Lost Legacy (A Zoe Chambers Mystery Book 2) (11 page)

Ten

A shooting at the Kroll farm.
Her
farm. Home.

Zoe mashed the gas pedal to the floor. The engine of her old pickup roared in response. Ahead of her, Nate’s police cruiser screamed along Route 15. Medic Two filled her rearview mirror. Sirens in stereo blasted her eardrums. Pete and his crutches occupied the other side of her truck’s bench seat, his cell phone pressed to his ear.

“Okay,” he said to the county emergency dispatcher at the other end. “If you find out anything more, call me back.” He snapped the phone shut. “The caller reported a male gunshot victim. No shooter at the scene. Nothing else.” His voice was low, calm.

It did nothing to sooth Zoe’s panic. Male gunshot victim? She started ticking off the possibilities, but couldn’t bear the thought of any of the men at the farm being hurt. Or worse.

Over the roof of Nate’s cruiser, she spotted a box truck rumbling along ahead of them, making no effort to pull over for the sirens. A semi barreled toward them in the other lane. She rammed the heel of her hand into the horn, expecting a whoop. Instead, the honk startled her. In the adrenaline rush, she’d forgotten she wasn’t behind the wheel of the EMS unit. Her pickup had been tucked in between police cruiser and ambulance as a courtesy.

“Take it easy,” Pete said. “Or I’ll drive.”

With that bum ankle? But instead of pointing out the obvious, she asked, “They can’t give you any idea who the victim is?”

Once the semi roared past, Nate swung his vehicle around the lumbering box truck. Zoe floored the accelerator and kept with him. Medic Two clung to her back bumper. As they flashed past the truck, she glanced over to see the driver talking on his cell phone.

“Hang it up,” Pete bellowed at the window while pumping his fist up and down in a sign language version of his order.

Whether or not the driver understood or obeyed, Zoe didn’t know. Or care. Her eyes burned into Nate’s car. Her mind, a mile ahead—at the farm.

“Apparently the caller was on the verge of hysteria.” Pete answered the question she’d almost forgot she’d asked. “The dispatcher was lucky to get as much information as she did. She’s been trying the call back number, but there’s no answer.”

Hysteria? That sounded like Kimberly.

Zoe’s fingers itched to grab her own cell phone, but she knew better. Especially at this speed. Still, she wanted—no,
needed
—to know who had been shot. A
male
gunshot victim. She prayed it wasn’t Tom. But that meant wishing the fate on someone else. Of the fifteen boarders at the farm, only a few were men. But the younger girls’ fathers often drove them there. And the older girls sometimes brought a boyfriend to the barn.

The emergency procession approached a car and a van. Brake lights glowed as both vehicles dove toward the right shoulder. Or as far as they could without dropping over a ten-foot embankment into a pasture. Nate swept around them. Zoe followed.

Route 15 swung in a wide arc to the right followed by one last lazy bend back to the left before straightening out again and splitting the Kroll farm in half.

With home in sight, Zoe risked a glance out her window at the barn. Cars, trucks, and horse trailers crowded around the building. In all the excitement, she hadn’t had a chance to call off the search and rescue mission.

Nate’s brake lights reminded her to slow down, although he barely did. The cruiser bounced and kicked when it hit the gravel farm lane. Zoe followed close on his bumper, glad for the seatbelt digging into her lap and preventing a mashed head against the truck roof. Pete’s cast thumped against the floorboards, and he let fly a string of profanity.

“Sorry,” she said.

Churning up gravel, she tailed the cruiser. Threatened to push him up the lane next to the farmhouse. The graveled road then looped behind it and toward the barn. A slender figure in a bright red shirt and capris stood in the backyard, waving the vehicles on. Kimberly. If she’d been the hysterical caller, as Zoe assumed, this explained why she wasn’t responding to the dispatcher’s callback attempts.

They topped the rise above the house and rolled down the other side to the barn. Two long aluminum horse trailers blocked the road. Nate steered around them, spewing dirt and grass under his wheels. Zoe stayed with him. When the brake lights came on again, she had to jam her own brake pedal to keep from acquiring a police car as a hood ornament.

One of the boarders, a short bulldog of a man in a Western hat, appeared in the barn doorway and signaled frantically.

