Fatal Reaction (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

Paramedic Anneliese Ashmore blasted the heat in the First Responder Jeep and waited at the drive-through window for her fifth cup of black coffee. Working twenty-four hours straight had her fighting exhaustion and the boredom that came with a relatively quiet shift.

The unpredictable New York winter had settled in, and the temperature was well below freezing. It was snowing—the kind of heavy flakes that made it hard to see past the immediate glow of the headlights, and that cut visibility even more under high beams.

A gauntly thin clerk, with dyed hair tamed only by her uniform visor, reached through the drive-through window and took two singles from Ana.

“You can keep the change.” Ana smiled and tucked her auburn hair behind her ears.

The woman smiled back, handing her a bitter-smelling cup of coffee undoubtedly hours old.

Ana tossed an empty onto the passenger’s side floor, replacing it with the full one that she fit into the cup holder. The Jeep lurched forward and crushed the freshly fallen snow beneath its tires. A police cruiser sped past her and pulled into the Aquarian motel parking lot, a block down the road. An ambulance from her station followed.

Ana checked her radio, and, finding it operational, wondered why a call had never come.

Eager to break the monotony, she went to find out.

The bitter February cold ripped through Ana’s open uniform jacket as her gloved hand struggled against its stuck zipper. She tucked her chin into the collar of her white turtleneck and reached into the back of the SUV for her medic bag.

Police cruisers filled the Aquarian’s parking lot. A rectangle of yellow crime-scene tape flapped in the icy wind, quarantining a single motel room. Camera flashes pulsed behind the ratty orange curtains, signaling the collection of evidence. All signs pointed to whatever had happened not being good.

Ana got out of the Jeep and walked with her head down toward room 11.

The wind made her brown eyes water. She was halfway through the crowd when the door opened and Sergeant Mike Richardson stepped out into the cold. His face was blotchy red, and he appeared to have been crying. He sniffled, wiped the tip of his slightly crooked nose, and headed toward the rental office.

“Mike, wait.” Ana waved her hand in the air. Mike seemed too lost in thought to hear her. “Mike, hey.”

Jim Moore, Ana’s shift supervisor, rushed out of an ambulance parked on the outskirts and headed straight for her. “Ana, stop!” His frantic shouting caught both her and Mike’s attention. “Mike, stop her.” A pair of emergency shears hung from a loop on his uniform and flapped against his leg as he ran. Tufts of sandy blond hair stuck out from beneath his knit cap, and his expression held a mix of urgency and sadness.

Mike doubled back toward the motel room.

Ana began to suspect that her not getting the call was intentional. Her heartbeat raced, and her palms grew damp inside her gloves as she waited for either Mike or Jim to explain their panic. When neither did, she said, “What’s wrong?”

Jim grabbed her right bicep hard enough that she couldn’t easily pull free. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

“Let her go.” Mike pushed Jim’s hand away. “Let me handle this,
please
.” He steered Ana down the crumbling sidewalk toward the snowy parking lot. “I told Jim not to call you.”

“He didn’t,” Ana said. “I saw the cruisers and the ambulance, and since nothing else was happening, I came to help. What’s wrong? Why won’t anyone answer me?”

Mike steadied his quivering bottom lip. “You have to leave. I’ll explain everything as soon as I can, but you can’t be here now.”

Ana’s inner voice insisted that
here
was exactly where she belonged. She looked around the parking lot at the cars, the ambulance, and the approaching coroner’s van. A camera crew struggled to set up its shot in the heavy snow. Terri Tate,
Capital News 9
’s lead reporter, powdered her face by the van’s dome light. The Aquarian’s sign flickered in Ana’s periphery and drew her attention. There, in the shadows of an overflowing Dumpster, was her sister’s metal-flake blue Honda Civic. A lump rose in her throat, and tears streamed down her wind-burned cheeks.

“Sydney!” Ana broke for the motel room door, elbowing her way through the crowd and catching Mike off guard enough to get a small lead on him. He rushed after her, but she was through the motel room door before he caught up.

