Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (17 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Margrave, Georgia

November 2

11:54 a.m.

The recording ended for the second time and Roscoe waited for a reaction. She didn’t get one. So she stood up and patted her equipment belt to confirm all her stuff was there, and she grabbed her car keys, and she moved toward the door.

At the threshold she turned back to Kim and Gaspar, both still seated.

She asked, “Are you coming?”

Kim looked at Gaspar, felt the fatigue in her bones and saw his exhaustion. She knew what he was thinking. Why go back out there? He’d already seen the body; she’d already seen the car. They could get full reports later. No need to traipse around in the weeds again. What they both needed was sleep. Decent food. Time to figure this thing out. Before they made a mistake they couldn’t fix.

All of which would have to wait, Kim realized. She said, “We’ll follow in our own car. We’ll be there in twenty.”

Roscoe said, “No, you’ll ride with me. We’ll talk on the way.”

She left the room before either Kim or Gaspar could protest.

“So, Boss Lady, do we obey?” Gaspar asked. He stood, yawned, stretched. Eased his pain. He wasn’t fooling her. His leg, and his side. He’d been sitting too long. He had to be hurting.

“Apparently there’s more than one boss lady here,” Kim said. “And you heard her. So move your ass.” She put a smile on her face. And in her voice. She was Number One. It was up to her to set the tone. Admitting exhaustion wasn’t the way to start. Or defeat. She walked out, following Roscoe, Gaspar behind her for once.

Gaspar said, “I don’t suppose we could stop at Eno’s Diner on the way? For pancakes and country ham?”

“I’m guessing not.”

“In that case, wait up.” He ducked into the break room and came back out carrying two donuts.

“For me?” Kim asked, and grabbed one from his hand before he could stop her. “You shouldn’t have.”

“I didn’t,” he said.

#

Roscoe was waiting at her reserved parking space, next to her navy Town Car. She got in and started the engine. Kim took the navigator’s position, leaving the back seat for Gaspar. She fastened her seat belt and used her right hand to hold the shoulder harness away from her neck.

Roscoe drove with the precise assurance of a woman who knew every chink in the local asphalt. She used her bubble light, but no siren. Other vehicles moved respectfully aside and she left them in her wake. She covered half the distance without speaking. Kim waited. Gaspar waited, too, for once.

Then seven miles from the cloverleaf, Roscoe asked, “What time did you find the body?”

Kim said nothing.

Gaspar said, “What?”

“No more games,” Roscoe said. Her tone was level and determined. She lifted off the accelerator and the big car slowed. “You must take me for a complete moron.”

“I wish you were a moron,” Kim said. “You’d be easier to handle.”

Roscoe glanced at Gaspar in the rear view mirror. “We all know Harry Black wasn’t shot two hours before Sylvia called 911. Plenty of time for you to clean up that crime scene, too. Good job, by the way. We didn’t find much.”

Gaspar said, “You’re on the wrong track, chief. We don’t know anything about Harry Black. We saw his body for the first time when you did.” He raised his right hand, palm out, first two fingers up, last two held down by his thumb. “Scout’s honor.”

“Oh, please,” Roscoe said. “You wouldn’t know a boy scout if he ran up and bit you on the leg.”

“Wrong,” Gaspar said. “I
was
a boy scout. An Eagle Scout, to be exact. Matter of public record. Check it out if you don’t believe me.”

Roscoe slowed the car to a crawl and then stopped on the shoulder of the county road. Miles of emptiness stretched in all directions. She put the transmission in park, unbuckled her shoulder harness, and turned toward her captured prey.

What is she up to?

Gaspar yawned, stretched, lay down on the cushy bench and closed his eyes. “Wake me up when we get there.”

Within seconds he was breathing evenly and his face was relaxed. Kim thought he’d actually fallen asleep. Maybe he was fresh out of amphetamines. Maybe they were what he kept pulling out of his pocket and sticking in his mouth when he thought she wouldn’t notice.

