Up in flames again.
CHAPTER 5
IT TAKES ME THREE minutes to get back to my house and jump in my car. I start up lights and sirens, then run every red light on the way to the scene. Along the way, I call Pam Doolittle, a neighbor who works from home as an IT consultant. Pam’s my logistical backup on the home front when duty calls. Her son, Tomas, is a year younger than Willow but goes to the same school.
Pam agrees to pick up Willow after school and take her to the Cross house. I don’t even need to call over there. Nana Mama says my daughter is welcome anytime for any reason. No questions asked. A standing invitation.
Even with all the lights flashing and sirens wailing, I hit gridlock about a block away from the bombing scene and get stuck behind a mass of unmoving vehicles, some of them abandoned. I realize that this is as close as I’m going to get.
I pull up on the sidewalk, grab my go bag from the trunk, andrun past clumps of civilians, some with hands up to their mouths in shock, others standing on concrete planters or atop stopped cars to see what’s going on. A lot of them have their phones raised, taking photos or videos. Two news helicopters and a blue-and-white police helicopter are hovering overhead, the sound of their rotors echoing against the buildings.
The smell hits me like a hard memory of other bombing aftermaths from my years on the police force and my time in the army in Iraq and Afghanistan, that acrid scent of smoke and burning rubber. When I finally reach the scene, two Metro cops are yelling at pedestrians to stay back, to little effect.
“You!”I shout, flashing my badge and pointing to the nearest uniform. “Get some barricade tape up! We’ve got to secure this scene!”
Smoke is still eddying around the intersection. I see two shattered cars plus what’s left of a van, flames flickering in the wreckage, and a huge crater in the middle of the street. A broken water main is spraying out water, flooding the whole area.
This is a four-lane road—two lanes southbound and two northbound—with trees lining the sidewalks. The windows in nearby office buildings have been shattered, and the trees nearest the blast have been stripped of their leaves. Branches are bent or snapped off, lying in the road. Up and down the block, car alarms are screeching.
I get closer, and the smells are more intense and more horrific, a choking mixture of spilled gasoline, burned fabric, and scorched flesh.
A woman in a business suit is writhing on the ground about twenty feet away, screaming, her hands squeezing her bloody abdomen. A man is sitting on a concrete planter, his face blackened, shirttorn away, looking down with wide eyes at his left leg, missing from the knee down, while a woman next to him desperately attempts to secure a leather belt around his tattered thigh.
On the asphalt around me, I count at least four lumps of ripped flesh that must have recently belonged to healthy men and women caught in the blast zone. Alive one minute, blown apart the next.
I have a strong impulse to assist the wounded, but well-trained crews from DC’s fire and EMS department are already racing past me, carrying bulging shoulder bags and backboards, followed by others pushing gurneys, their wheels rattling as they go by. I need to let them do their jobs. It’s time to do mine.
I bring up my handheld radio. “Dispatch, this is Sampson, D-five. We have a mass casualty event at the intersection of Thirteenth Street and N Street Northwest. We need units to block off traffic in a three-block radius. Tell DC Fire to roll as many buses as they can—and get the Metropolitan bomb squad out here!”
“Copy, Detective.”
I look down the street and see more survivors, some holding bloody handkerchiefs to their heads as they slowly navigate between the twisted and burning cars and the crater filling with water from the busted water main.
The crater in the road tells the story.
A car bomb.
I pick up my handheld again. “Dispatch, this is Sampson, D-five. Contact the FBI and the ATF. We’ve got a suspected terrorist attack here.”
The dispatcher acknowledges.
It all looks painfully, terribly familiar. I’ve been at scenes like this from Bogotá to Baghdad to Kabul. As unfortunate as it sounds,I’d come to expect it in places like that—countries torn by war. Sometimes, sad to say, mass destruction comes with the territory.
But not here. Not in my city. Not in the nation’s capital. We used to be safe here.
I start walking through the scene.
Something in a nearby tree looks off. Unnatural. Something colorful is attached to a piece of a branch and lodged between two limbs.
I step closer, looking up. It’s a woman’s shoe.
I turn away as yellow tape is being strung up by two Metro cops. I try not to think about what I’ve just seen: a severed leg with a high-heeled shoe still strapped to the foot hanging from the tree, blood dripping down.
CHAPTER 6
Cross
COMPARED TO THE AIRPORTS in DC, Raleigh-Durham International Airport is small and easy to navigate. Barely twenty minutes after disembarking from their flight, Alex and Bree are already in their rented red Camry and speeding west on I-40.
