“Captain,” Church snapped, “I’m not asking for an estimate on how difficult it is for you to do your job. People are dying and he has information we need. Surely some solutions will occur to you.”
He hung up.
Ouch.
I WAS JUST about to climb into the back of the DMS TacV when Circe came out of the ruined Starbucks, wiping her hands with a wad of paper napkins. Her hair was in disarray and there were bloodstains on her clothes. Ghost wagged his tail at her. Guess he forgave her for being a cat person.
“How are you?” I asked. It was one of those insanely lame questions we ask when nothing more sensible occurs to us.
She shrugged, then shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“You did good work back there,” I said.
Saying that caused a visible change in her. One moment she was a doctor who had spent the last twenty minutes struggling to save lives—she had been surrounded by death and blood, but to a degree she was in a known world and in the center of her own power—then my words jarred her back to the moment before she had entered the coffeehouse. She looked down at the powder burns on her hand. Circe had the calluses of someone who spent regular hours on a pistol range, and she’d handled her gun with professional skill and accuracy. Even so, her face went paler still and her mouth twisted into sickness.
“I don’t understand this,” she said. “Why did they do this?”
“That’s what I intend to find out.”
“I mean … why hit us? We’re not even close to anything yet.”
Her chest hitched as if she was fighting a sob. Or struggling to swallow bile that had boiled up into her throat.
“Where’d you get the gun?” I asked.
“It’s mine.”
“You had it on the plane?”
“Yes. I’m cleared to carry because of my work with
“You learn how to shoot at T-Town?”
She nodded and brushed a tear from her eye.
“Is this the first time you shot someone?” I asked gently.
She nodded again. “I’ve fired I don’t know how many rounds at the combat ranges … but … but …”
Suddenly her color changed from white to green. She abruptly spun away from me, ran to the side of the building, and threw up in a trash can. I tried to comfort her, but she gave a violent shake of her head and I backed off.
Ghost gave me a “smooth move” look and whined a little as Circe continued to cough up her fear and disgust and—if she was as human as the rest of us—self-loathing.
I understood that. No matter how much you hate someone, no matter how justified you are in pulling the trigger, at the end of the day there are only three possible emotional reactions to killing another human being. You either like it, in which case you shouldn’t ever be allowed to touch a gun again. Or you feel nothing, in which case the words “cry for help” should be tattooed on your forehead and they should lead you away to a nice, comfy therapist’s couch. Or you feel like you just committed an unforgivable sin. After the moment is over, as you stand there feeling the adrenaline ooze out of your pores and the cordite stink of discharged rounds mixes with the coppery smell of blood, you feel the enormity of it. You took a life.
Circe had shooter’s calluses. She had to have prepared for this moment.
That preparation saved lives, but you absolutely cannot fully prepare a person for the reality of having ended a human life. But the fact that it appalled Circe was proof of a heart and mind that was not already inured to basic humanity or corrupted by a disregard for the sanctity of all life.
I wanted to tell Circe this, but this wasn’t the time. She wouldn’t be able to hear it now. Right now she needed to survive the reality of the event, and that would add a layer of callus on her soul.
Damn.
“I got this,” said a voice, and I turned to see DeeDee. She closed on Circe and put a sisterly hand on her shoulder. A lot has been said about “brothers in arms.” In the twenty-first century we’re going to have to broaden that view to include sisters in arms. I backed off and then turned toward the TacV, where my suspect waited.
Interlude Thirty-eight
The Milhaus Estate
Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts
December 19, 6:04 P.M. EST
On Martha’s Vineyard, police cars and an ambulance were tearing along the winding back roads toward the mansion of H. Carlton Milhaus, CEO of Milhaus and Berk Publishing. The company published, among other periodicals,
As the emergency vehicles roared through the gates, the officers could see that every light in the house was on. Despite the cold, people in cocktail dresses and dinner jackets were standing outside on the patio and lawn. Many of them had hands to their throats or faces, and all of them had shocked eyes.
The first-in officers knew that everything they said, everything they did, here among these people would be scrutinized. A single misstep, a carelessly chosen word, could crush their careers. They’d seen it happen over and over again to their peers. Their former peers.
The first responders entered with as much haste as caution would allow. The EMTs were a dozen steps behind.
They stepped into a world of elegance and sophistication, of holiday cheer and conspicuous wealth, of shocked white faces and bright red blood.
Sandra Milhaus lay faceup, her feet on the second and third steps of the grand staircase, her arms flung wide with an inartistic abandon, her green silk gown twisted around her pale legs. Her eyes were open, as was her mouth. Her coiffed blond curls lay in the center of a pool of blood that, by perverse chance, spread around her like a halo and reflected the Christmas lights on the walls and banister. That she was dead was obvious, even from a dozen feet away.
The officers cut each other a quick glance, knowing they had just stepped out of a potential “incident” at the party of one of the richest families on the Vineyard and stepped into a crime scene that would be front-page news, even with all that was going on in London. When they were still five feet away they froze.
Sandra Milhaus was not merely dead. Every inch of exposed skin was covered with lumps like boils. Some of them had clearly burst and leaked blood or clear fluid that was tinged with pink. The others were pale knobs, the color lost from the settling of blood in her body after her heart had stopped.
They stood on either side of her, careful not to step in the blood.
“Who can tell me what happened?” asked Jimmy Redwood, the male officer. “Was she allergic to anything?”
There were a hundred people clustered around. On the stairs and balcony above, in the open doorway of the grand ballroom to their right and the dining room to their left. The officers recognized many of the faces from the news.
Redwood’s partner, Debbie Tobias, turned to the nearest person, an older woman. “Ma’am, do you know if she ate something she wasn’t supposed to?”
The woman shook her head and didn’t—or perhaps couldn’t—answer.
“Please,” said Tobias, pitching her voice for authority but not intimidation, “was she sick before the
