When Shadows Fall (11 page)

Chapter
23

FIVE STEPS LED
down to a sunken living room. Sam saw Ellie Scarron twisted on the floor, a pool of burgundy under her head.

Davidson yelled, “Jesus, don’t touch her. Get back up here and don’t touch anything. This is a crime scene.”

She ignored Davidson, rushed down the stairs and knelt by the woman. Scarron’s eyes were open, unseeing, staring upward. Sam avoided the carotid; there was a thin loop of wire around the woman’s neck, cutting deep into the flesh. Instead she picked up Scarron’s limp wrist. Her body hadn’t begun to cool into inertness yet; the killer hadn’t been gone long.

She was about to release the wrist when she felt a tiny bit of pressure, the weakest bump against her fingers. A pulse, thready and indistinct. Sam launched herself into CPR, hands intertwined, pushing hard on the woman’s chest.

“She’s alive, she’s alive! Get an ambulance out here. Xander, come here and stabilize her neck for me. She can’t breathe. We need to clear an airway for her.”

The men jumped into action. They were both professionals, able to handle an emergency situation without second-guessing or arguing.

Sam took one look at the damaged tissue around the victim’s neck and knew there was no safe way to intubate her. As Sam got her heart beating in a more regular rhythm, blood began to slowly pulse from the wound in her neck. Sam felt around the wire and pressed her fingers into the base of the woman’s throat, then nodded to herself. There. She could do it.

Xander knelt by the woman’s head, grabbed it with both hands. He’d been on enough battlefields to recognize what Sam was about to do.

“You’re going to trache her?”

“I have to. Keep her head still, tell her she’ll be okay. Put pressure on her carotid, not enough to knock her out, but keep that blood flow down. She’s tachycardic. Watch her pulse. I’ll be right back.”

Sam rushed toward the kitchen, grabbed a paring knife from a block on the counter and looked around for something to use as an airway. A straw, a pen, something, anything hollow.

Come on, come on, come on. You’re running out of time.

There. The plants on the windowsill had decorative glass watering bulbs inserted into their soil. She snatched one, cleanly cracked it against the edge of the stainless-steel sink. The head broke off with a clatter. She turned on the hot water and allowed it run through the tube. Thoughts of infection raced through her mind, but there was no time to properly sterilize the glass. She took off back for the living room, skidded to a stop by the butler’s pantry and its crystal decanters. She pulled the stopper out of the closest and doused the glass rod in spirits. It smelled like a very good single malt, which was heartening: it was pure alcohol. She brought the decanter with her.

The preparations hadn’t taken more than a minute. Back on her knees next to Ellie Scarron, she noted the woman’s skin beginning to blue.
Hurry, Sam, hurry.
She would save her, damn it. The woman had been lying on the floor bleeding out while Davidson screwed around outside.

She had one brief dark thought. At least June Davidson hadn’t tried to kill Scarron himself, but he’d had plenty of time to call someone to get out here and take care of things.

She splashed the Scotch on the woman’s exposed throat, then expertly pushed the knife through the skin at the base of her very small laryngeal prominence, going hard through the surprisingly tough cricothyroid membrane and into the trachea. The woman didn’t move, didn’t wince.

“Come on, Ellie. Stay with me. I’ve got you. You can’t die on me. I won’t let you.” As she talked, Sam used her finger to hold the opening apart, then gingerly placed the tube in the trachea. She pulled the skin together tight against the base of the tube, blew into it a few times, used the other to feel for a pulse and waited for the air to begin moving into Ellie Scarron’s lungs.

Sam heard a slight whistle, realized her own eyes were closed. She opened them in time to see Ellie close hers, not in death, but in a deep unconsciousness.

Xander whispered, “You did it.”

Sam blew out a breath of relief. “She’s alive for now. Davidson, we need to get her transferred to the hospital quickly. They’ll need to do a proper tracheostomy and get this wire out of her neck.”

Davidson said, “They’re two minutes out. Damn, woman, that was impressive. You brought her back from the grave.”

She had. Ellie’s pulse was bumping along merrily now that she wasn’t hypoxic anymore, and the color was coming back to her face.

Davidson squatted down next to them. “When will she be able to talk, to tell us what happened?”

Sam shook her head. “It’s too early to tell. She may never regain consciousness. There may be permanent damage to her vocal box. The wire is cutting through the skin there. I was careful as I could be, but I wasn’t gentle. It could have made things worse.”

“You were amazing. She’s lucky you were here. Whoever tried to kill her couldn’t have been more than five minutes ahead of us. Thank God we decided to head up here.” He patted her awkwardly on the shoulder, then went up the stairs to the foyer.