“Ana, stop!” Mike shouted for Coop to grab her, but the encroaching mob, including the persistent Terri Tate, kept him from doing so.

Time moved in slow motion as Ana took everything in, ignoring the chatter of those in the crowd outside as they tested the limits of the crime-scene tape.

Labeled plastic bags held pieces of evidence: an empty vodka bottle and some kind of prescription. Black fingerprinting dust covered every surface, and two investigators worked at collecting samples. A third snapped pictures of a folded piece of paper on the weathered nightstand, its finish bearing ring watermarks from decades of glasses left to sweat upon it.

Across the room, Julian Blake, a seasoned investigator, jotted down items in a small notebook. He wore jeans, a department sweatshirt, and a navy blue jacket with the name “Blake” embroidered on the right side. His black hair sprouted in patches along the back of his head, and his hazel eyes, red from lack of sleep, indicated he’d been called in from home.

Elsa Russell, Julian’s new partner and the only female investigator with the Marion PD, looked up when the wind blew her curly red hair. She lunged to grab Ana’s arm but quickly lost her grip. “Ana, you can’t be in here.”

Ana collapsed to her knees, interlaced her fingers, and started chest compressions. “No. No. God, no.” Rainwater tears blurred her vision. “Sydney, come on.”

“You’re contaminating the scene, Ana. Stop.” Julian tried to pull her back, and Ana threw her elbow as hard as she could into him.

Everything she knew about crime-scene processing, and about death, was gone from her mind.

“Get out of my way.” Mike shoved past Julian and wrestled Ana into a cross-legged sit. She fought him, squirming and screaming, but he didn’t let go. He pulled her arms across her chest and used his body like a straitjacket to hold her. “Ana, stop it. Please, she’s
gone
. Sydney is gone.” He was crying, too.

“Let me help her,” Ana wailed. “It’s not too late.”

Mike set his stubbled cheek against the top of her head and rocked her.

“Please, let me go,” she whispered.

Julian mumbled something under his breath as he assessed the compromised scene. “Mike, I’m sorry. You have to get her out of here.”

Mike dragged Ana from the stench-filled room into the frigid morning.

Julian slammed the door, and Ana fixed her eyes on the eleven, the room number irrevocably burned into her memory.

Jim knelt in front of her, and she stared right through him. “Ana, listen to me. You need to go home.” He looked at Mike. “She can’t drive, and I can’t have her back on shift. I need the Jeep keys.”

“Give me a damn minute, Jim, would you?”

The crowd parted for the coroner who wheeled a gurney through a fresh inch of snow, an empty body bag secured under the strap.

He knocked on the door, and Julian let him in.

“Ana, can you hear me?” Mike brushed the hair back from her face. “Can you give me your keys, honey? I’m going to take you home.”

Ana fished the keys out of her pocket and handed them to Mike who, in turn, handed them to Jim.

The heavy, wet snow soaked through Ana’s clothes, and though she knew she should be freezing, she was physically and emotionally numb.

Mike hooked his arms under hers and lifted her. She shuffled her feet in the direction he pulled her, eluded by an act as simple as walking. Had Mike not taken her away, she wasn’t sure she would have ever left.

The whispering crowd silenced as the coroner emerged from the motel room. Two young men forced the gurney’s wheels through the accumulating snow, loaded Sydney’s body into the back of the ambulance, and tapped the rear door, signaling it was all clear to go.

Ana watched the ambulance drive away.

Shock substituted someone else as the victim: some faceless, nameless person Ana didn’t have to grieve for.

Anyone other than her sister.

CHAPTER 3

Colby Monroe stared at her reflection in her dressing table mirror and brushed her reddish-blond hair over her shoulders. She leaned forward and gently stretched the skin around her spring-green eyes. In the sunlight, she saw the faint lines beginning to work their way out from the corners. Despite the constant compliments, she was seeing the signs that every day of her thirty-six years was starting to catch up with her.