Nate leapt from the cruiser before Zoe could shift the truck out of gear. Her first instinct was to race after him, but Pete’s fingers closed around her arm.

“Let Nate make sure the scene is secure,” he ordered.

Seth Metzger dashed past the passenger window. He must have followed the emergency units in his own vehicle.

“But EOC said the shooter was gone,” Zoe said. Besides, she wanted to point out, there were at least a dozen folks milling around just inside the door. Probably ready to load up their horses and help with the search for Harry. If there was a nut case with a gun still hanging around, the bystanders would have scattered. Or, knowing this gang, taken the shooter down themselves.

Pete’s grip tightened. “Let Nate confirm it.”

She met Pete’s ice blue eyes and saw—what exactly?—concern? He was worried for her. And with his foot in a cast, he was helpless to protect her. The thought of Pete Adams wanting to keep her safe would have given her heart palpitations on any other day. Right now, all she wanted was to dive into the fray and find out what was going on in her barn.

The handheld police radio on the seat between them crackled to life. “It’s clear,” came Nate’s voice. “Get the paramedics in here.”

Pete released Zoe’s arm, and she bolted from the truck.

Inside the building, onlookers clad in jeans and boots gathered in a semicircle around something. Someone. Zoe elbowed through them. And froze at the sight laid out before her.

The farm tractor with a manure spreader hitched to it sat in the middle of the riding arena. The faint smell of diesel hung on the air.

Nate and Patsy knelt next to the tractor’s massive left rear tire, her face deathly pale. In front of them, Tom Jackson bent over the still form of a man, both of Tom’s hands pressed into the form, obviously applying pressure to a wound. Seth attempted to herd the bystanders toward one corner, away from the crime scene.

Zoe sprinted forward.

“Zoe.” Patsy’s voice was little more than a squeak. “Thank God.”

Tom looked up. Blood smudged his stoic face. His bare arms glistened, wet with the stuff. 

Zoe’s gaze dropped from Tom to the motionless man between them. 

Mr. Kroll. Zoe’s landlord. The man who had offered her half his home as her own. The sweet, gentle soul who cared for his sickly wife and whose throaty laughter drifted through the walls of the old farmhouse.

Who could possibly want to harm Mr. Kroll?

Tom’s hands pressed into the older man’s upper chest, left of his sternum, below his clavicle. Blood drenched Mr. Kroll’s shirt and the ground around him. Zoe launched into paramedic mode and dropped to her knees. Her fingers settled against her landlord’s neck, searching for a carotid pulse. Please God, let there be a pulse. The sounds around her—Patsy sobbing, the soft whimpers and murmurs from the dozen or so horsemen who’d been corralled near the feed room, Seth’s calm, authoritative voice, sirens shrieking somewhere down the valley—all grew muffled and distant inside her head. She shifted her fingers, listened with them. And detected a faint rhythm.

She closed her eyes. Mr. Kroll was alive.

When she opened them again, Pete was leaning on his crutches, studying her with his jaw set. She forced something close to a smile and gave him a nod. His jaw relaxed.

Zoe shifted her focus to her watch, counting beats as the sweep second hand marked off time. Without looking up, she asked, “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Patsy wailed. “I came out to the barn to get Jazzel ready...you know...to come help with the search. And there he was. Right there.” Her voice cracked. “There’s so much blood...”

Barry Dickson and Curtis Knox, paramedics from the ambulance service’s B crew, jogged up, wheeling a Stryker gurney loaded with equipment. Nate rose and helped Patsy to her feet. “Let’s give them room to work,” the officer said. “I need to ask you some questions anyway.”

Barry Dickson, as big as a Steelers linebacker, knelt beside Zoe. “What’ve we got?”

“His pulse is 116 and thready,” Zoe reported.

“Do we have a name on him?”

“Mr. Kroll. Marvin. Marvin Kroll.”

Knox, tall and reedy in contrast to his muscle-bound partner, wiggled his fingers into a pair of latex gloves and tossed a second pair to Zoe. He leaned over the patient. “Marvin? Can you hear me?”

“He’s been unconscious since I got here,” Tom said through clenched teeth.

