Read an Excerpt
With a Vengeance
A Zoe Chambers Mystery
By Annette Dashofy Henery Press
Copyright © 2016 Annette Dashofy
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63511-020-3
CHAPTER 1
Adrenaline kicked Zoe's pulse into high gear. The black Glock clutched in her hands weighed more than she'd imagined. She wished she'd had a chance to test the weapon on a firing range at a bullseye target. Instead of here.
A shooter had reportedly been seen in this school bus parking lot. Zoe advanced although her feet felt rooted to the ground. She eased around the fender of one empty bus. Ahead of her, voices. Shouting.
There. Inside the next bus. A large man with a gun. Worse, he held Zoe's partner, a female police officer, in a chokehold, the weapon aimed at the cop's head.
"Shoot him," her partner yelled. "Shoot him."
The man appeared crazed. "Get away," he bellowed at Zoe.
"Drop the weapon," she ordered.
"Shoot him," the female officer demanded.
Zoe's hands held steady. But with the shooter using her partner as a human shield, her target was small. His head. And her partner's head was right there too. If Zoe's aim was off the least bit ...
"Shoot him!"
The man's finger was poised on the trigger. Zoe aimed. And squeezed. The gunshot popped. And the scene in front of her froze.
The lights of the classroom came up. The Meggitt firearms projection screen in front of her took up most of one wall and showed a red dot on the shooter's head by his ear. Nearly a miss. But good enough.
The other Citizen's Police Academy students burst into applause. One of them, a retired Marine, said, "Oo-rah."
Zoe Chambers laughed, relieved the exercise had ended without her making a fool of herself. Even more relieved it was only a simulation. As a paramedic, she was accustomed to saving lives. Not taking them.
With the Glock — a very real handgun made incapable of live fire — hanging at her side, she turned to see the instructor grinning at her.
Pete Adams had taken time from his job as Vance Township's police chief to run the simulator for the Monongahela County's CPA. "Not too shabby, Chambers."
Zoe's cheeks warmed. She gingerly set the Glock on the desk next to Pete. "I can't believe how scared I was." She pressed a hand to her chest. "I knew it wasn't real, but no one told my heart."
County Detective Wayne Baronick rocked back in his chair next to Pete's. "That was good shooting," he told the class. "But I'm not sure in a real-life situation, it would have been the wisest choice."
Deflated, Zoe battled to keep from glaring at the detective. She was here to learn and experience. Not bask in false glory.
Wayne tipped his head toward the still frozen image on the screen. "You should have ordered the assailant to drop his weapon."
"I did."
"Not loud enough." The detective demonstrated, barking out, "Drop the weapon!" in a voice that reverberated inside the small classroom.
Zoe had to admit, she would have dropped her gun if ordered to do so in that booming voice.
"And if you had waited a little longer, he was going to surrender as the scenario progressed."
But I didn't know that. Zoe kept her thoughts to herself. The purpose of the exercise for the non-law-enforcement students was to gain insight into what police officers faced every day in the streets. The danger. The split-second decisions.
Pete's cell phone rang. "Take over, Detective." He rose from his chair at the Meggitt control. "You done good," he whispered to Zoe as he turned toward the back of the room.
She contained a smile and returned to her desk.
Baronick called, "Next."
Another student, one of the regulars, moved to take his turn at a new scenario. Zoe was there for only the one class. When Pete accepted Baronick's invitation to lead the Firearms Training module, he'd invited her along for the ride, claiming it might help in her struggle to decide about her career path in the County Coroner's Office. She had no clue what a shoot-or-don't-shoot exercise had to do with whether or not she wanted to perform autopsies, but she wasn't going to argue the point. It was an evening out with Pete. Not quite a date. They still sucked at those.
Pete drifted toward the back of the classroom, his phone pressed to one ear, his fingers pressed to the other. Zoe couldn't see his face, but his shoulders tensed. The room lights dimmed, and another interactive scenario played out across the screen. Zoe, however, watched Pete with the same trepidation she'd experienced a few moments earlier when faced with a hostage situation.
Gunshots rang out. The lights came up. The room erupted into laughter. The student had emptied his virtual magazine without one clean hit.
Pete pocketed his phone and turned, his gaze locking on Zoe's. "I'm sorry, Detective Baronick. Something's come up back in Vance Township. I'm afraid I have to leave."
Baronick raised an eyebrow, and Pete whispered something to him. The detective's jaw tightened and he gave Pete a quick nod. "I can give Zoe a lift home."
"No. She's with me." Pete crooked a finger in her direction.
Ordinarily the domineering gesture might have irked her. But the grim pallor of Pete's face told her now was not the time for smartass quips. She snatched her purse from the back of the chair and scurried after him, catching him in the hall. "Pete?"
He didn't slow his long stride. "There's been a shooting. An ambush."
She jogged to keep up. "Ambush? Where? Who?"
