Dark Skies: A Fox County Forensics Lesbian Romantic Suspense

by Malone, Cara

  And then she brought both hands up to Simone’s cheeks, cupping her head in her hands and stepping closer. Their lips touched, and Simone breathed Amelia in, that heady, warm scent that made her dizzy in the best possible way. She tasted sweet, and it felt so right to hold her close in the rain.

  It was something she’d been daydreaming about since it had almost happened yesterday. It was well worth the wait.

  When she pulled back, Simone said, “I think I’m pretty good at signal reading now.”

  “If you were, you wouldn’t have stopped kissing me,” Amelia answered.

  And so, never one to need telling twice, Simone kissed her again—deeper, longer, drinking in everything about the moment and loving it.

  9

  Derika

  Derika Moore was bleeding from a head wound beneath her hairline. The blood flowed down her forehead and over one eye, and when she caught sight of herself in a shop window, she looked like a victim from a slasher flick.

  Felt like one too.

  Had he hit her, or did she get cut by some debris while she was staggering through the high winds away from him? She couldn’t remember, and she supposed it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that she’d gotten away.

  Escaped. With her life.

  Head wounds bleed more than cuts on other parts of your body. She remembered learning that somewhere—from her father, maybe? He shaved his head a lot when she was a kid. Clearly it was true because it had been quite a while since she escaped and the blood was still flowing. Did she need stitches? Was all this going to end in a hospital, or a police station, giving her statement and hoping the cops took her seriously?

  If she could just go home and never think about all this again, she’d be happy. But in her gut, she knew that wasn’t an option. If she didn’t tell someone, he’d just do it again to some other unsuspecting girl.

  When she turned a corner, brushing her shoulder against the brick building and feeling a little woozy, she realized she was downtown. Back where all this had started. She knew where she was again at last—the only thing she didn’t know was how long she’d been lost and wandering.

  She kept going, steeling herself to find help, tell her story. She walked two more blocks in the direction of the Fox County Police Department, and then stopped when she stepped in front of an open garage bay and saw a massive, bright red fire engine. Relief washed over her. Firefighters were trained in first aid, weren’t they? Firefighters took in abandoned babies and handled all sorts of other situations where people were reluctant—or afraid—to go to the police.

  And they didn’t carry guns.

  They didn’t kneel on innocent, unsuspecting Black civilians until they couldn’t breathe.

  The firefighters, they were safe. Or at least relatively so.

  Derika stepped inside the building, and she didn’t even have to announce herself. Before she could open her mouth, a tall, athletically built woman in a navy uniform rushed over to her.

  Derika must have looked even worse than she thought because the woman’s face betrayed horror at what she saw.

  “Oh my God, what happened to you?” she asked, putting her hand on Derika’s elbow. She was supporting her as if she were about to fall down, and it wasn’t until she felt the woman’s arm wrapping securely around her back that she realized how exhausted she was.

  Her legs momentarily gave out on her and Derika slumped toward the concrete floor. The woman held her up long enough for the swoon to end and for Derika to stand under her own power again. Then she guided her over to a table off to one side of the garage.

  “Sit,” she said, her hands going to Derika’s head the moment she’d landed in the chair. “Are you wounded anywhere other than your scalp?”

  Derika shook her head, although she wasn’t totally sure that was true. She didn’t remember getting hurt anywhere else, but she didn’t remember how she’d gotten the head wound either. “I don’t think so.”

  “Stay right here,” the woman ordered, and she said it with such authority that Derika didn’t even consider the alternative. “I’m going to get a first aid kit. I’ll be right back.”

  Derika nodded, her eyelids suddenly feeling so heavy. It was as if the moment she’d gotten off her feet, every ounce of the exhaustion that she hadn’t allowed herself to feel in the last twenty-four hours hit her all at once. Like her body knew that she was in a safe space now and it was okay to be vulnerable again.

  She was holding back tears when the woman returned. She set down a large first aid kit on the table, along with a folded blanket, then pulled a chair up next to Derika’s. “I brought you a blanket. You must be freezing.”

  It wasn’t until she’d said it that Derika realized she was cold. And her clothes were drenched. It had been raining off and on all day. She gladly accepted the blanket, wrapping it around her shoulders.

  “Is it okay if I sit next to you and clean you up a bit?” the woman asked.

  Derika nodded, swallowing back those tears. Her throat felt thick with them, but now they stemmed from gratitude instead of fear and exhaustion. “Thank you.”

  “My name is Simone,” the woman said. “I’m a lieutenant here.” She reached for a bottle of saline and some gauze. “What’s your name?”

  Her voice was soft and comforting, and Derika tilted her head to make it easier for her to take care of the cut.

  “I’m Derika,” she said. “Moore.”

  Cool liquid trickled down her scalp and into the gauze that Simone held against her temple. Saline, or blood? Derika wondered if she was overdue for a tetanus shot.

  “Is it bad?” she asked.

  Simone shook her head. “It’s deep, but only about an inch long. I feel confident that you’ll live.”

  Derika smiled. How was she smiling right now, when minutes ago she’d been on the verge of tears, terrified and confused?

