“How bad is it?”

“When I get through telling you,” Frank said, “you’ll want to order his headstone.”

CHAPTER 4

ELLIE TOLD THE paramedic she thought she was going to throw up.

“Not a problem,” he said. His name was Brad and he was somewhere around her age, she guessed, in his early to mid-twenties, and had a boyish, almost angelic face. He smiled, all perfect white teeth, when he handed her a good-sized barf bag. “Nausea is a perfectly normal side effect from the adrenaline dump you just suffered.”

As was crying, she supposed. Ellie didn’t tell him how badly she wanted him to leave the back of the ambulance and lock the door so she could break down, get it all out of her system.

She wouldn’t cry—couldn’t cry. A woman caught boo-hooing on the job, even if the reason was that she had seen her partner get wasted, was immediately branded as weak and unreliable. Always remember to grieve on your own time, a prominent female detective had once warned her. If you cry, show any emotion of any kind, the boys will never look at you the same way again. They’ll automatically think you don’t have what it takes for when the shit really hits the fan.

So far, she’d kept it together throughout the whole ordeal that followed the shooting. In a strong, clear voice she took her supervisor through how it all went down.

Her voice didn’t break once, and it hadn’t broken when she’d had to give her official statement to the pair of investigators from the “shooting squad.” She didn’t balk when they bagged her firearm and placed it into evidence, or when they demanded she give a blood sample for toxicology testing, to see if she had been under the influence of alcohol or drugs when she fired the weapon.

Now, though? Now she felt like she was coming apart at the seams.

Brad checked her blood pressure again. “Still a little low, but not too bad,” he said. “Again, that’s normal, given what you’ve gone through.”

The back door suddenly swung open, letting in a blast of hot air and jarring noises—crackling police radios and voices shouting over one another. She also heard the sound of a helicopter, maybe more than one, hovering somewhere overhead.

A patrolman she didn’t recognize motioned for her to come out. “Commissioner’s here, wants to see you,” he said.

“Before you go,” Brad said to her, “your blood pressure and heart rate may decide to suddenly drop, so the second you feel light-headed? Sit down immediately, because there’s a good chance you’re going to faint.”

Ellie thanked him and got out, surprised to see how much the area had changed during the two hours she’d spent sequestered inside the ambulance—dozens of cruisers, their lights flashing, and people, mostly reporters, she guessed, crowded behind blockades; news copters hovering in the sky, taking aerial footage of the backyard and the chaos in the surrounding streets. A patrolman was stationed at the front doors, his sole job to write down the name of every single person who entered the home. She spotted two more patrolmen, holding clipboards, standing near the gates along the fence. It was overkill, yes, but it was always better to control the chaos as much as possible—and have plenty of paperwork to prove to a jury that no one had slacked off on maintaining the integrity of the crime scene.