brakes squealed and more men were shouting, and looking down toward the open walls of the structure, Dunn saw five or six men in suits pointing guns at somebody that he couldn’t see, on the far side of the ramp.
And he thought: It’s somebody else. My God, somebody else was there to take a shot and the police had staked out the parking ramp. And he, Dunn, was right there, above them, with a rifle, and nobody was looking at him, nobody was coming.
He pulled the rifle off the camera bag and low-crawled over to the tool shed, hurriedly pushed the gun back in its case and shoved it as far as he could beneath the shed. Then he crawled back to the camera bag, put the binoculars in the bottom of the bag with the lenses on top of them, crawled toward the street, and when he was eight or ten yards out, peeked from behind the screen of trees.
Nobody.
The screaming from the parking ramp had stopped. He slung the bag