The sound of tires on the driveway drew her to the bedroom window where she shivered in her black negligee, watching her husband Jared’s silver BMW 6 Series disappear into the garage. She closed the blinds, self-conscious of her minor flaws, and dabbed on a fresh coat of vanilla-flavored lip gloss.

The front door opened, then closed, and Jared stomped off his boots. He set his keys on the entranceway table and turned on the water in the kitchen sink. A bar stool slid across the hardwood floor, and the smell of coffee crept upstairs.

Colby grabbed a stick-lighter off the dresser, lit several candles, and turned down the bed. She climbed beneath the comforter and stared at the time on the alarm clock: 8:02 a.m.

Jared was getting home later by the day.

Fifteen minutes passed, and as Colby was about to give up on her plan to romance him, Jared appeared in the doorway. He ran his hands through his dark brown hair, cut close at the sides and left longer on top in a style resembling one worn by George Clooney.

“Hey,” she said.

Red lines shot through the whites of his dark eyes. “Hey. Are you just waking up?”

She hadn’t slept past six in the morning since leaving her job as an OR nurse at County Memorial almost four months earlier, and he knew it.

“No,” she said, softening her hard tone. “I was waiting for
you
.” She pulled the comforter aside, leaned up on her elbow, and smiled.

Jared let out a sigh, and, for a long moment, didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. She could see his disinterest, and it hit her in the place where her fear of aging festered, hurting her more, she guessed, than he had intended.

“I’m sorry.” Jared shook his head. “It’s been a long night.” He went into the en suite bathroom and shut the door.

Tears burned behind Colby’s eyelids, and she closed her eyes until she was sure she could contain them. The hurt was visceral, and she refused to let Jared see that. She blew out the candles, put on her silk bathrobe, and knocked on the bathroom door.

“Jared, open up.” The shower turned on, and she reached for the door handle, finding it locked. “Come on. Unlock the door.”

Jared answered, wearing a white towel wrapped around his waist. He held his hand high on the doorjamb and stretched in a way that caused his chest and biceps to flex. Country club racquet ball kept him in impeccable shape, and, at age thirty-nine, he didn’t have a gray hair on him, a fact that secretly annoyed her.

Steam from the shower rolled into the bedroom.

“We need to talk.”

“I’m exhausted, Colby. I don’t have another fight in me right now.”

She pushed past him and turned off the water. “I said
talk
, not
fight
.”

“There’s no difference with you. One day you’re telling me that you want a divorce, and the next, I come home to find you half-naked in bed.” He held up his hands as if asking her what she expected. “At least this time you were alone.”

Talking
went quickly out the window.

“Is that what this is about? It’s been four months, Jared, and you haven’t so much as looked at me. Do you know how much that hurts, or what it feels like to always be the least important thing to you? I quit my nursing job for you. I gave up my independence to sit here, alone in this house, indentured to you for taking care of me.”

“You quit nursing for
me
?” Jared scoffed. “You’re always the victim, aren’t you? Well, let me refresh your somewhat-jaded memory. You quit that job because you slept with Simon Walker, chief of medicine at the hospital we both worked at. Everyone knows about it, and if you hadn’t quit, he sure as hell would’ve found a way to fire you to stop the chatter. I have to walk on eggshells at that place to save my own ass. Sure, I could take a job somewhere else, but I worked my way up to department head. Those jobs just don’t exist out there, and I’m not starting over. Do you have
any
idea how hard it is to sit across a meeting room table and talk about Emergency Department funding with a guy who slept with my wife?”

Colby slapped him hard enough across the cheek that her palm stung afterward.

Jared’s head whipped to the side, and a red handprint surfaced on his cheek. He drew a deep breath in through his nose and clenched his teeth. “I think we’re done here,” he said, and closed the bathroom door.

The lock clicked, and Colby stood for a moment in disbelief of what she’d done. No matter how much time passed or how many times she apologized, Jared would never forgive her. She wasn’t even sure she wanted him to.