"One of your medic units responded to a call. I don't have all the details, but two paramedics were shot."
Zoe stumbled, her knees suddenly weak. Pete kept going. She regained her balance — and her wits — and caught him once again. "Shot? Who? How bad?"
"I don't know the victims' names yet." They reached the heavy metal front doors, and Pete punched through. "One medic is being Life Flighted to Pittsburgh."
The cool evening air of early September chilled Zoe. "What about the other?"
Pete stopped so fast, she almost slammed into him. He turned to face her, his dour expression telling her the awful truth. The second paramedic — one of her colleagues — was dead.
The fifteen-mile trip between the county seat and Vance Township usually took a half hour. Zoe had made it in twenty minutes when driving the ambulance, lights and sirens. With Pete behind the wheel of the police department's Explorer, odds were good they'd beat her old record by at least five minutes.
Pete's radio, tuned to a non-public channel, crackled with a steady stream of police chatter as every department within a twenty-five-mile radius responded to the scene. The unknown shooter was still at large. State Police manned roadblocks, and county law enforcement had set up a command center near the shooting. Vance Township Officer Kevin Piacenza, who'd been first on the scene, had the lead, with Pete giving orders over the mic.
The one detail they weren't broadcasting was the names of the ambulance crew.
Zoe's partner, Earl Kolter, wasn't supposed to be on duty. She prayed he hadn't been called in for some reason.
While Pete drove and took charge of the crime scene remotely, Zoe pulled up Earl's number on her phone. He answered, his voice tight.
Her relief was short-lived. "Earl, have you heard?"
"Hell yes, I heard. Where are you?"
"On my way back from Brunswick with Pete. What happened?"
"Barry and Curtis responded to a call of an ATV accident out in the cuts behind Dillard. They called in that they were on the scene, but nothing more."
"Barry and Curtis?"
"Yeah." The line went quiet for a moment. "I thought you knew."
"They haven't given any names over the police radio." Barry Dickson and Curtis Knox. Two men Zoe had known for years. She'd graduated high school with Barry, and she'd gone through paramedic training with Curtis. She'd worked with both on dozens of calls. "I — I heard one of them is ..." She couldn't choke out the word.
Apparently Earl couldn't either. If it weren't for the background noise, she'd have thought they'd been disconnected.
When he responded, his voice had dropped. "Barry didn't make it. They're Life Flighting Curtis to Allegheny General, but we haven't had an update on his condition. From what the guys said, it didn't look good. He lost a lot of blood."
Ahead, a string of red taillights sliced through the night and indicated they were approaching one of the police roadblocks. Pete swung the SUV into the other lane, roaring past the line of cars. On the left, the small parking lot of a squat, single-story brick building housing a medical clinic had been transformed into news media central. Already, a pair of satellite trucks were setting up for remote broadcasts of the incident.
"Any word on whether they've caught the guy?" Earl asked.
"Not yet."
"Let me know if you hear anything."
"I will. You do the same, okay?"
Zoe ended the call as Pete eased past the Pennsylvania State Trooper manning the roadblock.
Pete raised a hand, acknowledging the trooper, before once again mashing the gas pedal to the floor. "You got names?"
"Dickson and Knox. Curtis is still alive. For now."
Pete's face tensed in the glare from the dashboard lights. "Good men."
The next two miles rushed past in a blur. The radio blared reports of new roadblocks.
The police had cordoned off a five-mile radius. No one in. No one out. State Police were responding with a helicopter with thermal imaging. Yet so far the elusive shooter remained at large.
Pete slowed as they entered Dillard. Five police vehicles from various jurisdictions idled at each corner of the usually quiet coal-mining town. Officers attired in Kevlar patrolled the streets.
After jouncing over a half mile of deep ruts, Zoe spotted the milky gray glow of rescue lighting on the horizon marking their destination. They topped one last rise, and the crime scene lay before them.
Halogen lights attached to rumbling generators turned the darkness into artificially vivid daylight. Law enforcement vehicles from a variety of jurisdictions parked around the periphery of a manmade canyon, the result of decades-old strip mining. A trio of firetrucks formed a barricade of sorts at one end.
At the center of the chaos, one Monongahela County ambulance. Zoe recognized the unit she and Earl usually drove on their shift, now a lonely witness to the unthinkable. Several yards in front of it rested an overturned all-terrain vehicle. On the ground next to the ambulance, a body.
Pete cruised the perimeter to park between a boxy truck with Monongahela County Police Department Mobile Command Center emblazoned across the side and a white van bearing the county coroner's insignia. Franklin Marshall had beaten them there.
Pete opened his door. "Stay close to me. The scene isn't secured. We don't know the shooter's location." He glanced toward the ambulance. "And Dickson isn't going anywhere."
