Acoustic Shadows

by Patrick Kendrick

  ‘Uh … okay,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, coming back into the room. ‘I’m Doctor Spirazza. Todd,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘And you are …?’

  Erica couldn’t look down at the name tag on her coat without giving herself away.

  ‘Susan,’ she said, smiling broadly.

  The doctor frowned. ‘Nice to meet you … Susan.’ He stood there for a minute as if he were waiting for her to say something. ‘It says “Melissa” on your name tag.’

  Erica looked down at it, feeling her face flush. ‘Oh, shoot. Mel and I came on the same time tonight. We were so busy gabbing that we must’ve accidentally grabbed each other’s coats.’

  The doctor stood gazing at her for another moment, then smiled. ‘I’ve got to finish my rounds, but I’ll be looking for that coffee in about an hour, or so. Think you can break away then?’

  Erica licked her lips, trying to be a little sexy, but her tongue was as dry as her lips, and it was like licking flypaper. ‘An hour, sure,’ she gulped. ‘Meet you at the nurses’ station then?’

  He winked at her as he left the room, then hesitated again. ‘You’ve got some blood on your sleeve,’ he said.

  Erica looked down, again, as if surprised, and could see the stain had spread.

  ‘Oh, damn. Must be from the gunshot patient. I was changing her dressing. Melissa will have a tizzy fit if I don’t get that out. Thanks for telling me.’

  The doctor smiled again, turned, and sped off toward his rounds.

  Erica had to sit down for a moment or she would have fainted. She put her head between her legs and breathed slowly. She rolled up the sleeve and wrapped some gauze around the IV site.

  When she stood up this time, she made a beeline into the hall and hung a left. She found the elevators and pushed the button. As she waited, she looked back down the corridor. The cop that had been flirting with the nurse was walking back to Erica’s room, the nurse accompanying him. The nurse was with him. Erica’s heart began to race again. She looked at the elevator light above the door that indicated which floor the car was coming from. Three more floors to go.

  The cop and the nurse entered her room. She was screwed. Within thirty seconds, both emerged. She heard the nurse say, ‘I can’t imagine where she could’ve gone with her injuries, or why she would’ve removed her IV. It doesn’t make sense. I’ll look to the left, you go to the right. I’ll notify my supervisor, too.’ They weren’t panicky yet, but it was clear they wanted to find her and get her back where she belonged. The cop started in Erica’s direction. She held her breath.

  Ding. The elevator finally arrived at her floor. The doors stayed shut for what seemed an eternity. She wanted to dig her nails into the crack between them and pry them apart. When they finally opened with a sucking sound, Erica darted inside. Then, the doors took forever to close. As they finally began to inch toward each other, she saw the cop walk past, looking both ways, but not into the elevator.

  Once in the lobby, Erica practically ran out of the hospital and into the parking lot. She walked away into the darkness, feeling safer with every step, but her side began to throb with pain. She leaned against a car and tried to catch her breath. Looking into her purse, she took out the stolen clothes, kicked off her Nikes and began to pull the jeans on. As she was doing so, she noticed a lump in one of the hip pockets and stuck her fingers in to investigate. Car keys. With a remote door lock. She finished sliding into the pants, then discarded the lab coat, and pulled on the T-shirt. The jeans were huge in the waist, the shirt baggy, but they would do for now. She squeezed her shoes back on without untying the laces. She noticed dots of her own blood on them and was grateful the inquisitive doctor had not noticed in the supply room.

  She moved into the middle of the parking lot and pressed the red button on the remote, the one with the picture of a horn. A piercing HONK from behind momentarily scared the crap out of her. She turned to see which car’s lights flashed.

  ‘No way,’ she whispered aloud. It was a squatty, black, Chevy Camaro SS. The SS stood for Super Sport. That meant it was fast. Erica smiled and got into the car.

