[Georgia 03] Fallen

through the dark interior. Amanda stopped yelling for a few seconds, then revved back up as Will closed the door. He took a deep breath of fresh air, scanning the scene from the top of the metal steps. Instead of the usual rapid activity that followed a shocking crime, everyone was milling around waiting for orders. Detectives sat in their unmarked cars checking their email. Six cruisers blocked each end of the street. Neighbors gawked from their front porches. The Atlanta PD crime scene unit van was here. The GBI crime scene unit van was here. The fire truck was still angled in front of the Mitchell house. The EMTs were smoking on the back bumper of their ambulance. Various uniformed officers leaned against emergency vehicles, shooting the breeze, pretending not to care about what was going on in the command center.
    Still, they all managed to glare at Will as he stepped down onto the street. Scowls went around. Arms were crossed. A curse was muttered. Someone spat on the sidewalk.
    Will didn’t have many friends in the Atlanta Police Department.
    The sound of chopping blades filled the air. Will looked up. Two news copters hovered just above the crime scene. They wouldn’t be alone for long. Every ten minutes, a black SWAT MD 500 swept by. An infrared camera was mounted on the nose of the mosquito-like helicopter. The camera could see through dense forests and rooftops, picking out warm-blooded bodies, directing searchers to the bad guys. It was an amazing device, but completely useless in the residential area, where at any given moment there were thousands of people milling around not committing crimes. At best, they were probably picking up the glowing red forms of people sitting on their couches watching their televisions, which in turn showed the SWAT copter hovering overhead.
    Will checked the crowd for Sara, wishing she would show up. If he’d been thinking at all when Amanda pulled up on the street, he would’ve told Sara to come with them. He should have anticipated Faith would need help. She was his partner. Will was supposed to take care of her, to have her back. Now, it might be too late.
    He wasn’t sure how Amanda had heard about the shootings so quickly, but they were on scene within fifteen minutes of the last shot being fired. The locksmith was just opening the shed door when they rolled up. Faith had been pacing back and forth like a caged animal while she waited for her child to be freed, and she kept pacing long after Emma was in her arms. As soon as she saw Will, Faith started babbling, talking about her backyard neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, her brother Zeke, the shed her father had built when she was little, and a million other things that made absolutely no sense the way she was stringing them together.
    At first, Will thought that Faith was in shock, but shocked people don’t pace around squawking like lunatics. Their blood pressure drops so quickly they generally can’t stand. They pant like dogs. They stare blankly at the space in front of them. They talk slowly, not so fast you can barely understand them. Something else was at play, but Will didn’t know if it was some kind of mental break or Faith’s diabetes or what.
    Making it worse, by that point, there were twenty cops standing around who knew exactly what a person was supposed to look like when an awful thing happened. Faith didn’t fit the profile. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t shaking. She wasn’t angry. She was just crazy, totally out of her mind. Nothing she said had a bit of reason. She couldn’t tell them what had happened. She couldn’t walk them through the scene and explain the bloodshed. She was worse than useless, because the answers to all their questions were locked up inside of her head.
    And that was when one of the cops had mumbled something about her being under the influence. And then someone else volunteered to get the Breathalyzer out of his car.
    Quickly, Amanda had intervened. She dragged Faith across the front lawn, banged on the neighbor’s door—not Mrs. Johnson, who had a dead man in her backyard, but an old woman named Mrs. Levy—and practically ordered her to give Faith a place to collect herself.
    By then, the mobile command center had pulled up. Amanda had gone straight into the back of the vehicle and started demanding this case be turned over to the GBI immediately. She knew that she wouldn’t win the territorial fight with the zone commanders. By law, the GBI could not simply waltz in