[Georgia 03] Fallen

“Tell me!” she yelled. “Just tell me!”
    “Agent!” She felt hands around her waist. The cop practically lifted her into the air.
    “Let me go!” Faith jammed her elbow back so hard that he dropped her like a stone. She scrambled across the grass, crawling to the witness. The hostage. The murderer. The only person left who could tell her what the hell had happened to her mother.
    She put her hands to the Mexican’s face, stared into his lifeless eyes. “Please tell me,” she pleaded, even though she knew it was too late. “Please.”
    “Faith?” Detective Leo Donnelly, her old partner on the Atlanta force, stood on the other side of the fence. He was out of breath. His hands gripped the top of the chain link. The wind whipped open the jacket of his cheap brown suit. “Emma’s fine. We got a locksmith on the way.” His words came thick and slow, like molasses poured through a sieve. “Come on, kid. Emma needs her mom.”
    Faith looked behind him. Cops were everywhere. Dark blue uniforms blurred as they swept the house, checked the yard. Through the windows, she followed Tactical’s progress from room to room, guns raised, voices calling “Clear” as they found nothing. Competing sirens filled the air. Police cruisers. Ambulances. A fire truck.
    The call had gone out. Code 30. Officer needs emergency assistance.
    Three men shot to death. Her baby locked in a shed. Her mother missing.
    Faith sat back on her heels. She put her head in her shaking hands and willed herself not to cry.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    S O, HE TELLS ME HE WAS CHANGING THE OIL IN HIS CAR, AND it was hot in the garage, so he took off his pants …”
    “Uh-huh,” Sara Linton managed, trying to feign interest as she picked at her salad.
    “And I say, ‘Lookit, bud, I’m a doctor. I’m not here to judge. You can be honest about …’ ”
    Sara watched Dale Dugan’s mouth move, his voice mercifully blending in with the lunchtime noise of the pizza parlor. Soft music playing. People laughing. Plates sliding around the kitchen. His story was not particularly riveting, or even new. Sara was a pediatric attending doctor in the emergency department at Atlanta’s Grady Hospital. She’d had her own practice for twelve years before that, all the while working part-time as the county coroner for a small but active college town. There was not an implement, tool, household product, or glass figurine she had not at some point or another seen lodged inside a human body.
    Still, Dale continued, “Then the nurse comes in with the X-ray.”
    “Uh-oh,” she said, trying to inject some curiosity into her tone.
    Dale smiled at her. There was some cheese lodged between his central and lateral incisors. Sara tried not to judge. Dale Dugan was a nice man. He wasn’t handsome, but he was okay-looking, with the sort of features many women found attractive once they learned he’d graduated from medical school. Sara was not as easily swayed. And she was starving, because she’d been told by the friend who’d set her up on this ridiculous blind date that she should order a salad instead of a pizza because it looked better.
    “So, I hold up the X-ray and what do I see …”
    Socket wrench , she thought, just before he finally reached the punch line.
    “A socket wrench! Can you believe it?”
    “No!” She forced a laugh that sounded like the sort of thing that came out of a windup toy.
    “And he still kept saying he slipped.”
    She tsked her tongue. “Quite a fall.”
    “I know, right?” He smiled at her again before taking a healthy bite of pizza.
    Sara chewed some lettuce. The digital clock over Dale’s head showed 2:12 and a handful of seconds. The red LED numbers were a painful reminder that she could be at home right now watching basketball and folding the mountain of laundry on her couch. Sara had made a game of not looking at the clock, seeing how long she could go before her self-control crumbled and she watched the blurring seconds tick by. Three minutes twenty-two seconds was her record. She took another bite of salad, vowing to beat it.
    “So,” Dale said. “You went to Emory.”
    She nodded. “You were at Duke?”
    Predictably, he began what turned into a lengthy description of his academic achievements, including published journal articles and keynote speeches at various conferences. Again, Sara feigned attention, willing herself not to look at the clock, chewing lettuce as slowly as a cow in a pasture so that Dale