by Malone, Cara
She and Carter did their best shoring up the house, then she realized she hadn’t heard from the probies since before the downpour. Lord knew what they were up to.
Simone jogged over to Amelia, who was absorbed in photographing the wreckage.
“Hey, I need to check on my recruits,” she told her. “Carter and I did what we could here, but promise me you won’t go into that house without help.”
Amelia looked up from her camera, that spark in her eyes again. “Do I look like a woman who needs help?”
“No,” Simone admitted, “but you do look like a human who’s vulnerable to crushing injuries if there’s another collapse.”
Amelia smiled wryly. “Point taken.”
“I’ll be right back,” Simone promised.
“Bring your recruits, if they’re not busy,” Amelia said. “We can use all the help we can get to process this scene quickly and minimize the risk.”
“Sure thing,” Simone said. She wandered through the neighborhood and, before long, found her three probies working with a police officer to clear the debris on the road. “Hey, how’s it going?”
“Good,” Velez said. “We cordoned off that downed power line.”
She pointed to a black cable running across someone’s yard, yellow caution tape strung up all around it. Simone asked, “Is it live?”
Velez nodded. “We notified the power company.”
“Guy I talked to was a complete dick,” the cop grumbled. “Acted like I was demanding special treatment or something. He said there are a ton of lines down around the city.”
“Yeah, I can imagine,” Simone said. “I don’t know an F5 tornado from a Dyson vacuum, but I can tell just from this neighborhood that it was a severe storm. Did he give any indication how long the wait will be?”
The cop shook his head. “He just said he’d add Balch Street to the list.”
“Great,” Simone said, rolling her eyes. “Well, if you can spare these three, Dr. Trace asked for a few volunteers to help her with her crime scene.”
“Crime scene?” Williams asked. “I thought this was a natural disaster.”
“It’s both, apparently,” Simone said. While they walked over to the Thomas house, Simone told them about the mystery woman and the gunshot wound Amelia had discovered on her arm.
When they arrived, an unmarked black SUV was parked in front of the house and a detective Simone recognized was standing on the lawn, talking to Amelia.
“Tom Logan,” Simone called, then gestured to the SUV. “What happened, did you wreck your Town Car?”
“Nah, I got an upgrade—chief said all the senior detectives are getting them eventually, but I think it’s compensation for taking a bullet on the job,” he said, pointing to his thigh.
Simone had heard about his last case. When the police chief’s daughter apprehends a perp, the news tends to travel fast, and Tom—who’d gotten caught in the crossfire—wound up sounding like the damsel in distress in that particular situation. He still favored his injured leg when he walked, but at least he’d gotten a nicer vehicle out of the ordeal.
“Well, you look like you’re nearly back to your usual horrible self,” Simone said with a grin. “Are you working this case?”
He nodded, and Amelia said, “I filled him in on what we know so far.”
“Well, I’ve got a gaggle of brand-new probies at your disposal,” Simone said. “What can we do to help?”
Tom was more than happy to have a few extra hands at his disposal, especially since he wasn’t as ambulatory as he once was. “The house is a mess and I don’t think I’m up to crawling through the wreckage. I take it no one handed over the gun?”
Amelia shook her head. “Three of the survivors are at the hospital now, and the others went home to their parents. They all left before we discovered the gunshot wound, and none of them knew the victim.”
“Yeah, that’s what they always say,” Tom answered. He looked to the pile of rubble that was once a family home and let out a long breath. “Eesh, hell of a case to come back from medical leave on.”
“We’ll help however we can, sir,” Velez said. Yeah, she definitely reminded Simone of herself as a young firefighter—right down to the suck-up tendencies.
“And now that you’ve got all the labor you need, I should probably get back to the office and find out what fresh hell is waiting for me there,” Amelia said. “I’ll leave Kelsey to finish the forensics on the scene.”
The mention of the ME’s office reminded Simone that this wasn’t the only destroyed neighborhood this morning. She looked at the refrigerated truck and wondered how many more there were stationed around Fox City. The thought turned her stomach.
“Good luck,” she said to Amelia, who gave her a wan smile.
“Thanks.”
She watched Amelia remove her exam gloves and pack up her investigation kit. Simone couldn’t bring herself to ask for Amelia’s phone number in the middle of a mass disaster, with so many dead around the city. It seemed callous, so Simone just had to hope their paths would cross again—in a more cheerful setting, preferably.
Amelia walked to the refrigerated truck and had a brief conversation with the driver through his window. He got out and together they stowed the ramps and secured the roll door, then Amelia climbed into the passenger side. The truck drove slowly out of the neighborhood, and Simone turned back to her recruits.
Kelsey was giving them instructions for processing the scene, and Simone used her radio to call over any other available members of her crew. They started at the perimeter. There were two exterior walls still standing, giving the structure the look of a life-sized doll house with two sides cut away.
The kitchen on the ground floor was still mostly intact, as were the stairs to the basement where both victims and survivors had been found. There was also a lot of rubble and splintered shards of wood down there, fallen from the crumbled upper levels. Through all that, Simone could see the broken pool table two of the victims had attempted to shelter under.
