Leah knew that her destination had to be different. She ran toward the front of the building, where Sergeant Tim Munson lay dead. She knelt in the blood by his body and worked the handle to open the gun safe, but it wouldn’t budge. The city tradition of keeping guns out of the council chamber was going to kill them all.

She heard the sound of glass breaking near the back of the building and looked in that direction. But the back door was solid, without glass to break, so she had no idea what the noise was. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but what was happening here. She ran her hand along Munson’s belt to the holster where his sidearm had been, but the holster was empty. They had taken the gun off his body when they’d come into the building.

She heard heavy footsteps coming from the direction of the council chamber, but she couldn’t stop to look, because she had one more hope. Munson had been a street cop in Denver for nearly his whole career. Those guys carried backup weapons. She reached for Munson’s ankles and encircled them with her hands, but there was no ankle holster.

Maybe a knife, she thought, one of those big ones like she used to carry as a state cop to slice through a seat belt to free somebody from a car wreck. She reached into Munson’s left-side thigh-level pocket and felt the grips of the backup gun. It was a compact .380 automatic. Thank you, thank you, she thought as she took it, pulled the slide, and whirled her body into a sitting position with her knees up, facing the sound of footsteps.

James Holliman was running hard toward her. She rested her right elbow on her right knee with the gun in both hands and fired. A hole like a big pockmark appeared in the middle of Holliman’s forehead. He seemed to take a full step forward, but his other foot did not come up to take his weight, and he fell facedown, slid to a stop, and lay still.

Leah got to her feet, snatched up the rifle he had dropped, and ran toward the door to the council chamber. Lambert was lying on the floor on his belly. As he turned toward her, she shot him with Tim Munson’s pistol and then stepped into the chamber with the rifle at her shoulder, looking for Lee Wolf.

“Where is the other one?” she called out.

Donaldson said, “He ducked out the fire exit to the street.”