Ignoring him, Knox dug his knuckles into Mr. Kroll’s sternum. “No response to pain stimulus. We need to check for an exit wound, guys.”

Zoe snatched the cervical collar from the jump kit and eased it around the farmer’s neck.

Barry eyed Tom. “Sir, are you okay there?”

He gave a quick nod.

“All right then. You’re doing a great job. Try to keep that pressure on while we move him.”

Zoe held traction on Mr. Kroll’s neck while Barry and Knox log-rolled him just enough to take a look underneath.

“No exit wound,” Knox announced.

Zoe nabbed the stethoscope draped around Barry’s neck and listened to Mr. Kroll’s lungs while Knox proceeded to pack sterile dressings against the wound. No longer needed, Tom backed away.

“Breath sounds are good,” Zoe reported. At least the bullet hadn’t pierced a lung.

“Damn it,” Knox muttered as blood soaked through the bandages as fast as he applied them.

Barry positioned the long backboard next to Mr. Kroll. Zoe helped them maneuver him onto it. All the while, she fought the impulse to look at her landlord’s clammy, pasty face, the slightly parted lips—fought against the questions raging inside her head. Who would do this? And why?

She swiped her arm across her face to catch the accumulating beads of sweat before they had a chance to burn her eyes—and to brush aside her thoughts before they could singe her brain.

“Let’s move,” Knox said, a tinge of urgency in his otherwise steady voice.

Zoe shot a glance at Tom, standing alone. His skin, streaked with blood, had paled beneath his Florida tan.

The three paramedics grabbed the gurney and hustled their patient out of the barn to the awaiting Medic Two.

Outside, the sun momentarily blinded Zoe, but she kept moving, past the trucks and the trailers, past the township police cruiser and her own pickup. An unmarked black sedan had joined the party. The car may have been unadorned, but it might as well have shouted Monongahela County Detectives.

At the back of the medic unit, they stopped. Barry flung the patient doors open, and without a word, they hoisted the gurney and Mr. Kroll inside and climbed in beside him.

Blood soaked through the dressings. Knox muttered something then said, “We need to get an IV started before this guy bleeds out.”

The cramped space left little room to maneuver. Barry snatched the IV equipment from the cubby in front of him. Knox readied the O2. And Zoe automatically flung open the LifePak.

Knox caught Zoe’s wrist. “We need you to drive.”

She blinked. Drive? The ambulance? Lights and sirens the entire fifteen miles to Brunswick Hospital? Fifteen miles to think about who was in the patient compartment? And if he took a bad turn...She swallowed hard and opened her mouth to say okay.

“
No
.”

Zoe snapped around to find Pete standing at the rear of the ambulance.

“She’s too close to the patient,” he went on.

Zoe wanted to argue. If she excused herself every time she responded to a call involving an acquaintance, she’d spend her entire professional life on the lumpy couch back at the garage. But Pete locked her in his hard gaze, and she kept quiet.

“Kevin just arrived,” he said. “He’ll drive.”

She spotted the young officer loping toward them from the barn.

Next thing she knew, Pete was offering his hand as she stepped down from the ambulance’s patient compartment. Kevin slammed the back doors and headed around to the front.

The ambulance lurched away from them, swinging into the grass to get around the two trailers still blocking the lane. Then it topped the rise and dropped over the other side.

Other than a voice or two that carried from the barn and the trill of cicadas in the woods on the hill, silence settled over them. Zoe drew a breath. Felt her legs go weak. And in that moment, she was in Pete’s arms, her face pressed against the soft cotton of his t-shirt. She clung to him, his crutches biting her elbows, and fought against the sobs that threatened to wrack her body.

Eleven

Pete drew Zoe close. At first, she held her body rigid as tremors rolled over her like small earthquakes. She’d gone pale at the sight of the old man bleeding in the barn. No way was he going to permit her to drive the frigging ambulance in her condition.

If she argued, which he fully expected her to, he had an ulterior motive for keeping her where she was.

Eventually, she softened against him. But just for a moment. Then she drew a ragged breath and pressed away from him. “Sorry.”

“What for?”

She dug a tissue from her jeans pocket and pressed it to her nose. “For...you know...going to pieces like that.”

He resisted the urge to pull her back into his arms. Instead, he touched her cheek. “You’re entitled.”

