Laura Cardinal - 01 - Darkness on the Edge of Town

More sounds. Radio static, a paramedic talking into his shoulder. Ripping sensors, snatching bandages, and sucking oxygen. The pneumatic wheeze of the gurney bearing Jerry Oliver down the steps to the waiting ambulance, a few blocks to Weems Memorial Hospital, and from there a Medevac to Tallahassee Memorial—if he didn’t die before he got to Weems.

Jerry Oliver had been shot in the cheek, eye, left shoulder, and upper right chest. Oliver, whom Laura was sure had been the one to open the trapdoor, was going to Weems and, if he was lucky, on to Tallahassee. Andrew Descartes, who had tried to stop him, was going nowhere—not for another couple of hours at least. First he would lie in his own blood while he was photographed from every angle. Then he would be transported to the morgue, evidence tweezered from his wound, his statistics read into a recorder, his organs weighed and measured, his skull sawed in half.

Andrew Descartes was now evidence in a crime.

The responding officer—a sheriff’s deputy—looked sheepish after yorking his guts out on the linoleum floor. Uniforms coming, but where the hell were they?

Where were the techs from the Hazardous Devices unit?

They would be the ones to handle the 12-gauge, sawed-off shotgun still resting in its brackets on the underside of the trapdoor, everything but the muzzle concealed by a homemade plywood box. This she saw with brilliant clarity; her clinical mind divided right down the middle from her more emotional side, the emotional side lagging behind, still in shock. A simple principle. When the trapdoor opens, the shotgun fires: Chief Redbone’s police force wiped out in an instant.

Laura stood in the torn, blood-spattered kitchen, hands tucked up under her arms from long practice.

She would not touch anything.

A paramedic entered the room, pulling another gurney bearing a body bag.

“You can’t do that,” Laura said.

“Who are you?”

I’m the person who caused all this. She held up her shield and gave him her name and rank. “He’s not going anywhere.”

“The chief—“

“This is a crime scene. He’s staying here.”

The sheriff deputy stepped up. “She’s right, man, we have charge of this scene now.”

Only then did the paramedic leave.

The room narrowed down to just Laura and the body of Andrew Descartes. She made herself look at him. She was used to looking at the dead, but this was different. She knew him. She’d shared a joke with him not an hour ago. She saw his promise—a good cop who might have grown into an exceptional cop.

I wonder who will tell his wife.

She should be the one to do it because she felt responsible. If she hadn’t come here, none of this would have happened. He’d still be at home, getting over strep throat, his new wife babying him with chicken soup…

The thought suddenly occurred to her: Where was Chief Redbone? She didn’t remember him being around here. Had he already gone to tell Descartes’s wife?

She wondered how it felt to have your whole police force devastated in the course of a split second. She thought of how his life had been laid out just the way he liked it—his teenage daughters, his sleepy town, dispensing his good ol’ boy wisdom.

In twenty-three years, I never had to draw my gun in anger.

That record was shot to shit.

Laura kept her eye on Andrew Descartes, feeling dizzy. Look at him until you detach. Step back, detach, do your job.

Never before had her job felt moot. Never until now did she realize what a small dent seeking justice made into grief. Yes, she helped pick up the pieces, but they were still pieces. The aftermath of a tornado. In the face of that destruction, you were helpless. Now it had struck home, and she wondered if her job was worth anything at all.

She continued to stare at him, like serving some godawful penance. Filling her eye, her soul with him. Her mind straying away, and she patiently bringing it back around and around again to the fact: You did this. You’re responsible.

But now she had to do the right thing. Look around, figure it out. Do your job.

Buckshot. She guessed .00 buckshot from the look of the wound. A single pellet, slicing through his carotid like a tiny razor.

Tears formed at the edge of her eyes, threatening to brim over, a still pool. That, she could not allow to happen. So she blinked. She blinked so hard and so fast she could feel it in the back of her skull, a corresponding ache to the one inside her gut.

Where was Chief Redbone? The deputy was the only other member of law enforcement here, but when she looked for him he was gone.

Out to meet the reinforcements, she hoped.

She heard the toilet flush somewhere in the house. The kid had used the bathroom at a crime scene.

She’d ream him out when he came back.

And then she realized it: You have no standing here. She would not be the investigator of this crime. That would fall to the state police, her counterpart in Florida.