“Don’t make us come and get you,” he added. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
Nothing.
The two crouched policemen moved slowly toward her car, one on either side, their arms outstretched, their guns aimed ahead of them. Diane squinted against the wind, trying to see inside her car. From that distance, she couldn’t see a thing. She huddled against the pine tree, partly for warmth and partly to make a smaller target.
The policemen stepped up to the car, shining their flashlights inside. They hesitated a moment, and one of them aimed the remote. She couldn’t hear the click of the doors unlocking over the noise of the fire and the wind. She saw one of them open a back door, reach in, and come out with a gun. She guessed that the kid had passed out in her backseat.
The ambulance arrived just moments after the police had secured her car. She walked over and stood with the police and waited as the EMTs gently pulled the kid out and onto the stretcher. With his eyes closed and face relaxed he looked so young, still a teenager, facing the rest of his life without his right hand. She suddenly felt pity for him-now that the police had secured his gun.
“Do you know him?” One of the patrolmen asked. Ben, Diane thought his name was. He was thirtyish, about ten years older and twenty pounds heavier than his partner. Bundled up in winter coats and earmuffs, they looked very much alike.
Diane shook her head, looking at his face again. “I’ve never seen him before.”
“Some guy-Shawn Keith-called it in,” said the other patrolman. “He said something about a woman being in trouble. Didn’t say it was you, Dr. Fallon.”
“Keith may not have known it was me. The kid tried to stop him first.”
As the EMTs worked getting him stable for transport to the hospital, Diane gave the police details on her encounter with the youth.
“You’re lucky he had only one hand. Punk kids are dangerous. He’s probably the meth cook who blew up the house,” the patrolman added, nodding in the direction of the fire.
Diane doubted it. Whoever was cooking the meth was probably dead in the explosion. But more than likely, the kid was connected in some way.
“Could I get a ride to the crime lab?” she said. I’ll have my forensic people process my car when we’re allowed back in the area.”
“Yeah, sure.” Both of them looked in the direction of the fire as if they had just remembered it and the evacuation order. “We’d better get out of here.”
They saw the ambulance off and, after retrieving Diane’s suitcase, the three of them piled into the police car. She was glad she had put her suitcase in her trunk instead of the backseat where he would have bled all over it. On the way to the crime lab, the two of them took turns admonishing her for not having snow tires in the middle of a North Georgia winter.
They let her out at the entrance to her crime lab. Diane smiled and thanked them, glad to get away from their banter. The sick dread in her stomach, which she had awakened with because of the fire and the fear inspired by the gun-wielding kid, was still with her. Instead of going up to the lab, she walked around the building to the entrance to the RiverTrail Museum of Natural History.
Chanell Napier, head of museum Security, was on night duty and opened the door for her before she had a chance to fish out her key.
“Cold night out there, Dr. Fallon,” the slender, round-faced African-American woman said as Diane entered. “What you doing out here so late?”
Diane explained about the explosion of the house on the street near her apartment and the mandatory evacuation. She left out the part about the carjacker because she felt too tired for the questions that were sure to follow.
“Oh, no. There’s students from Bartram living in those houses, aren’t there?”
Diane nodded. “I’m going to stay in my office the rest of the evening,” she said.
Juliet Price from Aquatics, who managed the seashell collection, came across the lobby toward the doors. She looked like a waif or a wood sprite with her wispy blond hair and slender figure. She fumbled in her purse and pulled out her car keys as she reached Diane and Chanell.
“You working mighty late,” said Chanell.
“I don’t need much sleep,” said Juliet. She nodded at Diane and Chanell as she hurried out the large double doors.
“She’s a scared little thing, isn’t she,” said Chanell.
“Juliet’s a shy one,” said Diane. “She’s good at her job, though.” Diane looked at her watch. “I wish I didn’t need much sleep. Don’t call me unless the museum’s on fire.”
“Sure thing,” said Chanell.
As Diane made her way through the large double doors of the east wing and to her private conference room adjoining her museum office, she expected her cell phone to ring at any moment. It didn’t. She took off her wet boots and socks and lay down on the stuffed sofa. A brown suede and cotton jacket of Frank’s was lying across the back. She picked it up and folded it into a pillow. It smelled of his cologne. He’d been gone only three days, chasing a fraud lead to Seattle. It seemed like a month.
Frank was a rock-always reasonable, always logical, and always loving. She thought about calling him, but he was probably asleep-or maybe playing poker with his detective friends in Seattle. He would ask her how her day was and she would say great, but tomorrow wouldn’t be a good day at all. Tomorrow she’d have to identify charred bodies. Frank would sympathize and say some right thing; then he would tell her how fortunate that the dead have her to speak for them, and he’d tell her he would be home as soon as he could. She wished he were here now. Frank liked to cuddle and she would like to have him here to warm her. She grabbed the throw at the end of the sofa, covered her cold feet, and drifted off to sleep in the middle of her imaginary conversation with him.
Diane awoke with a start. Not because there was an explosion outside her window this time. It was her cell phone vibrating and ringing in her pocket. She fished it out and looked at the illuminated display before she flipped it open and put it to her ear.
“Chief Garnett,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound sleepy.
“I guess you know why I’m calling.”
Chapter 3
At nine o’clock in the morning the air was just as cold as it had been in the early hours before daylight when Diane fled from her home. The sky was gray-white and sunless. She stood in the ankle-deep snow just outside the yellow crime scene tape surrounding the burned-out husk of a house that was at the center of the night’s events. Unlike the bright, sparkling white mantle in front of her apartment house, the snow here was an ugly blanket of black and gray. The air smelled of chemicals, smoke, and wet ashes.
Little remained of the house-its stone foundation, a few blackened pieces of wood framing, twisted shapes of water pipes, broken and blackened ceramic plumbing fixtures, the remnants of a brick fireplace, and a section of charred floor hanging over the dark pit of debris that had been the basement. She could pick out the forms of blackened disfigured bodies like a hidden picture puzzle among the rubble. She dreaded the next few days.
“The fire chief tells me it was a meth lab that exploded in the basement.” Chief Garnett, well dressed as usual in a dark brown topcoat, stood beside Diane, surveying the damage. He shook his head. “There was a party going on upstairs at the time. The house was rented to a bunch of college students.”
Douglas Garnett, chief of detectives, was Diane’s immediate supervisor for her position as director of the Rosewood Crime Lab.
“How many people inside? Do you know?” she asked.
White steam rose in front of their faces with each breath. Diane’s nose was growing numb.
“That’s what you’re going to have to tell us.” He paused a long moment. “The neighbors say there was loud music going all evening. They saw kids on the front and back porches. I’m afraid to guess how many.”
“Dear God,” Diane whispered.
“We have a few survivors. Kids who were out in the yard when the house exploded. They’re all badly injured,