  Well, she was still confused. But it was nice to feel calm.

  “Derika, did someone do this to you?” Simone asked, cautious like she’d had to ask the question too many times before. She probably thought Derika had an abusive husband or boyfriend, that she was a battered woman. Well, she had been battered, but not by anyone she knew.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “But there was so much going on… the winds…”

  “Tornado,” Simone said, and Derika arched her brows.

  “Really?”

  “You didn’t know?” Simone asked. “It touched down in three different places around the city.”

  “Are people dead?” Derika asked. Suddenly those tears were welling up again. What she was doing here, taking up the lieutenant’s time, when there were other people who had it so much worse?

  “Let’s just focus on you right now, okay?” Simone said. It was like she could read Derika’s mind, saw the guilt festering there. She must have been at this job for a long time because she was damn good at it. She reached for a little bottle of liquid bandage and said, “I’m going to try this and we’ll see if it holds. If not, you’ll need stitches.”

  Derika nodded, then sat still while Simone worked. It didn’t take her long to apply the adhesive, then she laid a gauze pad over the wound and wrapped an elastic bandage around her head to hold it in place. Then she offered her bottled water or coffee.

  “Coffee would be amazing,” Derika said, positively salivating for a warm beverage. “I feel like I could fall asleep sitting right here.”

  “Well, don’t do that—you could have a concussion,” Simone said. She disappeared for another minute or two and came back with two steaming mugs of coffee on a tray, plus cream and sugar.

  “I wasn’t sure how you take it.”

  Derika poured equal amounts of both into her mug.

  While she stirred, Simone asked, “Will you tell me what happened to you, Derika?”

  She smiled again, this one more of a grimace. “I barely remember.”

  “You said it happened during the tornado,” Simone observed. “That was
yesterday. Where have you been since then?”

  Derika furrowed her brow. “I was looking for help, I think. This is the first place I stopped.”

  “In a full day?” Simone questioned. When Derika gave her a blank, helpless look, she explained, “The tornado hit Monday morning. It’s Tuesday afternoon now.”

  “Oh.” She was missing an entire day of her life. Had she passed out? Was she wandering around in a fugue state that entire time? It would explain why she was so damn tired. “Wow.”

  Simone put her hand on Derika’s forearm. “What do you remember, hon?”

  Derika took a deep breath. She tried to remember even though parts of her brain didn’t want her to. Right before she came to the firehouse, she’d been thinking that it was important to tell someone what he did to her… it looked like she’d found that someone.

  She dug deep, sorting out all the fuzzy, confusing thoughts and memories. “I was going to work. I’ve been taking rideshares since last week because my car broke down. He was weird from the start.”

  “Your driver?”

  She nodded, thinking about him. She got lost in that thought, and Simone had to prompt her to continue.

  “Weird how?”

  “Friendly, but like, excessively,” Derika said. “Like we were speed dating instead of him driving me to work and then never seeing me again. And then when we got downtown, he drove right past my office. That was when I noticed there were no handles on the insides of the passenger doors.”

  “He tried to abduct you?” Simone asked.

  “He did abduct me,” Derika said, all of it becoming clearer the more she talked. The panic, the complete and utter helplessness of being locked in the back of his car. “I don’t know where he was taking me—somewhere downtown, not too far from my office. He pulled over and he was about to drag me out of the car when the siren went off.”

  “The tornado siren?”

  “Must have been,” Derika nodded. “He looked up to see what was happening and I kicked him as hard as I possibly could and got the hell out of there.”

  “Good for you,” Simone said.

  “I hope I ruptured his testicle,” Derika said, her body tensing at the thought of him. When he’d reached into the back seat, ready to haul her out and do God-knows-what to her, she’d felt physical sickness and a visceral terror more real than anything she’d ever felt before. Just thinking of him now made those feelings rise up her gullet again.

  “I do too,” Simone said with a smirk. “So you got away in the middle of the tornado? That’s incredible.”

  “I was running on pure adrenaline,” Derika admitted. “I can’t remember what happened after that.”

  “You got away,” Simone said. “That’s what matters. I know that’s a lot to go through, but do you feel up to giving an official statement about what happened? I can call a police officer to come over here—you won’t even have to leave the firehouse.”

  Derika nodded. “I can do that.”

  “Good,” Simone said. “We can’t let this guy strike again, and he needs to pay for what he did to you.”

  “With more than just his testicle,” Derika said, and this time they both did more than just smile. They actually laughed, and it felt good.

  10

  Amelia

  It wasn’t until the end of the week that Amelia finally got to autopsy Jane Doe number eight. She’d asked the other pathologists to leave it for her, and they were all making steady but slow progress through the tornado victims.

  By Friday afternoon, they were down to two refrigerated trucks in the parking lot, having released about a dozen victims to their families and various funeral homes around the city. So far they were all deaths by natural causes, but there was obviously more to Jane Doe number eight’s story.

  Amelia had Jordan prepare the body for autopsy right after lunch, and she’d arranged for Tom to come observe, as was protocol in any kind of criminal death investigation. She was putting on her paper gown and exam gloves when he came into the morgue, and she was a little disappointed to see that he was alone this time.