She stayed on the lawn while Tom, Kelsey and the probies carefully explored inside. Her job was watching them all, listening for any indication that the structure was imminently unstable, and she didn’t breathe for the first few minutes. It all held, though, and the probies cleared the staircase so Tom and Kelsey could get to the basement.
“Oh, wow, look at that!” Larson said. Simone was still turning her head in his direction when she heard the distinctive crack of wood giving way.
“Stop!” she and Tom both shouted.
Larson turned around. “Huh?”
He was on the first floor, standing in what used to be the living room and which now had a sharp drop-off to the basement. He stood slack-jawed as the floorboards snapped beneath his feet, and Simone sprinted to him. She grabbed his hand and yanked him out of the house just as the living room floor dropped six feet into the basement.
Kelsey was down there, fortunately in the opposite corner, and she made a mad dash for the stairs.
“You okay?” Tom called.
She had her back pressed up against the cinderblock wall, panting for breath, but she managed a thumbs up.
“Oh shit,” Larson said when the dust settled, looking at the spot where he’d been standing.
“Yeah, oh shit,” Simone scowled. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I’m sorry,” Larson said. “I got distracted.”
“You can’t afford to get distracted,” Simone told him. “Not in this job—that’s how people get killed.”
He nodded. She could have kept yelling at him and the other recruits just to make sure they also learned his lesson, but he looked as if he might cry. She relented—this was a hard day for everyone, and she couldn’t imagine how she would have felt if her first day as a firefighter had been like this.
Truth be told, she was a little surprised none of her recruits had quit on her.
“You’re all doing a good job,” she said. “But you can’t
let your guard down.”
Larson nodded, and Williams and Velez looked sufficiently warned too.
“So,” she asked, “what the hell distracted you?”
“There’s a gun safe in the rubble down there,” he said. “The kind people use for rifles.”
“You sure?” Tom asked.
Larson nodded. “My dad has one just like it.”
“Well, we’re going to have to get it out of there,” Tom said. “If we’re real lucky, we’ll find the gun used on Jane Doe and that’ll answer some big questions.”
“Those things are heavy,” Larson said. “A couple hundred pounds at the least.”
“And I can’t let anyone go back in there after the floor collapsed,” Simone said. “It’s not safe.”
Tom nodded, thinking for a moment. “I’ll make some calls, see about bringing in a crane to lift it out.”
“Sweet, like a giant claw game?” Williams asked. Simone scowled at him and he clapped his mouth shut.
7
Amelia
The next day, the skies were still overcast and it drizzled on and off all morning, but the threat of more storms appeared to have passed. Amelia heard from Reese that the previous day’s tornado had been an F4, classified as causing ‘devastating damage.’
It had certainly been devastating for the families of all the victims in the three refrigerated trucks now parked outside her office, awaiting identification and autopsy. There were three dozen in all, the worst mass fatality Amelia had ever personally seen and the worst tragedy Fox City had endured in a single day.
Of course, the opiate epidemic still raged, and took the lives of more than three dozen people every year in this city. But to see death on this scale, all those bodies tucked into black plastic bags and stored en masse… it was crushing.
Amelia went about her work feeling as if somebody had turned the gravity up on the world, pulling her shoulders down and making each step feel heavy.
“Hey, you doing okay?” Jordan asked in the afternoon when they were finishing up yet another autopsy.
She was Amelia’s assistant, and most of the time she was boisterous and jovial to the point that Amelia sometimes needed to remind her to be professional. It was her coping mechanism to get through a job that was otherwise morbid, but today, even Jordan didn’t have any jokes or pranks in her arsenal.
“Yeah, just tired,” Amelia said.
She’d barely taken a break since yesterday. There was too much work to do, a city to rebuild. She was hungry, her feet hurt, she had to pee like mad, and a bubble bath with a glass of chilled white wine would be absolutely heavenly. That last wish list item would have to wait until those three refrigerated trucks were emptied out and sent back where they’d come from.
Nobody else was taking a break, and as the chief, Amelia sure as hell couldn’t. All five of the autopsy tables were in use, something Amelia had rarely seen. The morgue was noisy with the voices of five doctors, five assistants, five attending police officers. And it’d stay that way for the foreseeable future.
There was just one thing Amelia couldn’t ignore.
“Nature calls,” she said as she finished stitching up the Y-shaped incision she’d made on the body cavity of the present victim. “Let’s take a ten-minute break before we move on to the next case.”
“Sounds good, Dr. T,” Jordan said. “I could use a Red Bull.”
Amelia grimaced. “I don’t know how you drink that stuff.”
“I don’t know how you don’t,” Jordan countered. “Especially on a day like today.”
“Coffee is more than enough for me,” she said. “I can’t afford to get the shakes.”
In fact, a hot cup of coffee sounded damn good right about then. She finished her work and helped Jordan move the body onto a gurney, then stripped off her gloves and gown.
First, drain the bladder which had been aching for far too long. Then, coffee.
