Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(91)
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 driven up 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 like I do. 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.”
“So we don’t know if she disappeared as in ran away or disappeared as in presumed dead,” I said. And then realized how dreadful it was that I could say such a statement in a calm and rational and unemotional tone of voice. I didn’t know what I was becoming as a special agent, but it wasn’t the woman I had been.
Rick said, “Disappeared as in there’s been no sign of her since—no leads, no official search, no credit report, no death certificate, and she isn’t on any missing persons databases—nothing.”
“That’s odd,” Soul said, “especially for the family member of a public official, who could pull strings and find her, get her case special attention.”
JoJo said, “We have an incoming call from T. Laine and Tandy.”
The overhead screens flickered and Tandy’s face appeared, his lips moving, his eyes to the side. T. Laine appeared beside him, and she was clearly looking at him, listening. Rick said, “We have visuals. Why don’t we have audio?”
Oh. Sorry, Tandy’s lips said, without sound. He punched a button and looked at the screen, saying, “Starting over. Healy’s prison cellmate died in an infirmary fire last night. We were just shown in and saw the place. It looks like either he was attacked with a flamethrower or he suffered self-immolation.”