  SEVEN

  Thiery gathered officers from the various departments that had responded to the scene and questioned their involvement. Answers ranged from, ‘we arrived and responded as a tactical SWAT unit’, from the Calusa County Sheriff’s Office, to, ‘by the time we got here, it was all over and we just helped with traffic’, from the Lake Wales Police Department. They all met in the offices of the parish hall at the church as parents and teachers from the school began to filter out and make their way home. It would serve as a temporary command post until a mobile unit was brought in.

  There were numerous departments involved, plus the school board sent their internal police. Thiery delegated assignments to each department, based on their involvement, and dismissed those representatives from departments with little to no involvement. He requested reports from all in attendance, then asked Chief Dunham to head the interviews with the families of survivors and victims. Though he didn’t say it aloud, he felt Dunham had a natural compassion that made people more comfortable talking to him. Dunham nodded his head graciously and accepted the assignment.

  Thiery asked Sheriff Conroy to have his department do the most extensive reports, the scene diagrams and initial entry reports, and to follow up with the county dispatch system to get an accurate account of any calls they received, the times they came in, were dispatched, units arrived, et cetera.

  Conroy almost sneered as he said, ‘that’s what I was going to do anyway.’

  Thiery was in no mood for his callousness. ‘Good, Sheriff Conroy, then you’re probably as concerned as I am about the reports I’m hearing on the response to the school.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked Conroy, pushing himself off the wall he’d been leaning against.

  Thiery’s jaw muscles flexed as he pondered the quandary of calling out the local sheriff in front of his peers, or swallowing his own pride and looking weak in front of the same group. He was about to say something not very nice when Logan stepped in.

  ‘I think what Agent Thiery was saying is, it’s very late, and we all know what we have to do.’

  All eyes turned toward her. She’d come into the meeting later than the others and had stayed hidden in the back of the room until now.

  ‘Hi, I’m Agent Sara Logan, with the FBI. Agent Thiery asked me to follow up on the guns used in this morning’s incident, and I’ve accepted that assignment. So, if any of you have questions or comments regarding the subject, please don’t hesitate to contact me.’

  Thiery nodded. ‘Thanks, Agent Logan. Which reminds me, I need to ask you all to get with your administrative staff and, when your officers have completed their reports with whatever system you use, have them send them to me in a PDF format, okay? And, before we leave tonight, I need to get everyone’s contact information on a piece of paper we can duplicate and share with each other.’

  ‘I, uh, already have that, sir,’ said Dunham. He stood up, no taller than anyone’s shoulders in the room, walked to the front, handed a copy to Thiery, then began handing them to other officers.

  ‘Thanks, Chief,’ said Thiery, nodding his gratitude.

  Fatigue permeated the room like a Port-O-Potty air freshener. The combined scents of gun oil, leather, Kevlar, and sweaty bodies covered in polyester uniforms wafted about. Thiery could hear stomachs growling and watched officers rubbing tired, red eyes. Most of them had been there for fifteen hours, or more.

  ‘Okay, people,’ said Thiery, ‘let’s wrap it up for tonight. You have my number. Please call if you think of anything pertinent. I’ll touch base with all of you tomorrow. Try to have a good night, and get some rest.’

  Everyone filed out of the room and headed to their cars. Thiery saw Logan talking to Conroy off to the side and paused, then decided to keep moving. At that point, he didn’t want to talk to either one of them.

 
It was three o’clock in the morning at the tiny Sun Beam Motel, a clean but dated motor court that offered HBO, free Wi-Fi, a swimming pool, and close proximity to Legoland. After settling in, Thiery called his sons. Both lived in California: one in the Navy, twenty-one-year-old Leif, stationed in San Diego; the other, Owen, a twenty-three-year-old firefighter in San Francisco. After seeing the devastation at the school, Thiery ached to tell them he loved them.

  Neither answered their phone. He tried not to take it personally. He wondered if they’d heard about the shooting, wherever they were. It would be midnight in California. They were both young and probably partying. Maybe they were both on shift at work.

  He had felt a distance develop as they had grown up with him, their only parent. It was difficult to be both loving caregiver and disciplinarian, and he’d wished he had someone to tag team with. He believed, at times, they blamed him for their mother leaving them so young. They were there, in the house, when some of his co-workers, FDLE agents, stopped by, from time to time, to ask him more questions about her disappearance. She had packed a few items – enough for a weekend away – then vanished.

