We were silent the rest of the way to the hospital and reached the ambulance bay at the same time as the medic unit. I parked in a No Parking zone and put my shield up in the window to avoid getting towed. We bulled through into the emergency department behind the senator’s gurney as the paramedics shouted vital signs to the doctors and shoved their patient into the trauma room. We held up ID when the nurses tried to make us leave, shouting to be heard over the din in the trauma department, “PsyLED. Official business!” Not knowing what else to do, they let us stay.
A short, stout trauma doctor began working on the senator’s airway and I got my first view of Tolliver. His face was charred away, with blackened and red weeping edges. His chest was working, trying to draw in air. He was gurgling and gagging. It was the most horrible thing I had ever seen.
People ran back and forth cutting off his clothes and sticking things into the senator’s scorched body. He was badly burned from the hips up, only his legs still pale and hairy and growing gray from oxygen loss.
“Upper respiratory system is fried,” the doctor said, hergloved hands at the senator’s jaw and throat and a headlamp on her forehead. “Suction! He’s aspirating.”
“Probably inhaled flaming air,” another woman said. Her name was Madeline, with the wordRespiratorybelow it, on her name badge.
“I need a trach kit,” the doctor shouted.
Because there was nothing else to work with, and they needed multiple lines, they started inserting IV lines with screws into his thigh bones, which I had no idea could even be done.
Two people were monitoring the senator’s oxygen status and trying to get blood pressure readings off his lower leg. It was a haze of action that I couldn’t even begin to follow.
The doctor at his throat grunted out the words, “Who’s taking notes? We have acute inhalation injury. Acute pulmonary edema. Lungs are scorched.”
Madeline said, “Not sure the tissue will hold for a trach. His trachea is cooked.”
All that happened in the first two minutes. By the third minute, three doctors were working on the senator, along with two respiratory therapists and four nurses and techs. I recorded as many of their first names and departments in my cell as I could, in case I needed them later. It gave me something to do rather than staring at the senator’s ravaged body.
My cell dinged in the middle of the medical resuscitation attempts and Occam and I read the news that JoJo had texted to our cells. Clarisse, the senator’s wife, had been on the way to a meeting in her official car, with a driver and a full security detail. The driver had gone off the Alcoa Highway and into the river. The car had been only ten feet offshore and had been recovered quickly, along with the bodies of the driver and her security—two women and a man.
The senator’s wife wasn’t inside. When the car was pulled out, at about the same time that the senator was flash-burned, it was discovered that the windows were all broken out. The car was riddled with bullet holes. There were no witnesses to the shooting, and the shooter was believed to have drivenup beside them and opened fire with a high-powered automatic rifle. Casings were being recovered from the street where the attack took place. The same ammunition as had been fired at the Tollivers on each of the other occasions. Clarisse Tolliver was presumed dead.
Occam and I huddled against a wall, silent and ignored. Useless.
Twenty-seven minutes after we arrived, the senator’s heart stopped. They tried to resuscitate him for another half hour. Then they pronounced Senator Tolliver dead. The sudden silence was profound. The team working on him backed away. It didn’t last long. They had seen this kind of thing before. They began to clean up paper and plastic packages, to count discarded needles.
Occam and I informed LaFleur. Took names and told the doctors that we’d be sending papers to get copies of the medical report. Half an hour after the senator died, the day shift Secret Service agents, who had been stuck in traffic on the way to take over for night shift at the senator’s meeting, finally caught up with their quarry. We left the hospital.
The air outside didn’t smell like burned human, though the scent clung to our clothes and hair. Instead, the air was warm and the sun was shining. A dog trotted across the parking lot. An ambulance was pulling in. Cars followed it. Occam stepped off the curb into the street.
“You okay?” I asked Occam as we left the emergency entrance.
He didn’t answer until we were back in my truck, the cab an oasis of wakeful normalcy after a nightmare. “No. Not really,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of awful things in my life. Never seen a cooked piece of meat still trying to breathe. I don’t know how medical people do that kinda thing, day in and day out. It was...” He paused as if trying to decide how to phrase what he was feeling and seemed to settle on the inadequate, “...pretty horrible.”
I reached over and took Occam’s hand in mine. There was an instant of resistance, or maybe just surprise, before he laced his fingers through mine and gripped my hand back.His skin wasn’t rough or calloused like John’s. Or like mine, for that matter. Not the hand of someone who had labored too hard for too many years, working the land with tools that abraded the skin and damaged the joints. The flesh of his palm and fingers was firm and solid, like the paw of a young dog or cat. Healthy. Reborn every time he shifted forms.
He said, “The shooter went after Clarisse. If the flames in the restaurant were from a pyro, then we have two killers now. Maybe we did all along.”
Occam’s cell pinged and he swiped it with his other hand. Without emotion he translated what he was reading. “The senator’s postmortem has already been scheduled. It’s at four p.m. It’ll be performed by a forensic pathologist. According to the feds and the arson squad, the cook at the fire saw a strange-looking man in the kitchen just before the fire. She swears the man’s skin was blue.”
“We got to go to the PM?”
“Looks likeIdo. You got your own text.”
“I’ll check it after we get to HQ,” I said.
From the corner of my eye, I saw a small smile pull at his lips, and his dimple deepened. His shoulders relaxed. “When your hand isn’t busy being held, Nell, sugar?”
“That’s my plan,” I said, feeling unaccustomedly bold.
“I find I’m right fond of that plan.” His fingers tightened on mine and I squeezed back.
FIFTEEN
“The senator’s PM is scheduled for four p.m. today,” Rick said, “and Occam and I will be there, along with two feds and two members of the Secret Service. Meanwhile, JoJo’s been digging sideways and has discovered that the daughter who produced Justin Tolliver—Miriam—and who fell off the map right after Justin was adopted by her parents, was never reported missing.”
