Burden of Solace Read online

  He grunted, pushing down on his knees to help him stand. Days like these made him feel every one of his fifty years. He crossed the short distance to the shooter's body, repeating the ritual of viewing the empty husks left behind by senseless tragedy. He rose again and walked toward the CSU van, ducking under the yellow crime-scene tape. The sidewalks were filling with lookie-loos and their phone cameras. They only wanted to see the bodies, not the people.

  A flash in the afternoon sky caught Walsh’s eye, sunlight glinting off silver-gray. Walsh ground the cigarette under a worn heel before remembering that he hadn’t smoked it. Unlike his wife, Guardian 175 never lectured him about his habit, which somehow made more of an impact than Andrea’s nagging. For the twelfth time that week he promised himself he would quit. As soon as this case is over.

  The Guardian braked in midair and settled to the pavement with the lightest of steps. Walsh liked that about his friend. So many Guardians felt like they needed to make a grand entrance, slamming into the ground in a dramatic three-point landing. Maybe it was a way of protesting their loss of identity, their way of saying, “I’m here, I exist!” Walsh could certainly understand that, but someone would have to patch up that cracked concrete.

  Atlanta’s Guardian was more understated, his matchless strength tempered with restraint. If he broke up the sidewalk it was for a reason, like to throw a chunk of it at a huge, mutated alligator. The city maintenance crews had actually enjoyed cleaning up after that fight. Some of those concrete chunks from the MonsterGator fight had sold on eBay for as much as a hundred bucks.

  “I got your message, Lieutenant. How can I help?”

  Bill Walsh was one of the few people who knew 175’s original identity. The detective and this Guardian had a long working relationship, going back before his Emergence. It had started off rocky, but the two men had learned to respect each other and even became friends. Around others, 175 and Walsh assumed a less familiar tone. Part of it had to do with the whole ‘anonymous’ thing the government required of exohumans. 175 also insisted that the less friendly they appeared in public, the less likely it was some bad guy would try to grab Walsh and use him as leverage against the Guardian.

  "I understand you rushed a kid to Memorial yesterday, gunshot victim.”

  “Yeah," 175 said. "Marissa Acosta. Last I heard she was going to be okay. Her father was also shot. He was still touch-and-go last time I checked.”

  “The father died earlier today. His name was Tomas Acosta, and it looks like he was the target. Marissa was playing on the sidewalk while Tomas was working in the garage. She just got in the way.”

  “Damn. Do we have a suspect?”

  “You might say that. The shooter drove around the block into an alleyway, parked and ate his last round. A meter reader from the gas company found the body this morning.”

  The mirrored faceplate betrayed no emotion, but it snapped back as an indication of the Guardian’s surprise.

  “So, this gangbanger killed himself because he accidentally hit a kid in a drive-by? That’s new.”

  “You’d think. But the shooter wasn’t a gang member. Name was Ray Shanley, a pharmaceutical rep - regular guy, no priors, wife and two kids, nice house out in Tucker. He had a map to the victim’s home, and a picture of Acosta in the car with him. I think he went after Acosta with the intent to kill him, but he needed a picture, which means he’d never met him”

  “Professional hit?” the Guardian thought out loud. “Maybe a Twitter war that got too personal? Any known connection?”

  “None that I can find,” Walsh shrugged. “Acosta was a journalist, worked for the AJC. His editor says he’s never done any stories on Big Pharma or even anything related to healthcare. He mainly covered business and finance.”

  “Why would a normal family guy shoot someone he doesn’t know, then kill himself?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, because this isn’t the only attack like this we’ve seen. I’ve got five more files with the same pattern, murder-suicides all from the past six months.” The detective hooked a thumb at the two draped shapes. “This is the latest.”

  Walsh ducked under the tape and moved to the two covered corpses in front of the convenience store entrance. 175 followed, also ducking under the tape. Walsh guessed it would have been less effort for him to float over it, but that wasn’t his style.