  For a while, Thiery was the primary ‘person of interest’ in her disappearance. Newspapers printed the story of the cop whose wife was missing, and it had created problems for his sons at school. It was no secret to anyone that surviving spouses were the first suspect in missing or murdered partners. He felt people thought he was guilty of something and the burden weighed heavily on him.

  When Adrienne hadn’t returned after a few weeks, Thiery’s initial reaction was to assume the worst: she had left him, but something bad had happened along the way. Following that instinct, he’d gone to New York, where his wife had grown up in Brooklyn, the daughter of Albanian immigrants. Though he hadn’t spoken to Edona Manjola since he and Adrienne were married – Adrienne’s mother had never cared for him, for reasons he didn’t understand – he located her apartment, but it was empty.

  He learned Adrienne’s mother was dead. When he made further inquiries, neighbours told him that, a few weeks earlier, she had killed herself by leaping from the building. The suicide reinforced his notion that something had happened to Adrienne, but a check with every hospital in New York, and even the coroner’s office, turned up nothing. With no other living relatives, Thiery hit a dead end.

  After she’d been gone for over two years, after Thiery had spent every waking moment trying to find her, and then hired several private detectives to continue the search, he was no longer a suspect. He was just alone. Case closed. There was no formal announcement as to his innocence, any more than there had been that he was a suspect. The case, like his wife, just faded away. After seven years, he finally had her declared deceased, allowing him to collect a small life insurance policy she’d carried. He’d placed the funds in an account for his sons’ college savings.

  He often wondered if he should have remarried, but that wasn’t something he was going to do just to have a built-in babysitter. In any case, it was too late, now. His sons were who they were, and, to them, he was who he was. All the regret in the world wouldn’t change that.

  By four o’clock, Thiery was in bed, poring over reports he’d gathered from the Sebring and Lake Wales Police Departments, as well as the Calusa County Sheriff’s Office, whose SWAT had yielded the most reports.

  The reports from the departments who’d arrived first on the scene, Sebring PD and the School Board police, stated in dry, legal terms how and what they did to secure the building, set up a command post, and assist in the evacuation that was underway when they arrived. The Sheriff’s SWAT team recorded the team’s entry at 8:42 a.m., immediately followed by the discovery of both the victims’ and perpetrators’ bodies.

  The Fire Rescue reports comprised brief medical statements that included patient treatment – four treated for wounds and six more for chest pain, shock, or trouble breathing – and recorded which hospitals the patients were transported to. There were reports from each forensic team that entered the building and dealt with each of the bodies, the location, nearby weapons, bullet casing trajectory, and various gun blasts. All in all, the local law enforcement agencies had done an outstanding job, doing what they were supposed to do. The problem was that reports were just that: reports. Facts, times, data. There were no leads in them that would take the investigation to a point of conclusion. It was all paperwork formality, but, as lead investigator, he had to read every one of them thoroughly, in case something popped up.

  Thiery wondered again about the response time. According to the dispatch log, Calusa County SWAT arrived at 8:42. The initial call came in at 8:26. A sixteen-minute response? Maybe that was normal for this area, but Dunham had arrived at 8:38. Technically, the Calusa County Sheriff Office was ‘outside the city limits’ but it was still in very close proximity to the school. How did a police chief from a neighbouring city several miles away beat a SWAT located a few blocks away? Maybe protocol had them meet at the main department before responding? Maybe they had to go there for their SWAT gear? In most cities, officers kept their response gear in the trunk, but it might be different here. Thiery made a note to himself to audit the dispatch tapes and call times.

  Deadened by fatigue, Thiery wondered if he was making something of nothing. Maybe the governor was right, he thought. Maybe there wasn’t an investigation, other than to determine what triggered the two men to do the shooting. What was their common fuck up? Abused as children? Bullied in school? Too many violent video games? Could anyone ever really know what caused these – what had they called them on the news? – Human Tornadoes?