She headed out of the morgue toward the front of the office. The lab technicians, Dylan and Elise, were just as busy as the pathologists, and the investigators were all furiously typing up scene reports for each of the tornado victims. Amelia used the restroom, then made a beeline for the break room. She’d nearly gotten there when someone called, “Dr. Trace.”
She turned to see Tom Logan coming up the hall—with a familiar, very attractive firefighter.
Simone looked different without all the heavy gear she’d been wearing on the scene yesterday. Today she was in her station uniform, a pair of navy slacks and a button-up shirt with a Fox County Fire Department patch on her arm.
“Simone,” Amelia said, sounding breathless—because she’d been rushing or because Simone stole her breath away, she honestly didn’t know. “Hi.”
“How are you doing with all this?” she asked.
“Getting through it.” Suddenly Amelia’s feet didn’t hurt quite as bad and she didn’t feel her hunger as much. The bubble bath would still be nice though. Especially if she wasn’t alone…
She pushed the thought away. Talk about reminding someone of their professionalism!
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Simone gave her a wry smile. “Don’t sound so happy to see me.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Amelia said. “It’s just been chaotic around here. I figured the fire station would be the same way.”
“Oh, it definitely is,” Simone said. “But I’ve got the probies restocking supplies and I figured that would keep them busy long enough to pop over here with Tom for a few minutes.”
“Simone and her crew did a lot of work on the scene yesterday after you left,” he said. “I figured she’d be interested to see it through.”
Amelia studied his face. She knew from what Kelsey had told her that he’d been instrumental in the early stages of her relationship with Officer Zara Hayes by letting Zara shadow a case Kelsey was investigating. And then there was Zara’s patrol partner and the police chief’s daughter—he’d bent the rules for them too, and now they were happily dating. Was the gruff homicide detective and confirmed bachelor a secret matchmaker?
Not that Amelia needed it. She already knew that Simone was the most gorgeous woman she’d seen in a very long time, and she knew that she didn’t have room for romance—during the mass disaster or any other time. So while she loved the way Simone made her feel, and she loved looking at her, that was as far as it could go.
Or maybe she was reading way too deeply into all of it. She turned her attention back to the case at hand.
“I wish I had more to report about Jane Doe from my end of things,” she said. “Ordinarily I would have done the autopsy by now, or at least scheduled it. We’ve got three dozen bodies in the refrigerated trucks and the other pathologists and I have just been autopsying them in the order that we pull them out. We’re doing our best just to keep the process moving.”
“Understandable,” Tom said. “I’m not so concerned with the actual autopsy right now, but I was hoping you could take a closer look at that bullet wound today. Simone, tell her what your recruit found.”
“There was a gun safe in the basement of the house,” she told Amelia.
“I talked to the homeowner, Cal,” Tom added. “He told me that his wife knew the combination, and he’d recently told it to his son too, since the boy was getting older. Cal wanted him to have access for personal safety reasons in case Cal himself wasn’t home.”
“And you want to know if the caliber of the bullet matches one of the guns inside?” Amelia asked. “Come on, let’s have some coffee while we talk.”
“Exactly,” Tom said as she led them to the break room. “Cal owns a few hunting rifles and a .22 for home defense, says they should all be accounted for in the safe. We haven’t actually been able to retrieve it yet, though—I’m on a damn waiting list for a crane.”
Amelia poured them each a cup of coffee and offered cream and sugar. Tom loaded his up with plenty of both, and Simone added a dash of cream
to hers. Tom told Amelia he wanted to know the bullet caliber for when they did eventually excavate the safe, and his next step would be going to the hospital to talk to the two injured boys now that they were out of the woods.
“One of them needed surgery,” he said. “And the Thomas boy, Noah, ended up needing a blood transfusion. Apparently he’s a universal recipient, though, so that’s lucky, and he’s doing well now. Cal said he would probably get released today and I want to get over to the hospital before that happens so I can question them both at once.”
“I’m sure the Thomases are in no hurry to leave,” Simone said. “It’s not like they have a home to go back to at the moment.”
Amelia got to the bottom of her coffee cup entirely too quickly, and she figured it was probably past the ten minutes she’d told Jordan she would be gone. “Should we go look at that bullet?”
Tom nodded, and Amelia took their coffee mugs, then led them through the building to the morgue in the back. Tom was here on at least a weekly basis so she knew he’d be fine, and she guessed from Simone’s calm demeanor yesterday that she’d be okay too, but it was always nice to get a read on people. She’d had plenty of fainters in the past.
“Have you been back here before?” Amelia asked her.
Simone nodded. “Once, during training, and a couple of times to deliver bodies from fire scenes.”
“Well, it’s a lot busier than usual right now,” Amelia warned her.
“Don’t worry, I can handle it.”
Amelia nodded. “I’m sure you can.”
They went into the morgue, where the other four docs were still hard at work. Jordan was sitting on the counter and she hopped down the minute she saw Amelia. How many times had she told that girl there were more than enough stools and chairs in this office?
Amelia resisted rolling her eyes, and Jordan asked, “Ready for the next one?”