  “The victim is Denise Rogers, 48, auditor for the Federal Reserve. Our shooter is Billy Long, 32, pool service technician. Again, no apparent relationship between them.”

  175 looked back and forth between the figures.

  “Federal Reserve. And Acosta was a financial reporter. Any connection there?”

  “We’re still checking. And, yes, that’s where my gut tells me this may start to make sense. In the meantime, we’ve got store surveillance footage of the shooting, both the murder and the suicide.”

  Walsh held up his smart phone. “Ready for upload?”

  175 touched a hidden control under the edge of his helmet and nodded. Walsh held his phone to one side of the silvery visor and touched the screen. Once the near-field transfer was complete, 175 nodded again. Walsh knew that behind that mirrored façade, he was reviewing the footage, projected like all the rest of the maps and other analytical data built into his sophisticated head gear.

  “Long was acting odd,” 175 said, “stiff and jerky. No expression. He lifted the gun and fired, then turned it on... Now that’s interesting.”

  Walsh took out a cigarette and tapped it against the pack.

  “You see it too. He turns the gun around with his right hand, thumb on the trigger and starts to fire. But his left hand comes up and tries to move the gun away.”

  The helmet tilted slowly to one side as the mind inside tried to make sense of what it was seeing. “It looks like he’s wrestling with himself, like half of his body wanted to die and the other half didn’t.”

  Walsh stared at the cigarette and shoved it back in the pack. “Have you ever heard of an exohuman who could control other people? Some kind of mental puppeteer?”

  175 shrugged. “Dominators? Not that are still alive. There’s a Telepath in L.A. and a girl in Chicago who can go inside people’s dreams, but I don’t think XAC has any Dominators currently on file.

  That wasn’t good. Since the 1920’s, all American exohumans were required to register with the offices of the Senate’s Exohuman Affairs Committee - XAC. They maintained detailed records of everyone with Emerged abilities, even those abilities that weren’t terribly useful, like being able to turn things orange with a touch. They controlled the conscription of exohumans for law enforcement and military purposes. XAC also dealt out punishment for exohumans who decided to act in ways less than civil. It galled Walsh how they controlled people like his friend - under the legal pretext that they were no longer human - with a tight fist, although the registry served a purpose when it came to dealing with the criminals among their number. Hitler had done the same thing with Jews and that didn’t go so well.

  “If this is an exohuman, and they’re not in the XAC database...”

  175 finished his thought. “Then we’re dealing with a rogue exo - a powered serial killer. He, or she, might even be tied to those homicidal crazy women that have been turning up for the last several months.”

  Walsh pursed his lips. He hadn't considered that angle. Few people appreciated that 175's physical abilities were backed by a world-class analytical mind.

  "Good point," Walsh said. "I'll pull together all of those cases and send the whole lot to you. Maybe you can spot a connection I'm missing."

  The Guardian nodded and floated up, preparing to leave. He seemed to be staring at the crime scene, probably scanning for missed clues. Walsh ducked under the tape again and headed back to the van. He found himself pulling another cigarette from the pack, then stopped and turned back.

  “That Acosta kid, Marissa - you said she’s going to be okay?”

  175 nodded, rotati
ng to face Walsh as he floated a handful of feet above the ground.

  “That’s what a doctor told me. I’m going to check in on her later today.”

  Walsh regarded the unlit cigarette, then returned it to the pack again.

  “Maybe I’ll drop by and see how she's doing, too. Did I mention the mom died at childbirth? We haven’t been able to find any other relatives. Poor kid’s got nobody now. It just ain’t right.”

  After years on the job, it was the youngest victims that got to Walsh, like a little girl whose only concern had been a game of hopscotch.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Son of a BITCH!"

  Cassie tossed the useless paddles aside and started doing chest compressions on her patient. A nurse frantically stabbed at the controls of the faulty defibrillator, trying to reset the device.

  "Somebody get another crash cart in here, stat. Shelly, give her an amp of epi and 100 lidocaine."

