One of the officers stepped into the pool of blood beside Austin’s body and kicked the gun away from his motionless hand. “Suicide by cop,” he mumbled. “Always hate to see that.”
I knew it was standard operating procedure to use lethal force in a situation like this, especially for a suspected terrorist. And I knew it wasn’t uncommon in a gunfight to have dozens of rounds fired, especially with this many officers. It’s called survival stress reaction, it’s just the way your body reacts, especially if you’re inexperienced. You just keep firing. But still, I hated that it had happened. I hated that Austin Hunter had been killed.
Another tragedy. Another death.
I checked my watch.
7:16 p.m.
In less than forty-five minutes, Cassandra would be joining her boyfriend. I felt the screws of anger and grief tighten around my heart. “This man wasn’t trying to commit suicide,” I exploded.
“He wanted to live.”
A paramedic leaned over Lien-hua. Two other EMTs knelt to attend to Austin, but nothing could help him now.
“He didn’t want to live,” the cop said. “He had a gun to his head.”
I felt like decking this idiot. “That was to stop you from killing him. Couldn’t you even see that? He just snuck onto the Navy SEALs’ training base and burned down a secure military installation to save the woman he loves. A man like that doesn’t kill himself before he can finish the job.”
“You saw the guy,” the officer responded. “You heard what he said: ‘It’s over!’ This was his endgame.”
I couldn’t believe how stupid this guy was. I read his name tag.
“Listen to me, Officer Rickman, he wasn’t going to shoot anyone.
He was scared. He was trying to-”
“Pat,” Lien-hua called from where she sat beside me on the pavement.
I knelt beside her. “What? Are you OK?” I saw that the paramedic had wrapped a gauze bandage around her neck.
“We need to focus on Cassandra, now,” she said. “Please. Let it be. Don’t get tangled up in this. Let’s not lose her too.” Lien-hua began to stand up.
“Take it easy,” I said, placing a hand on her arm.
“I’m OK. Really. It’s just a scratch.”
“Lien-hua, I think you should-”
“Patrick.” Steel eyes. Steel will. “Stop it. I’m OK. Let’s go find Cassandra.” Yes, this was the woman I knew. The one who never failed to impress me. I offered my hand, and she let me help her to her feet.
I looked at the ground. The officer who’d been arguing with me had stepped back, leaving a bloody imprint of his shoe’s sole on the road.
Then Detective Dunn appeared and strode across the street. He stared at Austin Hunter’s body. “Who shot first?” Dunn scanned the faces of his men. No one replied. “Who fired the first shot!” he roared.
No one responded. Lien-hua asked for my latex gloves, I pulled some out of my pocket and after she’d tugged them on, she picked up Austin’s gun, ejected the magazine. It was full. “He didn’t even have a chance to fire his weapon.”
I was still staring at a bloody shoe print next to Austin’s body.
“You work many fires, Officer Rickman?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“Fires. Arsons. Did you work the one this morning?”
“I’m a cop, not a firefighter.” He spit out the words.
“Hunter was trying to tell us something,” Lien-hua said to Dunn, interrupting my exchange with Officer Geoff Rickman.
Dunn leaned over, felt Austin’s pulse. Unnecessary, but symbolic.
“This man could have helped us find a missing woman,” he said.
“And now he’s dead.”
Rickman muttered something indecipherable as he started back to his car. I had some suspicions about Rickman, but they were still vague and unsupported, and right now I needed to lean on evidence rather than instinct. We needed something solid, and we were running out of time.
“All right,” said Dunn. “We sort it out at headquarters. Let’s get this mess cleaned up.” He gazed at an abandoned car beside me, and then, in a burst of rage, kicked the tire and yanked out a pile of parking tickets stuffed under its windshield wipers. His reaction might have been fierce compassion, or maybe anger that he hadn’t been the one to fire first. It was impossible to tell. “Get this freakin’ piece of crap out of here. Take it to impound.” Then he stared at me. “You two really get around for a couple of federal agents.” He kept his words flat; I couldn’t tell if they were spoken with respect or disdain.
“And you really get around for a homicide detective,” said Lien-hua.
“That I do,” he said. “That I do.”
“Detective,” I said. “Send some men to talk to Victor Drake right away. Hunter mentioned his name. He might know something about Cassandra’s abduction.”
Dunn didn’t look happy about it, but he agreed and then walked away.
While everyone else drifted around the scene, seeming to breathe a collective sigh of relief, I thought of Cassandra and of Austin Hunter’s last words: “It’s over.”
I could only hope he wasn’t right.
I took a moment to kneel beside his body. It shouldn’t have ended like this. He didn’t need to die tonight. “I’m sorry, Austin,”
I whispered, and I really was sorry. Sorry he died for no reason.
Sorry he’d been coerced into committing another crime. Sorry we hadn’t found him earlier in the day so we could have stopped this.
Sorry about so many things.
Despite the mistakes Austin had made, despite the laws he’d broken, he had served faithfully in the special forces for fourteen years.
I laid my hand on his shoulder in honor of the service he’d given our country. He was just like so many people I know-a hero in one area of life, flawed and all too human in another. In the end, though, he’d died doing the noblest thing of all, trying to save another person’s life. And though I might not have taken the same steps he did, I respected the value he seemed to place on human life-clearing Building B-14 before starting the fire, planning his fires to avoid casualties. I wondered how I would have reacted if someone had sent me a video like that of Lien-hua chained in a tank. I could only imagine the things I would have been willing to do to save her.
As I was rising to leave, I saw the end of a cheap, prepaid cell phone jammed beneath the strap of his shoulder holster.
What?
“They contact me,” he’d said. This phone must be how!
Everyone else had left me alone with the body, so nobody was close by. No one else had seen the phone.
I slid my hand down, cupped the phone, and then slipped it into my pocket. Maybe, just maybe, this could lead us to Cassandra.
“I’ll find her, Austin,” I said, even though the corpse beside me couldn’t hear the words. “I’ll save Cassandra. I promise.”
I looked at my watch. I had only forty minutes to keep my promise.
Then I stood up to find Lien-hua.