Born To Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“Hang in there,” she ordered Trace as the sound of sirens blasted around them and lights bobbed up the driveway.

She didn’t look over her shoulder but prayed the EMTs had the equipment to save him. He’d lost a lot of blood, but she wasn’t going to let him die. Not on her watch. Quickly, she stripped him of his pants, yanking out the flashlight from her pocket to get a good look at the bullet wound in his thigh. Blood was pumping out of the hole in his flesh and she suspected his femoral artery had been hit. She crossed one hand over the other and pressed them to the wound just as she heard, “Hey! Over here!” from a deep voice yelling near the house. Then footsteps and heaving breaths and conversation swirled around her in the snow. “We’ll take over, ma’am,” someone said and she felt a man’s hand on her shoulder.

“But I’m a doctor—”

“Holy Christ, there’s another one!” He started bending over Leanna’s body.

“She’s dead.”

“Hey! Over here!” A woman shouted from the vicinity of Cam’s corpse. “Holy shit, what happened here. Looks like goddamned Armageddon!”

“Here, ma’am . . . I’ve got him now,” the EMT said, turning back to Trace.

“But I’m—”

“A doctor. I know.” He was firm. “Hey, Annie,” he called over his shoulder as Kacey was vaguely aware of colored lights strobing the night. Red and blue flashes through the ever-falling snow. “I could use some help over here! This one’s in shock,” the EMT said and glanced up at Kacey.

The O’Halleran ranch was a madhouse.

All hell had broken loose before Alvarez and Pescoli arrived, their Jeep sliding around the corner at the end of the drive and nearly taking out the mailbox. Two department issued vehicles were parked near an open gate and an ambulance too, idled, waiting to transport the injured.

At the back of the big farmhouse while battling the elements EMTs were tending to Trace O’Halleran, strapping him to a stretcher while a search team had been dispatched to find O’Halleran’s missing son. Cameron Johnson, dressed in black and wearing night goggles, was dead from two gunshot wounds, inflicted, admittedly, by Kacey Lambert.

Shivering, a blanket thrown around her shoulders, Kacey herself admitted to cutting him down when he refused to drop his weapon. Pale as death, obviously in shock, Kacey swore that Cameron had already killed the woman still lying in the snow in front of them.

A woman who could have been her twin.

“I think it’s Leanna,” Kacey said, almost numbly, her gaze fastened on the woman’s frozen features.

“Dead,” one of the EMTs confirmed.

“I need to go with him,” Kacey insisted as two burly rescue workers carried Trace on a stretcher through the piling snow to the waiting ambulance.

“You can ride with us,” Pescoli said.

“Hey!” Trilby Van Droz, one of the road deputies, cocked her head toward the main road. “Looks like we’ve got company.” Twin headlights glowed at the end of the drive, but Pescoli couldn’t make out the vehicle. “Five will get you one, it’s the press.”

A news van.

Of course. Great. Just what they didn’t need. “They have to back off. Until we know what went down,” Pescoli shouted and Van Droz began heading down the lane, following the tracks of the ambulance that carried Trace.

“I think O’Halleran is going to be okay,” Alvarez said.

“But Eli. We have to find him,” Kacey insisted. “Leanna . . .

I thought she was in the house with me . . . warning me . . . but the timing probably couldn’t be. I thought she was an angel.”

Pescoli glanced at her partner. “Let’s have a doctor look at her, too.”

“I’m fine,” Kacey insisted, but her face was pretty bruised, the skin scraped, her chin covered in blood.

“Okay, let’s go,” Pescoli said. As the ambulance sped off through the snow, Pescoli, Alvarez, and Kacey trudged through the drifts to the Jeep. Kacey climbed into the backseat. Her car was still in the police garage, the black paint transferred from her fender bender, not yet analyzed. Alvarez settled into the passenger seat and Pescoli backed up, then rammed the Jeep into gear.

Even though Cam Johnson was dead, Pescoli still felt a sense of urgency, and the missing kid didn’t help. Where the hell could he be? she wondered as she flipped on the lights and hit the gas. There were too many loose ends to be tied up, too much evidence to be collected, other stories that had to jibe with what Kacey was saying before Pescoli would be satisfied. Even though the doctor was half mad with worry about the boy’s whereabouts and beyond concerned that Trace O’Halleran might not make it, Alvarez and Pescoli were required to haul her to the station.

After their trip to the Emergency Room.

True, Pescoli thought as she drove onto the county road and saw the news team from a local station huddled in their van, Kacey Lambert had called 9-1-1 as well as left Alvarez several voice mail messages on her phone. It had been the doctor who had drawn the authorities to the scene, but she hadn’t played by the book, had ignored the 9-1-1 dispatcher’s advice and taken the law into her own hands.