  “Hopefully it doesn’t wake her up again. Girl’s bat-shit crazy,” Shelly muttered as she readied the drugs. “Worse than that zombie chick last week.”

  Cassie could feel the electrolytic gel from the paddles squishing under her fingers as she pumped the woman’s chest. She was far from squeamish, but she avoided looking at the bloody strips raked down the blonde’s face, a face that had probably been attractive before, well, before whatever it was that had made her claw her own flesh.

  The police had brought her into the ER in a state of pure panic, her fingers worn down to bloody stumps by her frantic self-mutilation. It took five nurses and orderlies to restrain her enough to administer a sedative. Then she’d gone cardiac on them. The monitor showed V-tach - ventricular tachycardia. The chambers of her heart were spasming rapidly, the muscles contracting without the synchronized rhythm that normally moved her blood. The defibrillator’s job was to disrupt all that unproductive jerking about with an electrical shock, a procedure everyone had seen on TV and in movies. Except this wasn’t a movie.

  The room had moved into high-gear when the code blue was announced, but that was nothing compared to the kicked anthill it became when the defib unit failed. When Cassie pulled the trigger, there was nothing. No zap, no ‘thump’ of the capacitors discharging. The squealing sound filled the room and the volt meter registered a full charge, but the bolt of life-sustaining lightning wasn’t getting to the paddles.

  Anger rose up in her as Cassie pressed down into the woman’s chest, forcing oxygenated blood to the brain. She had complained repeatedly to higher-ups about the age of the equipment they were forced to work with. Now, this woman might die because some bean-counter couldn’t see fit to unclench a nickel. If Cassie were a larger woman, her anger might have cracked a rib. In truth, her upper body strength was more suited to fine, delicate tasks, such as wielding a scalpel.

  In the periphery of her awareness she heard the replacement cart being wheeled in. Shelly wasted no time setting the charge and applying gel to the electrode paddles.

  “Charged!”

  Cassie stopped her compressions and reached for the paddles, positioning them quickly.

  “Clear.”

  Zap.

  Then came the agonizing seconds that seemed to last an eternity.

  Beep, beep, beep.

  “Sinus rhythm. She’s stabilized.”

  Cassie watched the display, waiting to be sure the heart maintained that steady beat. Then she discovered she could breathe again.

  “Okay, draw for a full panel workup, type and cross-match. Maybe we can figure out what she’s on. Clean and bandage the wounds and start an IV - Ringers with D5W - then get her up to the ICU.”

  Shelly grabbed a wall phone, punching digits to reserve a bed in the Intensive Care Unit. “Should we get someone from Psych down here? In case it’s not drugs?”

  Cassie nodded. “Good idea. Let’s roll, people.” She took a deep breath as they moved the gurney out of the exam room. “And for God’s sake, keep those restraints tight on her!”

  Her eye went to the useless piece-of-crap equipment sitting outside the exam room. First there was that blood shortage yesterday with the girl, now this. Maybe she couldn’t do anything about her dying grandfather or a disfigured exohuman, but this was different. This was stupidity, and stupidity made her mad.

  *

  Cassie and the crash cart barreled down the corridor, a runaway train with a redheaded locomotive dragging a loose caboose. She swerved to the left as two orderlies hurriedly plastered themselves against the wall to avoid her. Sliding to a stop in front of an office door, she swung it open and pulled the cart in after her.

  “Dr. Whelan? What are you--”

  “Don’t get in my way, Maggie.”

  Cassie charged for the inner office door, cart in tow, as the administrative assistant struggled to untangle herself from the telephone headset tethering her to the desk.

  “Stop! You can’t—”

  “Can. Am.”

  Cassie flung open the door and whipped the rattling crash cart past her. It rolled across the floor and slammed into a vacant desk. A name plate fell forward onto its face, obscuring the name engraved there – “Dr. Randal Blair, Chief of Emergency Medicine.”

  “I tried to tell you,” Maggie huffed. “He’s not here.”