The gravity of the situation settled even heavier over her. Barry was dead. Curtis was gravely wounded. And there was a very real possibility that others, including her and Pete, could still be in danger. She shivered. In the distance, hounds barked. Multiple helicopters thwap-thwap-thwapped overhead in a cloudless star-filled sky. "News choppers?" Zoe asked.
"Some. Plus the State Police." Pete took her arm, guiding her toward the box truck. "They're using night vision to search for our shooter from the air."
Coroner Franklin Marshall and Officer Kevin Piacenza stood inside the mobile command center truck. The cases Zoe worked had never brought her in contact with it before, and she gave the inside of the high-tech beast a curious perusal. A pair of county police officers wearing headsets manned computer keyboards. Radios broadcast an array of police transmissions.
"Update?" Pete asked Kevin.
"No shots have been fired since I arrived on the scene. The K-9 unit arrived about ten minutes ago and is doing their thing. The search helo's been circling and hasn't located anything suspicious. Roadblocks are in place."
"So we have nothing."
"If he's still out there, he's hunkered down."
Franklin clamped a hand on Zoe's shoulder. "It sounds safe enough for us to retrieve the body."
Pete turned to her. The intensity of his pale blue eyes might have made her blush under different circumstances. Tonight, though, his concern chilled her. Franklin was taking her into a potential active shooting zone, and it was up to Pete to give the green light.
Kevin looked back and forth at them. "From the position of the victims, we believe the shot came from that wooded area to the west. I had the fire department park their trucks on that side. Circling the wagons."
Pete shot a look at the young officer.
Kevin shrugged. "My granddad makes me watch cowboy shows with him when I go to visit." He grew serious again. "Anyway, they should be safe."
"Provided our sniper hasn't relocated," Pete said.
Zoe's chill deepened into her bones.
The coroner, his hand still gripping her shoulder, must have felt her shudder. "You don't have to go in," he said, his voice soft, understanding.
Zoe recalled the time she and Barry had responded to a barroom brawl. The police were tied up with a traffic accident. Rather than wait, Barry put himself in harm's way to shield her and their patient, bringing them both out unscathed.
She steeled herself against her fear. "I'm ready. Let's go."
Franklin clapped her on the back before heading for the door.
She followed, pausing to meet Pete's eyes. His jaw was clenched so hard, she half expected to hear his teeth crack. An unspoken order — be careful — passed between them.
As she stepped out into the night air, his command over the police radio trailed after her. "The coroner and deputy coroner are coming out. Cover them."
Pete hated everything about this incident. Two men he knew and respected, emergency responders, who put their lives on the line every day, had been gunned down by a coward. One wouldn't be going home again. The other? Too soon to call. And now Zoe was walking smack into the middle of ground zero.
Pete stepped closer to a bank of monitors showing different angles of the scene. One was trained on the body, and into that frame appeared the coroner's wagon. Franklin parked close, using the vehicle as an additional barricade from whoever may or may not still lurk in the darkness. The coroner and Zoe climbed out and moved to the rear of the van, removing a gurney. A camera hung around Zoe's neck.
"Anything?" Pete asked.
One of the county techs looked up from his computer. "The State Police helo reports no sign of any heat signatures outside the perimeter. Roadblocks are negative as well."
The second tech touched his earpiece. "The K-9 unit is still searching. Nothing yet."
"He's probably long gone," Kevin said.
"You willing to bet your life on that?" Pete snapped.
"No, sir."
Neither was Pete. And he sure as hell wasn't willing to bet Zoe's. "Take me through it from the top." His focus stayed glued on the monitors, watching for movement where there shouldn't be any. Watching Zoe and Franklin process Dickson's body.
"According to the county EOC dispatcher, at nineteen forty-six a call came in for an injured ATV rider giving this location. Dickson and Knox responded from the Phillipsburg garage. They radioed they were on the scene at nineteen fifty-two."
So the shooter set up his victims shortly before eight p.m. Just after sunset. "If he was up on the hillside to the west as we suspect, the sun would have been low and to his back."
"Even without the cover of the trees, they could've looked right at him and not been able to see him."
"What happened next?"
"Nothing. That was their last radio transmission. When dispatch couldn't raise them, she called and asked me to check on them."
On the monitor, Zoe was taking photos. "Go on," Pete said.
Kevin's voice grew heavy. "I arrived at twenty twenty-one." He motioned toward the monitor Pete was watching. "And I found the overturned quad, but the only victims were Dickson and Knox. Dickson was already deceased. Knox was unresponsive, but had a pulse. There was a blood trail indicating he'd tried to drag himself over to his partner, but couldn't make it."
Pete's jaw ached. "Where are you, you son of a bitch?" Other questions remained unvoiced. "Where's the crime scene unit?"
"On their way," one of the techs said. "ETA five minutes."
Not that it mattered. The bulk of the work would have to wait for daylight.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from With a Vengeance by Annette Dashofy. Copyright © 2016 Annette Dashofy. Excerpted by permission of Henery Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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