Fatal Reaction (Paramedic Anneliese Ashmore Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  Elsa Russell, Julian’s new partner and the only female investigator with the Marion PD, looked up when the wind blew her curly red hair. She lunged to grab Ana’s arm but quickly lost her grip. “Ana, you can’t be in here.”

  Ana collapsed to her knees, interlaced her fingers, and started chest compressions. “No. No. God, no.” Rainwater tears blurred her vision. “Sydney, come on.”

  “You’re contaminating the scene, Ana. Stop.” Julian tried to pull her back, and Ana threw her elbow as hard as she could into him.

  Everything she knew about crime-scene processing, and about death, was gone from her mind.

  “Get out of my way.” Mike shoved past Julian and wrestled Ana into a cross-legged sit. She fought him, squirming and screaming, but he didn’t let go. He pulled her arms across her chest and used his body like a straitjacket to hold her. “Ana, stop it. Please, she’s gone. Sydney is gone.” He was crying, too.

  “Let me help her,” Ana wailed. “It’s not too late.”

  Mike set his stubbled cheek against the top of her head and rocked her.

  “Please, let me go,” she whispered.

  Julian mumbled something under his breath as he assessed the compromised scene. “Mike, I’m sorry. You have to get her out of here.”

  Mike dragged Ana from the stench-filled room into the frigid morning.

  Julian slammed the door, and Ana fixed her eyes on the eleven, the room number irrevocably burned into her memory.

  Jim knelt in front of her, and she stared right through him. “Ana, listen to me. You need to go home.” He looked at Mike. “She can’t drive, and I can’t have her back on shift. I need the Jeep keys.”

  “Give me a damn minute, Jim, would you?”

  The crowd parted for the coroner who wheeled a gurney through a fresh inch of snow, an empty body bag secured under the strap.

  He knocked on the door, and Julian let him in.

  “Ana, can you hear me?” Mike brushed the hair back from her face. “Can you give me your keys, honey? I’m going to take you home.”

  Ana fished the keys out of her pocket and handed them to Mike who, in turn, handed them to Jim.

  The heavy, wet snow soaked through Ana’s clothes, and though she knew she should be freezing, she was physically and emotionally numb.

  Mike hooked his arms under hers and lifted her. She shuffled her feet in the direction he pulled her, eluded by an act as simple as walking. Had Mike not taken her away, she wasn’t sure she would have ever left.

  The whispering crowd silenced as the coroner emerged from the motel room. Two young men forced the gurney’s wheels through the accumulating snow, loaded Sydney’s body into the back of the ambulance, and tapped the rear door, signaling it was all clear to go.

  Ana watched the ambulance drive away.

  Shock substituted someone else as the victim: some faceless, nameless person Ana didn’t have to grieve for.

  Anyone other than her sister.

  CHAPTER 3

  Colby Monroe stared at her reflection in her dressing table mirror and brushed her reddish-blond hair over her shoulders. She leaned forward and gently stretched the skin around her spring-green eyes. In the sunlight, she saw the faint lines beginning to work their way out from the corners. Despite the constant compliments, she was seeing the signs that every day of her thirty-six years was starting to catch up with her.

  The sound of tires on the driveway drew her to the bedroom window where she shivered in her black negligee, watching her husband Jared’s silver BMW 6 Series disappear into the garage. She closed the blinds, self-conscious of her minor flaws, and dabbed on a fresh coat of vanilla-flavored lip gloss.

  The front door opened, then closed, and Jared stomped off his boots. He set his keys on the entranceway table and turned on the water in the kitchen sink. A bar stool slid across the hardwood floor, and the smell of coffee crept upstairs.

  Colby grabbed a stick-lighter off the dresser, lit several candles, and turned down the bed. She climbed beneath the comforter and stared at the time on the alarm clock: 8:02 a.m.

  Jared was getting home later by the day.

