“St. Mary’s Medical Center is closest. Something about his airway means he needs immediate surgical attention. The only burn centers in Tennessee are in Memphis and Nashville, I think. He can’t wait that long.”
I activated my emergency flashers and pulled in behind the ambulance as it sped through a red light. “Are you hurt bad?” I asked, hearing the strain in my voice. “You’ve been bleeding. And I smell burned skin.” It was a smell like no other.
“Burned myself and got cut pretty bad”—he held up his arms to expose seared, bloody sleeves—“wrapping the senator up in a woman’s overcoat and jumping through the front window.” He shrugged and belted himself in. “I’m fine now. Werecat healing. Becoming a leopard was a life stealer, but at least the taint has a few benefits.”
“Walk me through what happened,” I said, to keep my mind on the case and not on the man beside me.
“Early breakfast meeting. The senator and two Secret Service men walked into the restaurant at six forty-two. I was directly behind them. At six forty-six, while the senator was still glad-handing his voters, someone yelled. I heard a noise from the kitchen that went whump. A wall of orange and purple flame shot out through the service window and caught the senator and his men, dead-on. I threw three people to the floor, yelled for everybody to get out. Grabbed a woman’s coat off her back and smothered the senator. Picked him up. Jumped through the front window. Finished snuffing the flames. His men were dying when I left them. On the floor. The fire was abnormally”—he paused and I heard him swallow even over the siren—“unbelievably hot. It spread like it was fed by kerosene. A flash fire that far away from the stove should have missed anyone except kitchen help. Instead it ate to the bone on the sentator’s face. His eyes are gone. His lips.” Occam shook his head, his voice shaking. “His men were pretty much the same but over a larger body area. I never saw such a thing.”
I took off my hard hat and tossed it behind the seat, then reached behind into a gobag and brought out a room-temp bottle of water, which I gave to Occam. He drank it in three massive swallows, crushing the bottle fast as it went down. “Thanks, Nell, sugar.”
“The senator. You were holding him and he was bleeding. Is he human?”
“Flame that hot? Burning so many things at once? Including me? I don’t know, couldn’t tell, don’t remember anything standing out as nonhuman.”
We were silent the rest of the way to the hospital and reached the ambulance bay at the same time as the medic unit. I parked in a No Parking zone and put my shield up in the window to avoid getting towed. We bulled through into the emergency department behind the senator’s gurney as the paramedics shouted vital signs to the doctors and shoved their patient into the trauma room. We held up ID when the nurses tried to make us leave, shouting to be heard over the din in the trauma department, “PsyLED. Official business!” Not knowing what else to do, they let us stay.
A short, stout trauma doctor began working on the senator’s airway and I got my first view of Tolliver. His face was charred away, with blackened and red weeping edges. His chest was working, trying to draw in air. He was gurgling and gagging. It was the most horrible thing I had ever seen.
People ran back and forth cutting off his clothes and sticking things into the senator’s scorched body. He was badly burned from the hips up, only his legs still pale and hairy and growing gray from oxygen loss.
“Upper respiratory system is fried,” the doctor said, her gloved hands at the senator’s jaw and throat and a headlamp on her forehead. “Suction! He’s aspirating.”
“Probably inhaled flaming air,” another woman said. Her name was Madeline, with the word Respiratory below it, on her name badge.
“I need a trach kit,” the doctor shouted.
Because there was nothing else to work with, and they needed multiple lines, they started inserting IV lines with screws into his thigh bones, which I had no idea could even be done.
Two people were monitoring the senator’s oxygen status and trying to get blood pressure readings off his lower leg. It was a haze of action that I couldn’t even begin to follow.
The doctor at his throat grunted out the words, “Who’s taking notes? We have acute inhalation injury. Acute pulmonary edema. Lungs are scorched.”
Madeline said, “Not sure the tissue will hold for a trach. His trachea is cooked.”
All that happened in the first two minutes. By the third minute, three doctors were working on the senator, along with two respiratory therapists and four nurses and techs. I recorded as many of their first names and departments in my cell as I could, in case I needed them later. It gave me something to do rather than staring at the senator’s ravaged body.
My cell dinged in the middle of the medical resuscitation attempts and Occam and I read the news that JoJo had texted to our cells. Clarisse, the senator’s wife, had been on the way to a meeting in her official car, with a driver and a full security detail. The driver had gone off the Alcoa Highway and into the river. The car had been only ten feet offshore and had been recovered quickly, along with the bodies of the driver and her security—two women and a man.
The senator’s wife wasn’t inside. When the car was pulled out, at about the same time that the senator was flash-burned, it was discovered that the windows were all broken out. The car was riddled with bullet holes. There were no witnesses to the shooting, and the shooter was believed to have driven up beside them and opened fire with a high-powered automatic rifle. Casings were being recovered from the street where the attack took place. The same ammunition as had been fired at the Tollivers on each of the other occasions. Clarisse Tolliver was presumed dead.
Occam and I huddled against a wall, silent and ignored. Useless.
Twenty-seven minutes after we arrived, the senator’s heart stopped. They tried to resuscitate him for another half hour. Then they pronounced Senator Tolliver dead. The sudden silence was profound. The team working on him backed away. It didn’t last long. They had seen this kind of thing before. They began to clean up paper and plastic packages, to count discarded needles.
Occam and I informed LaFleur. Took names and told the doctors that we’d be sending papers to get copies of the medical report. Half an hour after the senator died, the day shift Secret Service agents, who had been stuck in traffic on the way to take over for night shift at the senator’s meeting, finally caught up with their quarry. We left the hospital.
The air outside didn’t smell like burned human, though the scent clung to our clothes and hair. Instead, the air was warm and the sun was shining. A dog trotted across the parking lot. An ambulance was pulling in. Cars followed it. Occam stepped off the curb into the street.