  Still, something bothered Thiery. Something that, every time he began to doze off, woke him like a new lover trying to sneak out of bed. Why was a forty-one-year-old man hanging out with a nineteen-year-old kid? How and where did they meet? And what about Erica Weisz? What was her story? How did she get a gun? Why would she chance taking a loaded weapon to school? And what gave her the wherewithal to aim and shoot it? Most people couldn’t do that, even once. She managed to do it twice. He made a note on his iPad to check with the school board’s human resources department to see if her employment background revealed anything.

  Thiery’s head slumped to one side. The reports and his ever-present iPad slipped from his hands as sleep overcame him. He welcomed the coming slumber and managed to slip off his loafers and slide his feet under the covers, though still dressed. The mattress was too soft for his liking, but felt like a mother’s embrace as the window-banger AC unit hummed a soft lullaby.

  His slumber lasted about one minute before his mind, as weary as it was, clicked back on, repeating the questions: What did Frank Shadtz and David Coody have in common? A mature, adult man from out of town and a nineteen-year-old, pimple-faced, hayseed kid. How had they met and joined together with the common idea they should shoot up a school?

  ‘Shit,’ he said aloud, rolling out of bed, his head swimming. ‘Goddamnit, man! Turn it off,’ he admonished himself. He got up, went to the bathroom, and unwrapped a tiny bar of soap. He washed his face and rinsed, then looked at himself in the mirror, though he had to squat to do so. His brown eyes were bloodshot, his face salt-and-pepper-whiskered, and his hair greasy. Someone once told him he looked like George Clooney on steroids. Right then, he was closer to Mickey Rourke on a bender.

  He shuddered and looked at his watch: 5:15. He couldn’t talk to the dead Shadtz and doubted if Coody was out of the coma yet. Maybe he would never come out of it. He needed to talk to Erica Weisz and Sally Ravich, the adult survivors, as well as some of the children. It kept coming back to that. But, it was so frigging early, or late, or whatever and he was just too damned whipped.

  He went back to bed and drifted off. This time, he slept almost seventy minutes before his cell phone rang.

  Away from his father, Julio Esperanza was the man. No one would have ever guessed he cowered under the glare of his father’s gaze. Few people had seen what his Papa did to those who crossed him. Ju
st the thought of his father’s displeasure turned Julio’s blood to ice.

  When he was eighteen, his father had told him to pack a bag; they were taking a trip out to the ocean. Just the two of them. They drove from Ciudad Juarez, a city his father literally owned, all the way out to the coast in his fancy new American car, a Lincoln Continental.

  They travelled to a small town called Puerto Penasco where Emilio owned a rather large beach house neither Julio nor his mother had known about. There, the father told the son he was now a man, and he allowed him to drink his very fine, aged tequila. Julio had never felt so close to his father, sipping the golden liquor on the warm sand overlooking the blue ocean. He felt as though they were buddies for the first time in his life.

  One morning, Emilio told his son he had friends coming from Tijuana. They were bringing Julio presents in honour of his birthday, because they respected Don Emilio. The men arrived, oddly, driving two beat-up vans. One man got out of his van and, grinning, went to the back and opened the side door. A half-dozen perspiring but beautiful women emerged from the back, as if a genie’s bottle had tipped over and spilled its lovely contents: blondes, brunettes, even a redhead who looked like the American movie star, Ann-Margret. They wore lots of make-up, and low-cut blouses that pushed their breasts up into nice, plump, fleshy pillows. A couple of them wore fishnet stockings. Julio almost drooled looking at them and found himself becoming both excited and a little nervous.

  The sun was setting, casting a warm, welcoming, orange glow over the ladies and the idyllic beach setting. Emilio told the women to go inside the house and freshen up. They walked close to Julio. He could smell their perfume and their sweaty sex. A couple of the mujeres winked at him. One brushed by him, slowed, and dragged her hand across his still hairless chest, letting her fingers linger on his nipple and giving it a little twist. Goose bumps broke out all over his body and an erection grew, noticeably, in his swim trunks. The men laughed good-naturedly.