Sam met Xander’s eyes. He was still holding Ellie’s head straight so the field tracheostomy wouldn’t dislodge. She spoke quietly so Davidson wouldn’t hear.

“Whoever tried to kill her used the same M.O. as Benedict’s killer.”

He nodded. “Clearly someone is trying to make sure we don’t find out about Savage’s world. They’re killing off everyone who’s had anything to do with him.”

“Worse than that. You see what’s happening, right? They’re killing off people connected to the will. Keep your hands on her. I’ll be right back.” Sam stood and went to Davidson, who was waiting by the front door for the ambulance. She could hear the thin wail of the siren coming from the base of the mountain.

She looked at her hands and realized she was covered in blood. Davidson looked down at her, and silently handed her his handkerchief.

She wiped her hands on it, watching the white stain red.

His voice was shaky and she realized he was fighting back tears. Her estimation of him went up a few notches. He swiped at his eyes.

“I’m getting pissed off now. Ellie is a good friend of mine. What the hell is going on around here?”

Sam resisted the urge to touch his arm, to comfort him. He was clearly upset, his chest rising and falling quickly as he struggled to maintain control. Maybe she’d misjudged him. Maybe he was a good man, a solid, trustworthy man. Maybe her own issues were clouding her judgment. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d only been delaying them, pushing them off the trail, reluctantly allowing them to be a part of the investigation. A small-town cop not wanting to be manhandled by the system, or a methodical one who didn’t jump to conclusions?

Or was this about her? Had she been so twisted by the events of the past few years in Nashville that she saw the bad in people immediately, instead of the good? Her inherent distrust of mankind, driven by years opposite the working end of a scalpel, trying to figure out why people did such horrible things to one another?

“I don’t know. We need to be cautious, and you need to find out who tried to kill Ellie Scarron. The attacker had to know we were headed here, and scrambled to murder her before we arrived. My God, another minute or two of us standing around dithering about whether she was home or not and he would have succeeded. Who did you tell? Who knew we were coming here?”

He held himself so still she wondered if he’d heard her. He finally dragged in a breath and sighed. “I made three calls on the way up here. One to Ellie herself, to tell her we were fifteen minutes out, one to a friend in the service to check out your boyfriend there and one to Mac Picker, to check what time his partners were coming back tonight.”

“Picker. All roads seem to lead to Benedict’s law offices, don’t they?”

His voice was cold and hard. “They certainly do.”

The ambulance lumbered over the crest of the hill and pulled to a stop in front of the house. Two EMTs spilled out, began gathering their gear. Sam shouted to them, “I had to do an emergency trache on Mrs. Scarron. You’ll need to stabilize the surgical field, too. It’s a little messy.”

One of the EMTs raised a hand in acknowledgment. Sam went inside, got a thumbs-up from Xander, who was helping the EMTs, had a glance at her patient, who continued to cling to life, if barely, then went into the kitchen to wash the blood from her hands.

Chapter
24

Metropolitan
Police
Criminal Investigative Division–Homicide
Section
Washington, D.C.

CAPTAIN ARMSTRONG STOOD
at the front of the room with two FBI agents—a man and a woman. They both were fit but looked drawn and gray, which told Fletcher more than he wanted. The woman was young, pretty, athletic, her dark hair drawn back in a ponytail, and she was frowning at a BlackBerry. The man, forties, blond hair high and tight and horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like a teacher instead of an agent, conversed quietly with Armstrong.

Fletcher slipped into his chair at 6:15 p.m., out of breath from his two-and-a-half-hour tear through the Virginia countryside and the mad dash across town to the run-down morgue that housed the OCME. He’d found Nocek and dropped off the cooler with the samples from Savage’s autopsy, then rushed downtown to Metro headquarters.

He ignored the looks from the rest of the team. They’d been a little cold to him since he returned a few weeks ago, not understanding why he’d thrown away a chance to work full-time on the JTTF—the Joint Terrorism Task Force. They’d kill for it.

Let them have it. He was better suited to this. Death and mayhem one-on-one, not for a higher cause, but for personal gain. He understood it. He’d lived it for so long, he flat-out got it.

Armstrong shot him a look. “Glad you could join us, Detective Fletcher. Are you up to speed?”

Fletch nodded. He wasn’t, all he knew was what he’d learned from the news in his car and Hart’s texts, but he wasn’t about to admit that. “Let’s begin our evening update. The child has been missing for seven hours now. There have been no sightings, and damn few calls about this little girl. We’re working the media angle hard. The tip line is going out on the local news right now, so expect this all to change. The FBI’s child endangerment team is lead on the case—this is Special Agent Rob Thurber and Special Agent Jordan Blake. They’ll take it from here.”