“Now what?” Kim asked Roscoe. “Are we going to the crime scene, or did you have something else in mind?”

Roscoe said, “We’ll continue on our way as soon as you tell me what you know.”

Kim shrugged. Tried a new tactic. “OK, I’ll play along, Beverly. I’m guessing Jack Reacher killed Harry Black and cleaned up the mess, and the tall guy impersonating the U.S. Marshal on your video tape was Jack Reacher, too. We already called it in. It won’t help you to shoot us.”

Roscoe’s mouth fell open. Kind of comical really, Kim thought. She watched until Roscoe realized where her jaw bone was and clamped her mouth shut, holding her lips in a stiff line.

Kim poked her again. “Oh, come on. It’s got to be him. That’s what Reacher does, right? Rescues damsels in distress? Sleeps with them? Saves their lives?”

A red flush crept up Roscoe’s neck and over her face. “So that’s the way it’s going to be?” Then her cell phone rang. She answered and listened and said, “Can he wait ten minutes? I can be there in five, and I need five to look. Tell him I appreciate it.”

She ended the call and buckled up again and pulled the heavy slow Town Car onto the road.

“Don’t think we’re finished this conversation, Agent Otto,” she said. She put the bubble light on top of the car this time and turned on the siren before she hit the gas. The big Lincoln accelerated faster than Kim expected. Gaspar didn’t sit up. Maybe he really had fallen asleep, as unlikely as that seemed. The ride was smooth and quiet. Even at high speeds it felt like they were gliding over the bumpy old road wearing ear muffs.

Roscoe said, “They’ve got to move the body. Crowd control is becoming a problem. They’ve closed the interstate both ways and there’s four miles of traffic already. Two fender benders so far and more to come if they don’t get unsnarled before rush hour. Coroner’s arrived and he’s got another case after this one.” Roscoe covered the remaining miles to the cloverleaf in less than four minutes and then slowed half a mile out. She didn’t know the Chevy’s precise location. Kim could have helped with that, but she didn’t. Fifteen hundred feet from the east side of the cloverleaf, Roscoe slowed to a crawl, searching for the best place to park amid the official vehicles already present.

A rainbow of pulsing hazard lights were flashing in uncoordinated rhythms. Interstate traffic was backed up as far as Kim could see in both directions. GHP cruisers were blocking entrances and exits at each point of the cloverleaf. Officers were directing vehicles to move along instead of gawking, but drivers weren’t complying.

Kim counted two fire department vehicles, a truck and a paramedic bus, and three GHP vans with “Crime Scene Technicians” stenciled on their sides, and two tow trucks, and an unmarked black sedan which must have belonged to the coroner. Three Crime Scene techs were working on the car. They had the trunk open, and they had cameras and markers and other equipment running. Then two techs left and walked back to their van while the third waited to document the body’s removal. Most of the remaining work would be done when they examined the car later.

Uniformed first responders stood near their vehicles waiting their turn to work. No one seemed to mind the delay. It was a nice fall day. Warm enough. Slight breeze. No urgency.

Two news helicopters circled wide above the chaos. Three news satellite vans parked on the opposite side of the road. Two sets of photo-journalists and stand-up reporters were taping live shots.

“What a circus,” Roscoe said, quietly.

Kim saw three men, two wearing GHP uniforms and the third in a dark suit, approaching the Chevy. One Leach brother stood five feet southwest of the car; legs braced wide apart, arms folded, holding his shotgun precisely as he’d pointed it at her yesterday. He noticed the men, too, and walked to meet them.

Roscoe found a strip of grassy land off the shoulder a short hike from the focal point. She said, “I could get closer, but we’d get blocked in. If we park here, we can leave when we’re ready.”

The three men met up with the Leach brother and all four stopped next to the Chevy, exactly where Gaspar had collected the hound dog earlier.

Roscoe settled her Town Car into the place she’d selected.

Leach lowered his shotgun and extended his arm toward the Chevy’s door handle.

Roscoe reached toward her keys.