  “No Lieutenant Olivier?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

  “No reason for her to be here,” Tom pointed out. He narrowed his eyes, studying her. “What, do you have a crush on her or something?”

  “No!” Amelia said a little too quickly.

  “What am I, the official wingman of the Fox County lesbian community?” Tom asked. “This is three times now, you know.”

  “I have no clue what you’re talking about,” Amelia said. She couldn’t help cracking a smile as she added, “You are good at it, though.”

  “Apparently,” he said, approaching the autopsy table with a faint limp.

  “Still hurting?” she asked, nodding to the thigh that had taken a bullet.

  “Had an occupational therapy session at lunch,” Tom explained. “Always hurts like a bitch afterward.”

  Amelia arched an eyebrow. “Hurts like a what?”

  Tom looked sufficiently ashamed as he said, “Hurts like crazy.”

  Amelia smirked, then turned her attention to Jordan, who was coming over with Jane Doe’s X-rays.

  “Hot off the printer,” she said, then clipped them to a view box near the autopsy table.

  Amelia and Tom both went over to look. As a seasoned homicide detective, Tom had been around the block a few times and he was perfectly capable of identifying major fractures, but that didn’t make him a radiographer. Amelia pointed to the cervical spine and talked him through what she was seeing.

  “Basal skull fracture,” she said, using her gloved hand to point to the base of the skull, then to the spine just below it, “with grade three dislocation of the C1 vertebra.”

  “And in layman’s terms?” Tom asked.

  “The back of her head was hit hard enough to fracture her skull and torque her vertebrae out of alignment,” Amelia said. “We see this type of injury most commonly in falls down a flight of stairs.”

  “Well, that fits what we know so far,” Tom agreed. “I got details from Simone since I wasn’t there when she pulled the body out of the house. She said Jane Doe was found near the base of the stairs, not at the other end of the basement where we found the others.”

  “So it’s possible they really didn’t know she was in the house. With all the chaos, it’s plausible that they wouldn’t have heard or seen someone falling down the stairs,” Amelia said.

  “What about the gunshot?” Tom asked.

  Amelia frowned. “Jordan, will you help me turn her?”

  They rotated the body on the stainless-steel table, face-down.

  The girl’s hair was what some call dirty blonde, made dirtier by all that she’d gone through. Amelia parted her hair carefully, looking for a wound.

  “If she hit the back of her head, she must have either fallen or been pushed backward from the top of the stairs,” Tom surmised.

  “Likely,” Amelia said. She almost never gave a definite answer, especially at this stage in an examination. In her line of work, assumptions were dangerous. They led to missed details and sloppy work. “She died in the middle of a tornado, so we really can’t account for what the high winds could have done in regard to the orientation of her body. Here, look.”

  She took Jane Doe’s head carefully in both hands, tilting her chin toward her chest to expose a long, straight gash at the base of her skull, right across the occipital bone. There was matted blood there, previously covered by her long hair.

  “I’ll examine this wound closer once I’m finished with the rest of the external examination, but a cut like this is consistent with hitting the edge of a stair tread, especially the square-edged type commonly found in basements.”

  She moved on, noting a few more cuts and scrapes most likely associated with the fall, then asked Jordan to help her roll the victim onto her back again. There were far fewer injuries to the front of the body, consistent with a backward fall. Then she got to the gunshot wound on
the upper left arm.

  “Did you find out the caliber of the bullet?” she asked Tom.

  He nodded. “Nine-mil, like I thought. None of the Thomases have one registered, and I finally got that crane to extract the gun safe. Just like Cal said, there were a couple hunting rifles and a .22, all accounted for. So we’re still on the hunt for a nine-millimeter.”

  “Maybe one of the kids brought it,” Jordan interjected. Amelia had briefed her on the case earlier in the week, and while she ordinarily would have reminded Jordan that speculating wasn’t part of her job, Tom seemed interested. “I had a friend in high school who used to flash his dad’s gun, trying to impress us or make us think he was a bad ass.”

  “I’ll see if any of the parents have nine-mils registered,” Tom said.

  Amelia shook her head. “I don’t think the kids could have shot her. At least not from the basement.”

  “Why do you say that?” Tom asked.

  “She was shot in the left bicep,” she pointed out. “If she fell backward down the stairs, that arm would have been next to the cinderblock wall. Besides, the angle’s all wrong. She was shot in the front of the arm on a downward trajectory. Whoever shot her was standing in front of her.”

  “What if she got all the way into the basement and one of the kids thought she was an intruder, shot her in self-defense? Then she fled and was on the stairs when the tornado hit,” Tom posited. “I wouldn’t at all be surprised if a kid lied about that—hell, some adults don’t have the sense to come clean in a situation like that.”

  Amelia shook her head again, though. “If she was running up the stairs, she most likely would have fallen forward, not backward. We’d see at least some injury to the front of her body.”

  “Okay, so she was shot before she reached the stairs, or on them,” Tom said. “By someone who was either standing above her or taller than her.”