  Fifteen minutes passed, and as Colby was about to give up on her plan to romance him, Jared appeared in the doorway. He ran his hands through his dark brown hair, cut close at the sides and left longer on top in a style resembling one worn by George Clooney.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Red lines shot through the whites of his dark eyes. “Hey. Are you just waking up?”

  She hadn’t slept past six in the morning since leaving her job as an OR nurse at County Memorial almost four months earlier, and he knew it.

  “No,” she said, softening her hard tone. “I was waiting for you.” She pulled the comforter aside, leaned up on her elbow, and smiled.

  Jared let out a sigh, and, for a long moment, didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. She could see his disinterest, and it hit her in the place where her fear of aging festered, hurting her more, she guessed, than he had intended.

  “I’m sorry.” Jared shook his head. “It’s been a long night.” He went into the en suite bathroom and shut the door.

  Tears burned behind Colby’s eyelids, and she closed her eyes until she was sure she could contain them. The hurt was visceral, and she refused to let Jared see that. She blew out the candles, put on her silk bathrobe, and knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Jared, open up.” The shower turned on, and she reached for the door handle, finding it locked. “Come on. Unlock the door.”

  Jared answered, wearing a white towel wrapped around his waist. He held his hand high on the doorjamb and stretched in a way that caused his chest and biceps to flex. Country club racquet ball kept him in impeccable shape, and, at age thirty-nine, he didn’t have a gray hair on him, a fact that secretly annoyed her.

  Steam from the shower rolled into the bedroom.

  “We need to talk.”

  “I’m exhausted, Colby. I don’t have another fight in me right now.”

  She pushed past him and turned off the water. “I said talk, not fight.”

  “There’s no difference with you. One day you’re telling me that you want a divorce, and the next, I come home to find you half-naked in bed.” He held up his hands as if asking her what she expected. “At least this time you were alone.”

  Talking went quickly out the window.

  “Is that what this is about? It’s been four months, Jared, and you haven’t so much as looked at me. Do you know how much that hurts, or what it feels like to always be the least important thing to you? I quit my nursing job for you. I gave up my independence to sit here, alone in this house, indentured to you for taking care of me.”

  “You quit nursing for me?” Jared scoffed. “You’re always the victim, aren’t you? Well, let me refresh your somewhat-jaded memory. You quit that job because you slept with Simon Walker, chief of medicine at the hospital we both worked at. Everyone knows about it, and if you hadn’t quit, he sure as hell would’ve found a way to fire you to stop the chatter. I have to walk on eggshells at that place to save my own ass. Sure, I could take a job somewhere else, but I worked my way up to department head. Those jobs just don’t exist out there, and I’m not starting over. Do you have any idea how hard it is to sit across a meeting room table and talk about Emergency Department funding with a guy who slept with my wife?”

  Colby slapped him hard enough across the cheek that her palm stung afterward.

  Jared’s head whipped to the side, and a red handprint surfaced on his cheek. He drew a deep breath in through his nose and clenched his teeth. “I think we’re done here,” he said, and closed the bathroom door.

  The lock clicked, and Colby stood for a moment in disbelief of what she’d done. No matter how much time passed or how many times she apologized, Jared would never forgive her. She wasn’t even su
re she wanted him to.

  CHAPTER 4

  Dr. Dorian Carmichael hung his lab coat over the back of his office chair and stared out the second-floor window of his Oakland Street office. He ruffled his wavy, dark blond hair, and rubbed a stray eyelash from the corner of his caramel-brown eyes.

  A mound of snow slid from the roof of the detached garage and piled on the construction trash next to it. Tearing down the old building was the last step in converting the 1900s home he had bought with his first bit of grant money into a welcoming obstetrical surgical practice. Nestled in a primarily residential neighborhood, the office was close to County Memorial Hospital where his pioneering of a uterine transplantation procedure had him quickly ascending the ranks.

