Today, however, was not normal. Not typical, no. Not regular or routine by any stretch of the imagination. Today Megan had turned on the speaker volume control thinking she wanted to leave every line of communication open, and it was for this reason that she heard the chime that signaled a message had jumped into her queue. It was the tenth she’d opened in under an hour. Eight of the previous messages were work related. The last had been a nasty bit of junk mail that managed to squeeze through her software filters and, because she was distracted, trick her into opening it with a moderately devious subject line that would have been otherwise identified for what it was by her mental antispammers to prompt a quick delete. All nine were long-term or short-term ignorable.

Until this one.

This turned out to be the message Megan had sought and dreaded, and nothing could stop the cold slide of ice that began to work through her intestines the instant she read its subject, causing her to break into visible shudders as she opened it with a hurried click of the mouse.

Much as she’d tried prepare herself, nothing.

“Don’t think I have to reconstruct what happened back here,” Erickson was saying. “You can see for yourselves.”

Ricci and Thibodeau stood with him outside the rescue center’s back door, studying its demolished lock plate and frame.

“Somebody fired a lot of rounds,” Ricci said. “Wanted past the door in a rush, didn’t care about surprising anyone with the noise.”

“Right,” Erickson said. “We can thank this rain for making the ground damp enough to give us some decent shoe impressions to photo and cast. There were four attackers from the looks of things, came around from either side of the main building in pairs. Your boss’s daughter must have left those kennels out behind us, seen them closing in, and hurried through this entrance to try and get away from them.”

Ricci had closed his umbrella and crouched to examine the door frame.

“You must’ve pulled a lot of slugs out of this,” he said, running a latex-gloved finger over the pocked, splintered wood. “What caliber?”

“Nine mil Parabellum,” Erickson said. “The ammunition was fragged, but the spent cartridge casings we recovered told us right off.”

Ricci glanced over his shoulder at Erickson.

“Big, deep punch for nines, even fired up close,” he said. “There a brand name on those casings?”

Erickson gave a nod. “Federal Hydrashok.”

“Premium make.”

“That’s right.”

“Expensive.”

“Right.”

“You able to tell anything about the guns from the ejection pattern?”

“Not definitively.”

Ricci responded to the cop’s knee-jerk hedge with a look of overt impatience.

Erickson hesitated a moment, exhaled.

“Off the record,” he said, “I believe the weapons used outside this door were subs.”

Ricci considered that.

“Outside,” he repeated.

Erickson nodded.

“Were shots fired inside?” Ricci asked.