  Cassie grabbed the cart, pulling it back out of the vacant office to resume her search. “Well, where is he then? I’ve got a little present for him, special delivery.”

  “Actually, I think you and I will wait right here for him.”

  Cassie turned to find Ari Zacharias blocking her passage.

  “Fine. Maybe you can explain to me why maintenance was deferred on this crash cart. The service log shows the defibrillator was due for service three months ago, but Blair’s office rescheduled it for six months out. I nearly lost a patient a few minutes ago because this thing went tits-up in a cardiac crisis.”

  “We can discuss— “

  “Oh, and that little girl nearly bled out yesterday because he cut back on our blood bank order. So, I just need to know how many fucking pennies we’re saving at the risk of people’s lives.”

  Cassie saw a series of emotions play across her Attending’s face: disbelief, denial, shock. But in the end, it returned to anger – anger at this upstart resident who dared too much.

  “Dr. Whelan, that is enough.”

  “A woman almost died!”

  Zacharias raised his hands, fingers splayed in exasperation as he carefully enunciated each word. “But. She. Didn’t.”

  He stared at her, the frustration visible in his eyes. Then he leaned in close and sniffed. Cassie jerked back, startled by the invasion of her personal space.

  “What the…”

  “Have you been drinking?” he asked, softly but with a keen edge to his voice.

  “What? No. Of course not. Why would you even ask such a thing?”

  “Because I know about the flask of vodka in your locker. And it would at least explain this recklessness.”

  Cassie sputtered in indignation. She’d never drank while on duty. Never. Well, except that tiny sip after Marissa Acosta’s surgery. But she should have already been off-duty by that point and she didn’t see any patients afterwards. All that and more ran through her mind, but her mouth went in another direction.

  “You want to talk about recklessness? Ari, this hospital has demonstrated clear negligence in how it—”

  Zacharias grabbed her by the arm and yanked her bodily out of the hallway and back into Blair’s reception area. Through clenched teeth he hissed, “Your parents were good people and that buys you a lot of slack around here, but you haven’t earned the right to throw around accusations.”

  His jab froze Cassie in her tracks, but probably not the way Zacharias had intended.

  “You don’t know jack shit about my parents, so don’t pretend you do.”

  His eyes softened and she saw the change come over his features as the anger seemed to flow out of Zacharias.

  Fuck me. Here it c
omes.

  Anger was something Cassie could deal with. She lived with it every day and could stand there in a river of someone else’s rage, letting it wash over her. It was her element. She’d learned to contain her own anger, to push it down. Other people’s was nothing compared to what she had bottled up inside.

  But pity was worse. She wouldn’t – couldn’t – stomach this man’s sympathy for the poor orphan girl. She didn’t need his charity. Her basilisk glare held his consolation at bay, but realization was finally setting in – she had screwed up. She’d let her anger out of its cage, and it had consumed her. She’d gone too far. His soft words just made everything worse.

  “You’re wrong, Cassie. I knew your parents. Not well, but I worked with them enough to know they’d expect better from you.”

  Expect. It always comes back to that, doesn’t it?

  A memory flashed through her mind. Her – crying, begging them not to go away so close to her birthday. Her father – irritation growing as his eyes went back and forth between her and the boarding agent standing at the gate. Her mother – kneeling down to lock eyes with hers, green to green, her voice radiating calm like an aura.

  “I expect you to be a good girl for Granny and GranDa, Cass. Can you do that for me?”

  Behind Mom, Dad’s eyes fixed on hers, impaling her with the threat of that rarest of punishments - disapproval.

  “I can do that,” she’d sniffed, straightening her back. But the tears didn’t stop, and through that wavy filter she’d watched them board the plane for that final, deadly trip.

  Zacharias’ voice brought her back to the moment.

  “You once told me once that this job was your dream, and that Atlanta and Memorial Hospital were perfect for you. Are you ready to throw all it away?”

  Cassie lowered her eyes, unwilling to accept his sympathy, unable to meet his gaze. He must have taken her change of bearing for defeat and pressed his point.