  Before his research, women born without a uterus, or those who had lost theirs to disease, were limited to surrogacy and adoption if they wanted to have a family. Dorian’s procedure gave them the ability to experience childbirth firsthand. The response was overwhelming. Like anything new, the procedure wasn’t without complications, not the least of which was the unwillingness and general lack of donors, but he’d forged past that, and had operated on his first human, a woman named Stephanie Martin.

  Four blocks away, a grieving family held his second patient’s fate in its hands. Thirty-six-year-old Janice Harmon remained alive on life support after a car crash had left her clinically brain dead. A perfect donor match for Emily Warren, a twenty-eight-year-old who had lost her uterus to fibroids, Janice, who had never had children of her own, and whose family would never see a penny from agreeing to the donation, was the key to a high six-figure paycheck that helped keep things, especially with County’s CEO, Mitchell Altman, lubricated.

  A knock came at the door, and Dorian turned to see his nurse, Noreen Pafford, at the threshold, holding a sandwich.

  Noreen was a young thirty: slim and fit, with a beautiful softness about her. Her highlighted brown hair was cut into a short bob style that ended just past her earlobes. A cascade of purple star earrings glistened against her ivory neck. Wispy bangs across her forehead gave her a pixie look that, if he was being honest, enchanted him in a one-night-stand kind of way. Besides being a genuinely caring person, Noreen was a more dedicated employee than Dorian had a right to expect her to be. She kept his long hours and never once complained. She filed his research paperwork, worked on grants, and eased tensions with his more-anxious patients in a way only another female could. Dorian wouldn’t be where he was without her, a fact she reminded him of on late nights when a couple of glasses of off-duty wine colored the otherwise dry, clinical conversations. Those nights were like walking a tightrope. Dorian knew better than to bring his sex life into the workplace again.

  Noreen slipped the stethoscope from around her neck and dropped it into her lab coat pocket. “You really should eat something.” Her voice was sweet honey.

  Dorian smiled and nodded. “You’re always taking care of me.” He sank into the leather office chair behind his desk and sighed. “Any word from County?”

  Noreen set the turkey sandwich—light mayonnaise, no crust—in front of him, and leaned against his desk. Her jacket fell open and beneath it, a fitted blue dress revealed the delicate curves of her hourglass figure. “I went over there this morning and spoke with Janice Harmon’s family.” She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. “Harvest team convenes at six a.m. Emily Warren’s transplant is scheduled for eight.”

  “You got them to sign?”

  She smiled. “There’s not much I don’t do for you.”

  “What about Prusak? Have you talked to Mitchell about him?”

  Mitchell Altman, County Memorial’s CEO and a man motivated more by power and money than ethics, had promised to take care of Marco Prusak, the pathologist who had staged a protest complete with blood and baby dolls. His position was that the transplant posed a risk to the fetus. At first blush, one would’ve thought he was protesting abortion.

  “Mitchell gave him two weeks’ leave,” Noreen said.

  “That’s it?”

  “Guess so.”

  Kristin Newman, the receptionist, appeared in the doorway. Her thin brown hair was pulled back from her plain, if not homely face. She wore a wrinkled cotton dress and Birkenstock sandals, which were entirely out of season. “Dr. Carmichael, your first afternoon patient is here.”

  Dorian swallowed a bite of his sandwich. “I’ll be right down. See if she wants some water or tea while she waits.”

  Kristin muttered something as she walked away about not being a waitress. Her flip-flop footsteps echoed on the hardwood.

  Dorian waited until she was downstairs to comment. “Tell me again why we hired her?”

  “She’s smart, efficient, and good with computers. Do you need her to be beautiful, too?”

  “I guess I can’t have everything.”

  Noreen guided his hands to her hips, beneath her lab coat, and smirked. “You can if you ask nicely.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Ana dragged a brush through her tangled, wet hair. The shower, meant to revive her, only made her more tired. She inhaled deeply, the warm steam easing the congestion from hours of crying, but doing nothing to quell the overwhelming sadness. Depression surrounded her, crushing her with its weight.