“It’s unprofessional.”

Pete fought back a smile. “You and I don’t always have to be professional with each other.”

She gazed at him over the tissue. Something—some emotion—passed over her eyes like a cloud, but he couldn’t decipher it. Then she looked away. Stuffed the tissue back in her pocket. Grew a little taller. Gave her head a shake. “I could’ve driven the ambulance. I’m sure you have plenty of work for Kevin here.”

This time, he didn’t fight the grin. Zoe could be painfully predictable. “It’s under control. The county detectives are helping Nate and Seth question your boarders. Besides, I need a favor.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “A favor?”

Pete sobered. “I need to question your stepdad. While I’m doing that, I’d like you to let the victim’s wife know what’s going on.”

Zoe looked toward the house. “Poor Mrs. Kroll. I should drive her to the hospital.”

Damn it. Zoe was bound and determined to go to Brunswick this afternoon. “No. Maybe your mother and stepdad can do that once I’m done questioning him.”

“But—”

Pete held up a hand to silence her. “Have you forgotten that you’re
my
ride today?”

“I’m sure Nate or Seth would give you a lift home.”

“I’m not going home. Nate has to finish up here, and Seth is supposed to be off duty. I don’t think the board of supervisors would appreciate paying him overtime to be my chauffeur. Besides, I think I can make it worth your while.”

She narrowed her eyes. “How?”

“First, you drive me over to Carl Loomis’ place.”

“Carl Loomis? Why?”

“I have a few questions for him regarding his employer’s health.”

“You mean James Engle’s lung cancer?”

“Or lack thereof. By then Nate should be finished here. I’d appreciate you driving both of us over to Warren Froats’ place so we could pick up my car. I left it there this morning. And you mentioned wanting to talk to him.”

“Oh.” She dragged the word out into about three syllables. “I suppose I could convince Mom and Tom to take Mrs. Kroll to the hospital.”

Atta girl.

Zoe jogged toward the house. Pete’s gaze lingered on the curve of her very nice ass in those tight jeans. He blinked and turned away before his imagination carried him off to one of his favorite fantasies. The one that did not include the jeans.

Clearing his throat—and his mind—Pete crutched his way back to the barn. At the doorway, he nearly collided with a man and a woman wearing Mon Valley Riding Club t-shirts and ball caps.

“Chief,” the man said. “I hear they found your father. How is he?”

“We were going to help search for him when this happened,” the woman added.

“He’s fine.” If only it were true. “Thanks. I appreciate that you were willing to give up your Sunday.”

“Any excuse to get on a horse.” The woman blushed. “Of course, now we don’t feel much like riding.”

“Your officer talked to us and said it was okay for us to leave.” The man took off his cap and used a red bandana to wipe sweat from his bald head before replacing the hat.

Pete thanked them again and tried to ignore the pitying look they gave him as he hobbled into the barn.

Seth stood next to a young woman seated on a hay bale, his notepad open. Nate was questioning the short, muscle-bound cowboy who had flagged them down when they’d first arrived on the scene. Across the barn, Wayne Baronick and another county detective were similarly occupied. Two girls stood near the feed room with their heads together. Pete spotted four more moving in and out of stalls, tending to their horses.

But Zoe’s stepfather was nowhere to be seen.

Pete made his way across the riding arena to Seth, who was tucking his notepad into his shirt pocket.

“Thanks for your help,” he told the woman. “If you think of anything else...”

She rose and gave him a shy smile. “I’ll be sure and call you.” She glanced at Pete before walking away.

“Did you get her number?” Pete asked.

Seth grinned. “Yep.” His face grew serious. “So far we have nothing. Patsy Greene was the first on the scene. She didn’t touch or move the victim, but called 9-1-1 and the main house from the phone over there.” He hoisted a thumb at an ancient black telephone on the wall next to the doors. “Says Tom Jackson responded and tried to stop the bleeding. Then everyone else showed up.”

“Where’s Patsy now?”

“Inside the feed room sitting down. She’s pretty upset.”

“And where’s Tom Jackson?”

Seth glanced around. “He’s probably out back washing up. I bagged his clothing and took swabs from him, so I told him it was okay.”