The lights dimmed, and a picture flashed up on the screen, a three-foot-high shot of a beautiful little girl, hair a pale red, eyes blue as the sky. She was smiling, missing her two front teeth, and seemed so damn happy, and so alive, Fletcher could barely stand to look at her. The thought of those eyes staring unseeing toward the heavens made him swallow, hard. She looked vaguely familiar, but she was a kid—they all looked alike at that age, still pudding-faced and round, before their bones started pushing out of the skin to form their permanent features and identities.

Blake nodded at Armstrong. Fletcher watched her move toward the mike as though she’d done this a hundred times. She was pretty young to be putting off the
been there, done that
attitude. But she cleared her throat before she started to speak and wiped an invisible hair back from her face, a tiny self-conscious gesture, and Fletcher realized he was wrong. She was scared to death. It made him root for her.

“Thanks, Captain. We appreciate all your help here. As you know, Rachel was last seen by the main zoo entrance on Connecticut Avenue. Her nanny was talking with another nanny, and swears she only took her eyes off her for a second. We’ve done a background check on the Stevenses’ nanny. She’s Guatemalan, here legally, and so far, everything she says checks out. She seems to be a cautious and concerned player, not a suspect.

“There are cameras galore in the area, but a sweep has turned up nothing. Metro canvass is still ongoing, but they haven’t drummed up any leads, either. Whoever did this was very careful, and managed to keep off-video. We’re set up on the family’s home phone and cells in case a ransom demand comes in, and my team has started deconstructing the Stevenses’ lives to see why someone might want to take their little girl. Because this seems like a professional snatch, we’d like to think there will be a ransom demand.”

Fletcher put up a hand. “A professional snatch? Agent Blake, what do the parents do?”

She nodded at him in appreciation. “Mr. Stevens works for an aerospace company in Bethesda, Lockheed Martin, and Mrs. Stevens is a legal attaché to the State Department. She is currently out of the country, and is expected back late tonight. They both have high-level security clearances and work with classified materials.”

Agent Blake’s demeanor, the mother’s job at the State Department, the idea of a professional kidnapping... It sounded to him as though Mrs. Stevens might be working for more than the State Department, maybe was a CIA asset. They were thick as flies around town lately, it seemed. Which upped all this to the next level. If this wasn’t a sicko after a little girl, but a terrorist trying to make a point, they could be dealing with a whole new level of crazy.

Agent Blake continued the briefing, running through the protocols her team had in place. Fletcher listened with half an ear. Snatching a little girl off a busy street in the middle of the day was quite a feat. There had to be more than one person involved. He knew the area where she’d gone missing. It was heavily populated, busy, two Metro stops nearby, lots of foot traffic and vehicle traffic. The National Zoo hosted daily field trips; there were busloads of excited kids running around. Add in the usual contingent of people wandering the streets and he could see why they chose the zoo to snatch her from. It was busy and crowded, and in all the confusion, a single kid could disappear easily.

What a couple of days. The eyes of the dead boy from yesterday crept into his thoughts, and he looked at the notepad in front of him to realize he’d drawn that crime scene, captured the boy’s empty, horrified look quite well.

“Fletcher? Yo, earth to Fletch?”

Hart was poking him in the ribs with a pencil.

“Stop it, you jerk.”

Hart pointed toward the front of the room, where their boss, Captain Armstrong, stood frowning at them, hands on his hips in exasperation.

Fletcher raised an apologetic brow. He ripped off the page and balled it up. “Sir?”

“Fletcher, I need you to run point with Agent Blake. If you’re through with your nap, that is.” The homicide detectives tittered, and the FBI agents had the audacity to look amused.

Fletch gave them a lazy smile.
Go ahead, laugh it up. You’ll regret it later.
“No, sir. I’m fine. No problem.”

“Good. Come on, people. Let’s get our asses in gear and head out. Find this girl. We don’t need another hit this year.”

Another hit. They all knew what he meant. D.C. had been under siege from terror attempts and drug wars for the past few months, and it was wearing on everyone. You could only keep your people on high alert for so long before things began falling through the cracks. It was one of the reasons Fletcher begged off the JTTF. The pressure there was obscene.

They all got to their feet. Armstrong called out, “Fletch, my office, please,” and there was a round of boos and hisses. Fletch flipped his colleagues the bird and went to his boss’s glass-walled office.

“Shut the door,” Armstrong snapped.

He did. “Sorry about that, Cap. I’ve had a lot going on.”

