Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(16)
An hour after sundown, I made black China tea with lemon mint and brought mugs and the carafe to JoJo with my notes. She didn’t look up but sipped her tea, which was made to her specifications with lots of sugar and no cream. “Mmmm,” she said on an exhale. “I wondered if you were going to stop farming and start working today, you lazy girl.”
She was teasing me. It had taken a bit of time to learn that insults and what the team called snark were actually bonding friendship rituals. I still wasn’t good at responding to it, but now I knew what it was and my feelings didn’t get tangled up in the repartee. “I was checking the reports. I found only a few errors so far and most of them are mine. Clementine doesn’t like my accent.” Clementine was the name given to the new voice-to-text software, which was much easier to say than CLMT2207.
JoJo blew a laugh through her nose. “Yours and mine both, chicky. I think the designer was British and male. Black and female weren’t on his radar when he input his ‘regional pronunciation, intonation, and enunciation modulations.’”
I held in a grin at the quote. “Hillbilly was even less on his radar. Still, I think the new software is pretty good.”
“Anything that keeps me from being the unit’s transcriptionist is good by me.” JoJo—who was really Special Agent Josephine Anna Jones—stretched in her chair, throwing her arms up and arching her spine. PsyLED agents didn’t tend to follow regulations in dress or hairstyle, and JoJo was less amenable to rules than most. Today she was wearing red and pink—red beads in her wrapped braids; red leggings under a flowing pink skirt; layered dark pink, skintight, tank-style tunics that flared below her waist; and a short, dark red jacket. Her shoes were black. If for some reason JoJo had to go into the field, the skirt would come off, field boots would replace the shoes, and she would be ready to go. “What else did you find?” she asked.
I almost told her that the mints were happy today, but JoJo would just roll her eyes. “Everyone at the party has interlocking business and personal relationships that sometimes go back generations. They attend the same churches, are either right wing or left in their politics and theology, vacation at the same places, and bank at the same institutions. Their vacations are lavish. They routinely cheat on their spouses. They divorce often, and those divorces are spectacular and vicious, the custody battles brutal. They make money together, they politic together, and they marry into each other’s families. It’s almost incestuous.” And I would know, coming from a church where the bloodlines were mapped out for generations to keep us from marrying our own cousins. “You?”
“More of the same. Nothing that points to a specific reason for murder, terrorism, or even political assassination. There’s been no recent chatter about anyone looking for a hired gun, and nothing on the terrorism boards, international or homegrown. So we still don’t know who the real target was.”
“The Holloways’ blinds and draperies were open, so if there was a specific target, all the shooter had to do was take a hunting rifle and a deer stand, ratchet it up into a tree, and take a single shot,” I said, “or several if he wanted to confuse the objective. This was messy. It feels like terrorism.”
“Look at probie drawing conclusions.” She pointed at me as if showing me off to a crowd. We were alone. I wasn’t sure I understood, but she added, “Not bad, girl. I’m leaning that way too. Evidence that obviates that conclusion?”
“The eight seconds we noticed on the video before he started firing,” I said. “He took time to study the scene, choose his target, raise his weapon, aim, and make a limited fire to take out people with the first rounds. And he had a rate of fire upwards of seven hundred rounds per minute and a caliber of ammo that would punch through brick walls, enough to take out everyone at the party if he’d wanted to. It’s been suggested that he—we’re guessing male—wasn’t used to the weapon or wasn’t a good shot. Or had another agenda.”
“Yeah. Not bad at all, Maggoty. Get back to work.”
I shook my head. The nickname Maggoty had made its way into the official reports. It was embarrassing, though there was nothing I could do about it.
A piercing wail came over JoJo’s computer and her attention snapped back to the multiple screens. “Get your gear,” she said. “We got another one. Knoxville PD just got a ten-eighty-one code. Multiple shots fired into a restaurant. Secret Service is on-site, which means the senator was there. Sending the address to your tablet and your cell.” Her voice rose to follow me down the hallway. “Abrams Tolliver’s family is inside. His security team is pinned down. Wear your vest! Take an AR-15 and a comms unit. More info as I have it.”
“I’m not certified yet on automatic rifles,” I yelled back as I grabbed gear.
JoJo cursed and said, “Take one anyway. Give it to one of the team when you get there!”
“Got it!” I shouted and checked out an AR-15 from the weapons room and added it to my gear.
“Be safe!” JoJo shouted.
I grabbed my gobag and was out the door into the dying light of day while the last words were still dying on the air.
? ? ?
I had requested use of an official vehicle, but the request was taking forever making its way up the chain of command, and so I was still using my old truck for official business. The C10 didn’t have speed, it didn’t corner well, and it drank gasoline like a Saturday night drunk did liquor, but it did have three things going for it. It wasn’t a vehicle that people saw and thought, Cop, it was reliable, and the heater put out hot air like an industrial furnace. It was already warm inside by the time I reached the end of the street and turned on my jerry-rigged blue lights. My new PsyLED car would be here in a day or a week or maybe a month. With official vehicles it was hard to tell. But when it came, I’d have an ugly but city-smart vehicle to drive while on business, and the truck could be for farm activities, as it should be.