Leach opened the Chevy’s door exactly as Roscoe clicked off the ignition.

The click triggered Kim’s reptilian brain and the training memories embedded there.

Instantly, she saw, heard and understood.

“Get down!” she screamed.

And the Chevy exploded.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The high pressure blast wave hurled the Leach brother and the coroner and the two GHP officers across the weedy grass like boneless scarecrows, dead before they hit the ground, and then a monstrous orange fireball filled the sky. White flames swallowed the Chevy in a blinding hot flash. Black smoke plumed up, then out, erasing normal daylight.

Kim closed her eyes, covered her ears and ducked her head. Smaller shock waves bounced Roscoe’s Town Car on the grassy shoulder and squeezed Kim’s breath from her chest. Pain seared as if her lungs had collapsed.

Muffled sound far away.

Kim squeezed her eyes tighter and curled as far into the foot-well as the shoulder harness would let her. Her chest hurt. She gulped shallow breaths.

Another explosion, smaller, followed quickly by a third.

Unnatural silence.

Kim waited, struggled to breathe, finally felt her lungs working again. She gulped air, hungry for it.

How much time had passed?

She opened her eyes again. Saw Roscoe still belted in her seat, conscious. OK. Kim struggled upright in her own seat. Took her hands off her ears.

There were fires outside the Town Car. There were muffled noises. There were pieces, chunks, slabs of things scattered everywhere. There were burning vehicles. There was smoke too thick to see through.

The Chevy was still burning.

Kim’s brain was processing data like slow-falling dominoes, one thing leading to the next. Both tow trucks were covered in flames. Tow trucks usually carried extra gasoline. Hence the second and third explosions? Two GHP cruisers also burning. One rested on its roof, the other in the ditch, lying on its side. Thrown there by the initial pressure wave?

Several uniformed personnel were down, injured, but likely alive. Gawkers might be hurt, too, inside vehicles closer to the Chevy than Roscoe’s Town Car.

On site rescue workers mobbed the scene. Firefighters rushed to put out the flames. Helicopter blades fought to disperse the blackness. The noise must have been outrageous, but everything remained muted by the Town Car’s body and the cotton that filled Kim’s head.

Behind the wheel, Roscoe seemed dazed, too, but conscious and not bleeding.

“Gaspar?” Kim asked. But how loud was her voice? She couldn’t tell. And she heard no answer. “Gaspar?” she called, louder. No response.

She unhooked her seatbelt. She took stock of her body, which seemed to be unhurt and functioning. She turned in her seat but couldn’t see him over the high seatback.

“Gaspar?” she said again. She raised up as far as she could without kneeling, craned her neck and looked down into the deep foot well.

She saw him, face down, prone.

She remembered he’d been lying on the bench seat, not wearing his seatbelt. Had he been thrown to the floor when the car bounced? Was he hurt?

Kim scrambled out of the sedan and pulled open the back door.

“Are you OK?” she screamed, reaching in to him.

He didn’t scream back. Instead, he nodded, lifted himself onto his hands and knees, and crawled backward out of the floor well onto the grassy red ground. He leaned against the door to steady himself upright. Kim thought he looked unharmed. But percussion injuries could manifest hours or days later, hard to detect and potentially devastating. They patted themselves down, checked for broken bones, or blood. Found none.

Kim and Gaspar moved away from the vehicle. Roscoe stared forward, pale, rigid, horrified. Kim understood. The dead, the injured, were Roscoe’s friends and colleagues. She could have been among them. All three of them could have been standing at the Chevy when it exploded, had Roscoe not stopped back there on the county road.

And then the shaking started. Kim felt it, but was powerless to stop it.

Gaspar wrapped his arms around her, holding her close to his body.

“What is it? Are you hurt?” he yelled, patting her down, looking for anything, everything.

Kim shook her head and mouthed without sound, “No, I’m fine.”

Then she thought:
Gaspar might have opened the Chevy’s door this morning when he first found the body.
And her shaking intensified. Her teeth chattered. She couldn’t stop.