“I know. What were you doing in Lynchburg?”

“Chasing a dead end, I think. Dr. Owens received a letter from a dead man asking for her to investigate his murder. I wanted to be sure nothing went south. She posted the guy, sent some lab work up with me. I don’t see it going too far.” He hoped.

Armstrong sat behind the desk and smoothed his fingers across his mustache. “All right. This kid who drowned yesterday? They’ve got a preliminary ID. Name’s Oscar Rivera. Catholic University, good kid. No known connections to anything that should have gotten him killed. FBI sent over the news, but they’re handling the case. They think it might be related to another couple of murders they’re working on. We’re off the hook there.”

“I figured it was part of something bigger. That was way too creepy to be an accident.”

“They’re thinking it’s drug cartel related, but with a sweet kid like Rivera, I don’t know. It doesn’t fit.”

“Saw the wrong thing at the wrong time, maybe.”

“Maybe.” Armstrong went quiet, then leaned back in his chair and stroked his mustache. What hair he didn’t have on his dark, shiny head was more than accounted for on his lip. “Fletch, are you still with us?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“You know exactly what I mean. You had a taste of how the other half lives during your sojourn at the JTTF. Is working homicide going to be enough for you?”

“I wouldn’t have asked for the transfer back if I wasn’t sure I wanted to be here.”

“I know you wanted out before you left. You’ve made it clear you plan to put in your twenty and move to greener pastures. And that anniversary is going to be here sooner than you think. But if you want to stay, Fletch, stick around a few more years, I’d like to put you up for lieutenant. And God help me, I want to give you your own squad.”

Armstrong’s jaw was set, as if he knew what Fletch would say, since he’d said it so many times before.
No way, sir. I can’t even think about it, sir. I want out as soon as my date comes, sir.

Lieutenant. His own squad. Autonomy.

Fletcher surprised them both by saying, “I appreciate the opportunity, sir. So long as Hart gets to be my lead detective, I’m in.”

Armstrong’s face split in a smile, a rare enough occurrence it felt like the sun breaking through after a month of clouds. “Good man. I’m glad to hear it. Now, get out there and help the FBI find Rachel Stevens.”

Fletcher went back to his office with a spring in his step. He’d made the decision in a split second, and he knew it was the right one. When Armstrong said
Lieutenant
he’d actually felt a click of
yes, this is the right thing to do.

It meant more work, more hours, more responsibility, but for some reason, he wanted it. He wanted it bad.

He dialed Andrea Bianco, head of the D.C. JTTF. They’d met while Fletcher was attached there for a case, and had been very casually hanging out. He didn’t want to call it dating. He liked her, maybe even a lot, but Fletcher wasn’t exactly the settling-down type. He’d done that once to disastrous results, and vowed never to take things to the next level again.

Of course, he’d have been willing to make that particular sacrifice for Sam Owens, but he knew, deep down, he would have ended up hurting her, and she him.

Andrea answered in a rush of “Hi, how are you I’m running out the door is it important or can it wait,” the words smashed together, breathless and excited, and he said, “Yeah, sure, but—” and she said, “Okay, great,” and hung up without saying goodbye.

So much for that.

She had a seriously heavy duty job, with responsibilities he couldn’t be paid enough in the world to handle. He didn’t want it. Being at JTTF was a straight line into cardiac arrest.

Maybe he’d catch her later, but he was going to be tied up, too. No matter. This was the reason he didn’t want to be tied down, ever again. Dating other cops was hard, but the only way a romance worked in this field was with someone who understood the hours, the devotion, the insanity and the horror.

He plopped down at his desk and pulled up his email. Nothing from Lynchburg.
Damn it.

Hart knocked on the door.

“Hey, princess, ready to go chat with the looker from the FBI? Hey, why do you look all googly-eyed and happy? Did Armstrong suck—”

“And that’s enough out of you, young man. I just agreed to take over your lowly ass. You’re looking at your new homicide LT. And my first administrative move is to promote you, if you’ll take my spot as lead.”

Hart grinned, the muscles in his neck flexing. “Hell, man, that’s great news. You deserve it. I deserve the bump, too. When is this blessed occasion taking place?”

“Next round of promotions, so next week, maybe.” He stood, clapped Hart on the back. “Come on, let’s go hook up with the FBI folks and find this kid. I remember the chick’s name. What’s the dude’s again?”

“Rob Thurber. He’s a lifer, been there for twenty years. He—”

“Rob Thurber? God, that name sounds so familiar. Where did I see it?”

And then it hit him. The will. Savage’s bloody will. Rob Thurber was the name of one of the beneficiaries.