  She walked to the master bedroom and sat, slumped over, on the edge of the bed, holding her throbbing head between her hands. The light made her headache worse, and she closed her eyes, immediately recalling the image of Sydney’s lifeless body on the filthy motel-room floor. For the rest of her life, that was what she’d see first when she remembered her sister.

  She stood, a simple act made difficult by unrelenting grief, and haphazardly toweled off, leaving her back and shoulders damp.

  The phone rang for at least the tenth time that night, and Ana checked the caller ID before answering. Word of Sydney’s death spread quickly, in no small part due to Terri Tate’s news report. If Ana heard another person say they were sorry, she’d scream. She stepped into a pair of black underwear, gray yoga pants, and a sweatshirt, and answered the phone on the fifth ring.

  “Hello?”

  It was Mike.

  “Hey, I just wanted to make sure you were awake.”

  “I am,” she said. “Why?”

  “Can we talk?”

  A car door slammed, and Ana looked out the window to see Mike’s blue Dodge parked in her driveway. She hung her towel on a hook in the bathroom, headed downstairs, and stood, arms akimbo, in the open front door. The cold breeze froze her damp hair and chilled her scalp.

  “Is there any news?”

  Mike closed his cell phone and forced a tight-lipped grin. “Unfortunately, no.” He moved to step inside, but Ana blocked him.

  “I’m not feeling up to company.”

  “Ana, don’t be mad.”

  “Don’t be mad? Like it’s that easy? You should’ve called. We’re family, right? Isn’t that what you always told us? The minute you realized it was Sydney, you should’ve said something.”

  “I didn’t want you to see her that way, Ana. There was nothing you could do.”

  “You honestly believe that?”

  A plow truck cleared the road in front of her house, adding to the already enormous banks and filling the tense silence with its loud scraping.

  Mike wiped his gloved hand down the side of his face and sighed. “Yes”—he looked directly into her eyes—“I do. Can I please come inside? It’s freezing out here.”

  Ana kept her distance, avoiding their usual greeting hug and feeling a little uncomfortable because of it. “If you have no answers, why are you here?”

  “Other than being concerned about you, I thought you might want your car. I can give you a ride to the station.” Mike took her keys out of his pocket.

  With everything that had happened, Ana barely remembered handing them over.


  “You should be investigating, not driving a taxi.”

  “I’ve done all I can do for tonight. I have Julian and Elsa on it, people with a different perspective and fewer attachments. You know, you screwed us with evidence. We’re going to have to disclose that ambush of yours.”

  At the time, Ana knew she was crossing a line, storming the crime scene, but she was too panic- and grief-stricken to care. “Jim seem angry about what happened?”

  “A bit, but right now he’s more worried about you than protocol.”

  Ana rummaged the coat closet for something warm to wear, settling on a down-lined parka and pulling the hood up over her wet hair. “He probably should be.”

  Mike flashed a concerned look.

  “I didn’t mean it the way it came out,” she said. “I just meant that after all the years I’ve known him, he should be more concerned about me than disciplinary action.”

  Mike pressed the button on his remote start, and the late-model Ram sprang to life. A cloud of white smoke poured from the tailpipe, and the wipers made a pass across the windshield. Mike opened the passenger’s side door and helped Ana inside.

  A Willie Nelson song played quietly on the radio. It was barely audible over the sound of the blasting heat, but it brought back better times. Mike had sung that song to her and Sydney when she was young.

  Though most people didn’t know it, Mike was pretty good at campfire guitar.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Ana said. “I know you thought you were doing the right thing. Anger’s one of the first steps, right?” Mike nodded. “So what do Elsa and Julian think happened?”

  “Suicide?” Ana’s eyes went wide with disbelief.

  Even with four-wheel drive and the roads clear, Mike kept his speed under thirty. “Elsa found a note on the nightstand. I know what you’re thinking.”