Red and blue lights swirled through the trees and headlights crosshatched the open field, and all the sudden attention on the place seemed to make it shrink. A few residents had gathered at a distance in the street.
I sat on the rear bumper of an open ambulance. One paramedic was trying to cradle my arm into a sling while another was using an antiseptic soaked towel to wipe the blood off the knuckles of my right fist.
Richards was next to me. Her weapon had been taken and placed into a plastic evidence bag for the shooting review board.
We both watched as Eddie Baines was taken from the blockhouse to a waiting ambulance. It took four men to lift him onto a wheeled stretcher and push him through the high grass. Sergeant Carannante said Baines was unconscious when they arrived. A paramedic had guessed the man had lost several pints of blood from the gunshot wound. He doubted he would survive.
Almost apologetically the sergeant explained that the call to the river had been a false alarm, that the man seen pushing a cart had been a late-night janitor wheeling a bin of trash through the alley to a dumpster.
"There was so much radio traffic, no one recognized your call," he said to Richards. "The dispatcher thought you were with us, and so did I.
"Then it took us a while to get here and we couldn't figure out why Mr. Freeman's truck was parked in the road with a girl handcuffed to the steering wheel."
I looked at Richards and she shook her head.
"Witness," she said. "Oh, by the way. There's a hundred-dollar bill in the locked glove box that needs to be bagged for evidence."
The sergeant nodded, as if nothing this night would be an unusual request.
"And we've got to get you over to administration, Detective," he said to Richards. "Chief Hammonds is waiting. And you don't want to see this."
Across the field the coroner's team was removing McCane's body, hefting the black bag across the dried grass. Richards got up, touched my shoulder and when I looked into her eyes her fingers drifted to the scar on my neck and a single tear stained her cheek. I couldn't lie and tell her it would be alright.
"I'll follow you," I said.
Carannante followed me to my truck, still parked in the middle of the street where Richards had pulled up and come to back me up. The steering wheel was scraped and gouged where the girl had tried to pull herself free from the handcuffs.
"They took her to the lockup on a vagrancy charge," Carannante said. "That's all we can hold her on for now."
"And Carlyle?"
"Couldn't find him. But he'll surface."
I unlocked the glove box and the sergeant handed me an evidence bag into which I slipped the hundred.
"If they match the sequence number to the ones they found in Dr. Marshack's car, you've got a physical link between him and Eddie," I said, handing him the bag.
"I'll take care of it," Carannante said.
I U-turned the truck and had started down the street when I saw them gathered at the next corner. The three-man crew was standing back away from the glare of the squad cars. When my headlights caught them they turned and started the other way. When I pulled up even to them they stopped and the leader looked into my window.
"Y'all a violent people," he said.
I could say nothing in response. He held out his fist and I tapped his knuckles with mine and he shook his head and turned to continue back north to the off-limits.